Marianne Moore, the baseball fan

I just learned from Chris Fischbach, publisher of the great Coffee House Press, that Marianne Moore once threw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium.  I always thought she was a Dodger fan!  My hope is that she threw the pitch and then said “I, too, dislike them.”

I forgot that there was actually baseball in this poem!  See:

the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
                   do not admire what
                   we cannot understand: the bat
                             holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
        a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea
                                                                                         the base-
       ball fan, the statistician—

 

(line breaks kind of destroyed by WordPress, sorry)

I’m actually not sure how to read this — I think the catalog here is not delineating who “we” are, but rather what we cannot understand and thus do not admire.  What makes a baseball fan hard to understand?  Maybe this makes more sense in 1924, when the first version of the poem is written, and we’re not so far from the point where the term “fanatic” for a baseball rooter acquired its permanent abbreviation.  But why is it hard to understand the bat looking for something to eat?  The other animals in the poem are, indeed, engaging in some weird repetitive unparseable motion, but the endless quest for food seems like something we fail to admire precisely because we do understand it.

The appearance of the “bat” before baseball is presumably on purpose but I don’t really understand the work it does.

Also, the famous phrase from this poem, “Imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” is not so far off as a description of mathematics.

Anyway, per BaseballLibrary, Moore was a Dodger fan for most of her life but felt so betrayed by the team’s move to Los Angeles that she switched to the Yankees.  Understandable but unforgivable.  She’s the baseball equivalent of those people who repent for their youthful liberal overreach by becoming right-wing culture warriors.

 

 

Reader survey: writers and their baseball teams (also Joan Jett)

Almost World Series time!  I’m supporting the Giants — I still feel low about the title Bonds and the Giants should have won in 2002, and while Bonds is gone, my affection for his team remains.  Also, the Giants have more ex-Orioles.

I was just reading about Marianne Moore and the Dodgers and wondering what else we know about writers and the baseball teams they loved.  Offhand, besides Moore, I can think of

• Delmore Schwartz:  Giants
• Don DeLillo:  Yankees
• Stephen King:  Red Sox

As for the Orioles, I’m not sure.  Tom Clancy owns a piece of the team but I don’t know whether he has a rooting interest.  Joan Jett likes us!

Baltimore Orioles:
I follow them everyday. If I could watch them everyday I would. I call Sports Phone every 10 minutes when the Orioles play whether I’m on the road or at home. I’m following them very closely as always. It seems like every time I write about them in a song they do well. Bad Reputation was dedicated to the Orioles and they did well in 1979. On Notorious, in the song, “I Want You” there’s a lyric that says “I want to go and see the O’s never lose.” I want to go to Baltimore sometime this year and see the new stadium.

Theme song to the greatest television program ever aired and dedicated to the Orioles?  Sometimes the world is too good.

Anyway, please contribute your literary baseball fans (or baseball-loving rock icons) in the comments.