Minor League Rainout, Iowa
by Mark J. Mitchell

Even today—the sun gone missing,

sky solid, sodden, all over gray,
wind bursting umbrellas—today

I can remember everything:
the small ball park in Iowa,
young athletes in cheap caps waiting
for the wind to stop, rains to go away

so a game could start. The grounds crew
smoking by the tarp spool (a drain
pipe, really), calm, ready to do
their act. And brats on coals, hissing
as raindrops pop their casings. Blue-
white lightning in the south, playing
tag with the light towers. The huge
river swelling, rolling away.

Even today—must be the storm—
while we walked the wet streets we knew
the game was holy and the rain
was sacred. We turned chairs facing
the Travel Lodge window, got warm,
watched the rain, the river, the blue-
black streets. Strangers from out of state
transfixed by weather, just sitting,
looking as clouds and lightning formed
new toys for God. I looked at you,
though you didn't know: wet, wild, fey
as you looked at the sky, wishing
there were words for this. Now transformed
into memory, it comes back, new,
borne by a cold and rainy day.
Your eyes, your wet hair, our kissing.

Mark J. Mitchell, a widely published poet, now also finds himself a struggling novelist. He grew up on the Dodgers of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale but underwent a midlife conversion to the Giants. This makes his wife, filmmaker Joan Juster, very proud. "Minor League Rainout, Iowa" first appeared in Fan Magazine (1997).
Copyright © 1997 by Mark J. Mitchell and used with permission.

It Ain't Over . . .
by Louise Grieco

Baseball is something
like love. There's an elegance
about it—a fine tension.

Fielders pluck comets
from thin and glorious air.
Pitchers make solid spheres
disappear. And batters smash meteors
with matchsticks.

But fielders also topple
over fences, sprawl empty-handed
in the dust. Pitchers throw wild.
And batters sometimes tilt
at windmills.

Yet they lean in—watch—wait.
They risk looking foolish
in order to be brilliant.

Louise Grieco has published poems in a number of small press magazines, most recently Thirteenth Moon (SUNY-Albany). She lives and writes in Albany, New York, and works for a public library. "It Ain't Over" appears courtesy of the author.
Copyright © by Louise Grieco.

How to Hit a Home Run
by David Jauss

1.
Get yourself a bat with a grain so thin you need glasses to read it
(this is a sign the wood is under greater pressure than you'll ever
be) and name it after your secret lover, the one who comes to you
only in dreams. (If you don't know her name, don't expect any-
thing but singles all your life.)

2.
Practice your swing while reciting the names of everyone who
ever betrayed you. Swing a little harder each time until you reach
your own name. Then swing with everything you've got.

3.
Accept that there is always some waver in the foul lines. And pay
the lines, faulty though they be, the homage due them: always
step over them when you take or leave the field. (Remember what
stepping on a mere sidewalk crack can do.)

4.
The batter's box is a different story: show these lines no respect.
Kick dirt on them, scratch them out with your cleats. Allow no re-
strictions here, where you must shape your own home.

5.
Know the umpire wears more than one mask. Distrust the one
that looks like skin. And know, too, he will call anything over the
black edges of this stark place you call home a strike, and say it's
in the rulebook. And it is. So thank him each time he calls a strike.
But dispute each ball.

6.
Before the pitcher takes the sign, think of all the girls you never
got to first base with. Then imagine three strikes whistling past
while the bat sleeps on your shoulder. Rub dirt on your hands in
penance.

7.
Never forget the pitcher holds death by his fingertips. It can get
away from him at any time. The scorer calls this a wild pitch, but
you know better: nothing is more civilized than the pitch that
makes you hit the dirt, where you belong. So do not insist on the
false dignity of two feet firmly planted. Be ready to fall.

8.
Scorn the pitcher's magic act. Granted: he can make the ball van-
ish then reappear in the catcher's mitt. But you're the one waving
the biggest magic wand of them all.

9.
Think of all the reasons you should never have been born. Then
wait for the dark one down the middle and lose yourself in it so
that when you meet it square you're ready to begin the long run
back to where you must begin again.

David Jauss teaches at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and in the Vermont College MFA program. His most recent books are Improvising Rivers, a collection of poems, and Black Maps, a collection of stories. "How to Hit a Home Run" first appeared in Poetry Now (1979). Copyright © 1979 by David Jauss and used with permission.

"Sometimes I still can't believe what I saw," said Harry Hooper, a Boston teammate of Ruth's. "This 19-year-old kid, crude, poorly educated, only lightly brushed by the social veneer we call civilization, gradually transformed into the idol of American youth and the symbol of baseball the world over - a man loved by more people and with an intensity of feeling that perhaps has never been equaled before or since."

Pearly Babe
by Mikhail Horowitz

When Babe Ruth died & went to heaven,
he was a rookie all over again.
His homers & heroics, merely dust motes on a distant moon.

This is a great team, kid,
St. Peter told the Babe.
You won't be able to crack it for at least another nanosecond.

But the Babe felt good,
he was giddy as a lamb,
he played catch with a comet
& beamed like a Baltimore aureole,
happily slapping mustard on a manna-dog
& chugging a six-pack of ambrosia.

In less time than it takes to circle the bases of a quark,
he made the starting lineup,
& as of this writing he's been a superstar—I think it's Betelgeuse—for 22 eternities.
Now & then he hits one out of the dark,
but whether it's a single, double, triple, or Big Bang is hard to say:
up there (or is it in?) they don't keep stats.

Mikhail Horowitz, a Hudson Valley performance poet who edits books at Total Sports, is the author of Big League Poets (City Lights, 1978), a compendium of collages and captions recapitulating the baseball careers of such immortals as Whitey Whitman and Smokey Coleridge. "Pearly Babe" first appeared in Elysian Fields Quarterly (1999).
Copyright © 1999 by Mikhail Horowitz and used with permission.