By Victor D. Infante, Worcester Magazine
Key Points
- Dodgers announcer Todd Leitz was the winner of the first-ever NESN/National Baseball Poetry Festival “Green Monster Poetry Challenge.”
- The contest was part of NESN’s “Green Monster Week” promotion.
- The National Baseball Poetry Festival has been held in Worcester for three years.
It’s not every day you hear a poem on NESN, primary broadcaster of the Red Sox and the Bruins, but that’s what Duxbury native Todd Leitz delivered on July 10 with “The Monstah.” The poem was the winner of the first-ever NESN/National Baseball Poetry Festival “Green Monster Poetry Challenge,” and considering Leitz is also the PA announcer for the Los Angeles Dodgers, his delivery was, to use the only baseball pun we’re allowing ourselves in this column, a home run.
Steven Biondolillo, seen here with “Casey at the Bat” at Polar Park, is the founder of the National Baseball Poetry Festival. Photo: Allan Jung/ Worcester Magazine
Steven Biondolillo, founder of the National Baseball Poetry Festival that has run for three years in Worcester, couldn’t be happier with the results, even if it all came together extremely quickly.
“NESN developed this ‘Green Monster Week’ promotion,” says Biondolillo, in a conversation last week, “and they’re filling the week with features, and they say, ‘We’ve got to connect up with the National Baseball Poetry people and run a contest, and let’s get someone to generate a poem … a one minute poem. That was the one parameter they gave us.”
Tall order? To make it even tougher, they only had 30 days to pull it off. But the festival has a database of 350 “baseball poets,” and with an extra push from the Worcester County Poetry Association, they received 27 entries, not counting a few that didn’t follow the contest’s rules, notably that it had to, “bring to life the spirit of the Green Monster at Fenway Park, and communicate what it means to the team, fans, and Boston community,” and that the poem must be written in rhyme and meter.
For contemporary poetry aficionados, that last bit might seem anachronistic, but Biondolillo reasons that, “it’s going to be broadcast on television to fundamentally a sports audience. We have to make the assumption that the average viewer who’s not educated in poetry, doesn’t read poetry, won’t recognize a one-minute piece as a poem unless there’s meter and rhyme.”
It certainly works. Leitz’s poem, which centers on a fan winning a chance to play at Fenway Park at Red Sox Fantasy Camp has an easy charm, heightened by Leitz’s stentorian voice and game effort at a Boston accent.
“I dig into the batter’s box, and see it looming in left field,” writes Leitz, “The fabled ‘Monstah of the Fens’, that hungry homer-shield./I tap the bat on hallowed ground, I can’t believe I’m here./A chance to hit in Fenway Park, and hear the faithful cheer.”
The second-place poem was, “I Am the Green Monster,” by Brolin Winning of Colrain, who is also a rap artist, and third place went to “Monster of the Mind,” written by Herbert Munshine, a baseball poet with dozens of publication credits who lives in Great Neck, New York, who was a school teacher for 58 years. So clearly, the contest draws a wide variety of poets.
A possible new tradition
It’s Biondolillo’s hope that NESN will run the promotion again next year, and that the festival may spread to other regions and ballparks, although few features of a stadium are as iconic as “The Green Monster.”
Biondolillo posits that, if they ran the contest for Yankee Stadium, they might go with something like, “The House that Ruth Built.”
In the meantime, Biondolillo’s happy both with the outcome of this contest, as well as the festival in Worcester and its more open “baseball poetry” contest, which has fewer format restrictions. And really, as Biondolillo theorizes about holding similar poetry contests in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, it’s striking that it all began with an eccentric little festival in Worcester.
Poetry, baseball and ‘the story of America’
Worcester is, as we’ve been saying at WoMag for years, a “Poetry Town,” a fact that’s right now being reflected with the exhibit, “The Poem Next Door — Worcester Through Poetry,” which is running through Sept. 30 at the Museum of Worcester.
Perhaps, then, it’s not surprising that this odd melding of sports and poetry echoed out from Worcester. All three, after all, are things that reward a bit of patience. And it’s easy to see how rewarding a subject “baseball” is to attracting new fans to poetry. Right now, the largest poetry festival in the country is the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, and if we’re being honest, there are enough baseball fans out there to someday, maybe, give Elko a run for its money. But what does poetry bring to baseball?
“Poetry,” says Biondolillo, is a boon to baseball “by bringing in and connecting deeply and more closely to the sport people who aren’t athletes.” Moreover, he says, “It doubles down on the sport being the story of America, the best narrative or storyline among all sports.”
