Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
Inside the Mets’ locker room
Is a future Hall of Fame pitcher,
Probably the only one ever
With a losing record:
The great Jacob deGrom.
He wouldn’t do it –
If you knew him, not his style –
But someone should be advertising
Somewhere, anywhere,
For non-existent Mets’ run support.
When the Federal League filed their anti-trust suit in my court
because of my reputation as a trust-buster,
they failed to realize that I considered baseball
a national institution,
and that I would not brook radical action
against a national institution,
no matter what the law might say on the matter
(you saw what I did later to other radicals)
I sat on the case until the two parties
could settle the matter amongst themselves
(The suit that later reached the Supreme Court
was filed years later in a different court)
Baseball was grateful, and a few years later
offered me the position of single Commissioner,
a dream job:
many times my judge’s salary,
free admission to all baseball games,
and best of all, no annoying appellate judges
to overturn any of my decisions
I fought a losing battle against the growing farm systems,
but otherwise did what I was hired to do:
clean up the game’s image with the fans and writers,
and put in their place anyone who dared
to attack the game’s economic structure
The totals so far say
Five wins, ten losses
In the first fifteen games …
And the worst beginning
In twenty-five years.
The play-by-play person
Searches for a lining
For the pinstripe cloud,
And keeps on saying
It’s a long, long season…
Ring Lardner
You know me as the author of stories,
many of them about baseball
A popular game that I never wrote about
is trying to figure out real-life models for fictional characters,
so I want to clear this up once and for all:
Jack Keefe was not based on any one player
Though such a thing is frowned upon now,
I was friendly with a few ballplayers I covered:
Doc White and I wrote a few songs together,
and I considered Eddie Cicotte a friend,
which made the events of 1919 hard to swallow
I was already moving away from baseball
when The Great Betrayal occurred,
so it wasn’t a sudden disillusionment
but more the final straw that broke my fandom
Guy Harris White
I was a dentist,
so like anyone with any medical training
I was called Doc
I am proud of my five straight shutouts,
but glad I lived long enough to see Mr. Drysdale beat it
And I thought Ring’s and my “Gee, It’s a Wonderful Game”
was better than Von Tilzer and Norworth’s work,
but they had a catchier chorus so they’ve lasted longer
I think there’s room enough for both our songs
From Michael’s collection, Dugout Anthology
by Kenneth Patchen, recited by MC Mistabil