My Team

Sept 3 2015

My team

is on a late-season run,

showing some promise

after 2 futile decades

of false starts

and broken-hearted fans.

Men will understand

the possessive pronoun.

The tribal loyalty.

The identification

with something greater than ourselves.

The sense of community;

total strangers

in team regalia,

nodding knowingly

touching our caps as we pass.

How players

less than half my age

can be revered as demigods.

We believe.

We bleed

Blue Jay blue.

We parse stats, plays, moves

like diviners tossing bones

reading entrails.

I know I go on

about the beauty of the game,

the character and skill

the manly etiquette.

Knowing all along that they are grown men

playing at being boys.

Are mercenaries,

selling themselves

to the highest bidder.

Still, we need to part of something bigger.

Something pure, and beautiful.

Something evergreen with hope;

the next play

tomorrow's game,

that blissful championship

we let ourselves imagine

reckless, or not.

How odd

that the players get younger every year.

And odder still

that our boyhood greats

could have aged so much so fast,

limping and stooped and overweight

as they take their pre-game bows.

Now there is yoga, diet, the science of sport.

But the rules

handed-down like Commandments

are just as eternal.

And the grass still gleams, just as verdant.

And taciturn managers

still spit and chew and curse.

While the announcer uses words

like an inadvertent poet,

his southern drawl

as languid as August.

The season dwindles, as summer fades.

A championship year, perhaps.

Or a crushing collapse,

and a bleaker winter

of if-onlys, what-ifs

missed chance.

But there will always be spring,

when hope is freshly made

and no one's lost a game

and we're all tied for first.

Opening Day,

when we'll wait for the ump to brush-off the plate

then step-up and holler Play Ball!!

I love baseball, and could write elegiac poems about the game just as I could write dog poems: every day. So please appreciate my restraint!

We've just begun the last month of the season, and they're hanging on to first place. But I've been disappointed enough to know I shouldn't get my hopes up. (After all, it's actually been 22 years, not 2 decades!) In a month or so, I may look back on this piece, punch the air, and jubilantly cry "Nailed it!" Or I may be full of regret, perhaps imagining I jinxed the team: like the ball-players we idolize, fans can be just as superstitious.

The poem doesn't specifically mention baseball. (At least until the last line, and if you ignore Blue Jay blue.) But I don't really want to share these sentiments with other sports. Especially soccer (or, for you purists, "football" or "footie"). I can't tell you how much I hate that its fans have the temerity to call soccer "the beautiful game". Kicking a ball? Into a net? That's it?!!! If any sport deserves that encomium, it's baseball. I am repeatedly amazed at the perfection of the diamond, the athleticism of its players, the timelessness of the game itself. In the poem, I use "beauty" once, then "beautiful" once more. Again, heroic self-restraint!