The 1953 Brooklyn Dodgers were as great as a National League team ever got — at least in their hitting and fielding. Their pitching, alas, was merely good, which is why they still couldn’t get by the Yankees in the World Series. That would have to wait till 1955, when a weaker Dodgers team managed at last to defeat their hated crosstown rivals.

And a key piece of that 1953 team was Jim “Junior” Gilliam, the second-baseman who was brought up from the minors to receive 100 walks, score 125 runs, and lead the league in triples. Deservedly being named the Rookie of the Year, he took over second base, giving a solid double-play partner to the Dodger’s great-fielding shortstop, Pee Wee Reese, and allowing Jackie Robinson to platoon at third and the outfield — with the added benefit of granting some rest to the third-baseman, Billy Cox, who responded with the best year of his career. The infield finished off Gil Hodges at first. 

You can read about those Dodgers in Roger Kahn’s classic 1972 baseball book, “The Boys of Summer.” Or appreciate Gilliam in today’s Poem of the Day, 1978 verses by B.H. Fairchild (born 1942). Mr. Fairchild’s breakthrough into major acclaim came with his 1998 collection, “The Art of the Lathe.” And that book includes “Body and Soul,” a long poem that features the teenaged Mickey Mantle in a semi-pro game among the oilfields of Oklahoma. It is, by our estimation, the greatest narrative poem of the past 30 years, and proof of the poet’s ongoing sense of baseball as somewhere near the center of the American story.

In the earlier poem, “For Junior Gilliam (1928–1978),” Mr. Fairchild writes, mostly in a loose tetrameter, about his own youth: listening to baseball games, reading baseball cards, and imagining himself on the the Dodgers’ team. Imagining himself as their graceful second-baseman. With Gilliam’s death in 1978, Mr. Fairchild writes, “The inning’s over. You’re in the shadows now. / But summers past you taught us how to play / the pivot (or how to dream of it).”

For Junior Gilliam (1928–1978)
by B.H. Fairchild

In the bleak, bleacherless corner
of my rightfield American youth,
I killed time with bubble gum
and baseball cards and read the stats
and saw a sign: your birthday was mine.

And so I dreamed: to rise far
from Kansas skies and fenceless outfields
where flies vanished in the summer sun.
To wake up black in Brooklyn,
to be a Bum and have folks call me Junior
and almost errorless hit .280 every year
and on the field, like you, dance double plays,
make flawless moves, amaze the baseball masses.

You would turn, take the toss from Reese,
lean back and, leaping past the runner’s cleats,
wing the ball along a line reeled out
from home and suddenly drawn taut
with a soft pop in Hodges’ crablike glove.
And we went wild in Kansas living rooms.

The inning’s over. You’re in the shadows now.
But summers past you taught us how to play
the pivot (or how to dream of it).
And when one day they put me in at second,
I dropped four easy ones behind your ghost,
who plays a perfect game.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.