I enjoyed the interview with Reggie Jackson, “Mr. October,” during the Cardinals-Giants game at Rickwood Field in celebration of the Negro Leagues. It reminded me of this poem I wrote several years back and its back story.
“Mr. October” has a unique publishing (and non-publishing) history. I included it in my collection of sports poems, Keeping Score: Sports Poems for Every Season (2007) and reprinted it in Oldtimers’ Game: Poems of Baseball and Memory (2022). But it had a much earlier journal appearance, and in 2001 George Plimpton selected it to appear in the book he edited: Home Run: The Best Writing About Baseball’s Most Exciting Moment. I have a hand-written letter from Plimpton acknowledging his acceptance.
But when the book came out, the poem was not included. Interestingly and ironically, I’m listed among the contributors, and I must say the bio is very fine: “Robert Hamblin is a professor of English and the director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University. He is the author of several collections of poetry and the book Win or Win: A Season with Ron Shumate. He is the poetry editor of Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature.”
But search as you will, you’ll not find my poem in the book. So, alas, I missed my chance to play on the same team with such great writers as Roger Angell, Don DeLillo, Garrison Keillor, Bernard Malamud, Grantland Rice, Red Smith, and John Updike.
Unlike Bobby Thomson, I hit a shot never heard ’round the world!
I never received an apology from Plimpton, but I forgive you, George. Even the greatest hitters sometimes strike out.
Mr. October
Brock, Carew, Boggs,
Yount, Gwynn, Sandberg:
those impressive career numbers,
compiled, admirably,
through longevity
may win over our heads,
but never our souls.We’ll give you a pedestal
in the Hall, but not
in our hearts.No, in real life,
where most of our hits
are dribblers between short and third,
we’d trade any two players
with perfect Roto League stats
for one Reggie Jackson:Mr. October,
who arrived every season
just in the nick of time
to pull us back from the fall
of the year, when our lives
seemed about to descend forevermore
into acceptance and defeat,And, with one gigantic swing,
one orgastic explosion of the spirit,
blasted the lights out
in the deepest part of the darkest night,
loosing our dreams from narrow infields
of desire into the seamless, celestial
orbit of the home run.Year after yearning year
we rode that towering swing
all the way to April.
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