Sixty-One

Sixty-One

By Robert Watson

The card I treasured most at eight showed Mickey
and a smirking Roger, bats on shoulders:
they would handle fastballs and those tricky
Sliders for me. In manila folders,
 
traces of the race with Ruth: that card,
some autographs and clippings, and a sense
(now cracked with age) that it would not be hard,
that in October over that immense
 
façade in center field they’d fly another
pennant, every single year, above 
the monument for Gehrig, and my mother
and my Grandpa Jake would always love
 
me, somehow.  Then they took a few steps on
the warning track, and they were going—gone.
 
The Stadium seemed bigger then than life.
The Senators, for reasons still obscure,
were Grandpa’s favorite team, As did his wife,
the umpires dressed like death, and just as sure.
 
I knew he couldn’t win. It was July 
of ’61; the Yankee team was packed
with sluggers. First time in the stands, and my
enameled seat was so near home I lacked
 
perspective: every time a Yankee batter
popped one up I thought that it would clear
the bleachers; and I thought that what would matter
was the Yankee score, year after year.
 
Somebody joked the Bronx now had Atomic
Bombers. Power, glory, plus some comic
 
style relief from Cuba, all about
a screwball and cigars; and then a burst
of power turned the race into a rout,
and Maris finally hit his sixty-first,
 
and we were history. My father left
me with a whiffle bat, an ugly scene,
and a transistor for the games; bereft
of him, I turned to Houk, an ex-Marine.
 
The season started with the Bay of Pigs,
but, in the end, the Yankees beat the Reds. 
By next October, Cuban missile rigs 
and Giant Mays were looming; “Kubek heads 
 
Into the army”; but I had no fear:
at short we had a Rookie of the Year,
 
Tom Tresh.  And by the end of ’64
his knees were shot, and Blanchard hit the booze.
They traded Moose, and Stafford’s arm was sore.
And—shockingly—the team began to lose.
 
We moved into the basement, them and me,
my teenage years, and lots of things were new.
Some things I wasn’t ready quite to see.
And am I ready yet? It may be true
 
that Mantle was a drunk who used to pester
waitresses, and Maris was a lout.
But if I had my way, nor God nor Nestor
Chylak would have ever called them out.

Robert N. Watson is Distinguished Professor of English at UCLA. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Oxford Poetry, Prairie Schooner and twenty-some other literary journals. His books have studied Shakespeare; Ben Jonson; the Renaissance roots (in poetry and painting) of modern environmentalism; the fear of death in Early Modern England; editions of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama; Kurosawa’s film adaptation of Macbeth; and the malfunctions of cultural evolution. A more extensive bio is available at https://english.ucla.edu/people-faculty/watson-robert-n/. His greatest baseball memory was being in Yankee Stadium in 1964 to see Mickey Mantle win a World Series game with a home run in the bottom of the ninth.

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