left to (tinker to evers to) chance in poetry

baseball is only boring if
the only way you can ever enjoy it
is in anticipation of a championship

in the majors, there are like thirty teams
and by the time you read this, there’ll be
fifty-seven of them, probably even more
in Las Vegas or Orlando or Albuquerque
in Jacksonville or San Jose or Austin

every day you wake up, it seems
there’s another team in a place
that doesn’t make any sense for
baseball (but all the sense for
selling their television rights)

all of which is to say, only one of those thirty ballclubs
or those coming fifty-seven instead can win it in the end
one hundred sixty-two games then ten months of playoffs
(again, for television rights)
after all that only one team wins the whole damn thing

if all you’ve rooted for is
the three-point-three-three
percent odds of champions
it won’t go well for you

baseball is only boring
if you’re watching it to cheer for champs
but if you watch to ruminate and theorize
upon the coming surprise of how they’re
going to cough it all up again this time
it is a transcendent kind of magic

soccer watches like a game of human pong
where two other people get the controllers
football watches like a filmstrip explaining
brain damage in a freshman medical class

but baseball is more an opera
a grand elegy praising failure
that prepares us all for how
very little will actually go right
in our mayfly’s span existence
LEFT TO (TINKER TO EVERS TO) CHANCE (page two)

But every once in a while
maybe only twice in a life
that too is proven wrong
and failure itself will fail
and all your pessimistics
your twice-checked math
melts away for a moment

and those terrible and awful
overpaid and arrogant
aging always-injured
bums you love so very
goddamn much do win

and all the walls come down
and you are as a child again
and all vistas are re-opened
and faiths briefly rewarded
and fear momentarily dashed
and then it’s gone

it only comes back once or twice again
like the circuit ride of Halley’s Comet
dropping off a Samuel Clemens and then
picking up a Mark Twain on the next trip

baseball is only boring if winning it all is all that matters
if you never stop to smell flowers, the stale beer and old men’s cigars
if you never stop to do the math of why they will most likely lose and
count how many steps he’s leading too far off first, he will be caught
if you never look to your scorecard and chart out how many amazing
and amazingly stupid things happened
between the hopeful beginning
and the sorry ending

baseball is only boring if
you don’t know how to live a life
(and even then, it can be quite exciting still
if you happen to own the television rights)

Last updated November 21, 2022