Hitting to the Opposite Field

Hitting to the Opposite Field

By Michael Gaspeny

You found the gap almost every at-bat,
lashing clothesline doubles hissing
in the grass between right and center.
Though we edged into your alley,
knowing what was coming,
your blurs whisked our shadows
and sent us running.
 
I saw you yesterday, twenty years later,
still fit to grip the bat. You caught me up
on your sons: Ted in Kansas, five boys
of his own, so many he could coach
only three of their teams, and Tim
in Minnesota, with a trio of pony-tailed,
softball-playing daughters. I recalled
Ted back in the day, sporting your stroke
and rocket arm, and young Tim, springing
like a terrier around bases between innings.
 
Sometimes things work out.
The kid doesn’t land on the needle
in the sand. The writing on the wall
is a psalm, not a curse. Somehow
the closed stance, inside-out swing,
the liners flicking the green proceed.
God, it was good to see you.

This was the sixth most-read piece of 2022.

Michael Gaspeny’s novel Postcard from the Delta is forthcoming from The Livingston Press. He’s the author of The Tyranny of Questions, a novella in verse(Unicorn Press) and the chapbooks Re-Write Men and Vocation. He has won the Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition. When Gaspeny was a sportswriter in Arkansas, Bob Gibson told him, “You can ask all the questions you like, but I’m not answering any of them.” At least the reporter got a brush-off instead of a shave.

Sam Williams is a cartoonist, comics publisher and baseball enthusiast based in Bournemouth, UK.

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