Monday, September 20, 2021

HoraceClarke66: "It's true. Edna St. Vincent Millay predicted the Yankees 2021 season

 (From the tortured mind of HoraceClarke66...)


As your New York Yankees slowly circle the drain, we here at
IIHIIFIIC will continue to honor our pledge to entertain you with little-know facts from Yankees history.

 For instance:  did you know that the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay predicted the Yankees awful 2021 season over a hundred years ago?

 It’s true!

 Many people are aware, of course, that Millay, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, was an avid Yankees fan and baseball annie. Babe Ruth, a lifelong admirer, was known to have said on many occasions:

 “That little bohemian poetess was the only broad who could ever drink me under the table. And dammit, she could write a sonnet like Shoeless Joe Jackson could hit a baseball!” 

Nonetheless, the literary world was startled recently when previously undiscovered drafts of what became some of Millay’s most memorable work revealed a remarkable prescience about the disasters that would afflict the Pinstripers’ 2021 campaign.

There was, for instance, her initial attempt at “First Fig”:

“Our pitching sucks at both ends;
It will not last the year.
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
Let’s have another beer.”

Some critics have noted that this verse, which was written in 1920 in red crayon, could have been referring to almost any pitching staff, anywhere, anytime. But as baseball historians have pointed out, the Yankees generally had excellent staffs throughout Millay’s adult life.

Any doubts about the poet’s powers of prognostication began to fade when some lines intended as the opening to “Recuerdo” surfaced recently on a scrap of page from an old Greenwich Village phone book:

“We were very tired, we were very merry,
"We had spent all night trying to stuff Gleyber on the ferry.”

 Since Millary died in 1950, it defies explanation as to how she could possibly have known that a man named “Gleyber” would play for any major-league team—especially considering that Gleyber Torres was not even born until 1996.

 Some baseball scholars have suggested that the discrepancy could be due to the tendency of players from Latin America to alter their birthdates—an explanation that would also account for why Gleyber Torres often plays like a man who is at least 70 years old.


But how, then, to account for this draft of “Travel,” discovered recently in one of longtime trainer Pete Sheehy’s travel bags, along with a note in the poet’s hand that read, “Pete, you old son-of-a-bitch, thanks for the bootleg hootch!”:

“My heart is warm with the friends I make,
And better friends I’ll not be knowing;
Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t put Aroldis Chapman on
No matter where it’s going.”

 How could this supremely talented literary giant see so far into the future? Like the 2021 Yankees themselves, the answer remains a mystery.

(Visuals courtesy of Balloon Boy.) 

10 comments:

JM said...

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Was alive while the Yankees made hay
She missed Horace Clarke
And the Sanchezy snark
So we have to salute her
Say Hey

Anonymous said...

Hoss,

You have an interesting mind.

Have you eve read the poetry from Yankee killer
Edna St. Vincent Milar?


Doug K.

HoraceClarke67 said...

Major points, Doug K.!

TheWinWarblist said...

Edna, could not get published as a young writer until she began submitting her work as E. St. Vincent Millay, as opposed to Edna. She was a great New Yorker and a great feminist.
Steepletop, also known as the Edna St. Vincent Millay House, was the farmhouse home Edna St. Vincent and her husband Eugene Jan Boissevain, in Austerlitz, New York. It's still there and houses a writers colony, I think. It's open to the public and has a sort of poets ramble, if you're taken to such bucolic pastimes. One of my classes went there of an outing when I was an undregrad. Bucolic as I said. But we also had cocktails with the artists in residence.

13bit said...

As a Villager who passes her house almost daily - on Bedford Street - Old Edna, as we like to call her in the back rooms, is on my mind often.

I'm sure most of the literati on this blog know that her middle name is in honor of the hospital - now razed for luxury condos - that used to grace the intersection of 11th Street and 7th Avenue South.

What you may NOT have known, but which Hoss alluded to, was her torrid relationship with Henry George Steinbrenner II, father our the late King George. THERE ARE SOME WHO SAY...

That she bore an illegitimate son to Hank II who if he had lived, might have battled for succession to the team's leadership, but he was, sadly, blown to bits by a artillery shell on Okinawa in 1945.

Old Edna was never the same after that.

13bit said...

god, I need to nap. please excuses the typos...

HoraceClarke67 said...

Bitty, the legend grows!!!

C... said...

She was having nightmares. I feel terrible for her.

catasus said...

I have to stop reading this blag at work. Bursts of manic laughter are going to get me fired!

HoraceClarke67 said...

Thanks, catasus!