It is like shaking hands with a bag of oyster crackers;
Joints sprained, ligaments torn, fingers fractured
And splayed off in several different directions
Like a weathervane that has had a rather nasty shock, indeed,
The whorls of his fingertips, the uneven rise and fall of the knuckles
Serving as a travelogue of a lifetime spent
In towns not quite ready for the big time:
Olean, Oneonta, Visalia, Valdosta, a dozen more besides,
A million miles on buses
Of uncertain vintage and roadworthiness.
Each scar and swelling, each uneven path
Between base and fingertip has a tale of its own;
The ring finger on the left hand first broken
By a Big Bob Veale fastball that was supposed to be a curve,
Later snapped again by Steve Dalkowski,
Who, drinking quite a bit by then
(When ol’ Steve had put away a few, he notes ruefully,
You didn’t want to hit him, catch him,
Or sit in the first few rows behind the plate)
Most likely never saw the sign
Indicating slider instead of high heat.
The index finger on his throwing hand?
Well, that was from a foul tip in…Wellsville in ’59? Walla Walla in ’62?
When you’ve bit up by the ball as many times as I have,
You tend to forget what you tore up when.
Ah, but no such problem with the right pinkie;
That was snapped one cold April night
Somewhere between Winnipeg and Duluth,
During a poker game when a backup infielder
Produced an unexpected and wholly inexplicable king
Seemingly from nowhere.
But those hands! They were, in the lexicon of the scouts
(The same ones who labeled him
With the dreaded tag of “good field, no hit”)
Who trolled the sandlot parks
And high school fields of his childhood, “soft”;
Indeed, he could cradle a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball like an infant,
And, with the gentlest and most imperceptible of movements,
Turn the wildness of a nineteen-year-old phenom
Into an inning-ending third strike, and even now,
Two decades of bad lighting and jury-rigged equipment
Having turned the topography of his digits craggy and asymmetrical,
They seem as smooth and supple as they were at nineteen,
With all the strength and unsullied smoothness of youth,
As he grips and waggles an unseen bat
In the course of retelling
(In his one brief, glorious spring in camp with the big club)
How he doubled to the gap in right-center
Off none other than the great Whitey Ford himself.
It's a beautiful day for baseball. Let's play two.