Signal Fade
Signal Fade
Michael P. Hill
Forget all the dead languages
moldering in ancient texts
or languishing in classrooms,
your Sanskrits, your Latins, et cetera.
If there’s any arcane vernacular
whose disappearance disheartens me,
it is surely the wordless tongue
spoken by catchers and pitchers
for a hundred and fifty years before
the arrival of the pitch clock
and the on-field implementation
of wireless communications.
A discretely delivered shorthand,
it was scrawled on the air with the fingers—
one for a fastball, two for a curve,
three for a changeup, and so on—
by someone wearing a mitt
crouched behind home plate,
and acknowledged with either a nod
or a headshake by someone else
perched on a mound of dirt
sixty or so feet away. And
it wasn’t just about pitches
or locations either. A thumb,
for example, might be employed
to alert the pitcher to a base runner
with a generous lead off first, prompting
a pickoff attempt in response,
or a fist might elicit a pitchout,
a ball thrown clear of the batter to help
a catcher foil a steal.
Of course, there was always the danger
that a runner at second base
might decrypt the sequence of signs
and give their own team an advantage,
but that only urged the development
of an increasingly intricate parlance,
one that could never compete with
the length of the modern attention span
or the rise of the digital age, and thus
was abandoned, leaving a silence
where once there was so much to say.
Michael P. Hill is the author of three collections of poetry, Where That Leaves Us (Kelsay Books), Not Just Passing Through (Main Street Rag Publishing) and Junk Drawer (Kelsay Books). His poems have also appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Briar Cliff Review, Gray’s Sporting Journal and Opossum, among others. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Jeff Brain is a San Francisco-based baseball artist and poet. He was a featured poet at the first two National Baseball Poetry Festivals, and now serves on the Poets Committee of the NBPF held each May in Worcester, MA.
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