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    Red Sox Rhymes: Verses and Curses
    Red Sox Rhymes: Verses and Curses
    Red Sox Rhymes: Verses and Curses
    Ebook182 pages53 minutes

    Red Sox Rhymes: Verses and Curses

    By Dick Flavin

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    About this ebook

    From the voice of Fenway Park comes a collection of sixty-four humorous and nostalgic poems celebrating the Boston Red Sox.

    A commonwealth institution and popular local television personality who is also the announcer, ambassador, and poet laureate for Fenway Park, Dick Flavin has entertained audiences with his incredible poetic talent and abiding love for the Red Sox before countless home games for more than twenty years. Now, this legendary talent’s poems are gathered together for the first time in this keepsake volume.

    As a beloved Red Sox insider, Flavin has been privileged to watch history in the making, from the team’s 2004 World Series victory that finally broke its nearly century-long “curse,” to road-tripping with Dom DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky, to witnessing Ted Williams final appearance at the plate. His pithy and comedic verses—including such gems as “The Beards of Summer,” “Long Live Fenway Park,” and his best known, “Teddy at the Bat”—pay homage to the American pastime, New England’s favorite team and players (and the curses and legends that have followed it), and the passionate Nation that has remained faithful through victory and defeat.

    Illustrated with more than fifty photos from the official Red Sox archives, Red Sox Rhymes honors all of Red Sox fandom and is an essential memento for every BoSox fan.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJul 14, 2015
    ISBN9780062391537
    Author

    Dick Flavin

    Dick Flavin is the poet laureate and senior ambassador of the Boston Red Sox and voice of Fenway Park, serving as public address announcer for Red Sox day games. His television commentaries won seven New England Emmy Awards, he is a nationally known speaker, and is a member of the Massachusetts Broadcasters Hall of Fame. He wrote and starred in According to Tip, the acclaimed one-man play about legendary Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. He lives in Quincy, Massachusetts.

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    • 5/5
      Red Sox Rhymes: verses and cursesAm a long time sox fan and thought this would be a fun book to listen to.Love the summer beards!! Red flops song, too funny! I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device).

    Book preview

    Red Sox Rhymes - Dick Flavin

    INTRODUCTION

    When I was a kid in grammar school I discovered Casey at the Bat, Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s immortal ballad about a star-crossed slugger. Wow, I thought to myself, a poem about baseball. Wasn’t poetry supposed to be about the meaning of life, the moon and stars, that sort of thing? This, though, was about a game, one to which I was already addicted. I couldn’t get enough of Casey. Eventually I memorized the whole thing and would recite it at the slightest provocation. Often, to be honest about it, no provocation was needed at all.

    When I got to college and would go to the local beer hall with my pals for a few brews, if I ran out of money, which happened as often as not, I would climb up on a chair and loudly recite Casey in the hope that someone would take pity on me and buy me a beer. Happily, from time to time the ruse worked.

    In ensuing years, as a speaker and television commentator, I learned that writing and speaking in verse could get people’s attention and they’d tend to remember more of what I had to say. That’s what I did, and still do. But I never completely dropped Casey at the Bat from my act. One never gets totally over a first love.

    Fast-forward to October of 2001, when I took the road trip of a lifetime for any baseball fan, especially a Red Sox fan, driving by automobile from Massachusetts to Florida with Dom DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky to spend three days visiting with their old teammate Ted Williams, who was gravely ill and in fact dying.

    There I was in Ted Williams’s living room with three mythic heroes of my boyhood. I had to do something to justify my presence. I decided to do a quick rewrite of Casey at the Bat and turned it into a story of the great post–World War II Red Sox teams when DiMaggio batted leadoff, Pesky hit second and the great Williams batted third. I recited Teddy at the Bat before an audience of three old men, all of whom have since passed on. I surmised that would be the end of it and that I’d go back to reciting Casey in its original form.

    When word of our visit got out back in Boston, though, I was more often than not asked to recite my new version of the great old poem that had first appeared in 1888. It was Casey, not Teddy, who would be benched.

    A few weeks after Ted Williams passed away, the Red Sox held a memorial for him at Fenway Park. It turned out to be the closest thing to a wake or funeral Ted would ever have. They asked me to recite Teddy at the Bat before the twenty-five thousand spectators in the stands. It turned out to be the most pressure-packed appearance of my life. But it was also the moment my love for lyric poetry and my love for baseball and the Red Sox came together, and it was a marriage made, if not in heaven, in Fenway Park—which as far as a lot of Red Sox fans are concerned is just as good as heaven.

    I have since written and performed scores of verses on the team and on the game, many of which are in this book. I hope you enjoy reading them—and reciting them, too. And I hope you’ll keep in mind that none of them would have happened had not, a long, long time ago, a grammar-school kid discovered and fallen in love with a poem about baseball by Ernest Lawrence Thayer.

    For Red Sox loyalists the first sign that the end was at hand for the eighty-six-year march through the barren desert of defeat was almost imperceptible. The Red Sox stood on the brink of being swept by the dreaded New York Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship series. Then in the ninth inning a stolen base by a utility player who would not have even one at bat during that postseason is what lit the fire. That theft led to a game-tying single. Several innings later an extra-inning home run won the game. It was the hit that launched the legend of Big Papi. The next night there was another extra-inning nail-biter, won by a David Ortiz hit. Then came the heroic bloody-sock game followed by a blowout that left the Yankees for dead, at least for that year. The World Series was a joyous victory parade to the Promised Land. The Olde Towne Team ascended to nirvana again in 2007 and, most improbably, in 2013.

    Red Sox

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