POET / BALLPLAYER

Note: Adrian Cardenas, who played 45 games
for the Chicago Cubs in 2012, now is
studying writing and philosophy at NYU.

– from The New York Times, 8/9/14

“You wouldn’t think so, but there are a lot
of similarities between baseball and writing,
the most obvious of which is,
both crafts contain the seeds of failure.
A .200 hitter has failed to reach base 80% of the time,
and as any editor will tell you, the odds of
acceptance for a manuscript is under one percent.
But a beautiful line of poetry seems like a towering fly,
a perfect metaphor, as thrilling as a no-hit game,
an exact rhyme, the crack of the bat,
drafts and rewrites, time in the batting cage,
and the completion of a poem, the big W.
Few poets can express the lyricism
of a green outfield on a Sunday afternoon.
Yet, despite the beauty of the game,
I chose the pen over the bat.
A ballplayer lives for a season;
a poet lives for eternity.”