Romantic Comedies of Baseball

Sean Casey — no not that Sean Casey — published Carson Cistulli’s first (maybe) book-type thing, a slim chapbook called Assorted Fictions, which you can still buy for $2, postage paid.

Some years later, Mr. Casey made up for the blunder of publishing Cistulli by publishing a chapbook by the excellent Mark Leidner, called Romantic Comedies. Leidner used the romantic comedy meme again in his full-length collection, Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me, published by Factory Hollow Press in 2012. This excerpt, from the former title:

She’s like get a load of this and he’s like whoa.

She’s a lonely air traffic controller and his name is Eric Trafalgar and he’s completely out of control.

She’s a disorienting aroma and he’s a bee crashing into a mirror.

He’s a man running up a hill while morphing into a snowball and she’s a snowball rolling down a hill and morphing into a running woman.

Her very existence depends upon the capability of mimetic art, and he doesn’t even know what mimesis is.

He stabs her in the heart with an icicle, but when the icicle melts she resurrects.

Lovers’ Quarrel

In honor of Sean Casey, then, who makes my baseball and poetry worlds collide, and in the style of Mark Leidner, here are some Baseball-Based Romantic Comedies. Please mail me my millions, now, please.

He’s trying to score, but he-2 is standing in the basepath.

He’s Fred Merkle, Jr. and she’s got Major League Baseball’s baserunning rules memorized.

He’s Gary Sheffield and she’s the Milwaukee Brewers.

She’s waiting for him in the playoffs and he’s the Texas Rangers.

He’s spent the last three years alone in a tiny apartment creating baseball GIFs, and she’s spent the last three years in another country, without internet access, serving the poor, and doesn’t know what a GIF is, really.

She’s a disinterested attendee of a baseball contest with a dead smartphone battery looking for something to pass the time, and he’s sitting next to her completely invested in the outcome of the game — and of several other games, the scores of which he keeps checking on his well-charged smartphone.

His favorite player is Ichiro and hers is Adam Dunn.