The Best American Poetry

Les Keiter: "He beat the ball . . ."

Who remembers Les Keiter?
He recreated West Coast baseball games for heartsick New Yorkers bereft of the Dodger and Giants after they moved to LA and SF at the end of the 1957 season.
How well I remember lying in bed listening to my black Zenith radio with the lights out as the clock moved toward midnight on a September night in 1959. The Giants and Dodgers were battling for first place. In the opening inning, Don Drysdale walked the first three Giants to face him. Then he proceeded to strike out the next three. The Dodgers won, ended the season tied for first with the defending champion Braves, then of Milwaukee. The ex-Brooks prevailed in a two-game playoff, copping the NL pennant. Then they beat the Chisox in six. It was the last hurrah of Messrs. Snider, Hodges, and Carl Furillo, my father's favorite. I was eleven.
Alone in the radio studio, or maybe he had an engineer, Les Keiter would get the teletype, make an appropriate sound with a rudimentary noisemaker, and call the play. The teletype would say: Gilliam singles. Keiter would say: Antonelli goes into his windup . . .the pitch. . .is a fastball down the middle . . .Gilliam swings. . .and hits a scorching line drive. . . just out of McCovey's reach. . .into right field. . .Gilliam makes the turn. . .and. . .  holds at first with a single." The next day you'd learn that Gilliam had actually beaten out a lazy roller to the left side.
Les Keiter was at his best on a close play at the plate. A sacrifice fly became a big dramatic moment. The tap of a drum stick indicated the meeting of bat and ball: Ron Fairly or Don Demeter lifted a shallow fly to center field, which Willie Mays patrolled with the efficiency of DiMaggio. Maury Wills, tagging up on third base, broke for the plate when Mays made the catch. Then: "Here comes Wills. . .Mays throws . ..and. . .and. . .he beat the ball, he beat the ball!" The crowd noise always sounded the same but that was radio for you.
Les Keiter died on Tuesday in Hawaii at the age of 89
-- DL

Here’s To BASEBALL [by Grace Cavalieri]

It is April 11. My last guest blog, and I thank everyone at BAP for this week. After the weeklong honorifics of National Poetry Month, I exit with a story about baseball, because it is spring, and it is here. Washington DC is ready. I haven’t been to many games in the near past except to take my grandsons to an occasional training game for NAVY’s baseball team at the Naval Academy nearby. But once I was an ardent fan. Of course I was only ten but—this story takes place a long time ago. As children, we would go from Trenton, where we lived, to Philly, mostly to watch our favorite team,”The A’s”. Always in the cellar, people would say. Maybe that’s why we rooted for them. We had baseball heroes and movie star heroes because TV had not entered our world yet.  

This story happened one weekend in spring at the Stacy Trent Hotel on State Street in Trenton, New Jersey. Jean Carleton had a birthday party and I remember we all had on our Easter outfits, complete with hats. (Mine was black patent leather to match my shoes.) We all looked pretty fine in a grand hotel sitting around a birthday cake. In the next room. we spotted the Yankee Baseball Team, and there was the major love of my fantasy life, the famous Yankee outfielder, Johnny Lindell, laughing and talking just a step away. Jean and I rushed over with our paper party cups and pens to get an autograph. I can’t believe what happened next, but he grabbed the cup (my heart leapt) and he …..He….this is true…He SPIT in it, saying "Here’s a little something for you, kid.” Everyone on the team laughed. I don’t know what I did with the cup but I’m sure I didn’t keep it. Here’s the strangest part of all. Well first I went home and took down his picture, the one by Myrna Loy on my bedroom wall, but somehow since that day I‘ve always remembered it as TED WILLIAMS who spit in my cup! Somehow messing the Yankees with the Red Sox in my mind. Surely a form of denial.

 

Recently I happened to see Johnny Lindell on the internet and realized he was the villain that ruined Jean Carleton’s birthday. It never was poor Ted Williams whom I’ve trashed the better part of a century in every baseball conversation I could enter. Johnny Lindell. Star outfielder. My dreamboat. The first guy I ever loved. A spring long ago. On the prettiest day of my life.

 

Other news: This April there is a new baseball dictionary put out by W.W. Norton The Dickson Baseball Dictionary. It is huge and has every baseball term ever imagined. There is also the premiere of the baseball mural DC commissioned from the great artist Walter Kravitz (He happens to be husband to the marvelous poet Judith Harris.) “DC Creates Public Art Program” Invites us to a dedication of sculptures by Omri Amrany of Josh Gibson, Walter Johnson and Frank Howard and a suspended installation by Walter Kravitz entitled "The Ball Game"
 

Kravitz, Professor in the Department of Art and Visual Technology (AVT), George Mason University, was granted this commission by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities as part of the DC Creates Public Art program. Here is The Kravitz work:

Two views of "The Ball Game," above and below.

Images courtesy of Walter Kravitz

"The idea of baseball is not focused just on various large cities across the country, because it is played everywhere," says Kravitz. "The installation is meant to tell the story of baseball in a comic way, and I hope that as fans enter Nationals Ballpark and see the piece, they will have the opportunity to reminisce about their love of the game."
  

Also spring has other features to offer, and Dan Murano, reminds us of this with his photos.
 

"Blondes, Box Scores, and Elizabeth Bishop" [by Allison Contey]

Blondes, Box Scores, and Elizabeth Bishop

I.

A-Rod, your body rocks
as does your bat
but not so much, perhaps,
your plucked eyebrows or TV teeth, and—
is your hair frosted?
It's OK because when you're at the plate,
you look like a Cavalier—maybe more a Fop,
a frivolously fastidious dandy.
Something very Jeremiah of you, too.
Your tendency to hit into double plays,
the frequent and overzealous strikeouts,
and your well-documented lack of clutch.
I like to win, but it gives me comfort, lying
on my velvet couch, to know that despite the stats
one can still suck. Nevertheless, you give black socks
 a whole new meaning. On you, more like stirrups.
Not like stirrups at the OBGYN, (cold, insidious) but
like those that fall from a saddle. A relic
from your world. Your world the world of men—spitting,
then hitting into the sunset. Hopefully.

II.

Elizabeth Bishop, I have a bone to pick with you.
Your Collected admonishes and the clock
ticks loudly in the kitchen. I need to read you
but A-Rod is up,  the crowd is booing loudly
and he is about to mount the plate
on an imaginary horse. It stamps the dirt,
snorts, and A-Rod points his bat at the horizon.
Elizabeth, I implore you—discover baseball
wherever you are. The diamond is perfect geometry,
tracks of diagonals mowed like lattice the low
sun makes shine, then deepen. The crowd, white noise,
like the CD a friend uses to quiet her baby: children playing
in a pool, a hairdryer, running water. A full house tonight, Elizabeth,
a meditation, like Sudoku on a moving train or a jigsaw puzzle,
pieces scattered on the coffee table. Unlike your book,
consecrated by the required reading list. Poets love the mirror.
Perhaps as much as A-Rod, who searches for a fastball,
leaning back on his right leg swaying
back and forth. I've learned, Elizabeth, that they do this
to keep time. Something you know a lot about, I can tell
from your poem "Poem" (nice title), which I read
during the Jeter's Ford Challenge commercial. I had it on mute.
Here it comes—a curveball, off the plate.

III.

At the plate, a hitter has only one thought: right now.
At the computer, I have only one thought: kill me.
And it could, Elizabeth, but not as much
as Yankee commentator Michael Kay,
who sputters, "the Melkman cometh" about
Melky Cabrera, a returning, demoted rookie who
has lost his swing (late nights, girls).
These things happen when you're 24.
These things happen when you're 34.
Elizabeth, why were you reading about Baroque prose
in college when you should have gone to keggers?
There is art and there is an art to life. Like A-Rod's uniform,
which reminds me of Marilyn Monroe's  "Happy Birthday, Mr. President"
dress, so tight she had to be hoisted over the toilet to pee.
Blondes. Something A-Rod knows a thing or two about.
We can’t help whom we’re attracted to, Elizabeth.
If I had to love someone else's rack
as much as I love mine, we'd have a problem.
A-Rod whiffs. The crowd cheers. A cudgel stick of a season.

-- Allison Contey

September 21, 2001: Mike Piazza Homers to Defeat Braves, 3-2

It was the first ball game played in New York after 9/ 11. The Mets were down 2-1 in the bottom of the eighth inning. Mike Piazza got up with a man on first base (Desi Relaford, if memory serves) and unloaded a pitch over the wall in center field. If you had been at Shea that evening, as we were, with a full house, you will never forget the feeling through the stands at the moment the ball cleared the fence, as Piazza rounded first and Relaford symmetrically rounded third, and strangers hugged themselves in the aisles.

-- DL

The Year Brooklyn Won the World Series

The official 1955 team photo of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Top row, fifth from the left is Gil Hodges (#14) and fourth from the right, Duke Snider (#4) standing next to World Series hero Johnny Podres. Top row, extreme right Jackie Robinson. Second row, fifth from the left, looks suspiciously like rookie Sandy Koufax. Can you spot Walter Alston, Pee Wee Reese, and Roy Campanella in the front row, and Carl Furillo in the middle?

What's Fernando Perez Reading?

<<<
On the field he's a switch-hitting outfielder for the Tampa Bay Rays. Off the field, he's a bookworm with a degree in American studies with an emphasis on creative writing from Columbia University. Fernando Perez, whose parents emigrated from Cuba, grew up in New Jersey. We caught up with Perez, 25, by phone, just before Game 5 against the Red Sox on Oct. 16.

What is on your nightstand?

Right now, because of the playoffs, I'm reading slowly, but I'm reading Ian Stewart's Why Beauty Is Truth: A History of Symmetry. Once the season ends, I'm going to take a book back from my mom and read it. That one is Tom Miller's Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba.

Are you staying away from heavy plots during the playoffs?

Actually, what helps me a great deal right now is poetry, like Robert Creeley and John Ashbery.
>>>

from "What's Fernando Perez Reading?" by By Piper Castillo in St. Petersburg Times, October 26, 2008.

Cubs versus Dodgers: Game Three [by Peter Ferry]

October Requiem

Play ball!
Do or die.
Backs against the wall.
Ducks on the pond.
Can of corn.
Drat.
Frozen rope
Splittin’ the gap!
Two in.
It’s early yet.
Three up, three down.
Paintin’ the black.
Changin’ speeds.
One two three.
Working inside and out.
Goose eggs.
Tryin’ too hard.
Pressin’.
Tryin’ to do too much.
Gettin’ late.
Atom balls.
Big train: 101 mph.
No chance.
Study in futility.
Down to their final chance.
Strike three!
You’re out of here!
You’re history!
You’re toast!
Wait ‘til next year.
Again.

-- Peter Ferry

Cubs versus Dodgers: Game Two [by Peter Ferry]

There are six of us (four Democrats, two Republicans, all Cubs fans) in a cottage on the beach near South Haven, Michigan, and the waves are breaking hard on the sand outside. We’ve come together to cook and eat Paella Valenciana, watch the vice-presidential debate, and root for the Cubs. The pundits are saying that this is a must win for both Sarah Palin and the Cubs.

“May I call you Joe?” Palin asks Biden as they shake hands. Palin is aggressive just like Alfonso Soriano who singles to lead off the game and Carlos Zambrano who comes out firing like his old self. She’s all “hecks” and “darn rights.” She invokes the name “John McCain” in virtually every sentence and the word “fight” or “fightin” in most. But out at Wrigley Field the fans are on their feet screaming with two outs and Soriano on second in the very first inning. They already sound a little desperate.

Oops. The Cubs make two errors in the second including a blown double play that would have ended the inning, and the Dodgers are suddenly up by five runs. Biden makes no errors, but he can’t get a hit either. It’s all Palin so far. Did she just wink at me? Cubs fans and Democrats alike have an all too familiar sinking feeling.

Now it’s six nothing, then seven. The Cubs make another error. Griffin calls from college in total despair. Ron Santo is on the radio wailing, “Oh my God! Oh my God!”  Dick Stockton says the Cubs need a big inning. So does Biden, but unlike the Cubs, he gets his. He hits, if not a home run, a double off the wall when he recites a litany of ways in which McCain’s policies are no different that George Bush’s, who’s about as popular in the debate as a billy goat in a box seat; Biden can’t say his name enough and Palin never does.

Beating Palin to the sympathy punch, Biden knocks one over the wall when he says, “I know what it means to have a son who may not make it” with a catch in his voice. Late inning rally, and in the end the talking heads say that Biden probably won the debate, but that Palin didn’t lose it. Both kept their cool and played errorless ball.

Not so the Cubs. Out at Wrigley Field it’s ten to one when I go to bed. The best team in the league looks like the worst and its “insurmountable lead” at home has turned into a landslide for the Dodgers.

Say it ain’t so, Joe. Or Lou.

Now their only chance is to go to LA and win three in a row.

Course they did do that once before this year.

Stay tuned.

-- Peter Ferry

Cubs versus Dodgers: Game One [by Peter Ferry]

       The only post season Cubs game I ever attended was the first one in 1984, after a summer I’d been to nearly half the team’s home games.  I spent $75 on a bleacher seat, and the Cubs won 13-1, but it was invasion of the body snatchers out there.  None of the regulars were in the bleachers, not the gamblers betting on every pitch in the seats just below the concession stand, not the Trixies working on their tans, not the two blind guys listening to their transistor radio and doing funny color commentary, not the college kids measuring manhood by the number of beer cups they had accumulated, one within the next.  No, they had all been replaced by the college kids’ parents, men with sweaters tied around their necks and women asking beer vendors if they had any Pinot Grigio.

            So no more expensive, on-sight disillusionment for me.  This year I’m going to be right in front of my t.v. or beside my radio or in a bar as I am this afternoon when the first pitch is thrown at 5:33.  This one is Charlie’s Ale House two miles north of Wrigley Field right up Clark Street.  It’s the kind of place that calls its chili “kick ass,” but it does have 23 beers on tap and 6 flat screen t.v.s.  I’d planned to be down the street at the Hopleaf which has wonderful Belgian beers, mussels and frites, and where I’ve been invited by Jessa Crispin of Bookslut to do a reading at 7:30 (I’m hoping for a six run lead by then), but the Hopleaf has no t.v.s flat screened or otherwise, a fact I’d salute any other evening, but….

            We bail out of Charlie’s after one beer and two innings.  The Cubs are up two/zero on the strength of Mark DeRosa’s opposite field home run, but Ryan Dempster is nervous and wild.  Out on Clark we follow the Metlife blimp as if it’s the star of Bethlehem to a Turkish pizza parlor called Konak’s next door to the Hopleaf where we eat an eggplant pizza and nurse the Cubs through two more innings while we talk to two dancers/baseball fans from The Chicago Tap Theater.  They are designing their Christmas show as they cheer for the Cubs.  God, I love Chicago!

           7:10 and time to go.  Dempster has thrown a hundred pitches already and now loaded the bases, but Piniella leaves him in to face James Loney, who promptly parks one in the center field bleachers. Down 4-2.  Shit.

           At a reading I’d agreed to give from my new novel, I read my piece to a crowd that’s much younger than I expected, and I know instantly that it’s the wrong one, but people are polite and attentive.  Afterward I excuse myself to go to the bathroom:  5-2 Dodgers in the seventh.  A couple more readers and another bathroom break.  6-2 Dodgers in the eighth.  I sign a few books, drink a couple bears, and hurry back to Konak’s.  There’s a soccer game on.  I hesitate, then ask the old guy at the end of the bar just to be sure.

            “Yeah, they lost.  7-2.  Same old Cubs.”

            -- Peter Ferry

Ed. note: Peter Ferry's novel "Travel Writing" has just been published by Harcourt.

True Dodger Blue [by Benjamin Weissman and Amy Gerstler]

Tuesday, August 19, 2008: Dodger Stadium,  Los Angeles CA
Los Angeles Dodgers versus Colorado Rockies

Our lovely seventy-five-year-old mother-in-law / mother (respectively) Mimi, a RABID Dodger fan for seventy years, was recently our guest at Dodger Stadium. Her Dodger obsession dates back to early childhood. As a tot of five living in Brooklyn, she ran away from home to neighboring Ebbets Field, because it was her favorite place on earth. Her parents found her happily sitting on the grass, singing to herself, and with some effort coaxed her home, probably with the promise that they’d bring her back to a game, real soon.

Ebbets Field: Paradise Lost.

Mimi has old wounds dating back to when the Giants’ Juan Marichal cracked the Dodgers’ Johnny Roseboro on the head in the heat of an argument in 1965. 

Juan Marichal

Roseboro needed fourteen stitches. You can still make Mimi livid just by mentioning Marichal’s name. [Ed. note: I remember that game. Koufax pitched for the Dodgers.]

Sartorial commentary

Actor Chazz Palmenteri tossed out the first pitch. He was looking elegant and gaunt and Count Dracula-like, attired in black, with his black hair combed back, his cheekbones as dramatic and prominent as Bela Lugosi’s.

Dodger uniforms are way cuter than the Colorado Rockies' uniforms. The Rockies' uniforms look Star Trekky. The Dodgers' simple white and blue uniforms are elegant, dignified, classic, and show dirt right away from honest on-field activity like sliding into bases……while the Rockies’ strangely shaped black shirts and laundry-water gray striped pants look mismatched, like badly designed children’s pajamas. 

Happily, rumors that recently acquired Dodgers slugger Manny Ramirez had cut off or substantially trimmed his trademark flowing rasta braids are untrue. Were Manny to cut his locks, it would be a hair crime on the scale of Samson’s unfortunate barbering in the Old Testament. Fans were sighted at Dodger Stadium sporting at least three different styles of Manny hats. One: batting helmets with fake Manny braids attached. Two: regular baseball caps with fake Manny braids attached. Three: Manny style blue babushka kerchiefs/doo rags (he wears one under his baseball hat) with the aforementioned ropy faux dreads dangling down. Take your pick. All look great.

Cuisine notes

Mimi consumed a super Dodger dog with relish, mustard, catsup, and a triple helping of minced onions -- the full compliment of condiments available for dog eaters at Dodger stadium. She enjoyed the dog so much she kept closing her eyes while she ate as though she were listening to Mozart. Upon finishing the dog she requested a fork so she could eat the leftover onion bits out of its paper wrapper. She also shared a bag of famously salty Dodger peanuts (salted in shell! how do they accomplish this? are they soaked in brine before roasting?) and a diet Coke.

The garlic fries at Dodger stadium are top notch: prodigiously greasy yet marvelous visibly garlicky, flecked with parsley, creating a personal garlic cloud for eater and seatmates. One of the best Dodger Stadium foodstuffs. Eat them and you won’t get a cold for weeks.

Beer glasses with a little ring of flashing strobe lights around the base of the glass (like a sunken UFO at the bottom of your beer) are now sold at Dodger stadium and were a popular, if slightly distracting item.

Snacks from home: We brought carrot slices and hummus, tortilla chips and red seedless grapes. One twenty-four ounce beer, $12.

Literary criticism

“DodgerVision” is an enormous video screen on field. It’s the largest Standard Definition video screen in Major League Baseball (tied for that distinction with the Cincinnati Reds).

When players come up to bat, their huge, usually nervously grinning or grimacing  image appears on screen along with some of their recent stats and allegedly amusing text about them. Two substandard Dodgervision puns from said texts may benefit from editing:

For Nomar Garciaparra: “NO MAR MESSING AROUND!”

For Manny Ramirez: ‘SHOW ME THE MANNY.”

Actual game-related remarks

The Dodgers had just acquired forty-two-year old legend Greg Maddux from the Padres that afternoon, and although he did not pitch, there he was suited up in his new blue and white uniform that evening. The following conversation ensued:

B: having Maddux on our team is like having Confucius in the dugout. He has wowed teammates and coaches by accurately predicting where every hitter in the lineup will hit the ball.

A: Uh oh, our pitching coach is walking to the mound.

B: I always thought Honeycutt was an odd choice for pitching coach as during his days on the mound he was once thrown out of a game for having an emery board hidden in his glove.

A: So he could do his nails during the game?

B: No, so he could scuff the ball for enhanced gripping, which affects the movement of the pitched ball and makes it do freaky, subtle things.

Postscript: The Dodgers have long held the terrible ability of acquiring superstars after their prime. Pittsburgh Pirate batting god Bill Madlock wa a Dodger before retiring. The list of almost pensioners they’ve acquired in the eleventh hour is endless, embarrassing.

The Rockies scored two runs on three hits in the first inning. When you play the Rockies. you have to survive the dangerous Holliday/Hawpe duo and we did not.  Holliday lined a comebacker off Kuroda’s left foot and one pitch later Hawpe homered. Kuroda said about the homerun pitch, “I wasn’t able to transfer my will to the ball.” Then we had a string of sketchy middle relievers -- Jason Johnson, Hong-Chih Kuo, Tanyon Sturtze and Ramon Troncoso -- who gave up several more runs. The bullpen has been a Dodger strong suit, but not if the starting pitchers falter every game, with minimal run production adding to the pain

Manny being Manny

Manny can’t do everything, as the L.A. sports page announces three times a week, but he has been able to boost Jeff Kent’s batting average by twenty points by simply being there; Kent is getting tasty strikes to hit, because Manny's on deck. Mr. Kent had two hits in the game, briefly raising his batting average to 280 from the 250 zone it has been in for half a decade. Mr.  Kent, National League MVP in 2000, was once the possessor of outrageous numbers: 33 HR, 125 RBI, and 334 BA. (His lifetime BA is a more modest but still impressive.289.) He is one of the slowest second baseman in the history of baseball, and when he dives for a grounder, take note of the vain effort, which resembles a lethargic dinner guest volunteering to do the dishes after three quarters are already drying on the rack. He, Kent, was at his best when he played for the San Francisco Giants, frequently giving teammate Barry Bonds a piece of his mind.

Manny is beautiful, like a bouncy lumbering bear. He plays loose and free, and most of his new teammates appear to love him. He’s kid-like. And never hits a ball gently. His pop ups scrape the sky; his foul balls are lethal weapons. One foul curved in our direction (field box, first base side), whipped away at the last minute like a muscular dragon’s tail, and bruised a sequence of human palms before slamming into an abandoned seat.

The other Dodger delights include Matt Kemp, who combines power and speed, and has become a more disciplined hitter; James Loney, an elegant, reliable first baseman with a Ted Williams swing; and Russell Martin, the Canadian, who, earlier in the season, had “Play that Funky Music White Boy” played before his at-bats. (Dodgers get a snatch of their “favorite song” played when they’re batting at a home game.) Most joyous: brooding Nomar Garciaparra wisely selected “Low Rider” by War as the song to play before his at-bats. Nothing could be more nearly perfect for Dodger fans.

-- Benjamin Weissman and Amy Gerstler