Carolina League Old Timers Game, 1980

 Enos Slaughter

Durham, North Carolina

Summer 1980

Carolina League Old Timers Game, 1980

     for Miles Wolff

Dead arms cock and toss

ghostly looping baseballs.

With golf course tans,

paunches, and bored

teenaged children

in the stands.

they trade anecdotes

wives never hear.

In the dugout,

young minor leaguers

owned by the Atlanta Braves

giggle, nor recognizing

how it is they will gather

their own aged summers

into a blue weather

three-inning old timers game

where the trails cross

past pink slips, real jobs.

In our dugout,

Joe Cowley farts,

says Enos Slaughter

is obscenely fat.

Out on the mound,

Tommy Byrne kicks

at the rubber

with new spikes.

Gallagher tells me

not to watch too long.

I have to warm up

our starting pitcher,

a bonus baby

West Point drop-out

whose hard one explodes

like a grenade as it

crosses the plate.

But I want to memorize

this grassy field in May sunlight,

the baggy flannel uniforms,

the bald, blunt head of Enos Slaughter

as he grins and signs a ball.

I want to memorize

the blonde, nearly bare-breasted

woman interviewing Bob Veale for TV,

her butt tense and snug

in grey designer jeans.

I want to memorize

the quizzical expression

on Tommy Byrne's face

as he adjusts his grip

on a batting practice ball,

the pheasant-brained

radio announcer eating

his fourth free hot dog,

the wide-open happiness

of middle-aged baseball players

who never expected this

residue of poise and grace.

It's good to sit here

out of the old timers' way

with my hand in my glove.

When the years have been piled on

and I'm nearer some mortuary,

I'll stand over there, just behind

home plate with the gear on

one last blood-pulsing time.

And I'll look over here

to the dugout to see myself

young again, lean and hard,

my hands tight with impatience.

I'll look over one spring day,

then turn around, squat and catch

my finest innings... even if

I resemble a beached sea lion.

This poem first appeared in The Minneapolis Review of Baseball (now named Elysian Fields Baseball Quarterly ) in 1985, edited by Steve Lehman.

 Joe Cowley

Summer 1980

 Bob Veale

Summer 1980

Red Shuttleworth

Summer 1980

After the release of the movie Bull Durham, a lot of guys who played for the Durham Bulls (the Atlanta Braves Class-A minor league team in the early 1980's) were taken for bullshitters when they claimed they had been there... on the grass at Durham Athletic Stadium.  The Bulls returned to the Carolina League thanks to local franchise owner Miles Wolff.  It was Miles who paid my salary when I was the bullpen coach in 1980.  Every January I call Miles and thank him for the gift of being a Durham Bull in 1980.  A baseball visionary, Miles Wolff was instrumental in returning minor league baseball to profitable popularity.

Baseball Hall of Famer Enos Slaughter has passed on.  Tommy Byrne is gone, too.  Joe Cowley is rumored to be a nuts & bolts salesman somewhere in the South, but, after Durham, Joe went on to pitch in the Major Leagues for the Braves, Yankees, White Sox, and Phillies.  Bob Veale, my roommate on the road in 1980, our pitching coach, who led the National League in strikeouts in 1964 while pitching for the Pirates, is retired somewhere in Alabama.

The Durham Bulls are now a Triple-A minor league team.  Miles Wolff no longer owns the franchise.  I will never be invited back to an old timers game.