FUTURE PROSPECTS

By Terry Downes

High school athletes fight to play
While pros will only play for pay;
The question then is rendered clear:
Do we the game, or gold revere?

With players’ salaries on the rise
The owners scramble to devise
Ways to raise the money needed
Then to pay contracts completed.

Ticket prices are sent soaring
Commercial breaks are long and boring,
The cost of hot dogs and of beer
Has grown prohibitively dear.

A trip to bring a youngster there
Sends parents into corporate lair
To have their pockets picked with glee
To pay for owners’ spending spree.

So what is baseball after all:
A game of joy, or business brawl?
A field for millionaires-to-be,
Or happy days of reverie?

The nation’s game is sliding slow
Down a slope it shouldn’t go,
Away from hearts of average folk
Who on the cost of tickets choke.

Is baseball only for the rich?
Shall we be forced to pay-per-pitch?
Baseball’s fans must make their choice:
To lose the game, or raise their voice.

****

Terry Downes is an attorney and retired District Court Clerk/Magistrate who went on to found and direct the MCC Program on Homeland Security, and long served as an adjunct professor at Suffolk Univ. Law School and UMASS-Lowell. He lives in Lowell with his wife Atty. Annie O’Connor.

This is the last in a series of nine poems about baseball (nine, like in nine innings of a game, or nine players on the field, etc.) which will appear on the first Friday of each month through the baseball season. Here are the previously posted poems in this series:

March – Spring Training

April – Opening Day

May – Early Season

June – Postponed!

July – In the Minors

August – Pitchers’ Duel

September – Building Year

October – Pennant Fever