THE FICKLE ARM OF FATE

Whitey Ford, who exemplified stylishness and ease in his 16-year career as a lefthanded pitcher for the New York Yankees, died on Thursday at 91. While he achieved practically all a pitcher might ever want to achieve, he had one great frustration, as New York Times sportswriter Tyler Kepner recounts in today’s paper. The yarn has, oddly enough, got me thinking of the role of fate in the making of poems.

The story, as Kepner tells it, is that Casey Stengel, the eccentric manager of the Yankees, had the temerity to choose another hurler than Ford, nicknamed “The Chairman of the Board,” to start the first game of the 1960 World Series. Normally, managers pick the team’s ace to pitch the first game so that its top pitcher has the chance to pitch three games if the fracas goes all the way to the end of the best-of-seven series.

The series did end up going the full seven games. But Ford wasn’t able to start the seventh tilt because, as Casey (“the old perfessor”) had decided, Whitey had pitched the sixth game the day before—splendidly, as it turned, blanking the Bucs 12-0. (Starting pitchers are rarely allowed fewer than three games between starts.)

The seventh game was a classic slugfest, with the lead going back and forth as a bevy of hapless pitchers successively left the game. In the event, the light-hitting Pittsburgh second sacker Bill Mazeroski famously blasted one over the ivy-covered left-field wall, ending the Yankees’ season. The usually mild-tempered Whitey was furious with his manager, refusing to speak to Stengel. Ford felt that if Casey had chosen him to start game 1, the nifty lefty would have then gone on to start games 4 and 7, and the outcome would have been a lot more brilliant for the Yanks.

As a Yankees fan since the age of eight, I sympathize with Ford’s feelings and speculations. But as a poet and a lover of poetry, I’m glad that Maz sent my boys to the showers. If the Pirates hadn’t won that game, the world wouldn’t have the marvelous poem “7th Game  :  1960 Series.” The poem is by Paul Blackburn, a poet whose work I adore and who should be read and remembered a whole lot more than he is.

How do I love Blackburn’s poem? Let me count the ways. I love the way the words punctuate the silence of that day, which is one I remember well. I was 12 years old then, and I recollect pacing outside my school, pressing a hand-sized transistor radio against my ear, hovering on every pitch. The day was very quiet and bright, and the late afternoon shadows were starting to gather. Blackburn’s poem enacts, in its leisurely way, the slow-motion feeling of that afternoon as I experienced it. The lines step lightly down the page, alternately short and long, as the scene and rhythm require. Blackburn was a master of what was then called “open field” composition, in which the poet finds her poem as if she were walking through a field, finding the best words, phrases, line-lengths, etc., to fit the reality she and the reader are experiencing together.

The poem follows the movement of the speaker’s mind, discovering the link, in passing, between 2nd and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan (Blackburn’s stomping ground) and second and third base in the game of baseball. He notices the way the usually lustful male population has sublimated its libido to what’s happening on the transistor radio. Their rapt wordlessness is why the streets have grown so silent.

I love that Blackburn dedicated the poem to my late mentor, the poet Joel Oppenheimer, who wrote a popular lower-case column for the Village Voice covering The Mets. The two often drank themselves to distraction at The Lion’s Head Bar in the West Village.

Perhaps most of all, I love the way the poem presents the lengthening afternoon:

Blocks of afternoon

acres of afternoon

Pennsylvania Turnpikes of afternoon  .  One

                                    diamond stretches out in the sun

                                                     the 3rd base line

And then the ending, echoing the slogan of revolutionary Cuba:

  The final score, 10-9

Yanquis, come home

Had Whitey pitched that game, this poem might never have existed.

Photo Credit: "Whitey Ford" by Willie Zhang is licensed under CC BY 2.0