Skip to main content

The Physics of Baseball

It is something like tying up a boat.
It is an unequal contest:  the logic of mass.
You lean back against the line,
and if the wind is still and the tide resting,
the boat comes like an amused dog,
not because is has to, but because
it has no reason not to.

Jack picks up his bat,
clean and jerking it
to his shoulder.
Jack's bat weighs forty-four ounces,
while Jack is only forty-two.

Jack took a practice swing once
and corkscrewed himself knee deep
following his bat around.

"Yer out!", the umpire yelled,
"fer not leaving the on-deck circle!"

"Somebody give me a hand!", Jack replied.
"I can't find my shoes!"

Hitting, Jack says, is a science.
He waits for the wind to die
and the tide to take a break.
Then Jack leans against the line
he has imagined the ball will take;
slowly at first, then slower still,
easing the bat into the strike zone.

It is not hitting the ball that worries Jack:
it is missing and having to find his shoes.

There are ball players they call natural,
but Jack is a scholar among the tobacco chewing,
hoo-rah heroes of high school fame:
Jack thinks about mass, and the mechanics
of rotating objects, and angular frequency.

                   And Jack thinks about his shoes.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

AT YEAR'S END, 2014

Ah!  There you are!  And so are we! After more than thirty years, sometimes Mari and I look at each other and say how surprising it is that we have found each other.  It often happens when we have decided that neither one of us wants to go adventuring: you know, to the grocery, or to a movie; or least of all, to a party designed to disguise gravity, deny arthritis, and display bottomless good humor. At the same time, sometimes Mari and I look at each other and say how surprising is everything that has happened to us.  The world we grew up in has gone, and now there is another, and that we are still here, as we were, and altogether new. It is Jao we are thinking of. This year, more than any other in our lives, has been the year when a grandchild has occupied a significant portion of our ordinary lives.  We have, in our various ways, come to have several grandchildren, but this time one of them has lived so nearby that we could walk to where he...