I saw our blue-eyed ballplayer’s apotheosis
from bleacher section 96 in right. Five bucks
to watch Game Two One Three One (W-Mussina,
16-8; L-Boscie, 6-4) that night
when schools in Baltimore had just reopened
and summertime was digging in its heels. Euphoria
was levitating neighborhoods and marble stoops.
Inside the ballpark, pandemonium was trapped
and caged, but wouldn’t stay contained. Not past frame four,
when Boscie’s fastball, mashed against the ash wood barrel,
sprang off and sent a violent, mortar pulse’s shockwave
of jubilance. Cal trotted Cal-like. All the rest
was only after-party. Stooped, the emissary
of games in yellowed clippings, Joe DiMaggio,
pronounced the benediction of the superseded
who loped in pinstripes through Elysium’s grass. The four
great canvass digits dropped, confetti black and orange
rained down through pig fat smoke from Eutaw. Clutching babies,
fans at the railings strained to touch the hem of Jr
when he had slipped the concrete dugout’s mortal bonds.
Ramrod and weathered, Sr stepped unbothered past
his old eviction’s site, the coach’s box, more giddy
than all the limo-litter VIPs, more giddy
than all the big league regulars who grinned the grin
of kids in t-ball caps at the colossus Cal,
more giddy than the umps who didn’t make the slightest
attempt to dam their adulation up—men who
had punched the air derisively year in, year out
to teach their zone du jour to straight-backed Number Eight.
Above the Yards the moon turned on its Big Top beam
and, all the while, the tribute that was easily
the best, the board beneath the right-field porch, kept flashing
aloofly through the scenes of downright storybook
and choked-up words: …*OAK 1 BOS 3 … *CLE 4 MIL 1 …
George Angell, September 1995
Cheers! 