Spring Training Winter Haven
Our far-flung contributor Jim Provencher in Australia sent us a poem in response to my essay about hometown baseball from a few days ago (“Organized Ball”). Jim spent youthful days in Portland, Maine, playing Babe Ruth League, high school, and American Legion baseball.
Here’s what he told us: “It’s weird, but everything, all the lingo and rituals you commemorate we did as kids too in Portland, Maine . . . so it meant a lot to me. I coached a lot of baseball and here in Oz was the State Rep coach for girls softball. My old Tony Gwynn Rawlings glove sits right here on my desk pocketing the ball from the Minnesota High School finals (we lost!) . . . we were the dark horse rag-tag team from the little farming town of Faribault, a blow-in . . . Thanks for bringing back all the memories. Now it’s just . . . the hot-stove league for me. I attach a poem I wrote half a century ago, when I lived in a little orange grove picker’s shack right next to the old Red Sox Winter Haven spring training facility where I whiled away many an afternoon, happily watching those easy-paced games, infield practice, whatever. The Tigers were just a few miles over in Lakeland, the Dodgers down at Vero Beach. Days of bliss for me . . .” –PM
Red Sox shortstop Rico Petrocelli
.
Spring Training Winter Haven
for Rico Petrocelli
by Jim Provencher
A little sore a little stiff
winter’s never long enough
oil the glove bone the bat
polish spikes wet a chaw
memory saves a step around the bag
I can spoil the jam inside
give me the extra base I’ll take it
I lie like leather in the groove
Sweat showers like success
and works warm lubricant
round my thickened waist and raisin skin
my eyes are slit like gunsights
drawing beads on flies and fouls
the mortgage on third’s paid off
with dives for darters barehand grabs
I’m no evicted shortstop who lost his wheels
I make my home at third
I protect the plate punch and stick
behind the runner bingle in the hole
I can deliver the long ball when it counts
15 last year this year I’m 30
maybe I’ll switch to a lighter bat
ball sails in big as a continent this spring
and with a sweet smack I kiss the equator
they pay me to hit ropes
My past performs like a politician
routine buddy the old routine
I never wash my socks
my feet know what to do
somewhere in the diamond constellation
I’m a steady star I feel good
I know the best place to eat in any town
Another spring not the spring
not coming off a big year
and nowhere near my last at all
no ground ball hiccups off the grass
good hands good hands my hands
smooth as ash the color of wood
routine outs scattered clapping
polite as I approach the plate
no burden but to do my job
the sun is butter on my back
that kind of year that kind of year
I love this — the language of baseball, the ebb & flow of action. The frictions of age and time, and the wisdom & blandishments that accrue thereunto . . . “the sun is butter on my back.”
It could be a riddle, asking who am I? Answer: Rico Petrocelli, shaking hands with eighty.
Nostalgic doggerel well before the dog days of August arrive …