The San Francisco Giants would make their 1960′s forebears proud.
Seeing “the Captain” Derek Jeter break his ankle conjures up Whitman’s “captain” poem.
The film “Moneyball” helps explain this year’s extraordinary story of the Oakland Athletics.
In this topsy-turrvy baseball season, as in Midsummer Night’s Dream, all things are possible and the Baltimore Orioles are a game out of first.
The strange case of Stephen Strasburg–missing the playoffs if he exceeds his innings pitched limit–has parallels with the Balzac novel “The Magic Skin.”
St. Louis’s improbable World Series victory corresponds to the mythos of comedy as described by Northrup Frye. Comedy’s improbably reversals symbolize the escape of life from the clutches of winter.
As I watched the amazing day of baseball last Wednesday, I found myself thinking (being the literature nerd that I am) that the English novel was invented to do justice to reality when it got this dramatic and complex.
Posted in Defoe (Daniel), Dickens (Charles), Fielding (Henry), Sterne (Lawrence) | Also tagged Charles Dickens, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Lawrence Sterne, Robinson Crusoe, Sports, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy |
Robert Francis’s poem “The Base Stealer” helps us appreciate the exquisite tensions between the base runner and the pitcher.
In his poem, Robert Francis compares the interaction between poet and reader to two boys playing throw and catch.
Roger Clemens tried to bully his Congressional interrogators the way that Oedipus bullies witnesses. To say that he should have handled himself differently is to say that he should have been a different man.
In his poem, Scott Bates fastens on the fact that the baseball diamond and the outfield, in their intersection, resemble a mandorla. An almond-shaped figure of mythic significance, the mandorla has been seen to symbolize “the interactions and interdependence of opposing worlds and forces,” such as spirit and matter or heaven and earth.
Sports Saturday We are well into the World Series but I want to hearken back to game six of the National League championship series where the San Francisco Giants won the pennant. It was a game eerily reminiscent of that described in poetry’s greatest poem about baseball, Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat.” Baseball [...]
Film Friday The World Series between the Texas Rangers and the San Francisco Giants gives me an excuse for posting on what is, in my opinion, the greatest movie on baseball. Among the many virtues of Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham are its literary allusions and its literariness. Each year Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) chooses to [...]
Sports Saturday The baseball postseason is off to an amazing start, what with Roy “Doc” Halladay pitching only the second no-hitter in playoff history to begin it. And it was his first game ever pitching in the postseason! The other no-hitter is enshrined in legend: Yankee Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World [...]
second only to the Dominican Republic in providing active Latin American players to the major leagues? (There are over 200 currently playing.) Among the greats have been Orlando Cepeda, Pudge Rodriguez, and the Alomar family (Sandy, Sandy Jr., and Roberto). I’ve asked Israel, who is a poet, to keep an eye out for Latino baseball [...]
Sports Saturday There is nothing like a brilliant rookie pitcher to breathe life back into the game of baseball. Living less than two hours from our nation’s capital, I’m in the midst of the unbridled excitement over the Washington Nationals’ Stephen Strasburg. Strasburg had a bad outing as he came off Injured Reserve this past [...]
Sports Saturday Last Sunday was a very good day for Colorado Rockies player Carlos Gonzalez. He hit for the cycle (a single, a double, a triple and a home run), a feat that has occurred only 291 times in the history of baseball. Furthermore, the home run was of the walk-off variety, occurring in the [...]
Sports Saturday Mistah Steinbrenner—he dead. So I imagine T. S. Eliot announcing the death of the legendary Yankee owner this past week. That’s because, if one goes by Eliot’s famous 1925 poem “The Hollow Men,” one could not say that “the Boss” was “Shape without form, shade without colour,/ Paralysed force, gesture without motion.” In fact, an [...]
Armando Galarraga Sports Saturday Even as we stand on the precipice of the World Cup—tragically I will be traveling cross country today when the U.S. is playing England—something has been happening in the world of baseball that invites comment. Perfect games are breaking out all over. A pitcher pitches a perfect game if no runner [...]
Poet Bruce Cohen Sports Saturday We’ve long had an active poetry series at St. Mary’s, and periodically a wonderful new voice will swim into my consciousness. Bruce Cohen from the University of Connecticut is the latest. Cohen has a wonderfully wandering surrealistic style. Often, as in the poem below, he gives us a narrative that [...]
Greg Maddux, one of baseball’s great control pitchers Sports Saturday Some of my favorite moments as a father came in watching my three sons play sports. Justin, my oldest whom I am remembering this week, was a fine baseball pitcher and outfielder. Two plays especially stand out for me: a diving catch he made as [...]
Jackie Robinson steals home Sports Saturday In the memorial service held at St. Mary’s College for Lucille Clifton two weeks ago, I learned that she had three special heroes: Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, and Jackie Robinson. Robinson, of course, was the African American player who broke the baseball color line in 1947, which he [...]
Sports Saturday In one of the tidiest sports weekends of the year, one sports comes to an end while another begins. March Madness holds its semi-final and final games while baseball kicks off its season. To celebrate opening day, I promise reader Carl Rosin a write-up on a baseball novel. It seems like the great baseball novels [...]
author Jerry Gabriel Sports Saturday Saturday posts are devoted to the intersection of literature and sports. To gain access to all the posts on sports, click “sports” in the tag cloud to your right. My creative writing colleague Jerry Gabriel has just published Drowned Boy (Sarabande Books, 2010), a collection of his short stories that won [...]
Robert Redford in The Natural I take a momentary break from Margaret Edson’s W;t to address Mark McGwire’s confession yesterday to having used steroids. The man whose homerun race with Sammy Sosa “saved baseball” and who then refused to “speak about the past” in a Congressional hearing is finally opening up. Or at least opening [...]
