David Berman’s Actual Air isn’t the reason I started writing poems — it was to impress fine ladies that I did that. Nor was it the first book to change my entire notion of what poems could be — some combination of Charles Simic’s The World Doesn’t End and Kenneth Koch’s entire oeuvre did that.

Indeed, I was rather skeptical of Berman’s book when I first saw it — on account of he was a musician, is why, and musicians are famously unashamed of everything, whereas writing good poems requires a great deal of shame. Endless shame, really.

In the interest of making a rather short story even shorter, what happened is, is I did eventually read and did very much liked David Berman’s first and only book. For a number of reasons, certainly, is why I enjoyed it — but a relevant one to this blog are the numerous references to baseball and/or baseball things.

References like these three which follow. (Note: links are available to the first two poems. I was unable to find the Cantos online, however.)

From Community College in the Rain:

Announcement: Today we will discuss the energy in a wing
and something about first basemen.

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“Dopamine and Baseball” is not, turns out, the name of Marcy Playground’s second most popular song. Indeed, it’s the name of nothing, in particular, besides this post on a ridiculous blog read by fewer than, say, .0001% of the entire world.

However, dopamine’s role in our enjoyment of baseball is, in fact, mentioned in a New York Times article from 2002 by Sandra Blakeslee which the author found himself reading this afternoon for reasons that will continue to remain mysterious — even to the author himself.

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Today’s peculiar tweet comes from the official Twitter feed of the Baltimore Orioles (click to embiggen):

It’s possible that what Bob Uecker has about Kauffman Stadium is not, in fact, a joke, but rather a witticism. If not a witticism, there’s the off chance that what he has, instead, is either a sally or a bon mot.

Those are all fine. Whatever you do, though, don’t believe anyone who says that what Bob Uecker has about Kauffman Stadium is a quip. It’s not a quip, goddammit. Bob Uecker is better than that.

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From the official Twitter account of the Chicago Cubs (click to embiggen, if you darest):

CINCINNATI — Doctors at the Centers for Disease Control announced Tuesday that left-handed Tigers starter Drew Smyly has “just a little” Ebola.

“After extensive testing by a team of leading experts in the field of infectious disease,” Dr. Prajit Kapoor said in a prepared statement, “we’ve determined that Mr. Smyly definitely has Ebola — or, at the very least, an Ebola-like virus — but that, strangely, it is confined to the tip of his left middle-finger [pictured right] and is unlikely to spread further.”

Smyly began to notice the Ebola while pitching against the Cincinnati Reds on Sunday, eventually leaving the game. “It started hurting and affecting my pitches,” Smyly said on Tuesday. “Honestly, I just thought it was a blister. I mean, I knew it looked bad, but you never think it’s a left-threatening disease responsible for thousands of horrifying deaths.”

When asked if the delay in reaching a conclusive diagnosis on Smyly’s condition was due to the rarity of it, Dr. Kapoor answered in the negative. “Actually, it was less that and more how gross it is. I, personally, vomited four times.”

The reader — knowing something about the old rerum natura, as it were — understands immediately from this image that Southpaw, the official mascot of the Chicago White Sox, will use the horse also pictured here towards the end of satisfying his appetite.

What we can’t know — can only speculate upon — is if that appetite is gastronomic or sexual in nature.

Concerned and likely muscular reader Bryan, recognizing that the celebration of Bob Uecker is a cause worth dying and (maybe even more importantly) killing for, has alerted the editors of NotGraphs to some Audio from the Past that will help the advancement of said cause.

The Greek philosopher Epicurus (341 BCE – 270 BCE) teaches us that “If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if you living according to opinion, you will never be rich.”

In the clip below — from WTMJ Radio’s August 10th, 2011, broadcast of the Brewers and Cardinals at Busch Stadium — Bob Uecker says the same thing, just with different words (all of them to the great pleasure of then-radio partner Cory Provus).

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In what follows, radio voice of the Milwaukee Brewers Bob Uecker discusses jockey shorts and, before that, a scheme he’s developed for relieving contest entrants of their winnings.

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The author, in his capacity as a member of this country’s Leisured Poor, recently made a journey to the Duck Pond at Warner Park in Madison, Wisconsin — baseballing home of the Madison Mallards of the summer college wood-bat Northwoods League. This is something I’ve done before — both with the internet’s Common Man and also the internet’s Jackie Moore — however, in the present work, I’d like to address, specifically, what a Mallards game reveals about the ideal ballpark experience.

There is, of course, reason for me to delude myself into the opinion that a Mallards game represents something close to the ideal ballpark experience. Both (a) living in Madison and (b) having no car, my options for live baseball are limited. The Brewers are about 75 or 80 miles to the east; the Beloit Snappers (Low-A affiliate of the Twins), about 50-55 miles south. As such, the Mallards represent my only real opportunity for live baseball.

Even so, games at Warner Park satisfy the criteria that I (and I’m guessing many fans) consider when evaluating the quality of live baseball as entertainment — have, perhaps, helped me to understand what those criteria are, in the first place.

Criteria like these:

Proximity — As in, how far the stadium/park is from my house, in minutes. And also how easy it is to park or commute via public transit, too.

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