Saturday, August 25th, 7:oo pm
Donation requested

Amy Davis, Jim Doane, Michael C. Ford, francEyE, and Tim Green, will read works by themselves and others, including a heart-rending rendition of “Casey at the Bat” by Tali Stein and great baseball songs by the incomparable Ross Altman. Open MIC for BASEBALL POETRY ONLY.

This is going to be fun. I don’t talk about baseball, and never write about it, but I play all the time. I had 5 games last week, 3 this week, including the semi-finals in LA County Men’s Slow-Pitch tomorrow night. Honestly, it’s kind of ridiculous how much time a grown man can spend playing softball in this land of perpetual summer. Coming from upstate New York, where we have three months warm enough to play, and still half of the games get rained-out, this feel a little too much like heaven. If I really wanted to, and the tendonitis in my shoulder could take it, I could easily play 200 games a year, between nightly leagues and tournaments. This LA’s biggest redeeming quality, as far as I’m concerned.

Every time I’m confronted with the idea of Baseball Poetry, I can’t help but wonder why, if I play so often, if I watch each of 162 Mets games every year, why do I never write about it? There are probably a number of reasons.

For one, it’s very difficult for a baseball poem to resist becoming sentimental — sports-writing is a minefield of cliche, but as “America’s pasttime,” baseball is especially precarious, with its age-old sticky pinetar, the smell of cut grass, a father and son playing catch, the first game, the hotdog, the dropped ball in the stands, your peanuts, your crackerjacks, and on and on. To love baseball is to slip into the nostalgia of that cliche. You have to admit, on some fundamental level, loving baseball is cheesy.

There are poems worth writing about baseball, but it seems like they’ve mostly been written. One of them, the one I’ve always meant to write, we published in our last issue. Peter Harris’s “Will Buddhism Survive?” In the poem, Harris describes baseball — and rightly so — as one of the last bastions of pre-concious thought, the kind of all-action, no-judgment transcendence that the Buddha would have truly appreciated. That meditative state of notan is what I love about playing. I’ve always meant to write that poem, but Harris beat me to it. So this Saturday, I’ll read it, along with severall others I’ve enjoyed.

All this said, I’ve never really pursued baseball poetry as a reader, either. Maybe I just assume it’s going to be too sentimental. Maybe I’m embarrassed that I’m a jock at heart. Who knows. But I’m very curious to see what other people come up with. Searching around, I found some baseball poems online by Donald Hall that I like. I’m sure there will be some good ones here, and maybe it will be inspiring.

I actaully do have one baseball poem, but it’s so bad that I don’t know if anyone’s ever read it — I’ve definitely never read it in public. But what the hell, I just might. So come by at 7pm Saturday and listen to me embarrass myself.