This haiku was first published in Full Count: The Book of Mets Poetry. One of the fun things about haiku is that a writer can cram a lot of imagery into three very short lines, and this piece does just that.
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Sun shines on diamond,
two birds on a citrus limb
ball meets bat, a crack!
Insomnia has struck tonight, but the plus side of it is that I was able to listen to the last 3.5 innings of the first official game of the World Baseball Classic. The Netherlands has defeated Cuba to kick things off, and in just a few short hours, Chinese Taipei will be taking on Panama.
If you’re interested in following along, the list of teams and the intended schedule for the tournament can be found here.
If you want to know who from each Major League team is participating in the Classic and which country they will be representing, those lists can be found here.
And you can find the complete roster for each country here.
And so it begins. Cuba 🇨🇺 vs Netherlands 🇳🇱. Let’s play some international baseball pic.twitter.com/wm47ZPiRbH
— Matt Monagan (@MattMonagan) March 8, 2023
Team Netherlands gets the first W of the #WorldBaseballClassic! pic.twitter.com/8QitNH5eIc
— World Baseball Classic (@WBCBaseball) March 8, 2023
During World War II, Philadelphia Athletics catcher Harry O’Neill was killed by a sniper at Iwo Jima on March 6, 1945. O’Neill had only appeared in one game for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1939. O’Neill and Elmer Gedeon were the only two Major League Baseball players killed during World War II.
Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls, late hitting, and unnecessary roughness. Baseball has the sacrifice.
~George Carlin
On the first day of spring training, March 1, 1954, Ted Williams broke his collarbone running after a line drive. Williams would be out for six weeks, and in April he wrote an article with Joe Reichler of the Saturday Evening Post saying that he intended to retire at the end of the season. Williams instead returned to the Red Sox lineup on May 7th, and during the 1954 season he hit .345 with 386 at bats in 117 games.
