Three Baseball Poems

From Oldtimer's Game: Poems of Baseball and Memory

Robert Freeman

Busch Stadium, 1970,
a Sunday afternoon game,
Cards versus the Pirates.

In the bottom of the seventh
Torre drives a high fly
to deep right.  Clemente
back pedals gracefully,
casually pulls the ball
out of the air,
then unleashes a laser throw
to third to hold Javier
on second.  Amazed,
I follow the ball
splitting the air all the way
to Hebner on the fly.
The crowd, in concert,
exhales a loud “Oooh!”
in admiration.

It’s my first time to see
the incomparable Clemente,
but immediately I’m aware
that I’ve seen that throw before.

Early 1950s.
A dusty Mississippi summer.
A cow-pasture baseball game
between two Negro teams.
A white boy too young to play,
even had the teams been white,
is among the spectators.

One of the players, the best,
and the only one in full uniform,
wears number 42 on his back.
“Robert Freeman,” the boy’s father
tells him.  Then somewhere
in the course of the game
Freeman cuts loose a throw
from deep center that clears
the catcher’s head by a good five feet,
sails over the makeshift backstop,
and disappears into the woods
ringing the field.

The boy had never seen
a baseball thrown so far,
and he would not see
a matching throw until that day
when he watched Clemente
let one fly in St. Louis.

Sometimes I wonder
what happened to Robert Freeman.
I know he never made it
to the big leagues;
no Mississippi black did in those days,
unlike Don Blassingame,
the white kid from Corinth,
who played second base
for the Cardinals.

Did Freeman go Up North,
to Chicago maybe,
like so many blacks of his generation,
searching for a life to match his name?
I wonder if he ever saw Clemente play.
Did he ever sit, as I have done,
in the bleachers of a major league park
and watch dozens of outfielders,
though few with the arm
of a Robert Freeman?

Or was he swallowed up,
talent, potential, ambition,
all, by the Jim Crow South,
his only autograph an errant throw
still sailing in a white man’s memory
in the lost Mississippi sunlight?

Stickball, Country Style

After the radio voices
and the studio-manufactured
crowd noises had faded,
he would go outside
with his makeshift bat—
the handle of one of his mother’s
discarded brooms or mops—
and hit fungoes with small rocks
picked, like unopened bolls of cotton,
from the gravel road
that ran beside his house.

Often, he would play
imaginary games, pitting
his favorite team, the Dodgers,
against Ewell “The Whip” Blackwell
or Robin Roberts.
Grounders or pop flies
that failed to clear the road
were outs, flies landing between
the ditch and the chain-link fence
surrounding the Presbyterian cemetery
across the road were singles,
over the near fence a double,
past the angel high atop the Agnew
family monument a triple.
Over the back fence, clearing
the cemetery entirely,
was a home run.

He always played fair:
for Reese and Cox, singles hitters,
he selected rocks that stayed
close to home, large ones
that stung the hands and barely left
the ground, or thin, waferlike ones
that zinged through the air,
then hooked or sliced to earth
like a shot quail.
The smooth, round stones
that could fly straight and far
like pigeons he reserved
for the power hitters—
Snider, Hodges, Campanella.
He cheated only in this respect:
all the perfectly shaped agates
went to Hodges, his idol.

During the ’52 Series, while
a Brooklyn priest held a special mass
to pray for Gil to break his slump,
the boy, offering prayers of another sort,
powered rock after rock over the dead
in a north Mississippi cemetery.

Years later, a man, though still
a boy where baseball was concerned,
he stopped at a corner newsstand
in St. Louis and read the headline
that Gil Hodges had died.
Stunned, he caught
in his mind’s eye a fleeting glimpse,
tangible and real as a child’s bad dream,
of a hard, round stone falling to earth,
among tombstones engraved with names
he thought he had forgotten forever:
Leslie, Huckaby, Hickey, Bryson, Hill.

This Ball

I’m holding a baseball
in my hand, an old one,
dirty, scuffed up, much used.
But still intact, firm to the touch.

It’s not mine.
Probably one Steve cast aside
when he took up cross country.

I finished my playing days
on a softball field,
and there are probably a half-dozen
softballs, red dots,
lying around the house,
if I chose to look for them.

This ball is small in comparison,
but plenty large enough
to hold lots of memories.

I practice the grips I learned
as an occasional pitcher in high school:
across the seams for a fast ball,
with the seams for the overhand curve,
slightly off center for the change up.

Seems only yesterday.
And that’s the nicest thing
about holding a baseball in your hand:
if you trace the seams all around,
you’ll find you’re all the way back
to where you started.