Saturday, April 25, 2015

Geometry of baseball

Many poems are written of baseball; a few of them involve mathematics --  see the posting for April 9, 2010 for math-related baseball poems by Marianne Moore (1877-1972) and Jerry Wemple; see the posting for September 18, 2011 for one by Jonathan Holden.
     Today I feature the opening stanza from a baseball poem by Pennsylvania poet, Le Hinton.

from   Our Ballpark    by Le Hinton

       This is the place where my father educated us:
       an open-air school of tutelage and transformation.
       This is where we first learned
       to count to three, then later to calculate the angle
       of a line drive bouncing off the left field wall.
       We studied the geometry and appreciated the ballet
       of third to second to first, a triple play.
              . . .

     Here's a link to a posting of Hinton's complete poem.  
     At PoetryFoundation.org may be found a varied sampler of baseball poems -- alas, however, not related to mathematics. 
     In closing here is a baseball limerick -- one of mine, offered earlier as a comment to my April 20, 2010 post.

       In baseball the diamonds are square--
       And the ball has the shape of a sphere.
                Nine guys make a team--
                So, two teams make eighteen--
       And fans cheer when the plays come in pairs.

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