Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
It is soaking humid night.
Even the ball park lights are perspiring.
Top of the ninth.
Bases loaded.
No outs.
The batter smashes a line drive to third.
Caught-
step on third,
fire the ball to first.
Game over.
R. Gerry Fabian is the author of three novels and four books of poetry. His latest book of poems, Ball On The Mound, is a collection of original baseball poems, available at Amazon.
It’s not like I fail to read the pitch.
I’m familiar with the entire arsenal
Employed to make me look foolish
When I step up to the plate.
I know the dip of the curve,
The splitter’s relentless movement,
And the four-seam high heater—
Not to mention the change of pace.
Yet whatever it is I do,
I appear totally out of my league,
Unable to adjust to the rhythm,
Mechanics, and flow of the delivery.
Once my weakness is revealed,
I’m soon confined to the bench.
If it weren’t for my defensive skills,
I’d be booted off the team.
I tell myself it’s a long season;
I’m bound to get a hit one day.
The law of averages keeps me toiling
At the stadium long after dark.
Still, I can’t help but think
I’m pretty much dead weight,
Standing in the batter’s box—
I wish I could simply open.
Bart Edelman, former Little League first baseman for Rudy’s Dairy in Teaneck, N.J., is the author of Crossing the Hackensack (Prometheus Press); Under Damaris’ Dress (Lightning Publications); The Alphabet of Love, The Gentle Man, The Last Mojito, and The Geographer’s Wife (all Ren Hen Press); and Whistling to Trick the Wind and This Body Is Never at Rest: New and Selected Poems 1993 – 2023 (both Meadowlark Press). He now lives in Pasadena, California.
Way to go, Jahmai Jones:
After two years of patience
In the Yankees organization,
You hit your first home run.
Someday, years from now, I’ll be sitting
at the Brooklyn Center for Fiction,
working on some story or other,
and a sound will grow in the background—
soft at first, then it will rise and rise
until it will hit just the right frequency
as the fillings in my teeth. The fillings will buzz
into my mind, creating a whole new kind
of sound that will nearly drown the screams,
screams that will draw everyone outside.
Screams that will draw everyone down
to the East River. Dread Cthulhu himself
will rise from the waters intent
on destroying New York City as his conquest.
His first target will be Lady Liberty.
He’ll break our spirits by breaking that monument.
A bright flash will appear in the sky,
only, it won’t go away, that flash, bright
as the sun, and Gregorian, rag-time hymns
will drown the alien frequency buzzing
through our fillings and into our minds.
A spiritual subway car will fly out
of that perpetual flash, carrying
Jackie Robinson and Babe Ruth from Heaven.
Those two legendary swingers will leap
out of that spiritual subway car and swing away
with their holy baseball bats of righteousness.
Cthulhu won’t stand a chance. Those sluggers
will slug dread Cthulhu back to the depths
chunk by battered chunk, and I’ll head back
to the Brooklyn Center for Fiction
and finish working on some story or other.
From his collection Cameos, which will be released May 28.
I was one of the Clean Sox,
but that doesn’t mean I was perfect:
at the start of my career
I played professionally under an assumed name
in order to try to keep my college eligibility,
and I was a contributor to the pot gotten up
to reward Detroit for beating Boston in ’17,
something that the Dirty Sox later
tried to make out as part of a fix
Such rewarding was common at the time,
though I can see now how it could be misconstrued
I should have taken the job as Yankees manager
when it was offered to me;
I thought I was going to succeed Mr. Mack
when he retired, and that retirement would be in a few years
When that few years passed without his retiring,
I took the job with Mr. Yawkey,
and what I did and didn’t do in that job
has justifiably dimmed my reputation,
something that I now see in retrospect
