Eratosphere Forums - Metrical Poetry, Free Verse, Fiction, Art, Critique, Discussions Able Muse - a review of poetry, prose and art

Forum Left Top

Notices

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #1  
Unread 08-27-2021, 05:27 PM
Jim Moonan Jim Moonan is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2016
Location: Boston, MA
Posts: 4,197
Default The Immaculate Inning

.
There is little doubt that few noticed this rarity in baseball that took place August 26th — An Immaculate Inning pitched by the Boston Red Sox's Chris Sale.

Though I doubt it will resonate with many here, it is truly a beautiful thing to watch unfold. For me, baseball has the capacity to be a complete metaphor for life.

I remember when I first joined the Eratosphere poet John Whitworth would at times reference his love for cricket. It always gave me a sense of reassurance that a poet as talented as he could also become engrossed in a game. Poets can be sports fans, too.

Does anyone have a particular sport, sports term (like “Immaculate Inning”), sports event, story, movie, artwork or literature on the subject of sports that confirms for them that sports can at times elevate itself to being art?

If you care/dare to watch the Immaculate Inning pitch by pitch, here it is. No? I didn't think so : )

.
Reply With Quote
  #2  
Unread 08-28-2021, 04:34 AM
Andrew Frisardi Andrew Frisardi is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: Lazio, Italy
Posts: 5,813
Default

I watched that game too, Jim, and yes, I've been a die-hard Sox fan for ages. Watching Chris Sale pitch is baseball bliss, I think. Of course pitching like him is an art, if art has anything to do with well-timed legerdemain and telling the truth with beautiful lies.

You must know this poem by Robert Francis, another Massachusetts poet who loved baseball:

Pitcher

His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,

His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance.

The others throw to be comprehended. He
Throws to be a moment misunderstood.

Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,
But every seeming aberration willed.

Not to, yet still, still to communicate
Making the batter understand too late.
Reply With Quote
  #3  
Unread 08-28-2021, 05:58 AM
Jim Moonan Jim Moonan is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2016
Location: Boston, MA
Posts: 4,197
Default

.
No, I don’t think I have read that before, or just don’t remember it. But that seems unlikely since it is a perfect pitch of a poem. Thanks for that.

I love John Updike’s writings on baseball. There was one about Ted Williams’ last at bat and then there was another one published in the Boston Globe on opening day. I’ll try to get my hands on that one and post it here because as I recall, it expressed perfectly (for me) why baseball is the game that explains so much about life. Updike called Fenway, "a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities."

Great to know you are a Red Sox fan! I grew up in New Jersey equidistant from NYC and Philadelphia and was a rabid Phillies fan. My father was a life-long die-hard Yankee fan. I cried coming home on the school bus as I listened on my transistor radio to the Phillies losing their final game of the season, squandering a 10 game lead to lose the pennant. I was devastated.

When I finally ended up in Boston I immediately fell in love with the Red Sox. I fell in love with my wife partly because she was a Red Sox fan and took me to my first Red Sox game at Fenway Park. Fenway is a great place to be on game day, though I hardly ever go these days. Ticket prices are through the roof.

.
Reply With Quote
  #4  
Unread 08-28-2021, 06:53 AM
Sarah-Jane Crowson's Avatar
Sarah-Jane Crowson Sarah-Jane Crowson is offline
Moderator
 
Join Date: Oct 2018
Location: UK
Posts: 1,687
Default

I don't have a sporting affinity, but my Dad does, and (for what it's worth) felt inspired enough about a folksong about Sir Stanley Matthews in the 1960's that I think is still kicking around somewhere on the web.

He's a cricketing man at heart, though. I am a heathen, who likes cricket for the teas and long-time-drawn-outness of it all. The murmurs of it.

I love the idea of an 'immaculate inning' and I will go and look as soon as I can (although I will not understand it). I wonder if each sport has its own vernacular, and where they cross and where they differ.

Sarah-Jane
Reply With Quote
  #5  
Unread 08-28-2021, 10:00 AM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2001
Location: New York
Posts: 16,475
Default

And might as well put Francis's other baseball poem out there:

The Base Stealer
by Robert Francis

Poised between going on and back, pulled
Both ways taut like a tightrope-walker,
Fingertips pointing the opposites,
Now bouncing tiptoe like a dropped ball
Or a kid skipping rope, come on, come on,
Running a scattering of steps sidewise,
How he teeters, skitters, tingles, teases,
Taunts them, hovers like an ecstatic bird,
He's only flirting, crowd him, crowd him,
Delicate, delicate, delicate, delicate - now!
Reply With Quote
  #6  
Unread 08-28-2021, 10:38 AM
Jim Moonan Jim Moonan is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2016
Location: Boston, MA
Posts: 4,197
Default

.
A stolen base is a thing of beauty.

Sarah-Jane, yes, baseball (and all sports) has its own vernacular. I think baseball language is poetry.

Here is what might be considered found poetry, though no one actually said it or wrote it down. It is my own accounting of the Immaculate Inning described in baseball vernacular.


The Immaculate Inning
(On the occasion of Boston Red Sox pitcher Chris Sale’s historic third Immaculate Inning pitched, August 26, 2021)


From his high place he eyes the plate.
He leans in, shaking off, then taking the sign
delivering untouchables numbering nine:

Fastball, inside, swinging strike one.
Curveball, catching the inside corner, looking strike two.
Fastball, upstairs, swinging strike three.

Fastball, outside corner low, swinging strike one.
Curveball, off the plate low outside, fouled off strike two.
High heat, at the shoulders, swinging strike three.

Slider drops in, down the middle, looking strike one.
Fastball, inside corner, swinging strike two.
Slider, the bottom falls out of it, check-swing strike three.

The Immaculate Inning.
Something to see.
Selection. Control. Velocity.




.
Reply With Quote
  #7  
Unread 08-28-2021, 11:09 AM
Michael Cantor Michael Cantor is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: Plum Island, MA; Santa Fe, NM
Posts: 11,168
Default

Here's a villanelle I wrote about the time I moved from New York (home of Murderer's Row and the perennial world champion New York Yankees and their unassuming fans) to Boston in the early 80's, and had great fun with at poetry readings in the Boston-Newburyport corridor - it was my closer, and the New England poets would pelt me with tea bags and beer cans (were you there, Jim?), while police grudgingly protected me and led me from the reading. My home team, the Powow River Poets, disowned me. All this ended, unfortunately, in October, 1984, when the world turned upside down.


October Speaks

...(A poem for the city of Boston. And environs.)

It is ordained that things will fall apart.
Do not delude yourself – remember that
when summer ends I get to break your heart

with dark and practiced skill that makes an art
of pain, turns every champagne bubble flat.
It is ordained that things shall fall apart

again. You have no charts that can outsmart
a lack of will; no joyful entrechat
when summer ends. The bullpen breaks your heart,

the pitchers drink, the fleet no longer dart
from base to base; with every splintered bat
it is ordained that things will fall apart.

And yet you dance and hope for hope to start
each year, and dreams become your habitat,
till summer’s final ball shall break your heart;

the beer cans, bouncing, clatter from the cart,
the fat relievers shame the Theocrat:
it is ordained that things will fall apart.
When summer ends I get to break your heart.
Reply With Quote
Reply

Bookmarks

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump



Forum Right Top
Forum Left Bottom Forum Right Bottom
 
Right Left
Member Login
Forgot password?
Forum LeftForum Right


Forum Statistics:
Forum Members: 8,399
Total Threads: 21,839
Total Posts: 270,784
There are 2965 users
currently browsing forums.
Forum LeftForum Right


Forum Sponsor:
Donate & Support Able Muse / Eratosphere
Forum LeftForum Right
Right Right
Right Bottom Left Right Bottom Right

Hosted by ApplauZ Online