ESPN opening day poem

Open couplets? There's only a ghost of meter.

 

Iambic pentameter, bitches!

I don't know if said poem was written in such a manner. Just seemed like a fun to phrase to throw the word "bitches" behind.

 

I suppose one could always cite poetic license.

But this would've gotten me a B- in freshman comp at most.

 

know I'm spending way too much time around my kids, but it is frightening how easily those words line up with the rhythm of Marlo Thomas' "Free To Be You And Me." It's almost like they set it to that tune.

 

Where do I go to kill you, I will be singing that damn song all day now.

 

Opening Day Haiku's, let's hear them!!!

 

Ernie Harwell wrote a Opening Day essay in 1955 for the Sporting News. I'm still looking for the short poem he opened every season with.


Baseball is the President tossing out the first ball of the season and a scrubby schoolboy playing catch with his dad on a Mississippi farm. A tall, thin old man waving a scorecard from the corner of his dugout. That's baseball. And so is the big, fat guy with a bulbous nose running home one of his 714 home runs.

There's a man in Mobile who remembers that Honus Wagner hit a triple in Pittsburgh forty-six years ago. That's baseball. So is the scout reporting that a sixteen year old pitcher in Cheyenne is a coming Walter Johnson. Baseball is a spirited race of man against man, reflex against reflex. A game of inches. Every skill is measured. Every heroic, every failing is seen and cheered, or booed. And then becomes a statistic.

In baseball democracy shines its clearest. The only race that matters is the race to the bag. The creed is the rulebook. Color merely something to distinguish one team's uniform from another.

Baseball is a rookie. His experience no bigger than the lump in his throat as he begins fulfillment of his dream. It's a veteran too, a tired old man of thirty-five hoping that those aching muscles can pull him through another sweltering August and September. Nicknames are baseball, names like Zeke and Pie and Kiki and Home Run and Cracker and Dizzy and Dazzy.

Baseball is the cool, clear eyes of Rogers Hornsby. The flashing spikes of Ty Cobb, an over aged pixie named Rabbit Maranville.

Baseball just a game as simple as a ball and bat. Yet, as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes. A sport, a business and sometimes almost even a religion.

Why the fairy tale of Willie Mays making a brilliant World's Series catch. And then dashing off to play stick ball in the street with his teenage pals. That's baseball. So is the husky voice of a doomed Lou Gehrig saying., "I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth.”

Baseball is cigar smoke, hot roasted peanuts, The Sporting News, ladies day, "Down in Front", Take Me Out to the Ball Game, and the Star Spangled Banner.

Baseball is a tongue tied kid from Georgia growing up to be an announcer and praising the Lord for showing him the way to Cooperstown. This is a game for America. Still a game for America, this baseball! Thank you.

 

And here is how Ernie Harwell would open each season:


Each year, on the first broadcast from Spring training, the devoutly Christian Harwell recites from the biblical Song of Solomon:

For the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the song of the birds has come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

 

Wind is blowing out.

Hendry pines for a veteran.

The Cubs suck again.

 

Vet. er. an.

 

Morgan's in the booth
Wondering where the hell are
Sparky, Pete, and Bench.