The Baseball Playing Poet

Fernando Perez plays outfield for the Tampa Bay Rays, and he is also a poet. He recently wrote a piece in Poetry magazine (which I heard about on NPR one day while driving in the car) and about three lines into it, you realize that this guy is the real deal. He has the hands of a baseball player, and the heart of a poet. In this dazzling passage from his piece, he compares baseball and poetry:

"Like poetry, baseball is a kind of counter culture. The (optional) isolation from the outside world (which I often opt for); the idleness about which—and out of which—so many poems are written or sung: I see this state of mind as a blessing. Sometimes, in fact, when I haven’t turned on a television or touched a newspaper for months, freed from the corporate bombast, poetry is the only dialect I recognize."