Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
I’m proud of my major-league career,
though some will denigrate it
because I pitched through the war
I’m proud of resurrecting the eephus pitch
(I thought I had invented it,
but I understand historians have found
someone who threw it before I was born)
But what I’m most proud of is my part
in the defeat of Murphy’s Guild in ’46:
I spoke out against the strike,
and the proposed union went down to defeat
The pressure never lets up.
Doesn’t matter what you did yesterday.
That’s history.
It’s tomorrow that counts.
So you worry all the time.
It never ends.
Lord, baseball is a worrying thing.
When basketball players complained
About the ball, the NBA fixed it.
When hockey players complained
About the puck, the NHL fixed it.
But when baseball players complained
About the ball, MLB … well, it didn’t fix it.
Instead, seemingly clueless, MLB has allowed
Three different balls — one, Matt Scherzer
Has said, as hard as a cue ball — and has
No intention of fixing the problem, even though
Getting hit by a pitch this year is on
Average at an all-time league high.
From the dugout steps in Game 2 of the ’77 Fall Classic,
Billy Martin watches the Bronx burn.
With the Yanks getting extinguished by the Dodgers,
He ponders, that if the flames kept burning like this,
Maybe Reggie Jackson could finally catch fire.
Matthew Johnson, a two-time Best of the Net Nominee, has appeared in Maudlin House, The Roanoke Review, The Maryland Literary Review, and elsewhere. His debut collection, Shadow Folks and Soul Songs, (Kelsay Books) was released in 2019, and his second, Far from New York State, is scheduled for release in Fall 2022 by New York Quarterly. https://www.matthewjohnsonpoetry.com
You saw what I did coming up in my mid-thirties,
so you can imagine what I could have done
if I’d come up a decade or so earlier:
if that writer had ever heard of Big Luke
he might have based the character Hobbs on me,
at least in part,
the part about getting a late start in the bigs,
though my reasons were different:
the war took years away from everybody,
they weren’t hiring us in the white majors,
and even the Negro Leagues
didn’t find me until after the war;
it wasn’t getting shot like in the book
I did get shot decades later
and it ended my life, but that
wasn’t the stuff of literature,
it was during an ordinary robbery.
