I thank you both for the well-intended offerings, timely as they are, but I submit that George Wills' prose about the game is better poetry about the game than these offerings.

The writers, I think, are captivated by the obvious and by the dramatic, the sorts of things one might gather by attending a game or two, by catching the play-by-play on the radio in the days of the legendary announcers most of whom have now gone on to that great dugout in the sky.

It has been said that baseball is boring. It has been said that baseball is about numbers. And both of these statements are true, in part. Much of any baseball game, to the casual observer, is boring, indeed, and to the fervent fan, numbers are everything, even if they seem insignificant to that same casual observer.

Having played the game for a number of years, having loved it for even longer, I know that there are any number of seemingly marginal activities that occur in the course of any single pitch. A coach rubs his stomach and removes his hat and pulls on his ear lobe: the hit and run is on! The manager shouts something seemingly innocuous out to his catcher: the hitter is about to hear one fly by his ear. The shortstop nods to the second baseman: that's all it takes to know who will be covering if the guy on first takes off for second. On an and on and on. And none of it conveyed in these poems.

For these reasons, Casey at the Bat, or whatever it is called, remains the best of the baseball poems that I am aware of. It captures a dramatic moment, to be sure, but we are given a pitch by pitch account and, in the end, the drama resides within the hometown hero's failure, built to that crescendo of emotion by every single act leading to it.

And Wills, even if I am not an admirer of his politics, can sit with me in the stands any time.

Take care,

Joe