In five delightfully gruesome tetrameter quatrains, this newspaper poem explains exactly what a fan would like to do to the umpire, even before the innings start.
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We’ve been publishing poems with a connection to the archives of The New York Sun: Ernest Thayer’s 1888 “Casey at the Bat,” for example. Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s 1892 “March” — along with Nathalia Crane’s 1922 “The History of Honey” and Don Marquis’s 1920 “archy confesses.” Not all the newspaper poetry of those days appeared in the Sun, however. Some, alas, appeared in the pages of our rival papers. And here, since it’s still baseball season, is an example: an anonymous comic squib from the New York Tribune in 1886.
“Slug the Umpire” is not great poetry. It’s not even good poetry, with too many prepositions forced to carry a stress: “ìn a dèar delìghtful grìp,” for example. But the point of the lighter verses we run as Poems of the Day on Wednesdays is that, first of all, they have to be fun. And “Slug the Umpire” is fun. In five delightfully gruesome tetrameter quatrains, it explains exactly what a fan would like to do to the umpire, even before the innings start.
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