Collection

Baseball Poems

Poems to celebrate the national pastime.

BY The Editors

Image of baseball stadium.
Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
Players Famous And Infamous
Metaphors For Life
Poets playfully measure baseball’s symbolic weight.
  •         Lugo
    wants you to know he's only
    human: We're human beings.
    That's why we're here.
  • Ball hates
    to take bat’s
    bait.
  • It’s the keenness of conflict that appeals
  • this is not a microcosm,
    not even a slice of life
  • Every day I peruse the box scores for hours
    Sometimes I wonder why I do it
Dreams And Fantasies
Baseball imagery seeps up from the subconscious.
Dad Days
Fathers, sons, and daughters on the field and in the stands.
  •             I could homer
    into the left-field lot of Carmichael Motors,
    and still you stressed the same technique,
  • but you, there, father, through it all, a yardbird solo
    riffing on bat & ball glory, breaking down the fabricated myths
  • And go back to the bleachers at Yankee Stadium
    where you took me at 7 though I was not the son
  • Kenny’s bottle smashed on home plate and Jack heard in the sound
    the absurdity of all his desiring since seventh grade,
Spectators Sporting
Watching the game becomes a sport unto itself.
Articles & Blog Posts
Poets and players on attentiveness, idleness, intimacy, and other parallels between poetry and baseball.
  • Baseball’s very rhythms are those of poetry, acknowledging that if everything can change in a moment, then attention to those moments is an essential duty.
  • I write from Caracas, the murder capital of the world, where I’ve been employed by the Leones to score runs and prevent balls from falling in the outfield.
  • Poets historically can be pretty fun ballgame companions, and not only if they are on hallucinogens at a Red Sox/Yankees game like Ted Berrigan and Harris Schiff in the great Yo-Yo’s with Money.
  • What sets these poems apart from the bulk of baseball poetry, and from the ideology of individual accomplishment that is so much a part of the ethos of the sport, is that they’re about failure, and about intimacy, implying a deep, even necessary connection between the two.
  • And in baseball, there’s so much space in the sport. The pitchers are doing a lot physically, but at the same time, they’re also standing there. You have to get interested in a slower sense of time passing.