SPORTS POEMS
BOSCO BUYS THE FARM
Enos Slaughter was a '59 Topps headshot.
My best buddy traded a kid up the street.
Didn't know what lust meant,
but I had to have that card.
In '34 he played Bi State ball HERE,
his hometown was 50 miles away,
lifetime average .300;
Enos was a YANKEE.
We traded 3 times before
Tom got smart and ordered another one.
He didn't get the number from me-
"somehow" mine got inked out.
In '75 at NC State, I read
Enos coached Duke's baseball team
and parked in a Doak Field seat.
State shellacked 'em twice
but my joy was hollow;
Slaughter never showed!
Fifteen years later at the hometown mall
Enos plugged his autobiography.
He signed mine while talking about Branch Rickey;
Slaughter was truthful but undiplomatic.
Tact was never Bosco's hallmark;
in 1960, managing Raleigh Durham's Mets,
he told the front office what a lousy team they'd given him.
Kept telling them till the Mets didn't offer him another contract.
Slaughter's gone to heaven now.
God only knows how long Enos will last;
he'll tell Him what he thinks too.
Daniel Grey Taylor
June 20th, 1973
Trip to Yankee Stadium
(gingerbread shrine In the ghetto)
Yanks vs. Orioles
Stottlemyre vs. Cuellar
Our best against their best
Box seats over right field foul line
(Just 3 bucks apiece-
IMAGINE THAT)
0-0 into bottom of eighth
Mom is so excited she falls asleep.
Then MY YANKS score two
Orioles get 1 in top of ninth
In rides the PRINCE
(Albert G. "Sparky" Lyle)
In a blue Datsun chariot
To save the game
Final:Yanks 2 Orioles 1
WE MOVE INTO FIRST!
June 20th, 1982
The day I said "I do."
5 years later,
I said "I don't."
Where were you then,
Sparky Lyle?
Daniel Grey Taylor
He Played First With His Bat
The first time I saw Nick Etten's picture
remains a fond memory of childhood.
Red bottomed 1943 stamp
with washed out colors of him gracefully
posed in lordly Yankee pinstripes, bat cocked,
a pulsing extension of his being.
That year his twenty two homers were league high;
with Oakland's Oaks he scalded 43.
Fielding, Nick looked more at home in baggy
Phillie uni that seemed accessorized
with flopping shoes and squirting flower.
One day with the Yanks in between innings
he laid his glove in foul ground near the bag
and (MAN CLAWS CAT) a candy wrapper
flew into it. Next day Joe Trimble wrote,
"Etten's glove fields better without Etten".
Daniel Grey Taylor
Requiem for a Ballpark
On a sun drenched Saturday in 1989
I saw a bloodied, unbowed baseball shrine.
Portsmouth's Lawrence Stadium, monument to WPA
and the confluence of streets uniquely intersecting ;
a park with the personality of an Ansel Adams character study.
Forgotten since '69's Tidewater Mets swansong,
the curved stands beckoned as an old friend
to determine where home plate used to be,
look at overgrown basepaths,
barely recognizable pitcher's mound,
and marvel at Piedmont League ghosts.
In '37 Phil Rizzuto digs out a short hop,
tosses slowly enough to give the Norfolk pitcher palpitations;
barely gets the runner at first.
'Old Double X' manages here in '44,
pitches in 3 games, pinch hits twice,
is released -he hardly controls himself once.
A '48 Portsmouth Cub goes down swinging,
lets Norfolk off the ropes with men on base;
Tars pitcher Whitey Ford sees the value of a full count curve.
York's Brooks Robinson snags one in '55 over the bag
turns catlike, shifts his feet, guns out the runner,
making George Staller glad he suggested shifting Brooksie to third.
Finally time for my center field booth broadcast of a high school football game
on undulating field with lines limed by a groundskeeper who must have
been dodging the vermin he saw during a terrible hangover.
With bat and rat colonies behind and under the baseball stands,
everything fit perfectly.
Daniel Grey Taylor
Doing the Seeing
He could pitch but Fates decreed
him cursed by inconsistency.
24 is old scouts say,
for one more year in single A.
They were right; this was the year
he ended his baseball career
(for a '73 team created more
with genuflection than genius).
BUT in Winston on a white breathed night
he danced in rhythm with the Great Flashlight.
Right arm working beyond it's means,
mowed em like a threshing machine.
Fastball rose, curve dipped down,
as a moth hits Raid then smacks the ground.
Sometimes life's roadmap stinks it seems
(paradise quite misshapen);
But it let Steve Hardin live his dream,
and one night made it happen.
WILSON 3 6 0
WINSTON SALEM O O 1
Daniel Grey Taylor
What do you think of this article?
Leave feedback on our
message board.
|