Game Called

Mr. Rice also coined that famous phrase.

I'm taking a cheap way out tonight.

I'm posting a poem, and it's not even mine.

Grantland Rice was the original Bard of Baseball, I suppose. Born in 1880, Rice attended Vanderbilt University where he lettered in football and was captain of the baseball team in 1901.

Rice worked at several newspapers before reaching the New York Tribune. There, he wrote the famed "Four Horsemen" piece regarding the Notre Dame/Army game at the Polo Grounds. His brilliant prose, published in the New York Herald Tribune on October 18, 1924, read:

Outlined against a blue-gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below.

Rice would dabble briefly in early play-by-play announcing on the World Series from 1921 and 1922, but in truth, that wasn't his thing.

He also wrote poetry, including a passage he titled "Game Called." Rice had a first version published in 1910 by The Tennessean Company, and a latter version published after his death, in 1956, in The Fireside Book of Baseball.

But I'll run with his version from 1948, written as a eulogy for Babe Ruth. I don't know if it's particularly great poetry (I'm frankly not that smart) but I do think it paints a good picture. It ran in the New York Sun.

The work is copyright Grantland Rice, 1948.

Game Called by darkness — let the curtain fall.
No more remembered thunder sweeps the field.
No more the ancient echoes hear the call
To one who wore so well both sword and shield:
The Big Guy’s left us with the night to face
And there is no one who can take his place.

Game Called — and silence settles on the plain.
Where is the crash of ash against the sphere?
Where is the mighty music, the refrain
That once brought joy to every waiting ear?
The Big Guy’s left us lonely in the dark
Forever waiting for the flaming spark.

Game Called — what more is there for us to say?
How dull and drab the field looks to the eye
For one who ruled it in a golden day
Has waved his cap to bid us all good-bye.
The Big Guy’s gone — by land or sea or foam
May the Great Umpire call him “safe at home.”

Game called here also. At least until tomorrow.