Archive for Poem

With my sincere apologies to the wonderful Ogden Nash.

Line Up For Today:

A is for Alonso
That’s “Yonder Alonso” to you
BEST NAME OF ALL TIME:
Truth, truest, or true?

B is for Braun,
Whose pee was mishandle’,
Pissing off M.L.B.,
The stupidest scandal.

C is for Cespedes,
A slugger from overshore,
We don’t know how he’ll hit,
But he does love Star Wars.

D is for Dickey,
A favorite of many,
Who value climbing mountains,
Over striking out any.
Read the rest of this entry »

Some days, we make Peter Gammons tweets looks pretty funny; some days, Peter Gammons makes the funny for us. And then he reaches into our souls with shaky thumbs, and brushes off the cobwebs to flip the rusty lever to make us think and to ponder and to trouble over our own and very and uniquely terrifying existence.

Today is the second day — the day where that thinking crap happens. After the laughing bit:

I’m on an elliptical right now, but have been slowed by glute pull that won’t go away and hurts my back. You’re in Jupiter

— Peter Gammons (@pgammo) February 18, 2012

, not Orlando?

— Peter Gammons (@pgammo) February 18, 2012

If this accidental poetry does not tug on your heartstrings, festoon your soul with sparkling, golden laughter and secret, shimmering and crimson red regrets — secret pains about secret problems you feel shameful to tell your deepest most dear friends and loved ones — if these two tweet poems do not do all this, then check your heart, man. Or woman. Because the cybermen may have replaced the beating muscle of your existence with a tuft of wiring and cold steel. Just like in that distressing dream I just awoke from.

Also, Glute is a butt muscle… BUTT JOKE! (Discuss.)

A gentleman’s bow, courtly and obliquely disdainful, towards the shareful Yirmiyahu.

Dear Buddy,

Winter’s end is closer. Bills pile but, oh, done with ’em. Bored? Spring! Birds all over! Got a glover, lover? A lent one. Jersey? Ball? Bats? Field? Games please. Eat on your, a, pork chop, Buddy. Not hard, fatty. Bad news? Dang. Snow’s fine. We’re ready.

Done. Goodnight.

A Boomer Whipple to Jeff Sullivan & Jon Bois, whose twitter game inspired this post.

“Some Common Weaknesses Illustrated” by Mr. @cistulli is only $0.99 for the Kindle. It’d be rude not to buy it at that price.

— Craig Robinson (@flipflopflying) January 26, 2012

I’ve got to admit, it was pretty fantastic listening to a Britisher, the one and only Mr. Craig Robinson, talk about baseball, among other things, last week on FanGraphs Audio. That accent, man; gets me every time. Although, I will say, it pained me deeply to learn that the legend behind Flip Flop Fly Ball, the man who’s led me — led all of us — on numerous baseball infographic adventures, is a New York Yankeees supporter. The horror.

Anyway, after listening to Mr. Robinson wax poetic about baseball, Mexico City, and the remix of R. Kelly’s “Feelin’ On Your Booty,” I came across his tweet, embedded above, about the works of NotGraphs’s Supreme Leader, Carson Cistulli. As a Canadian, and therefore the definitive opposite of “rude,” I felt it was my patriotic duty to buy “Some Common Weaknesses Illustrated.” I mean, the cover alone is worth the $0.99. (Or $1.03 Canadian.) And, let me tell you, the book didn’t disappoint. Cistulli is one of the greatest poets of our time; a real-life Rafael de la Ghetto, if I may.

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A line — a beautiful line — from Charles Baudelaire:

See on these canals those sleeping boats whose mood is vagabond; it’s to satisfy your least desire that they come from the world’s end.

A line put to action:

Baseball, while lonesome, is nothing like life.
Otherwise no one would play.

It doesn’t diminish you, rend you in quite the same way.
But it can diminish you.
It teaches you things about baseball, not about our vain grasps at some animal spark.
It is within a rubric of one.

The metaphors, like metaphors, do not hold.
It need not take you away from something.
It need only be something.
Which it is.
It need only take you toward something.
Which it will.

So here’s your first glove.
Smell it. That won’t change much. Pound it.
Put it in the oven if it’s too stiff.
I mean that.
Rip the ties tight with your teeth.
I remember that the best players would do that.

Keep a ball in it at night.
This is important for purposes of seasoning.
And liturgy.
One day it will feel like a dead hand.

I hope you’re better at this than I was.

Often, we wonder what might have happened if Napoleon or Hitler weren’t so dumb and had gone on to rule the world. Or, what if Custer didn’t die at Little Big Horn?

I’m excited that my homeboy Ryan Braun just won the NL MVP, but I had this Matt Kemp post pretty much ready to go (didn’t want to jinx Brauny, and am happy to take the credit for jinxing Kemp), so now I present this “acceptance speech” as an alternate reality. Speculative fiction, call it. Move over George Lucas.

Behold, your new king.

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There is a chance I will have to tussle my own hair.

Your heart felt good:
it was drippin’ pitch and made of wood.
           –“3^rd Planet”, Modest Mouse

It is not half bad to swim
half naked with seniors
when you win the MVP.

Would I do it all over again? Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: The full original title broke FanGraphs (congrats Robert!), here it is in its entirety: Ryan Braun has the ability to hit for average and significant power and his fluid swing is compact and short with tremendous bat speed and a protracted follow-through and he is a pull hitter with strong wrists and he waits well on off-speed pitches and uses the entire field and he drives the ball no matter where it is in the strike zone.

That’s all pretty true.
Let’s go with that.
Put that in the lead-in, in fact.
Hell, make that the title.

It has to be titled “Ryan Braun.”

Oh.

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I’m never one to enjoy others laughing behind my back, so when troublemaker Dayn Perry put forth a spurious Pauly Shore quote recently, I determined to find the actual source of the quote. Why? Well, when Carson Cistulli found out I didn’t know Vin Scully’s name, he mocked me publicly for weeks and garnished my wages.

I figured the quote was not indeed that of Pauly Shore, but it seemed old-timey enough to be real and possibly important, so I — as every good investigator does in Step 1 — opened a Google and searched:

“I once thought this game of base ball to be something paltry — a trifling, a merest emanation. Yet, lo, across my years I have learned that the end of the base-ball season is as redolent of death, of foreordained annihilation, as the vicar’s withered corpse.”

Which led me to happen upon this:

It doesn’t take a word wizard to see I had stumbled onto something both very poetic and very frightening.

Obviously I didn’t click on the page — my computer has enough angry, Russian viruses as it is — but I think we can all agree I had seen enough. Slicing in a few words and non-sequiters here and there, and BOOM! we’ve a James Joyce poem:

e-at-- --gry
… ball field ball game
         ball of fire
                  ball over

ball up ball valve ball-park
         where daddy took me tuesdays
… base base 64 base metal base-court
         baseball baseball bat baseball player
                  sign the ball! sign the ball!

…… dead dead beat
         dead code dead end
                  dead ground dead hand
dead head dead horse ……
daddy’s gone, season’s gone
…… dead dead beat
         dead code dead end

year leaped
         leaper leapfrog
lost time with the goldmine
                  leaping leapt lear learn learnable
learned …

daddy never left
         he was here at the
… ball field ball game
         ball of fire
                  bawl over

NOTE TO THE READER: My father is fine and well and is neither dead nor haunting a ballpark.