"A player who can run fifty yards in six seconds ought, with a lead of eight feet off first base, run to second base, 82 feet away, in three and one-half seconds. A pitched ball will travel from the pitcher's slab 68 feet to the catcher's glove (fast ball with catcher standing nine feet back of the plate, timed from the start of the pitcher's motion), in seven-eights of a second. The catcher, if he handles the pitch perfectly and gets the ball away fast, will start the ball towards second in one and a quarter seconds after it hits his hands and his throw from nine feet back of the plate, if perfect, ought to reach the second baseman in one second, and be caught and the ball be ready to apply to the runner in one-quarter of a second additional. Perfectly handled in that time, the ball ought to beat the runner to second base by from one-eighth to one-quarter of a second, or by 3 1/3 from to 6 1/4 feet and result in an easy out.
— from Touching Second: The Science of Baseball, John J. Evers & Hugh S. Fullerton (Reilly & Britton Co., Chicago)
Suddenly behind the pinch hitter’s back he signaled
the pitcher. Seconds later the catcher fireballed
the potato to the first baseman, tagging
the stealer.
— "Tagging the Stealer" Selected Delanty
Poems and translations by Greg Delanty chosen and introduced by Archie Burnett.
softcover edition
"A sense of vital, actual experience is in fact wonderfully sustained in Delanty's verse in its notable linguistic energy, product of a distinctive fusion of a literary lexicon (even Latinate at times) with contemporary demotic, Cork argot, Irish language phrases, place names, craft cant and North American slang (baseball lingo in one poem, 'Tagging the Stealer'). The language of his verse functions indeed as the verbal equivalent of the printer's hellbox (subject of one of the finest of Delanty's poems), which the poet tells us 'was a container in which worn or broken type was thrown to be melted down and recast into new type.' For in Delanty's work a world in constant transition (the 'simultaneous going and comings of life') is realized in a vocabulary and variegated tonal register that displays language itself in the process of being re- made." — Terence Brown
This edition of Selected Delanty (Un-Gyve Press) is a 234 page softcover. ISBN: 978-0-9993632-1-8.
