[1649] Baseball's Sad Lexicon

These are the saddest of possible words:
  "Tinker to Evers to Chance."
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
  Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
  Making a Giant hit into a double --
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
  "Tinker to Evers to Chance."

   -- Franklin Pierce Adams

Note: http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem2940.html for a detailed
  explanation of what's going on

Poetry had its origins in oral tradition, and it continues to rely heavily on
the spoken word for its full impact. Devices like rhyme and metre, which
have attended poetry since antiquity (and continue to attend it despite
transient bubbles of unfashionability) are not just mnemonic, but actively
pleasing to the ear; moreover, they form a natural framework in which words
and phrases are emphasised or deemphasised, linked together or split apart -
in other words, they are an integral part of the sense and flow of the poem.

Today's poem is firmly rooted in the oral camp - it really cries out to be
read aloud, and even a silent read through gets me counting out the rhythm
in some physical form. And I was delighted to learn the story behind its
origin:

	The author was Franklin Pierce Adams who was a Cubs fan, a sportswriter
  for the New York Evening Mail and a poet thanks to an article that his
  editors said was too short — making him pen Baseball's Sad Lexicon on his
  way to a game at the Polo Grounds.
     -- http://www.baseball-almanac.com/poetry/po_sad.shtml

There is no real way to know why some poems of this sort enjoy a brief spurt
of popularity and vanish tracelessly, while others become immortal;
nonetheless, having known and enjoyed this little ditty long before I knew
anything about baseball, I am unsurprised it has fallen into the latter
category.

martin

[Links]

We've run a couple of Franklin's poems before; there's a biography attached
to Poem #212

And the wikipedia article on baseball should tell you more than you ever
wanted to know about it:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball

[this poem is archived, accessible and awaiting your comments at]
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1649.html
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From: mpenney@  Mon Mar 28 13:22:54 2005

There seems to be some confusion about whether Adams was a Giants fan or
a Cubs fan.  The Baseball Encyclopedia link you gave says Cubs (which
jives with his biography, which begins in Chicago), but the
Representative Poetry site says Giants (which makes more sense in
context), and the Hall of Fame agrees.
http://www.baseballhalloffame.org/hofers_and_honorees/extra/tinker_evers
_chance.htm

The Giants, by the way, played at the Polo Grounds while they were in
New York (they moved to San Francisco in the 1950s).



Tinker, Evans, and Chance, as the Toronto site notes, were elected to
the Hall of Fame together in 1946 (in Frank Chance's case,
posthumously).  This is a testament to the effect of this poem on the
collective memory, since these guys did not have real Hall of Fame
credentials as players.  It's tough to judge what the stats mean for
players this old (baseballs were constructed differently during that era
and couldn't travel as far when hit), but here are their career batting
averages and RBIs-I'm not listing homers because in the dead-ball era
that number didn't mean anything:

Tinker .263, 782 (15 seasons)

Evers .270, 538 (19 seasons)

Chance .297, 596 (17 seasons, several significantly shortened by
injury).



In their historical context these are middling batting averages, and the
RBI totals are above average but not stratospheric.  Compare to some
unquestioned Hall of Famers from the dead-ball era:

Honus Wagner .327, 1732 over 21 seasons

Willie Keeler .341, 810 over 19 seasons

Cap Anson  .333, 2076 over 27 seasons (!)

Nap Lajoie .338, 1599 over 21 seasons



As for any league-leading categories for single seasons, Chance led the
majors in runs, with 106, in 1906, and twice led the majors in steals.
Tinker and Evers have no "red ink" at all.  The one thing they do have
is championships: four NL pennants and two World Series rings each.
Also, it's a baseball truism that defense doesn't show up in the stats,
and (as this poem tells you) they were apparently great fielders.



All the same, it's pretty obvious that they have plaques in Cooperstown
solely because of this poem.  Ah, the power of verse.



--Mark Penney