Hardball

Walt Whitman was really pissed off about the curve ball. 

In the poet’s prime, in a developmental stage of baseball, around the time of early unrest when Blues battled Grays, the pitcher lobbed the ball underhanded to the batter. His objective was to allow the batter to club the ball, making play more lively. 

A baseball game without many hits is today the major complaint of someone who professes to dislike the game because nothing much happens. Because it’s boring, they say. Anyone who understands the game— and revels in it like I do—understands that the people making those statements don’t understand the poetry of the game. Like Walt Whitman once did. And like a guy I know who still does. 

Looking back on the only time I played organized baseball, I can’t imagine a twelve-year-old giant like Gus Turonis or Sammy Parente thinking,  “Here you go, you skinny geek-face, drive this one to the gap, and we’ll let the fielders do their jobs.” 

To think that they would think anything like that— well… that, is utterly ridiculous. 

They wanted to set you down, paralyzed by not one, but three plumes of smoke trailing the crimson-stitched comets they heaved effortlessly at you. Like pre-teenage gods of thunder. They wanted to bring your ten-year-old ass near tears as you looked down at nothing but dirt while slinking back to the dugout. To the lonely end of the bench where another twelve-year-old veteran such as the Junction kid Gerry Delaney gave you the side eye and shook his head and wondered how the hell a bush-leaguer like you ended up on his team in the first place.

When the professional game in the middish-1800s had evolved to the point of trickery on the part of the pitcher, Walt Whitman was incensed. The curve ball had begun to infiltrate the game. He couldn't imagine a pitcher attempting to fool the batter. About baseball he then said, “I should call it everything that is damnable.” 

My brother or anyone for that matter, did not require so much deception as the curve ball to send me back to the makeshift bench on the sandlot, which on our turf wasn’t a bench at all. It was more the place where you stood, on pebbled patches of dirt with glints of green from shattered 7-Up bottles, behind and to the left or right of the batter and far enough away so that a foul ball might be caught before it could raise a knot at the hairline— or earn you a trip to the dentist. 

The fetching thing about Whitman’s poetry and certain other poets is the immortality of it all.  Shakespeare. Percy Bysshe Shelley. Seamus Heaney. They will eternally be present for you when you are present for them. They will be present for kids and grandkids and hopefully future generations if this lunatic world doesn’t first self-destruct. 

When my friend Mike sent me a poem he published many years ago, I wasn’t in literary mode. I was tickled but not overwhelmed as I was when I read it more recently. I was too busy then wondering from where the next wave of synthetic excitement would appear— and the only thing I was reading were want-ads because the exciting things and their by-products always knocked me off the basepaths. 

Mike and I spent years as kids playing catch, playing tennis-ball baseball, collecting baseball cards and listening to our dads' stories about men whose elegant movements on the diamond we could only picture in our minds. Jimmie Foxx. Frankie Frisch. Al Simmons. I always told Mike about my early struggles with my brother Ned on the home front, and on those sandlots, where with my weak hitting I couldn’t help the ragtag neighborhood team of older guys, either. There were days when I wanted to secede— or even expatriate myself from baseball and from brotherhood. 

Titled Hardball and sampled below, the poem Mike wrote reflects those distant and joyous struggles with my brother Ned: 

He powers 

the planet’s arc,

measured, careful

not to pass 

the boy who cowers at the edge of the park. 

Despite not following the game as closely as he once did, Mike never forgot the poetry of baseball. Or the beauty beneath balls and strikes and hits and inescapable errors. Despite not seeing each other or talking to each other as often as we once did, Mike never forgot the ties that bound together him and me and me and my brother—like the fingers of a fielder’s mitt, laced one to another, and then to the next.