Heart of the Order: Baseball Poems

Baseball truly is America’s pastime, beloved by most and familiar to all. This pocket-sized paperback carries nearly a hundred poems about this great game. The editor, Gabriel Fried, has broken the poems into seven sections: Baseball Fundamentals; Stickball, Pickle, and Little League; Sandlots and Cornfields; Expanding the Strike Zone; Screwballs and Double Plays; At the Letters; Greats of the Game. The chosen poems span time over the last seventy-five years, and were written by a long list of poets. What the poems all have in common is the apparent love of the game shown by these poets. They capture the fun and the heartbreak and the disappointment and the glory of the game, a unique combination of individual performances framed within a team sport. Most will agree baseball, of all the major sports, is the most cerebral, so poetry seems like the perfect vehicle to showcase the power, beauty, and vicissitudes of the game and the people involved. Gabriel Fried has done a fine job of choosing poems that really represent the many facets of this great American game.