Baseball Poetry

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Pick your Poem

Casey at the Bat
4
27%
Line-Up for Yesterday
0
No votes
Baseball's Sad Lexicon
1
7%
365
5
33%
WTF?
5
33%
 
Total votes: 15

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Joe Shlabotnik
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Re: Baseball Poetry

Post by Joe Shlabotnik »

I'll vote for Fogerty's Centerfield.

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Donnie Ebert
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Location: Reading The Boat Rocker by Terence Mann

Re: Baseball Poetry

Post by Donnie Ebert »

This isn't poetry, but I used to have it memorized and would recite whenever possible:
Terence Mann wrote: Ray. People will come, Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. "Of course, we won't mind if you look around", you'll say. "It's only $20 per person". They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it, for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they'll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game and it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come, Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game; it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again. Oh…people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.
And it's also not poetry, but The Greenfields of the Mind by A. Bartlett Giamatti should be required to be read aloud on the last day of the season for teams not winning it all.

But I'd still have to vote for Casey at the Bat, if only because it reminds me of the Disney cartoon from 1946.


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MrCrowesGarden
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Re: Baseball Poetry

Post by MrCrowesGarden »

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Sign Bryce Harper

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wart57
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Re: Baseball Poetry

Post by wart57 »

MrCrowesGarden wrote:Roses are red
Violets are blue
Sign Bryce Harper
If not, [expletive] you.

Finished it for you.

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CardsofSTL
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Re: Baseball Poetry

Post by CardsofSTL »

Donnie Ebert wrote:This isn't poetry, but I used to have it memorized and would recite whenever possible:
Terence Mann wrote: Ray. People will come, Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. "Of course, we won't mind if you look around", you'll say. "It's only $20 per person". They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it, for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they'll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game and it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come, Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game; it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again. Oh…people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.
That is actually pure poetry.

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MrCrowesGarden
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Re: Baseball Poetry

Post by MrCrowesGarden »

wart57 wrote:
MrCrowesGarden wrote:Roses are red
Violets are blue
Sign Bryce Harper
If not, [expletive] you.

Finished it for you.

It feels a tad wordy.

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Kincaid
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Re: Baseball Poetry

Post by Kincaid »

"Memorial" and Other Poems
Memorial

a brisk chill descends
over downtown St. Louis
as cloud-covered canopies open
while leaned up against
the chain link partition
i gaze at the stadium looming
and tiredly fading
into low-hanging stratus
the white painted archways recede

cold mist shivers against my skin

the monolith forming
now rises above
the skeletal footprint beneath it
as quickly expanding
construction encroaches
increasingly close to its forebear
and already the brick
red facade has begun
echoing old Union Station

steel cranes bellow against the sky

suspended intently
the wrecking ball wavers
over the faltering structure
then suddenly racing
to life without warning
comes crashing violently downward
instinctively shuddering
frail cement
concourses shatter like maple

Busch Stadium falls
another of the crumbling cookie cutters washed away
in the wake of Camden Yards

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sighyoung
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Re: Baseball Poetry

Post by sighyoung »

William Carlos Williams' "The Crowd at the Ball Game": https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/ ... -ball-game

The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them—

all the exciting detail
of the chase

and the escape, the error
the flash of genius—

all to no end save beauty
the eternal—

So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful

for this
to be warned against

saluted and defied—
It is alive, venomous

it smiles grimly
its words cut—

The flashy female with her
mother, gets it—

The Jew gets it straight— it
is deadly, terrifying—

It is the Inquisition, the
Revolution

It is beauty itself
that lives

day by day in them
idly—

This is
the power of their faces

It is summer, it is the solstice
the crowd is

cheering, the crowd is laughing
in detail

permanently, seriously
without thought

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sighyoung
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Location: Louisville

Re: Baseball Poetry

Post by sighyoung »

jackie robinson

By Lucille Clifton

ran against walls
without breaking.
in night games
was not foul
but, brave as a hit
over whitestone fences,
entered the conquering dark.

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sighyoung
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Location: Louisville

Re: Baseball Poetry

Post by sighyoung »

Sign for My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt

By David Bottoms https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/ ... d-the-bunt

On the rough diamond,
the hand-cut field below the dog lot and barn,
we rehearsed the strict technique
of bunting. I watched from the infield,
the mound, the backstop
as your left hand climbed the bat, your legs
and shoulders squared toward the pitcher.
You could drop it like a seed
down either base line. I admired your style,
but not enough to take my eyes off the bank
that served as our center-field fence.

Years passed, three leagues of organized ball,
no few lives. I could homer
into the left-field lot of Carmichael Motors,
and still you stressed the same technique,
the crouch and spring, the lead arm absorbing
just enough impact. That whole tiresome pitch
about basics never changing,
and I never learned what you were laying down.

Like a hand brushed across the bill of a cap,
let this be the sign
I’m getting a grip on the sacrifice.

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