Archive for Poem

This evening, I’m extremely pleased and proud to announce that, after an exhausting and extensive appeal, the NotGraphs Highly Reputable And Totally Real Think Tank has approved, for these very electronic pages, the canonization of active baseball players. It’s a great day to be alive. (Pun intended.)

Now, don’t for a split second think that I can do one of these as well as world-renowned poet – and baseball scholar – Carson Cistulli. But I’ll give it my best shot.

Today, this 18th day of February, 2011 years after the passing of Jesus Christ, the second soul we canonize — and first active — is celebrating his 30th year on the planet.

St. Alexis the Enigma

Life: Born in Coffee, Alabama, and hailing from the island of Puerto Rico, Alex Rios tickled Toronto Blue Jays fans for five and a half years with his potential, accumulating 17.7 WAR from 2004 to August 2009. Until the fateful day he was given –- nay, stolen –- by the Chicago White Sox. Sometimes the best laid plans go awry.

Prayer:

Hola Alex Isreal Rios!
Proficient with the bat,
Yet you always left us wanting more.
Graceful in the field,
The reason we called you the Gazelle.
When model helicopters fly in center field
Our thoughts invariably drift to you,
And to the good times.
Who gives a f*ck?
We do, Alexis. We do.
Chicago, the south side, does too.

Image courtesy the Alex Rios Fanclub.

As you have no doubt heard by now, the Angels have traded useful parts Mike Napoli and Juan Rivera to the Blue Jays for Vernon Wells and his hulking, cumbersome contract forged in the wild of Canada. To say the least, it’s an inexplicable deal from the Halos’ standpoint.

And this brings us to the mostly piqued commenters at Halos Heaven. Understandably, they are not pleased. And to best capture their displeasure, I’m going to brazenly steal this beautiful idea from Royals Review.

So what comes out of the sausage-maker if we concoct a poem using nothing more than the comment headlines found within the Halos Heaven thread linked above? I’ve rearranged the order, capitalized in places and tweaked punctuation, but otherwise the words are all theirs. By the way, I do this in empathy, not mockery …

A Poem About the Vernon Wells Trade

Call me crazy, but this trade makes us better.

I’ve almost definitely mentioned, at some point in these pages, that, before my life as Semi-Professional Baseball Writer, I read and wrote poems quite a lot — sometimes to the point of a stranger actually publishing them.

If the reader is under the impression that most poems are terrible, then the reader is under the correct impression. In fact, most poems are written with the express purpose of emotionally scarring American high school students. However, there are other writers — ones who receive less attention, maybe — with the novel idea that poems could actually be enjoyable. These are the ones from whom I’ve shamelessly stolen everything.

In this game I made up, what you do
is think of exactly ten hundred things
better than discussing the role of poetry
in today’s society. If you’re looking
for an example, here’s one: “the role of
a donkey’s nads in today’s society.”
And also: “crackers — either in the racist,
or every other, way.”

Which, that reminds me:
you’ll never guess who I saw at the frigging
library yesterday. Former baseballing great
Dick Allen! He was doing some bizarrely intense
research on the historic Burlingame Olympics.
He was dressed in a jacket made exclusively
from the lapels of other jackets. When I saw him,
I was all, “Dick Allen! You suffered the slings
and arrows of outrageous Philadelphians! What possible
coping mechanisms could you have developed?” —
which question he answered by quietly lathering in Wite Out
all, or close to all, of his myriad interior scars.

Image stolen directly from Dick Allen Hall of Fame