Archive for Poem

No, no, go not to Boston, nor lose that twist
glove waggling, spinning, confusing the swine;
Nor allow thy stats to suffer away from Wrigley mist,
By dollar signs, and contract time;
Make not your bed of 75% cotton, 25% linen, all green,
Nor let the batter assuage his fears.
Your fancy whimsy Waggle, and split finger change,
Are all a function of some forgotten dream;
For age comes to all pitchers, and not too drowsily —
To drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

My good friend that also sent this letter to Clayton Kershaw has penned another work of complicated genius. Even if you don’t agree with the main treatise of the new version, you have to admit it is of our time:

Before the time of MLB,
And sans ESPN,
They took the field at Mudville
To cheer the Mudville men
5000 voices yelling
A throng for way back when
The legend lives until this day
From even way back then
They cheered for mighty Casey
The legend’s famous name
Some still say they saw him
Now forever cloaked in fame
And as you all have heard by now
The game was pretty tight
Mudville fell behind by two
By the bottom of the last
Then got two outs and two men on
Awaiting Casey’s blast.
But as you know he watched two strikes
Then swung with all his might
Deflating the Mudville faithful
As he whiffed that fateful night.
Now looking back on Monday
From 125 years away
The commentators have gathered
To review Vin Scully’s play by play.
It now seems elementary
I hesitate to say
But with men at third and second
Intentionally walking Casey was the percentage play.
Casey lead the league that year
He always had come thru
The pitcher was just lucky
Casey had ‘nt hit him too.
So know we’ll never know the score
Had they played game our way,
And because first base was open
Put Casey on that day.
It makes a better story
A legend ’til this day
To pitch to mighty Casey
Is not the percentage play.

The Kansas City Royals have lost seven in a row. The worst of it (so far) was a humiliating four-game sweep at the hands of the Angels, a series in which the Angels started Jason Vargas, Jerome Williams, Joe Blanton, and, perhaps worst of all, Billy Buckner. Buckner was a former Royals prospect traded away back in 2007, who, until this last game, had not pitched in the majors since 2010. He shut the Royals out for five innings and was promptly sent back down.

Enough of the misery! These are hard times in Royals-land. After years of hard times. It may take divine intervention to restore the wholeness of “Royals Nation” or whatever stupid name people want to give to collective Royals fandom. In hopes of restoration let us turn to the hymnal words of G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), the early twentieth-century English Catholic writer, whose works span philosophy, theology, history, cultural and social criticism, and, yes, poetry, on this day of Chesterton’s birth, which I totally knew about and did not need to be told by someone on Twitter. “Coincidences are life’s spiritual puns,” indeed.

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When you bounded into Sutter’s arms,
It now seems the very instant of an ascension
Of a man who brushed his burst fingers against the endurable
Only when he was ashamed.

You can do this, we know, this hitting, catching, running.
But it’s the after — the plenteous and undetailed after,
The quiet after
That you’ll always belong to.

If you could only see us seeing you, urging you
On before the hot lights and champagne,
Your words as simple as you could never hope to be.
Your words, like your swing, quavering on the hinges of a pinfold.

Come back to this game and be cloaked again,
You and that lunging, halting, hoping swing —
That motel Gideon’s Bible of a swing.
Just be anything but Sugar Creek dead.

See us. See us with
Each lens less a lens than a deep-water amphitheater
That harbored a sunken eye,
That conspired to let no one quite know

What it all looked like to Darrell Ray.

Today when I got on the bus
I said to myself,
“It is like I don’t exist.”
At the doctor’s office on a papered table
in my boxer briefs
I was like,
It is like I do not exist.
When I am at home
in an armchair
when my mouth is full of food
or dong
when I pull a well-worn dollar bill
from my Genuine Leather wallet
wherever there are books,
websites, weirdos, women,
or dullards — or ducks, really: ducks
make me feel this way —
whenever I watch a drug dealer
teem w/ existential angst
on TV
I want to be a drug dealer and
it is like I do not exist.

When Joey Votto
wants to break a bat but does not
when Joey Votto curses himself —
in high socks, no less! —
when I noticed the elastic of knee-high knickers
at Joey Votto’s knees
when I closed my eyes
and saw nothing but Joey Votto’s
hairline it is like
I do exist,
am alive, am a part of everything
that there is
to be a part of
which is only one thing:
this world of shit
w/o which nothing would exist.

Would that Joey Votto will want to break a bat
at those moments
when I wonder
if there is life on other planets
for I am not large,

cannot get past
this earth.

Raul Ibanez.
He gives and gives, yet asks for
Nothing in return.

This has been a NotGraphs Haiku.

And this was entirely an excuse to post the above GIF, for which all praise goes to @lonestarball. And Raul Ibanez.

You and I are

bound by self-same objectives,
one can assume.

Our flight: From MDW to PHX by way of OKC.
“Can I raise this?”
Yes you may.
An armrest between two broad-shoulders
is more a barrier than a rest
anyway,
and since this is the only
time our arms will ever touch,
why not let them press together, two hams
resting flank against flank for one
hour and forty-five minutes.

And in two days, at an A’s / White Sox game,
I will describe your gas
to interested friends.

This is our only interaction
and unless I am
in OKC or you are
in MDW
and again we somehow twain for another
hour and forty-five minutes,
or maybe side-by-
flank at an A’s / White Sox game,

this will be our last.
Fare thee well.

Image credit.

When Ibanez traipses through the grass,
One hardly feels the moments pass.
With his eyes peeled tight and expression grim
The sky seems like it might fall on him.

Are his arms too short? His legs too tall?
One hardly seems able to tell at all
When the ball’s hit hard above third base
One feels the thrill of a NASCAR race.

What perils could our hero befall?
Get decapitated by the wall?
Or perhaps, he might only injure his grace
As the ball caroms off both glove and face?

But perhaps on Ibanez we’re being too hard.
It’s not like it’s wiffleball out in the yard.
I know, as one who felt Algebra’s sting
A parabola can be a quite tricky thing.

And adding 3-D complicates it a ton!
One wonders how outfielding ever gets done.
To calculate vectors and find the right spot,
My tip for Ibanez: go somewhere you’re not.

so much depends
upon

a red schoen
dienst

brushed with spring
shadows

against a green
wall

I recently encountered a new means of writing poetry. The method is simple: Collect several disparate magazines; cut out some phrases. Don’t have a plan. Just cut.

Get different kinds of magazines too. The Economist, Sports Illustrated, Womanly Digest of Femmerica. Don’t try to remember what you’ve cut out and don’t try to look for certain words. Put the pieces together, scramble them, add a few words, add some S’s, and make a poem.

Well, I did a proxy of this method. A facsimile, perhaps. I used only the adds here on NotGraphs, FanGraphs, and RotoGraphs. Most of these ads tried to tell me I needed to buy something to finally great that Great New Plateau in life. So I went ahead and built a contrary poem. Hopefully it will convey what is true; that you, dear human reader, are beautiful, if you’ll accept that: