Deadball Canto

"He had the best curveball since Ezra Pound …”

Numbers bah! Not a one can speak of what it was

For everyone saw through different eyes

That multiplied, as the war between the leagues

Allowed the common man to take sides.

Ah but they don’t sing of the game anymore,

They don’t remember the language

                                              of the suicide squeeze,

Or how my slider knock-kneed knickerbocker batteries.

Did you know I mowed down 17 in a row at Baker bandbox, er, Bowl?

Or how I spread peanuts on the infield grass

To slow down McGraw and his nail-toed logicians

   with pigeons?

My two-catcher strategy kicked him off his trolley

              in a flask of his own crow medicine

As the Polo Grounds went rolling down in groans,

Crying for the sobriety of Marquis of Queensbury rules

That otherwise were for losers, on any other Sunday,

When “every low and contemptible method that his erratic brain

Can conceive to win a play by a dirty trick” can be employed.

               And the sweep of my curve covered most of history.

I tested the Flying Dutchman’s kindness amid adversity

                            amid making the impossible look easy

And I handled dear Tyrus through gentle and deadly understanding

on his hero’s quest to avenge his father’s murder

                                                                        at his mother’s hands,

Showed how beauty could be sprung from the well of pain

                                                                                        or as he said
“They all were against me, tried every dirty trick to cut me down.
But I beat the bastards and left them in the ditch."

And my bluffing flutterball broke the royal suits

                                  of Connie Mack

Aka Slats McGillicuddy, who broke you down cleaner than a cop

                                                               from behind the plate

                                            with a voice gentler than a priest.

I whiffed Nap Lah-zhwa with the ball he’d knocked the seams offa,

Fanned Heinie Groh and his bottle bat,

threw slick from the mitt to make quick work of Elmer Flick,

Beat Johnny the Crab E-vers at his own game

of well-tempered double plays erasing many names:

Hooks Cotter, Sweetbread Bailey, Phenomenal Smith …

They all became part of my repertoire,

            soft knuckler to set up wild fastball,

                                slider to leaven the curve,

                                               and after a steady diet of breaking throws

           they’d be dead red for a freeze pop in the zone.

But I always had trouble with Dinty Barbare

             and Jimmy "the Human Mosquito" Slagle

       born without a strike zone.

I was an enemy of many cities but, like Glass Arm Eddie Brown before,

a baroque-bat squib broke the heart

of my home

borough of brotherly love.

‘Twas a hale drunk from Wilkes-Barre

                                    Piano Mover Smith who sent me

humblety tumblety 

After throwing him only stinging nettles

he pushed around the plate like runny eggs.

It echoes like the ghosts at Bennett Park
                                                 or in the meadows of Swampoodle,
And there’s no recompense in the hearts of the many

            for all the spars I cast,

                                                         foul flies to shag,

Or for suffering through a slurry of wretched utility cups of coffee

Who stayed alive waiting for the magical palm ball

                                               they’d never seen, only been told of,

And how oft I had to reach

for chin music on a 3 and 2 pitch.

But we climb and decline

                 as a team

             on diamond jewels

And railway atriums, murky with periploi,

And in the morning smoke below the glistening hills of Pittsburgh 

looking down

and dusky autumns in Brooklyn when the crows flew in

Under Eppa’s drunken flag that had been mercilessly beaten

             by a mother back in Factoryville none of us cared to know.

                        Cactus Gaavy brought the gravy,

                                                Possum the taters,

But it was up to Harvard Eddie to prove the theory

                that leather was mightier than wood.

Every man was his own man, slightly more than human

                                                as he streamed out on the field

As a uniform in the thinking player piano machine of team,
But these volleys buzzing round the horn did not happen

                                                           by themselves,

For men on the great chain of being
Cannot give nor receive

                                                           without instruction,

They must be given keys ...

To stare with uncommon eyes at the common enemy:

                                   The indifference of the crowd

packaged like cold cream,

How to make them proud, of themselves,

As they sit in fetid bleachers wanting for one thing to cheer—

So we went all-in on victory, out of all the beauties 

Our fiendish craft lays out for us to dabble

Like Anchises to make Aphrodite fall in love with a mortal:

                         The art of hit and run in the mud,

The loom the catcher weaves of deception,

The clean line of fine-aimed rope and well-timed dart,

The science of where to stand

                                           and when to run,

The mumblety-peg at the keystone sack

          to delay that step away,

The third bagger sensing when to stay at home

                               and when to trespass in,

The would-be steal that could be foretold

by peering deeply in the rosin bag,

The centerfield catch that makes the mind of heaven happy.

                               

All for a moment of timelessness

and Stuffy McInnis.

But the crazed eyes along the circuit stared back,

j’accuse to nolo contende

for playing a children’s game

however lethal it became.

There was chicken wire to protect us at the Palace of the Fans.

For the line was much too thin

between doomed and demigods,

so much recognized in between.

One more hit in ten at bats and you could stay here in the show.

One less and the crowds in Altoona pity you,

the illusion of fear, the beast

that had been closing in on you

no longer there.

And deaf-mutes lain in wait to ambush you with clubs

in the sticks.

So many a good man was lost to the oceans of the minors.

So we bounced our heads like marionettes on clipper strings,

                      alive in the world of the dead,

No money to be had

                                         instead, a queue of shots and bottles,

Overwrought posadas, tavern-clearing brawls

In each establishment where the uniform drinks for free.

           There is no need to ask why. Ay! I couldn’t tell you,

It’s in the urge to win and the ways it’s dangled and withdrawn,

For we are innocent men, content to mangle each other

And wash the sawdust down with blood to show we’re stronger

Than the ones who question our toughness, knowing nothing.

            Better to let our silence tell the lie of the pious hero

                                            than be undone by our mouths already raw

From venom thrown on the ones who’d understand,

Brother players! Those we cared enough for to get under their skin,

Mid hostile forces:

                                   The baseball Gods

& skinflints who kerosen’d the teams they owned

                        with their papers and distilleries,

Who looked at their charges a necessary expense
                                                        to appease Mercury,

The illusion of lucre felt more keenly

                        than that of a forkball table-dropped.

We were suckers at best, at worst accessories to murder,

But the game redeems as it corrupts, absolutely.

                       And we noticed, when the kranks brought pencils

The scorecards were filled, and the sport-page scored us black

For the spectacles, and a history began to be compiled

       For what had been lost in dirt and blood,

And as it turned out no one who could hit

could be a sinner,

For eyes and hands revealed character

Otherwise unobserved in parish neighborhoods.

But the cork ball began the long debasement:

The Federal League greed with no Titanic to stop it,

The 8 men out in France, where Harvard Eddie perished,

 better able in the end to sniff out hot corner smoke

                              than Lost Battalions in Argonne.

The shell shock epoque that kneaded the little doughboy lost

Also mustarded Muggsy and brought Grover Pete to his seizured knees
                         mumbling to the flea circus how he K’d Lazzeri—

Both buried with full military honors

         and a hall of fame slab

That was never enough, for they had led their legions to battle

And rushed with just their sore arms into the swarm of darkness,

The buzzing still stinging their ears long after, back at their lot of sand 

to work out the karma

At each stop at the slaughteryards of America. 

Then Ray Chapman, temporarily like Achilles,

                        brought the tragic end of history,

The dictate that the pitcher’s art, dependent on one baseball

Exposed to the elements of nature and fate in one game, be curtailed,

With the umpire – that anti-art bureaucrat – deciding the life of

                                                           each ball, and, so,

I could no longer fill the jars with the holy honey

of dive-bombing curves, fluttering flatirons, seamless hides
                                               harmlessly falling.

Once Prohibition and Mountain Landis stoppered up the Dionysus,

It was brute against boar, the cathedrals were filled up with skins  

            for a population only trusted to be benumbed

And a long, slow decline. And the wireless war machines

brought night baseball

And the Payseurs replaced the very grass.

And in no time

                                I was

A rag-armed also-ran for the Browns

Brought in to handle aging superstars

In the dark parts of late and difficult innings

pregnant with thirsts for revenge,

And to perch like Balzac on top of the bullpen,

My cape strategically placed to block out the sun

For my imagined long-limbed order of blind bats.