The Outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day:
The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play.
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game.
A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to that [...]

Hoorah, hooray!
Be glad, be gay-
The best of reasons
Is Opening Day.
And cheering the players
And counting the gate
And running the bases
And touching the plate.
And tossing the ball out
And yelling Play Ball!
(Who cares about fall-out-
At least, until fall?)
Let nothing sour
This sweetest hour;
The baseball season’s
Back in flower!

If I may be so presumptuous, I’d like to stick in my own little baseball poem here…
Four-finger fast
on its way home
spin stitch-catch breeze
half-second
ash-thwacked and
heart-walloped
in a parabolic function, going,
a playful sunlit arc -
gone.
The smell of oil, grass,
the broken-hearted pinstripes,
the pant
of breath;
the crowd cheers.

A pasture is best, freshly
mown so that by the time a grounder’s
plowed through all that chewed, spit-out
grass to reach you, the ball
will be bruised with green kisses. Start
in the evening. Come
with a bad sunburn and smelling of chlorine,
water still crackling in your ears.
Play until the ball is khaki-
a movable piece of the twilight-
the girls’ bare [...]