Heart of the Order: Baseball Poems ed. by Gabriel Fried (review)

In Heart of the Order: Baseball Poems, poet, educator, and baseball enthusiast Gabriel Fried has brought together the work of a diverse group of authors who have drawn inspiration from America’s national pastime. Divided into sections including “Fundamentals,” “Sandlots and Cornfields,” and “Greats of the Game,” this new collection consciously works to address many of the reasons why baseball remains important to the lives of many Americans (including, but certainly not limited to, precious childhood memories and beloved heroic figures).

Nostalgia permeates this collection, from the subtle recollections of the camaraderie of little-league games played on long summer days to the evocation of father-son relationships that have long characterized baseball narratives (in both print and film). Regarding the former, Richard Hugo’s “Missoula Softball Tournament” pays homage to the rituals that develop sportsmanship: “They shake hands on the mound. / […] Good game. Good game” (50). Similarly, Kevin A. González reminds the reader that across America, children do not need organized ball to come together as a community, outlining the impromptu rules developed to serve the needs of children without access to a traditional field, coaching, and equipment. Illustrating the latter, David Bottoms, in “Sign for My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt,” succinctly characterizes the complex father-son relationships in many baseball narratives when he notes that “I never learned what you were laying down” (5).

The routines of baseball, the collection suggests, have also long provided comfort against those historical moments of turmoil, while also serving as a marker of cultural progress. Wyatt Prunty’s “A Baseball Team of Unknown Navy Pilots, Pacific Theater, 1944” commemorates the many soldiers “whose names we never got, / As all we know is they returned to bases, / Went up when told, came home or not” (56). Elizabeth Powell’s “At the Old Yankee Stadium,” in a more positive reminder of our history, recalls the moment in the 1970s when, for baseball, there was “No such thing / As gender”: “girls can join Little League now” (78–79). In both instances, baseball is the common bond between heroes great and small.

However, for all the familiarity that these poems provide, Fried also does a wonderful job of making baseball new again. For instance, the opening poem, Robert Francis’s “The Pitcher,” reminds the reader of the paradoxical nature of pitching: “He / Throws to be a moment misunderstood” (3); for all that we—the fans, the announcers, the players on the field—know about the mechanics of pitching and in-game strategy, the best pitchers have mastered hiding their intentions while standing in the spotlight. In a similar vein, Brian Turner’s “Jackie” does not recall the player who changed the game; rather, this poem introduces the reader to “Virne Beatrice ‘Jackie’ Mitchell, Pitcher (1912–1987),” who “for one brief moment in the history of the sport, / […] struck out the Sultan of Swat and the Iron Horse” (141–42) when the Chattanooga Lookouts played an exhibition game against the New York Yankees.

As much as this collection will appeal to the fan of the sport, Heart of the Order will also appeal to poets. In the foreword, Daniel Okrent (author of numerous books on baseball and founder of Rotisserie League Baseball) notes, “Poets write about baseball for the same reason they write about nightingales and urns” (xi). And this is hardly the only allusion to some of the finest poetry of the Western canon, as several of the poets allude to such classic authors as Sylvia Plath; Walt Whitman; and, as William Trowbridge calls him in “Poets’ Corner”—a lament for the loneliness of right field, a position often filled by those who “didn’t pitch that well / or throw or catch or hit” (26)—“some kind of / little priss, some kind / of Percy Bitch Shelby” (27). Additionally, this collection reprints work from some of the most celebrated poets of the twentieth century, including Yusef Komunyakaa (“Glory”), Marianne Moore (“Baseball and Writing”), and May Swenson (“Analysis of Baseball...