Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
If you’re a Yankees fan, you know:
You have no fingers anymore.
Every game, every ninth inning …
It’s been a steady, three-week diet
Of nonstop nail biting.
And now, after having started
Nine games behind, the Bombers —
Doggedly riding their bus, The Grinder —
Have chased and passed Boston…
There are only 22 games to go.
I was a better pitcher and a better writer than Bouton,
but he had played for the Yankees and so received
all the superlatives from those who hadn’t heard of me
and even if they had, probably didn’t realize
I actually wrote my books myself
I had had a good year for the White Sox in ’63,
but when they wanted to put a clause in my contract
prohibiting me from writing without their consent,
I retired from baseball
Years later I testified for Curt Flood in his suit
and I was proud to have done so, though he lost
And that led me to my one regret in baseball:
that I, perhaps having an even better case,
hadn’t been the one to challenge baseball
It’s better to be lucky than good
I wasn’t good:
I knew the Series had been fixed in ’19,
though I’ve always denied that I profited from that knowledge
(wink wink)
And though I fit the Commissioner’s definition
of someone who wasn’t strictly honest,
and though others had been banned for ‘guilty knowledge’,
I was lucky to be a pawn in the game
between the Commissioner and the league presidents,
so I was not banned, and was able to play
three more years in the majors
and then eight years in the minors after that
“Kids, don’t be too big to accept advice.” —Lewis Robert “Hack” Wilson
Hack Wilson said he played “hung over, yes,
but never drunk.” He said, “when I see three
balls, I just swing at the middle one.” You’d guess
he’d likely die of drink, in poverty,
and so he did, in Baltimore, far from
his glory days at Wrigley, where he’d hit
the big green scoreboard with a homer, some
poke for a guy just five foot six. His mitt
failed him in ’29, when two fly balls
played three balls with the sun, and Hack missed both
and blew the World Series, no animals
like Billy Goats involved. Though one is loath
to draw a moral, it’s just common sense
to wear shades near the center field fence.
I was a player, manager, and umpire,
the only one to do that in League history,
and that eventually got me in the Hall of Fame,
but of course there’s only one thing everyone wants to know about
A few weeks before the Merkle incident
there was a similar scenario in a Cubs-Pirates game
I told Evers to go home, the game was over,
and wrote up the incident in the game report to President Pulliam
Many have criticized me through the years
for calling Merkle out on a technicality
for what was a common practice at the time,
but we actually called him out
because McGinnity interfered on the play,
which is hardly a technicality
And if I were consumed with technicalities
I could have ruled the game a forfeit to the Cubs
because the Giants couldn’t clear the field
I made what I think is the right decision:
calling the game a tie ended by darkness
First President Pulliam, and then the League Board,
upheld the decision,
and you know the rest of the story
