Baseball

Baseball

By Elliot Slater

We noted as this was unfolding,
Our creeping distaste for the professional game.
The usual culprits: the ballpark expense,
The salaries, the metrics, the woke sports pages,
The seventy-dollar six packs, the pay TV, all
The dispiriting corruptions of baseball’s soul.
Free Friday games were stolen from old fans
Confined to homes, or gathered in trailers,
Or little clubs with memberships on a like wane.
All this paling before our simple epiphany,
That the game is best watched, loved, on the field,
From the dugout, the foul lines, the low bleachers or
Standing by the fence, leaning forward,
Or sitting in lawn chairs.
We could be watching eight year olds
Making brilliant force plays to third, Babe
Ruth players suddenly tall, High School
And College teams, eighteen fans, all parents or girlfriends,
Adult fast-pitch softball, in towns where the mill is gone,
Or the fabulous women’s game, the old game, really,
Restored by marvelous athletes with ponytails and enormous grins,
Blessed with incredible skill and joie d’vivre.
We want to be at field level with them, if possible
(Coaches, scorekeepers, or aging hangers-on)
We love the game. The game poets write about.

Elliot Slater grew up in Massachusetts and Maine. He is working on a number of thematically connected stories and poems based upon his childhood and adolescence, and other short fiction, poetry, and several novels. His work has appeared in The Northern New England Review, Halfway Down The Stairs, The Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Ibbetson Street Magazine, Workers Write! and Litbreak magazine, among others. He has coached the same Little League Team in Cambridge, MA, for twenty-five years.

Elliot Lin is a college student who spends their free time musing about sports and how they shape or reflect identity. You can find their other baseball-related illustrations here, on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram.

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