Strat-O-Matic Baseball 365

I paid tribute to Allen Ginsberg with naming this team the Davis Howlin' Poets -- https://365.strat-o-matic.com/team/1528859. But a fellow owner in my division did much better, and penned this very cool missive based on "The Howl" poem by Ginsberg:


Your valiant Howlin Poets have been an inspiration to us this season however so brief as six games. You appear among the best minds of our generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical? And how did you come from the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats to the Strat diamond to confront our hallow-eyed ballplayers of Brooklyn & L.A.? Let us float across the rooftops of two cities contemplating jazz. Let us be platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, and let me tell you how our jazz will jazz with you, Poets who Howl.

1. I see you have three radiant eyed hurlers, Maddux-Alexander-Johnson, among the finest pitchers ever to pass through universities, the starters, all hail the Hall-of-Famers as they pass by us, their Majesties great and gracious. The Professor, Old Pete, Big Train, they who drink Gatorade in Paradise Alley. who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, dragging themselves through the Roseboro streets at dawn looking for a bullpen fix. To them, we bend the knee.

2. The voiceover asks "What happens after Marichal?" Indeed, there appears a bottomless crater below your starting staff. I can barely see your relief corps down in the darkness. I hope they're ok. You say they're trained professionals? You think they can see our light from up here? I suppose they can, but we would only look like starlight to them. Let us then give friendly hello to you Howlin Poets of the bull pen! Good luck.

3. To the contrary, our angelheaded hipsters are burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of Strat-O-Matic. The immortal Drysdale who pitched continuously seventy hours from park to pad to the Cooperstown museum will lay waste to your visionary angels suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and howlin migraines at the thought of facing him and thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy, who vanished into nowhere Zen leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of which put together in puzzle forming the numbers 0-3. You’ll meet the rest of our staff in due time. There is already yacketayakking of whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball homers and shocks of doubles and triples and Ks.

1 – 2 – 3, we’re out. This time.

The best of luck to you, Davis, leave no broken hearts.
DJ the DJ

Great stuff. Staying on topic how about Lawrence Ferlingettis Baseball Canto.

This is very, very good

Here's "Baseball Canto" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti":

Watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn,
reading Ezra Pound,
and wishing that Juan Marichal would hit a hole right through the
Anglo-Saxon tradition in the first Canto
and demolish the barbarian invaders.
When the San Francisco Giants take the field
and everybody stands up for the National Anthem,
with some Irish tenor's voice piped over the loudspeakers,
with all the players struck dead in their places
and the white umpires like Irish cops in their black suits and little
black caps pressed over their hearts,
Standing straight and still like at some funeral of a blarney bartender,
and all facing east,
as if expecting some Great White Hope or the Founding Fathers to
appear on the horizon like 1066 or 1776.

But Willie Mays appears instead,
in the bottom of the first,
and a roar goes up as he clouts the first one into the sun and takes
off, like a footrunner from Thebes.
The ball is lost in the sun and maidens wail after him
as he keeps running through the Anglo-Saxon epic.
And Tito Fuentes comes up looking like a bullfighter
in his tight pants and small pointy shoes.
And the right field bleechers go mad with Chicanos and blacks
and Brooklyn beer-drinkers,
"Tito! Sock it to him, sweet Tito!"
And sweet Tito puts his foot in the bucket
and smacks one that don't come back at all,
and flees around the bases
like he's escaping from the United Fruit Company.
As the gringo dollar beats out the pound.
And sweet Tito beats it out like he's beating out usury,
not to mention fascism and anti-semitism.
And Juan Marichal comes up,
and the Chicano bleechers go loco again,
as Juan belts the first ball out of sight,
and rounds first and keeps going
and rounds second and rounds third,
and keeps going and hits paydirt
to the roars of the grungy populace.
As some nut presses the backstage panic button
for the tape-recorded National Anthem again,
to save the situation.

But it don't stop nobody this time,
in their revolution round the loaded white bases,
in this last of the great Anglo-Saxon epics,
in the territorio libre of Baseball.

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/baseball-canto.html

Thanks Hack that why I love Ferlinghetti. Now I will have to locate my copy of "Coney Island of the Mind".

WELL DONE