Walt Whitman

Whitman saw great things in the ‘game of base’

and predicted that one day there’d be a team

in Albany called the Angel-Snappers

who would play shirtless in the summer sun.

When the rules disallowed ‘soaking’

(throwing a runner out by throwing at him),

the fun of Whitman’s game was gone,

and he died good in Camden, New Jersey.

Nineteenth-century baseball, as you know,

featured spectacular mustachio play

and ad endorsements were for ‘stropping,’

‘hamboiling,’ ‘stonerail fixing’ and ‘unsnaking.’

Whitman’s baseball rap has no real substance,

of course; his thoughts on the game exist

to comfort all washed-up peanut-tossers,

long assured they were unfit for poetry.