[StLee]

What's with this Base Ball?

by Tom D'outin

President of the Literary and Oral Society of Elitist Readers
Study Room C, Boston Public Library

July 25, 2302

I take my early morning stroll through the cracked streets of Diamond City, from my apartment near Hangman’s Alley overlooking the newest opening of a Power Noodles franchise to the path toward my office inside the Boston Public Library. A typical winter day would be met with the quiet contemplation of life, but the summer. Oh, the summer.

Base ball fans are littering the path, talking nonsense of base ball and poetry. The demise! What would our literary greats of Boston think? They would be crestfallen to see such an abomination of leisure wasted not on reading or seeking books but on playing and observing this Neanderthalic barbarianism.

I cannot help but think Sylvia Plath’s first attempt at suicide was through her travels to Cincinnati. The red stockings of that foul city probably had her frothing and having permanent splotches of blood implanted into her mind. I too would leave this cruel world if forced to observe base ball constantly as my only pastime.

I could never imagine Robert Frost conducting poems of leather cylinders and wooden weapons. Would his “Birches” be supplanted by “Base Balls”? When I see base balls bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker skyscrapers, / I like to think some boy's been swinging swatters. / But swinging doesn't bend base balls’ paths to stay / As rad-storms do. What splotch it would be! To imagine Frost as a pitcher for those Diamond City Swatters. What a life wasted! What unpoetry!

As the founding president of the Literary and Oral Society of Elitist Readers, I implore all you crude settlers of the Commonwealth to shut up kindly about base ball. Enjoy your Cuppa Joe and your Sugar Bombs buried quietly reading the tomes of history rather than chirping on at 7 AM about “runs” and “whiffs” and “steals.” You sound like a clattering of feral ghouls trying desperately to push body through door rather than simply turning the knob. Knobs, all of you. With your rounders and flies. Filth, I say. From raiders to plebes. De-evolution at its finest.