Well, It’s a Game, No? A Meditation on Baseball and Poetry

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume II (1987).

 

“Poets, it should be noted, keep shaping their metaphors out of the ruins of their existence, in contradistinction to the powerful on this earth, whose stock in trade is the fable of their victories.” The poet Stanley Kunitz was referring neither to baseball nor baseball poetry in his comment on the poet’s craft, but he could have been speaking about both. For, as we shall see, it is partly the “ruins of existence” which the game of baseball exquisitely showcases and in doing so draws the poet to the game.

It must be said at the outset that no other area of American sport has attracted the poets of our nation as baseball has. One is tempted to say that no other specific manifestation of our cultural history has so consistently been used as the mythology of our national consciousness. Perhaps it is the need to mythologize, and baseball’s easy availability for such a task, which has prompted its popularity with poets. Perhaps it is its function as a national melting pot, a common drama to which poets of various immigrant backgrounds can point to as outsiders wishing to become insiders. Perhaps it is all of these or none. We will explore some of what the poets themselves think it might be. Suffice to say that the connection is real and significant. The comparative preoccupation of poets with baseball has important things to say about both the game and the art.

To catalogue the number of poems about baseball and the number of major poets who have treated baseball themes is beyond the scope of any mere article. Rather I will focus on a small number of the most important American poets who have written baseball poems as well as those who have written commentary about their attachment to the game and its metaphors. My selection is neither exhaustive nor ruled by any particular hierarchy. It is entirely idiosyncratic, personal. We will look at two groups: first, those contemporary poets who have written extensively about baseball in their poems, Tom Clark, Joel Oppenheimer, Paul Blackburn, and Paul Metcalf; the second group, Donald Hall and Richard Hugo, have written a few poems specifically about baseball, but are more important as poets who have talked about why baseball is of interest to them. Finally, in a group all of his own, we will talk about Richard Grossinger, editor and baseball myth-maker.

II

Partly the issue is the issue of play. Partly the issue is the issue of childhood, and partly the issue is the issue of potentiality. For the poet, it would appear, these issues come together in the game of baseball. Listen to Donald Hall:

But I need to leave behind my own ambitions, struggles, and failures; I need to enter the intense, artificial, pastoral universe of the game, where conflict never conceals itself, where the issues are clear and the outcome uncertain. I enter an alien place, or the child in me does — and the child plays….for a little while.

It is the illusion to play which attracts the poet. It is the remembrance of childhood and its endless potential doomed to frustration which attracts the poet, for listen to Donald Hall, the poet:

Against the bright
grass the white-knickered
players tense, seize
and attend. … But now
they pause: wary,
exact, suspended —
while abiding moonrise
lightens the angel
of the overgrown
garden, and Walter Blake
Adams, who died
at fourteen, waits
under the footbridge.

Yes, there is in the poem the setting of play, but more importantly is the attention to details, to the every minute reality of life, which the game provides and which forces us to confront the facts of mortality and its unfulfilled promises. Listen to the words of Richard Hugo:

I took interest in the whole scene not just the game. I thought again about those tiny worlds I’d lived in with far more desperation than I hoped any of them would ever know. How failures are in many ways successes and how successful people, those who early in life accepted adult values and abandoned the harmless fields of play, are really failures because they never come to know the vital worth of human relationships, even if it takes the lines of a softball field to give them a frame. How without play many people sense too often and too immediately their impending doom.

The poet sees the truth that the rest of us struggle to hide from: the quest for perfection is only exciting because we know that it cannot be achieved. In the routines of life we see the inexorable working out of our fate, and the fate of each of us is ultimately the same. Baseball moves us because we see in it both the futility and the grandeur of questing after perfection. In it, every detail of physical movement reveals both that quest and its impossibility. The routine becomes the sacred for what else is available for sanctification? 

Listen to the poet Richard Hugo:

… Their laughter
falls short of the wall. Under the lights, the moths
are momentary stars, and wives, the beautiful wives
in the stands, now take the interest they once feigned
oh, long ago, their marriage just begun, years
of helping husbands feel important just begun,
the scrimping, the anger brought home evenings
from degrading jobs. This poem goes out to them.
Is steal of home the touching of the heart?
Last pitch. A soft fly. A can of corn,
the players say. Routine, like mornings,
like the week. They shake hands on the mound.
Nice grab on that shot to left. Good game. Good game.
Dust rotates in their headlight beams.
The wives, the beautiful wives, are with their men.

III

Baseball relates me to my own life
and to others’ like nothing else
ever has, not even English

Tom Clark, unquestionably the most prolific poet writing about baseball, begins his collection “Fan Poems” with this short, revealing poem. How can this be? How can a mid-twentieth century poet achieve such feeling of connectiveness with himself and the world through the language of baseball? More of a connected feeling than provided by the English language! Perhaps it is because we mid-century Americans have so little else to call us beyond ourselves, so little else to project our aspirations upon. Nothing stays the same long enough. The poet says:

the elements never change, only the arrangements,
the drama’s situational
Down there on the field
the beautifully balanced cliches
play themselves out
in new combination each time
It’s all just like Bob Veale said —
good pitching will stop
good hitting any time,
and vice-versa

The contemporary interest in baseball begins in the mythic sameness of its elements, but it is the vice-versa of the poem’s end which captures our confused hearts. As the poet Gregory Corso said to Ted Williams in Corso’s “Dream Of A Baseball Star”:

Randall Jarrell says you’re a poet! I cried.
So do I! I say you’re a poet!

The lonely player working against the odds to achieve a vision of perfection, of immortality; who is it, the ballplayer or the poet? The battle for immortality no longer occurs on the great stage of history. It is not in the acts of kings nor saints that Americans search for meaning. It is, as poets have been telling Americans since Whitman, to be found in the lives of ordinary people. Who are our heroes? The poet Joe Oppenheimer describes one:

john g. “scissors”
mcilvain, described by
the sporting news as
remarkable, died
in charleroi, pa.,
recently. he was
88. He pitched for
22 minor league teams
in 15 different leagues
and was still in semi-
pro ball in his seventies.
when he won a 4-3 ball
game at seventy-five he
said: I don’t see anything
to get excited about. i
think a person should feel
real good when he does
something unexpected.
i expected this. his
big disappointment was
that he never made the
majors, although he won
26 for chillicothe
one season, and 27 the
next. he was, however,
a bird-dog scout for
the indians for several
years. he had been
deaf since 1912.

If “scissors” mcilvain is our contemporary hero, the epic within which the hero operates must be described in detail. The game itself, for some of our poets, becomes the world in which the drama is captured. For poet Paul Blackburn the details of one game come to stand for the entire 1965 season, which in turn stands perhaps as the last field of honorable battle. His description is, in some ways, no different than a play-by-play. The contemporary poet finds his language in the language of everydayness:

Okay, there’s one out.
Ruben Amaro, sacrifice fly, drives Thomas in.
John Wesley Covington on deck: 6 homeruns
11 RBI’s (o, he had his at Milwaukee in
57-58, those great years). He
goes to 3&2, takes the payoff, it
goes to Hunt, to Kranepool
(Cookie Rojas on deck)

IN TIME
IT’S ALL OVER

METS 2
PHILLIES 1

well, its a game, no?

Well it’s a game, no? That is the question. Where do we reveal what it is we value, what we are made of? In an urbanized, industrialized world, in a democratic-egalitarian world, that question haunts each one of us, and haunts our poets most of all.

In the midst of one of the most remarkable poems ever written about baseball, “Willie’s Throw” by Paul Metcalf, the poet asks: “… WHAT POWER HAS MAN AGAINST THE GODS?” For most people such a question in the modern context seems awkward, old-fashioned. Yet the question, in one form or another persists in the human soul. For us, however, the question frames itself in less grandiose terms. The world is no longer black and white but an endless gray. Metcalf begins his poetic description of Mays’ catch of Carl Furillo’s long liner on August 15th, 1951, in the Polo Grounds and his unbelievable throw that turned the play into an inning ending double play, with the following lines:

I remember
what I think nobody else remembers …
the way the clouds were against the sky …
… they were no longer white
but ribbed with gray too,
and you had the feeling that
if you could reach high enough
you could
get the gray out of there.

Willie Mays reached high enough, baseball reaches high enough, poets try, through baseball to reach as high.

And if you don’t believe me, ask Richard Grossinger. No one has done as much to organize for our edification the literary-mythic qualities of baseball. From the baseball issue of Io, to the numerous anthologies of baseball literature, Grossinger has collected from far and wide the elements of a sacred scripture. In his anthology Baseball I Gave you the Best Years of My Life (edited with Kevin Karrane) Grossinger writes:

In the daily newspaper we read the cumulative score and records of a Dogon creation myth, as if told by Ogotemmeli. On the city street corners, singers and drummers gather, flipping cards of their ancestors and totem-beings, gambling on throws of Pima and Creek stones and other’s teeth. A ritual jam session precedes the pick-up game, everyone clustered, living, chorusing, then, out in the field, guarding their positions, picking “roots and berries”. In the stadiums of the city-states the big games are played, tribal ceremonies complete with totems and clan representation. We might actually believe that Willie Mays comes wild from the waterhole races and zebra hunts, tamed to articulate skills of organized ball, via the dark vernacular of the Dixie slums.

Well, it’s a game, no?

IV

“Poems do not want to explain themselves, even to the mind that makes them. … They seem to come out of nowhere — a gift, to be sure, for which one ought to be thankful, but delivered suspiciously without a postmark and wrapped in bafflement.” I quote the poet Stanley Kunitz again precisely because he discusses contemporary poetry and not baseball nor poems about baseball. I do not believe that the poets and poems I have referred to in this essay are written about baseball because the poets happen to like the sport. They happen to like the sport for the same reason that they write about it, and for the same reason most of us love the sport but cannot articulate, not being poets. These poets did not seek to write about baseball. Those that do usually produce the most forgettable of poems. These poets surprised themselves in creating poems wrapped in the mythology of baseball, a mythology that they are in part responsible for creating, and did so because what they felt to be most true emotionally at a given moment came out wrapped in baseball terminology. The following, from Richard Hugo’s “The Freaks at Spurgin Road Field” should serve as a fitting conclusion.”

The score is always close, the rally always short.
I’ve left more wreckage than a quake.
Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back.

The afflicted never cheer in unison.
Isn’t it wrong the way the mind moves back
to stammering pastures where the picnic should have worked.
The dim boy claps because the others clap.

Hugo ends his autobiographical essay “The Anxious Fields of Play” following this poem and the statement: “l think when I played softball I was telling the world and myself that futile as my life seemed, I still wanted to live. ” 

Well, it’s a game, no?