E. Ethelbert Miller is one of the most accomplished—if not the most accomplished—of contemporary baseball poets. This is one of many hats that Miller wears and perhaps this versatility is what makes his approach to baseball so richly layered and poignant. He begins this collection with two epigraphs by the iconic pitchers Satchel Paige and Tommy John (the latter of whom is also referenced in the collection’s title). The coupling of these players and especially Paige’s storied wit sets both the tone and the links between past and present that characterize the collection as a whole. Moreover, this collection works as a sequel of sorts to Miller’s 2018 collection, If God Invented Baseball, which entangles the arc of the poet’s lifetime with developments in baseball across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Similarly, in When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery, baseball is an evocative vehicle for documenting personal and sociocultural memories, including about the tumultuous present characterized by the COVID-19 pandemic, protests against anti-Black violence, and a watershed U.S. presidential election.
In Miller’s skillful hands, baseball—a sport whose plays and rituals are irrevocably woven into the American vernacular—accrues new and layered significance. The autobiographical “Howard University, October 1969” recounts the camaraderie engendered by baseball for a young man “Still short on friends.” When the 1969 New York Mets win the World Series, “I high five over the heads / of guys from Baltimore and Philly / All dazed / by the Amazin’ Mets.” This is just one of many moments in which baseball is a social lubricant and a common currency—a way of ordering human experience. The collection’s title poem uses the metaphor of the surgery so many pitchers undergo to describe the fraying of intimacy in a marriage. Just as the arm is inexorably altered after a surgery in which a new tendon is grafted onto one’s pitching elbow, so is a marriage when “You no longer recognize the rotation / of love, the spin of desire, the funny movement / of lust.” It is fitting that this is the title poem, for it captures the brilliant combination of melancholy and humor that characterizes Miller’s baseball verse more generally. If baseball is a way of explaining the world for Miller, the explanations are most often like the blues with the underlying impulse of resilience, or to laugh to keep from crying. As he notes in “The Swinging Sonnet Is Sung,” “Baseball is a game of blues. You stand so you don’t fall.”
Unsurprisingly, Miller inflects his representations of Black baseball history with a similar blues mood. Satchel Paige and the many heroes of the Negro Leagues (1920–1960) dedicated their lives to a sport whose Major Leagues excluded them for decades. Put another way, Black baseball exemplifies making a way of no way, and what is more blues than that? Miller makes this analogy explicit in “The Negro League,” when he writes about being in his office at Howard University:
I surrounded myself with the blues
and heavy hitters
Sterling Brown
Albert Murray
Richard Wright
Ralph Ellison
LeRoi Jones
and Josh Gibson
Notably, such a pantheon of Black blues writers concludes with the most accomplished of Negro League sluggers (Josh Gibson), affirming that the constellation of Black blues, baseball, and literary traditions work congruently to nourish and sustain Miller’s poetic voice. Indeed, the final lines of this poem mimic Paige’s own propensity for generating humorous maxims: “Control your love like Satchel Paige. / If you have to resuscitate then hesitate.” Here and elsewhere, baseball and music are not only interwoven but also celebrated as crucial cultural and sociopolitical reference points for Black American life.
Invoking the title of Miles Davis’s masterful album, Miller’s poem “Kind of Blue” imagines a father who “watched the game while / Listening to Miles”; he stages a duet of sorts between “jazz / on the radio and the ball game / on television.” These dual performances facilitate catharsis otherwise unavailable in a backbreaking job and an unforgiving city: “He worked / hard all week for life’s tenderness.” “In a Sentimental Mood” likewise compares the feeling evoked by Duke Ellington’s famous composition to winning a high-stakes game and “savoring the moment” removed from celebrating teammates: “They are hugging and shouting. / I’m still looking at the field taking it all in.” This is the poet both among and apart from the crowd, rendering timeless moments of joy and melancholy.
At times, baseball is an especially elegiac vehicle utilized to call attention to the systemic racism represented not only by the history of racial segregation that made the Negro Leagues necessary but also by the current era in which anti-Black discrimination and violence persist. In “Lost in the Sun,” Miller paints this mournful picture:
Black fathers no longer standing
in a field of dreams
Their Black boys gone
sunglasses unable to hide their
grief
Baseball has long been bound up in myths of American meritocracy—the field of dreams a potent image for unfettered opportunities. Miller punctures that illusion in his exposure of the oppressive forces beyond one’s control that thwart the promises of youth and generational progress.
Similar attention to racial injustices and inequities characterizes “The Cardboard Season of 2020,” which references the cutout fans placed in the seats of baseball stadiums to create the illusion of the crowds no longer deemed safe while a global pandemic spreads like wildfire. Summer 2020 was also, as Miller’s first line announces, “The summer of Black Lives Matter,” yet there remains a striking lack of Black agency in the predominantly white national pastime:
we looked around the empty ball
parks staring at Black cardboard
faces—wondering who
decided where to place us.
Bemoaning a more general sense of white control over Black lives—and, in the case of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and so many others, Black deaths—Miller affirms that baseball (and sports more generally) is much more than a game. It reflects a nation riven with racial and intersectional disparities.
Alternatively, “The World Series” explains the stakes of contemporary life through a wide range (or series) of natural and human-made disasters. “One can go hitless and not understand poverty,” the poem commences, and then continues with analogies to global warming, a hurricane, an earthquake, war, and finally concluding: “Every year the World Series is played with survivors.” Reading this poem within the context of the 2020 season—one that will forever be asterisked because of the shortened and reconfigured schedule due to the COVID-19 pandemic—I’m struck by the word “survivor,” suggestive of the multifold threats that we all face during this most trying and uncertain of times. As with Miller’s baseball poetry more generally, “The World Series” is about much more than winning the game or the season at hand.
The poems in When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery also speak to Miller’s virtuoso poetic skills, moving seamlessly between blues, jazz, confessional, persona, and ekphrastic modes without skipping a beat (or a base). Miller imagines conceptualist painter and sculptor Marcel Duchamp as “a manager / who can get away / with anything,” Pablo Picasso in his Cubist phase seeing “the diamond as a cube, and, channeling Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks at the Diner, the loneliness evoked by “The player whose girl / sits alone at the all-night / diner.” While these poems are playful, they remind readers of the captivating visual symmetry of baseball, affirming that it stands alongside art, music, and poetry as a thing of beauty.
Baseball is not the cultural glue that it once was, with its fanbase older and whiter than the other two sports national pastimes: basketball and football. Despite these demographic and cultural realities, in Miller’s poetry baseball is as relevant as ever, serving as both a window and mirror. With Miller’s characteristic verve and wit, he offers a glimpse of what the game and, by extension, the nation could be while enjoining us to contemplate the ugly and beautiful aspects of our reflections. As he notes in the penultimate poem, “Just Let Us Play,”
Politicians try to be umpires.
They make and miss calls
outside the ballpark.
Let us play for the love
of the game.
Without naming the 45th president of the United States, Miller implies the devastation that he caused so many at home and abroad, and the poem implicitly champions the teamwork and mutual respect required to play “for the love / of the game.” As it has throughout this collection and much of Miller’s oeuvre, baseball stands in for America, and this poem champions an inclusive ethos frequently lacking beyond the field. Miller thus concludes with a bilingual imperative: “Just let us play. Juguemos.”
In the collection’s final poem—aptly titled “Extra Innings” —Miller moves into the interrogative mode, leaving readers to determine how and why we play this game of baseball (or life): “Is it for the love / of the game or the endless desire / for extra innings?” Put another way: What kind of player are you? These are the live questions that we must ask ourselves as we reckon with the inequities that structure our sports and, ultimately, our world. There is no better lyrical guide to the answers than the poems ahead.
Emily Ruth Rutter, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
Ball State University