I want to give Glenn Burke a high five / I want to give Glenn Burke a high five for seeing Dusty Baker’s raised hand and just hitting it / I want to give Glenn Burke a high five for coming out in 1978

My legs on yours, in the stadium lights,
I have only just learned your name.
You point, across the outfield,
at the worst fight we will ever have.

I can barely make it out in the crowd
of

It was the first walk I’ve taken
through the neighborhood
so late in summer without
listening to a ballgame.

Those voices from Toronto,
Cincinnati, L.A.—the waves
of crowd noise

It took me all morning to build the fence.  I used old lawn chairs, cardboard boxes, and rusty sign posts from the dumpster behind 7-Eleven.  I meant for it to look like Camden Yards.  The right field

Across the basement, your best friend pitches graduation balloons like they’re weightless baseballs. You swing with a curtain rod that had fallen behind the couch (your mom will ask about that

Mike and Nick and Tom are already playing stickball in the back lot when Dad drops you off at P.S. 236. On one brick wall they’ve chalked a strike zone, on the floor is a powder-blue pitcher’s mound

Last year, Tim and I bought cardboard cutouts of ourselves ($129 each, apparently for charity) that watched every Athletics game in the stadium that we could not.

Last year, Tim and I bought cardboard cutouts of ourselves ($129 each, apparently for charity) that watched every Athletics game in the stadium that we could not.

My husband Paul and I are drinking beers and eating hot dogs at the baseball stadium in San Francisco. It’s even a little boring, and I have my back to the field for a while so can I face my friends

In 1949 we had viewed television for three years on a 12” screen. It inhabited a large wooden box with doors that pulled out and covered the picture tube when not in use. For the most part in those

We were on vacation in Kansas City. Knowing I had never been to a major league game, my in-laws got my husband and me tickets to the Royals while they agreed to stay back at the hotel room with our

Bishop and I were smoking a joint on the pitcher’s mound. We drew dicks with our fingers next our school’s logo. It was mid-March, around midnight. I stopped drawing dicks and looked up at the empty

She was cursing at her TV. A Red Sox game was on. She was yelling at David Price, newly acquired from the Detroit Tigers. Price was behind in the count. I wanted to tell her that David Price was a

From the couch corner where 
his ass has crafted a killer dent
for the better part of a week,
my father begins shouting insane cuss words
at no one in particular – 
titty fucker bang bang, cunty

TOOLS OF IGNORANCE

“[the term] tools of ignorance...was meant to be ironic, contrasting the intelligence needed by a catcher to handle the duties of the position with the foolishness needed to play

We played in our cousin’s backyard. It was always pitcher’s hand out, right field out. If you did dish it right over the barbed wire into burdock, Queen Anne's lace, thistle, milkweed, you had to

The boys laced under cover of dark and ran the bases, or rather, ran to where the bases had once been. They floated over scars on the infield, phones glowing like shadow balls at the corners.

I will marry my fiancée in a few months
and that is a pitch I never saw coming

Three boys took their positions on the makeshift field. The flagstone wall edging the upper lawn was the outfield fence. One foul line was the street, the other the edge of the woods. Joey pitched.

This is our second time playing but he’s still constantly clarifying, correcting. The game, this one or the real one, has strict rules. You can’t fuck it up. You need to understand every instruction, every play, need to speak the language, know the abbreviations.

They sent me out here to get the final two outs of the eighth inning, to be the set-up man for The Closer, to set up his rightful dominion The Save, but now instead of setting up The Save I am going to blow The Save before The Closer even gets his shot at The Save.

As the blows against each other’s ribs and the glancing strikes on their now helmetless heads escalated, I moved to get out of the dugout and pull them apart, but their father, Coach Christen, blocked the exit with a Louisville Slugger

He visited the library later that night still in his baseball gear, his eye black dancing with tears.  I'm sorry, I said, but three strikes is three strikes. His batting glove let me know he understood.

Watching the game
from the dug out
the coach paces distracted by nothing