Lately, I have been trying not to live inside of an echo chamber, which means that this year I knew that April is not just National Poetry month, but also the month when a thing called “opening day” happens in Major League Baseball. It gives me a tidy segue to write about “Body and Soul,” by B.H. Fairchild, a baseball poem I fell in love with back when I was teaching English for the way it could hook even the most poetry-resistant students and for the truth that it packaged into a ripping good story.
We start around the kitchen table with men who are “guzzling bourbon and Coke from coffee mugs” and “nuzzling/the facts but mauling the truth,” as they reminisce about a sandlot baseball game from back in the day in Commerce, Oklahoma. These are men who “worked together in zinc mines or on oil rigs, /sweat and khaki and long beers after work, steel guitar music/whanging in their ears,” and the poem quickly captures the easy cadence and vernacular of their speech.
So it all begins, the men loosening up,
joking about the fat catcher’s sex life, it’s so bad
last night he had to hump his wife, that sort of thing,
pairing off into little games of catch that heat up into
throwing matches, the smack of the fungo bat, lazy jogging
into right field, big smiles and arcs of tobacco juice,
and the talk that gives a cool, easy feeling to the air
The scene is set: a vintage piece of Americana that illustrates the challenges of working-class life in the 1950s and the simple pleasures of a town baseball game.
Except, of course there’s more. It turns out that a seemingly random fifteen-year-old who’s been brought in to make up the numbers is pretty good. On his first time at bat, he lets two fast balls go by and then,
pops the bat around so quick and sure
that they pause a moment before turning around to watch
the ball still rising and finally dropping far beyond
the abandoned tractor that marks left field. Holy shit.
Things are now interesting. We have swear words! And we notice that the pitcher, like the tractor, has been “abandoned,” that the baseball is “ragged and bruised” and that the rising action of the story is now a battle between a teenager who has nothing to lose and a pitcher who has already lost everything.
Next comes a pitch from the “dark, green hell of forbidden fastballs,” which is a phrase that makes me want to actually watch baseball. The teenager, who has switched to batting left-handed just for style points, sends it back out past the tractor again.
Five home runs later, it’s clear we have a fifteen-year-old ringer. And, when the poem tells us that the kid’s name is Mickey Mantle, we know, in a way that the men in the poem cannot, what the pitcher was up against, existentially speaking. He didn’t have a chance.
Any ordinary poet-storyteller could be done here and head for the showers, but Fairchild has one curve ball left. He takes us to a consideration of what it’s like to brush up close to greatness.
When I see my friend’s father staring hard into the bottomless
well of home plate as Mantle’s fifth homer heads toward Arkansas,
I know that this man with the half-orphaned children and
worthless Dodge had also encountered for his first and possibly
only time the vast gap between talent and genius
I love that the gap between talent and genius is “vast,” and yet we all know it when we see it. It’s the thing that gets us up out of our seats at ball games or into spontaneous applause at a concert or on to our phones to exult by tweet or text. It’s the thing that puts our everyday wins and losses, petty, epic, and otherwise, into perspective. Yes, the presence of genius can shed a dispiriting light on the compromises we make with ourselves to get through the day—Fairchild refers to Mantle as “the bringer of truth, who will not easily be forgiven”—but for me it’s straight up glorious just to get to see it.
“Body and Soul” is in B.H. Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe, which can be ordered from Yankee Bookshop, Norwich Bookstore or Still North Books or on Bookshop.org
Courtney Cook is a writer who works in a technology company. She lives in Wilder, VT and publishes a weekly newsletter, "Survival by Book," at courtneycook.substack.com.