An Elegy for Quiz: The Plaintive Verse of Baseball's Best Poet (Dan Quisenberry) (Critical Essay‪)‬

September 2010 marks the twelfth anniversary of the death of Dan Quisenberry. Although he was the most dominant relief pitcher in baseball from 1980 to 1985 and the recipient of numerous pitching awards during his playing days with the Kansas City Royals, it is Quisenberry the poet who continues to surprise and delight those who are fortunate enough to come across his numerous forays into free verse. (1) Although legions of other baseball players have dabbled in literature, the most famous of whom is Jim Bouton in his tell-all memoir Ball Foul; precious few have aspired to write poetry, and none so studiously and successfully as Quisenberry. (2) After his baseball career ended in 1990, Quisenberry enrolled in multi-genre writing workshops in the Kansas City area and quickly found his niche with poetry. His second career as a poet was just beginning to take off, with frequent public readings and a book contract, when he was cut down by cancer at the age of 45. A good introduction to Quisenberry's verse is "Ode to Dick Howser," first published in the spring 1996 issue of the poetry journal New Letters. In this poem Quisenberry honors the former manager of the Kansas City Royals not by sentimentalizing his memories of the man or dwelling on the brain tumor that killed him, but instead noting Howser's very human shortcomings: the pet phrases Howser liked to repeat to his team ad nauseum, his stubborn habit of almost never dipping into his bench to relieve the same nine men he played every day, and the careful emotional distance he maintained between himself and his players, symbolized by the dark sunglasses he perpetually wore that gave him "shadows for his eyes" (3). Yet, despite his refusal to let his players get to know him, Howser somehow managed to win until the very end, when a malignant brain tumor finished his 1986 season at the All-Star break. The following spring, writes Quisenberry, Howser abandoned a comeback attempt at managing the team and gave a final speech to his players. As Quisenberry describes the scene, Howser had now discarded his sunglasses: