Like travel, baseball is one of my passions, which I satisfy in my midlife years with shared season tickets to watch the Cleveland Indians — and a franchise in a cerebral game called Rotisserie.

Ours, I'm sure, is the only Rotisserie baseball league in the country with a Poet Laureate.

Every April, a group of 12 otherwise sane adults — each with some relationship past or present to the Cleveland newspaper called The Plain Dealer — gathers the weekend after opening day of the real baseball season to auction off all the players in the American League, as if they were for sale. Each of us begins the day with $260. By the end of the auction, we are out of money, but are owners for a season of a fantasy baseball team.

For the next 25 weeks, we fantasy general managers will begin the morning with an Internet look at how our chosen players performed the day before and where our team lies in the Plain Wheeler Dealer standings.

Following tradition, each team carries a quirky name. Mine is the Neaux Brainers, and I play in another league as the NeauxBlesse Oblige. Like the original 12 owners of the original league formed in New York City in 1980 at  La Rotisserie Française restaurant, the Plain Wheeler Dealers are 11 men and a woman, whose team is named No balls and Two Strikes.

Poetry in measure

This year, before the numbers began to fly Saturday at the annual auction — overseen by grizzled league commissioner Ron Rutti, who doubles as owner of the Rutti Regalados — we paused for a reading by Jim Lawless, our Poet Laureate.

At the center of my core

is a hardball that fits firm

inside my fingers, finding

facility within the pocket

and locating the space just

under the nose of that noisy

second baseman, discovering

the music that goes with the chin.

 

Jerking back, he stares me

down, but has a strike rung.

The cord that binds the raw-

hide of the ball forms itself

within the balance of hand,

eye, arm, release point

and push off the rubber.

 

Baseballs were made

to fit the hand, like

the runner was made

to be out on a routine

grounder to short. He

can’t, no matter how

fast, beat the ball

to first. It is late

in his career

that he discovers

what normal humans

have always known.

No runner ever beats

the throw; he beats

the lazy motion at

short, when the arm

double clutches or

the grip is lightly bobbled.

  

Inches, as they say.

Lawless recently published two books of poems, "Portrait in the  Eye" and "Triscuits of Poems," available from macsbacks.com or from Jim (jtlawless@adelphia.net). He's not bad at baseball either, as his team, the Lawless Breed, won the league championship in 2009.

Our 20th season begins

Owners have come and gone since 1991, and some rules have changed. The purpose of our collection of baseball fans  has remained the same — fellowship, spirited but friendly competition, and the experience of loving baseball.

One season, after 161 games played by each of 14 teams in the American League, we arrived on the last day at the end of September with a tie that eventually came down to the last at-bat of the final game. As I remember it, a hit would have been a trophy for the OBrien Taters, an out would mean the gonfalon for the Paul Bearers. Inches.

The Bearers won. Quickly we raised a toast to prowess and luck, then moved on to discussions about the next season, because the Plain Wheeler Dealer League never has been about winning. Our fun is in the playing. And the poetry.