Best-Selling Humorist.
Don’t be glum
Don’t ask why
Albuquerque’s just a 6th inning guy
Don’t you fret
Don’t you worry
After the 7th, we’ll turn to Soria
Don’t lose hope
Just have faith — when
It’s down to one inning, we’ll bring in Nathan
No matter where
Or what or when,
I’m skipper, and would do it all again.
Tygers, Tygers, slinking low,
Humbled by the sailing O’s,
What makeup will yours be now
If Max and V-Mart take their bows?
We scarce knew you through this year
with superstars bought so dear.
With Triple Crowns and Cy Youngs
The faithful still bit their tongues.
What staff ace learns yet in May
He must recast how to play?
Which outfielder is there that
Can deftly wield both glove ‘n bat?
What cast of manager says,
“Pinch hit? Call Hernan Perez!”
And what manner of bullpen
Features Joba Chamberlain????
Tygers, Tygers, slinking low,
All these questions we would know,
Plus the reason for the fact
Ausmus has a long contract.
Today, at BARDBALL, with apologies to William Carlos Williams:
We have traded
Adam Dunn
who was clogging
the payroll
to the A’s
in a pennant race
for a bag
of rocks
Forgive us
he was ridiculous
so whiffable
and so old
Today, at BARDBALL:
Scherzer, Sanchez, Price and Verlander
An A-Team from Mr. I for all Michiganders
Sanchez, Scherzer, Verlander and Price
Dombrowski bets big with each roll of the dice
Verlander, Price, Scherzer, Sanchez
A squad made in heaven, so everyone says
Price, Sanchez, Verlander and Scherzer
Beef up the starters, the pen can’t get worser
Lester, Samardzija, Gray and Kazmir
Give the green-and-gold faithful reason to cheer
Samardzija, Gray, Kazmir and Lester
The A’s try not to let past losses fester
Kazmir, Lester, Samardzija and Gray
A huge power shift to the east in the Bay
Gray, Kazmir, Lester, Samardzija
Giving the rest of the AL neuralgia
It’s “win and win now”
They’re swinging their willies
And trying to ignore
The Phate of the Phillies.
Today, at BARDBALL:
Teams have shown over and over
(At least those who ain’t dozing)
If you want to play in October
@#$%!!! Always be closing!
Swing for the fences? Go ahead, then.
Make your double plays — great for posing
If you want to stand among men, friend,
@#$%!!! Always be closing!
Put that coffee down!
Coffee is for closers only!
It takes brass balls to win
Which you ain’t got, not remotely!
Second place is a set of steak knives.
Third place? Your job’s decomposing.
You think you deserve the hot leads?
@#$%! you! Always be closing!!
Today at BARDBALL, an ode to an old baseball lifer.
Old Zim
When I think of him
Looks like chaw and tar
And a grand har-har
To those squares
Who don’t care
About baseball
And giving your all
For what you love.
And when push comes to shove,
Had Martinez been 70,
Zim would’ve pounded him plenty.
You’re our kind of guy.
Goodbye, Popeye.
I’ve been too busy with speeches and the latest Rex Koko novel (COMING VERY SOON!) to come over here to the blog and talk about the latest in baseball doggerel. For those of you who miss it, here’s my latest piece of hackery from over there, about Derek Jeter’s farewell tour.
Remember, if you like your baseball poetry fast, loose and unsentimental, check out Bardball daily during the season, and tell your friends about it.
The Captain’s Yard Sale
A dining set of broken bats
A navy pinstripe yoga matA year’s supply of Genny Cream
A keg signed by the vending teamA “2″ carved out of northern granite
A solar-cell vibrating hammockA zircon-slathered Yankee topper
A 2,000-gallon popcorn popperAnother ugly pair of boots
A vid lip-synching with the Roots“2s” in crystal, onyx, steel,
Beer cans, tree trunks and fresh vealA wondrous Joe-Girardi-shaped ‘tater
A Japanese robot fellaterIt’s not a hoarder’s dream or last mirage –
Just what’s stuffed in Jeet’s garage.
Rick Monday
Born on Tuesday
Homered off Seaver Wednesday
Traded on Thursday
Saved the flag Friday
Broke Canada’s heart Saturday
Retired on Sunday
And that’s why people still talk about Rick Monday.
The Chicago Cubs have lost nearly 300 games in the past three years. They fired their manager at the end of last season. Any new tyro who might be in the farm system is at least two seasons away from helping the team in the big leagues. And the team is arguing with the city and all their neighbors about expanding Wrigley Field and the surrounding area into something that looks a whole lot like Disney World.
So what’s the best thing to do in this hot stove season? Introduce a fuzzy cub mascot, of course!
By now, everyone who’s the least bit interested has heard about Clark the Cub, so I won’t rehash it here. He’s not popular with the adults, who are staring to act a little juvenile in their objections. I’m no exception. Below you can find the link to an article I wrote for ChicagoSideSports, on how ol’ Clark can ingratiate himself with the fans, at least the young and female portion of that group.
It’s been a crazy Fall Classic so far — pitching duels, sloppy fielding, heroic at-bats. If WP Kinsella had written it, no one would believe the plot. Tonight it looks like the Red Sox have the upper hand, but I can’t cheer for those bunch of bearded barristas because of how they battered my Bengals in the ALCS.
Over at Bardball, we’re putting up a couple of poems a day, fast and furious, as we try and document all the action in doggerel form. Plenty of limericks by Hilary Barta, of course, and other poems from surprise contributors. Please go check it out, and like our Facebook page, which gives you both daily updates AND poems that you can’t get anywhere else.
I’ve been writing a lot of clerihews this season, a very fun structure that fits my style. (And Hilary is such a demanding limericist that I tend to give him the spotlight.) Here are a couple of clerihews from the 2013 World Series:
Jonny Gomes
Has earned his bones
Journeyman player
Redbird slayer
Kolten Wong
Did it wrong
And now will be mocked for eternity by passels
Of Massholes.
Carlos Beltran
Into a wall ran
In his Series debut
Cracking a rib in two.
Hi all. A few weeks ago, I read the following essay at one of my favorite live lit shows here in Chicago, The Paper Machete. If you have not been to this show yet — held every Saturday at the history-sodden Green Mill Lounge at 3 pm, with FREE admission, no less — then you should do yourself a favor and haul your keister over there. Great readers, great comedians, and sometimes great/always interesting musicians. The best thing since indoor plumbing (hey, the Green Mill even has THAT!)
One of the big news stories of the week had been the proposed renovation of Wrigley Field and the surrounding neighborhood. The plans involved, among other things, more than 35000 square feet of advertising signage at the intersection of Clark and Addison Streets. I decided to get a little snarky about it. Quel surprise!
WRIGLEY RENOVATIONS: EVERYTHING’S COMING UP ROSEMONT
Chicagoans are used to threats. We get em all the time. Threats of random street violence. School closings. Government bankruptcy. A second term for Rahm Emanuel.
Now add to that, the threat that owner Tom Ricketts will take his Chicago Cubs out of the city – lock, stock and Marmol – if he can’t get approval to renovate the area around the park and install scads of gargantuan video screens inside Wrigley Field. As threats come, it’s about as hollow as Sammy Sosa’s bat.
He told a business luncheon crowd this week, “I’m not sure how anyone is going to stop the signs in the outfield, but if it comes to the point that we don’t have the ability to do what we need to do in our outfield, then we’re going to have to consider moving.”
Whoa, harsh! If Denzel Washington heard the word “consider”, how fast would the bad-guy corpses start piling up. That’s the kind of hard-charging, take-no-prisoners attitude that made the Cubs what they are today!
First off, where would Ricketts “consider” moving? Rosemont? How peaceful, to rebuild the Friendly Confines within a few hundred yards of the runways at O’Hare.
Maybe a bigger market, like Las Vegas? It’d be tough to build a brand new stadium in a place only slightly less mobbed-up than Rosemont.
Besides, years of negotiations have already happened, among the team, the mayor, the alderman, and the neighborhood. The only hurdle now is the rooftop owners, who worry that the new signage will block their view of games over the wall. If you can only get off on baseball voyeuristically by peeking over the wall like a guy in loose, dirty sweatpants, there’s no better place to be.
The rooftop owners are painting themselves as the little guy in this contest. Some national reporters have even described them as a “neighborhood tradition”. Now, a real neighborhood tradition would involve a picnic table, cheap folding chairs and a cooler of beer, like it did 20 years ago, and not small corporations cramming Miller 64 and chicken wings into people either too claustrophobic to wedge into a stadium seat or too dumb to use StubHub. However, compared to all other commercial ventures in Wrigleyville — ah, Wrigleyville, that friendly northside village where the leafy country lanes stream with beer and vomit – compared with them, the rooftop owners are like Mr. Hooper on “Sesame Street”.
Continue reading “New “Paper Machete” Essay: A Bigger, Brighter Wrigley Field”
I was expecting the piece below to show up on my formerly favorite sports site last week, but with vacations and miscommunication, nobody bothered to tell me it had been spiked. I might not have spent more than 10 minutes on it, but man, it still hurts. The perfect window would’ve been last week, as the Cubs got ready to move home for the regular season.
I think the feeling at the site is to quit picking on the Cubs. I’ll quit picking on them when they stop pretending they are a major league team and lower their prices commensurate with their talent, about on the par of the Joliet Jackhammers.
CUBS COACHES SUSPICIOUS OF “TUMMY-ACHE” OUTBREAK
As spring training nears its end and Chicago Cubs rookies begin contemplating a season in the big leagues, officials with the team say a number of players have been complaining of “really bad tummy-aches,” and one brought a note from his mother asking if he can be excused from traveling to Chicago with the team.
“These complaints first surfaced when we mentioned heading up north for the regular season,” says manager Dale Sveum. “They became more common when players began discussing that Stephen Strasburg would be pitching against us. That’s when I first noticed some of the kids rubbing their stomachs. I’m starting to think it’s not the clubhouse tacos in Phoenix.”
Coaches have also noticed many players who can’t find their shoes in the morning or complain about “a big mean dog” that they’ve seen on the way to Chicago. They are beginning to question the desire of some players to make it to the big leagues.
“Hey, I don’t lie to the new players,” Sveum told reporters. “There will be some tough times in Chicago: playing in 40-degree April weather, dealing with an outfield turned to hay after some concert, and our mathematical elimination from the playoffs in July. But there’s lots of good things too, and deep-dish pizza, and they’ll make nice friends there. I try to tell them they can’t stay in Phoenix forever but right now they’re not being good listeners.”
I wrote a short silly salute to the fearsome starting rotation of the 1971 Baltimore Orioles for Bardball yesterday. It was only the second rotation to contain four 20-game winners in 92 years, just a buzzsaw that sent fear into their opponents.
I remember hating the Orioles as a kid, because they were the elite of the AL at the time, and always seemed to have the number of my beloved Tigers. Now, as the team is doing well for the first time in a generation, I feel a certain fondness for them. There’s all the old saws about Baltimore being a great old baseball town that has long suffered, blah blah. It’s probably just nostalgia on my part, or a generous mood to let bygones be bygones. The Oakland A’s are also okay by me lately for the same reason.
The Royals, however, can still suck it.
It’s been a while since I posted one of my poems from Bardball here. Not that I haven’t been working on keeping the site alive and growing, but because I’m starting to lose track of all the online venues I’m supposed to feed material to. The Internet is starting to feel like Audrey II, with constant cries of “FEED MEEEE!”
Anyway, here’s a fresh one from yesterday’s White Sox-Tigers game, possibly the most important game between them this year:
Madre de Dios! Ese Alex Rios!
Among Omar Infante’s dislikes
Must be incoming baserunners – Yikes!
To dodge getting maimed
Cost the Bengals the game –
One of inches, and feet wearing spikes.
Well, it didn’t take long for the Mouth from Venezuela to toss off some nonsense that offended the type of people who like to go into screaming fits about stupid things celebrity jocks say. It’s amusing to us in Chicago, because just like hurricanes and killer bees, we thought Florida would’ve been ready for it.
But Ozzie has opinions about LOTS of stuff. He called a friend of mine this week and unloaded about all sorts of hot-button issues, which you can find at the link below.