Plop It: Thirty Poems About the New Era Overlap Hats

Cincinnati Reds

A baseball cap begs to be broken in
It’s not just a matter of style
The human body features few straight lines
So nothing straight will sit flush
Nothing rigid will stay in place
Form-fitting requires hugging
Which is hard to do without bending
In one place or another

I think I learned late how to hug properly
How to smile in such a way
That people know you’re glad to see them
I still have to think about it sometimes
And I hate that
It should come naturally I think

I can never curve my brim just right
I’m always fiddling with it
Trying to make it fit me
Because I’ll never fit it

Chicago Cubs

“Nothing to see here,” said the huge, rotund C
That swallowed its skinny sibling whole.
“Nothing to see. Hop aboard the El.”
It looks like it’s about to throw the skinny C back up.

It’s somehow even worse when the spelling’s right.
You wouldn’t think it could be worse, but there it is.
Worse. It should really work better than this.
It still says Chicago, but God, the kerning.

And the big C is so round. It’s offensively round,
Lasciviously even,
Unsubtly smearing its rear all over the I
While its lips nuzzle the A from either end.

Arizona Diamondbacks

If there is, as there seems to be,
A cosmic law firmly stating
That only one Ariana may know fame
At any particular time, then maybe,
If the hats really fly off the shelves,
The Diamondbacks’ time has come.

…

We can never agree on boys’ names
In part because we’re different people
With different tastes but in part
Because we’re two people
With two separate lists of names
That have been poisoned since childhood
By the horrible boys who bore them.
Somewhere, surely, in our hometowns
Live people for whom we’ve
Ruined our own names.

…

The game is actually quite simple.
You take the first letter,
Slap it over the letters in the middle,
And read the new word it makes.
You can play it with any word.
Dandelion becomes DanDion.
Burrito becomes BurBito,
Which sounds maybe even tastier.

Baltimore Orioles

O giant bird, you dominate the crown.
The text extra-sub-, though those extra letters
Emit this swoosh that, as it sweeps around
And past you, kind of looks like a tail feather.
As if you’re not just disembodied head;
You once were whole, sang sweetly on a ridge,
Then someone neatly stole your body, fled,
And left just head and tail: a bird abridged.
I can’t quite read your face. Did you mind, bird?
When they excised your legs, your wings, your heart
And left you grounded, sans a middle third?
The wound must throb in one so picked apart.
Or, bird, perhaps you smiled as it sealed shut
And marveled at the cleanness of the cut.

Los Angeles Dodgers

I’d never stopped to think about the word slapdash before.
But I see now that it really is perfect.
It pushes together two old, simple words
Creating one that’s radically new, alive.
It’s clean, precise, intuitive, in service of naming
The sloppy, haphazard, unconsidered.

Its compound nature suits the images it calls to mind,
The myriad combinations of ways one could slap and dash.
The word itself feels like the idea: harsh, spondaic,
Plosives suspended in sibilants, the whole barely hanging on.
Somebody just slapped them together — boom —
Without considering for one second what they were doing
Then got the hell out of there before anyone could object.
I bring this up for no particular reason.

Washington Nationals

It says Narwhals. See it? If not, come along anyway
Because who wouldn’t want to cheer for the Narwhals?
To wave their twisty narwhal rally tooth
When the game is close and the outs are dwindling?
To dress their kids in tiny Narwhals hats
With blowholes on top instead of squatchees?
To be able to name just one
species of whale that isn’t endangered?

The Narwhals win the pennant.
The Narwhals land another coveted free agent
Who eschewed more lucrative offers
Just to wear the Narwhal name across his chest,
To hear the clicks and whistles from the crowd
After each base hit and the foghorn after each home run.
“There’s always next season,” we’ll say in October,
Hope is the thing with one weird, swirly tooth.

New York Yankees

The truth is neither hat would really work.
That thin script straight across: A miss.
It’s very Yankees, earnestly austere,
Devoid of anything a soul could love.
The logo with the drop-shadow: Pass.
It’s the hegemon that blocks out the sun
And hopes you’ll worship him instead.
But put the two together? Even bigger no.

What alchemy allows two things,
Both wretched on their own, to form
Some ugly beauty that just works
For reasons that we only ever feel?
There must be science to it or instinct,
But for those of us with neither,
Sometimes it’s hard to even picture.
You just have to play:
A pinch, a dash, a mishmash,
And hope you know it when you see it.

Tampa Bay Rays

And that’s it, the chaos that works.
The motion in the step-by-step descent,
The leg of the R cupping the T and B,
The subsumed Y turning into an apostrophe.
The RTB’S.
The graffiti on graffiti on graffiti
That you can’t help but look for
On your way to work each morning
Just before the train heads underground
Until one day another layer of paint
Turns it back into nothing but noise.

Toronto Blue Jays

Sunday, some jays alit in the sun-bathed trees.
“Blue jays!” I exclaimed, then went back to what I was doing.
I don’t mind that this blue jay looks like a crested dolphin.
Maybe I would if I hadn’t grown up with it, but I did.
It’s full of sharp angles, slashing diagonals.
It’s unfriendly. The jay glares
But its intensity is softened by familiarity.

I do mind the way the maple leaf is just plopped on top.
It has nothing to do with anything. It’s just there.
Plop: A bright red maple leaf, from nowhere.
What kind of person would just take one design,
Plop it on top of another design, and call it a day?
Surely, that can’t be a thing.

Chicago White Sox

Pay close attention, kids.
This is the danger of the limited color palette.
Life’s not black and white.

Or rather, it’s not all black and white.

There’s still right and wrong.
There’s right, and then there’s wrong.
So much wrong we’re drowning in it,
Clinging fiercely to our sense of right
As the tide does its best to rip it away
And erode the edges of the truth we used to know,
Because without it, what are we?

But there’s also nuance.
Or at least there used to be.
God, I’d kill for some gray,
For a place to hide from the weight of the moment.

Cleveland Guardians

You can’t help trying to pronounce it.
It just looks like it wants to be pronounced.
The mouthfeel is so chunky.
The GuaCans. The Cleveland GuaCans.
The guacan (rhymes with wok-in),
The sad, gray cousin of the toucan.

And something deep is at play here
In the rough-hewn, curveless cursive.
It’s the one-sentence novel
That won’t let you pause
But never lets you settle in either.
It’s putting chisel to stone
When you haven’t quite decided
What it is you’d like to say.

Detroit Tigers

The Detroit Tigers, as you may know,
From time to time
Employ the color orange,
As do actual tigers (all the time),
Which makes a lot of sense
No matter how long you think about it,
The Tigers and the tigers,
Both using orange
Because it’s pretty much definitional
To being a tiger,
And because, as you can clearly see,
Sometimes certain things
Are just crying out for some orange,
And without that orange
They’re no longer tigers
(Or anything really).

Kansas City Royals

Is there such a thing as negative space?
If it were truly negative,
Would you be able to wield it like a weapon? Like a balm?
Would it give your composition space to breathe?
Would it frame it in an angelic glow?
Would it squeeze it so oppressively that
You can’t help but hold your breath when you look at it?

I learned to sing and speak from pausers
Who took a breath and let you pass them by,
Picking your own path, inflection, meaning, melody,
And then smirked just a little as they chose their own
And watched you screech to a stop and dart back to follow them.

It’s not just that those spaces do work or hold meaning,
It’s that they make you do the work,
That they hold as many meanings you can make them hold.

Minnesota Twins

But sometimes, some things are simply broken.
Sometimes the pieces won’t fit no matter what you do.
Some spaces are truly empty.

I’ve known so many people with good hearts
Whom I just couldn’t find it in myself to love,
And I felt like a failure every time.

Maybe if I’d tried harder.
Maybe if I’d given it enough time,
Maybe I just needed to learn how.

Los Angeles Angels

This hat is on sale for $950 on eBay right now.
Three hundred and eighty-eight views in the last 24 hours.
I see why it makes people laugh. I do.
But who would pay so much for this particular joke?
You can get a used Angels hat for $12.99.
You could definitely spend less money and get
The whole word embroidered around the big A so it fits right.
What you would do next I have trouble imaging.
To err is human, to forgive divine.
Spending $950 (plus $4.84 for USPS Ground Advantage)
Is something else entirely.

New York Mets

I never thought to wonder what that’s called.
That font, split-serif, each stroke punctuated by
Condyles (ends of bones, those double balls).
The bottom of the Y, its own inverted Y.

But why stop there, with just one measly split?
What’s stopping you from more, the New York Mets?
From splitting and then double-splitting it
So every end begins and then begets?

Your logo would bestride the very earth
The Mets, the vast Colossus, deified
You landed Soto, now you claim your berth.
What’s stopping you from more? Divide, divide!

Athletic A’s

Honestly, this hat might have looked cool last year.
Probably not. Probably not, but it might have been
The one hat in this cursed, concatenated cash grab
That didn’t look like a tragic, gnarly,
Multi-car transparent PNG pileup
If it had just said Oakland underneath.
Probably not. Probably not.
Nothing green and gold can stay.

Seattle Mariners

My eyes keep seeing Mashers. It’s the way the light
On the eastern point of the compass rose
Intersects with the N, but it also just feels right.
The Mashers. What a baseball name, all the more so
For the baseball team that’s nearest Idaho.

But it doesn’t say Mashers. It says Masers.
And while I’m sure microwave amplification
By stimulated emission of radiation
Has its charms, I think I’d rather
Have a beer and root, root, root for the Mashers.

Texas Rangers

Blame it on the Tetas
Yeah, you can’t buy this one now

Wonder why it vanished
No, I don’t speak Spanish
Strange thing to be asking
God, I’m good at multitasking

Blame it on the Bluesky
Maybe you should get offline

All of you had free time
Just to drag my designs?
No, I didn’t Google
Twenty-nine more hats to zoom through

Blame it on the comments
Guess I learned a new word now

Oh, it was offensive?
Well, I’ve learned my lesson
How was I to know that
Anyone would notice those hats?

Blame it on the workload
God, I need a new job now

Houston Astros

That’s not a bad word?
Am I pronouncing it right?
The Houston… asHos?

Atlanta Braves

How infuriating that this is the one that almost works,
The one with the tomahawk.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s still ugly. After all,
It strikes me that the ugliness is almost the point here.
I say “almost” because the real point here
Is just for new hats to exist for purchase,
And it just so happens that it’s faster and cheaper
To make ugly things than beautiful things.

But it almost works. The blues and the reds and the piping
Are not, at first glance, unpleasant. It’s still just so much
And your brain still has to deal with the jarring disconnect,
The hat that says BroAes in different fonts, sizes, and colors
With no consideration for symmetry or scale,
With no consideration at all.

I once read an interview somewhere, I can’t find it now,
But the subject was a musician I believe
And they said something that I remember as:
“If you went back to ancient Greece and talked to Sophocles,
He’d tell you, ‘Garbage sells.’” These days,
When the whole point is to create as much garbage as possible
In order to profit off the tiny portion that’s salable
Because there’s seemingly no downside to creating a pipeline
That just pours an endless stream of garbage into the world,
I think about that a lot.

Miami Marlins

I take it all back. Garbage me.
The truth is that I try to operate in a similar fashion.
“The more ideas I have, the more good ideas I’ll have,”
I tell myself, though there are important distinctions.
It’s work to put myself in position to have ideas,
And I try hard to recognize and run with the good ones
While burying the bad ones somewhere deep
Where no one will come looking for them.
But I’m still just throwing stuff together,
Seeing if anything works.

If I’d been the one to come up with MMmi,
I fear I would have failed to recognize
Its absurd charm, its surprising comeliness,
Its versatility – a Roman numeral,
A halting, wounded denial,
A sassy, lilting come hither –
Until the dirt had nearly reached its tippy top,
If I recognized it at all.

Boston Red Sox

Whose hats these are I think I know.
It’s hard to be too certain though;
The BoBons? Yeah, they don’t play here.
It kind of seems like a typo.

Philadelphia Phillies

There are songs that take me years to write,
Songs with a first verse I love, forged instantly,
Instinctively in the fire of inspiration
And never even tweaked, then a second verse
That actively resists the idea of creation as work.
The more lyrics I push onto it, the harder it shakes them off,
The louder it insists I’ll never find the right ones,
Never match the first phrases that came so freely,
Never be the kind of person who writes songs at all.
I take a hard line on the idea of art as work:
It’s something worth dedicating your life to,
Something worthy of sacrifice.
But I tend to give the songs their space.
They usually know best.

Milwaukee Brewers

A stranger from Wisconsin messaged me tonight.
He found a song I wrote about his hometown.
The guitar part was difficult. I couldn’t play it
While singing with conviction, so the song feels flat.

Still, it’s nice that anyone can find that song you made
Sitting cross-legged on your bedroom floor
One night five years ago, that some stranger can
Write a song about your hometown sight unseen.

Pittsburgh Pirates

It matters when you can tell the script
Was written by a human hand.
Steady, highly polished,
But still recognizably human, blood and need.
That’s the P we learned in second grade,
The loopy G you nail about half the time.
There’s a soul in there.

St. Louis Cardinals

Come on down to Carl’s.
Come on down to
the Carl’s with the giant L and S on the sign
(and the als at the end,
which no one can
remember where it came from
[except Rodney, the one employee
who’s been here even longer than Carl
{but probably best to leave Rodney alone;
you heard what he did to Phil, right?
and all Phil did was ask the time}]).
That’s the one.
So come on down to Carl’s.
We’ll treat you right.
(Maybe stay away from Rodney though.)

San Diego Padres

I don’t think you’d believe me if I tried to say it plain;
Because strip away the artifice, and the truth sounds just as strained.
I’ll dress it in devices you can diagram and parse,
Start with some sincerity, then strip it down for parts.
So I’ll just say it once, then back to tricks and turns of phrase:
I’m here with you, a couple of the ways.

And back when we learned fractions, two halves made a whole
And though I like the elegance, I’m not completely sold.
It’s not that neat when someone drags your numerator down.
We’ve all got ragged edges out to places that won’t round.
And I’m not sure there’s any perfect fit for you and me — 
I’m here with you, because where else would I be?

Colorado Rockies

Oh cubical, vexatious blight
No camber, waves all planed
For purple mountain majesty
And monotonic majuscules
The Times New Roman All-Stars
The Colorado Blockies

San Francisco Giants

My apartment has started making this sound.
It’s a sort of rumble, like someone hit a particularly
reverberant air conditioning duct with a felt mallet.
It lingers in the air, would not be at all out of place
Accompanying a jump scare in a horror film,
And it now happens every so often in my tiny second bedroom.

I still have no idea what’s making it
Or even where it’s coming from. Maybe it’s the roof,
Or my landlords downstairs, the heating pipes,
The ventilation shaft outside the one small, always black window.
Maybe I’m about to be murdered in my sleep.

I’ve probably heard it half a dozen times now,
But because I’ll go days without hearing it,
I keep forgetting about it and being surprised all over again.
It should be memorable.
By all rights, it should be creeping the hell out of me.
But it’s just a part of my apartment now.

One day, it’ll happen when I have a friend over
And I imagine they’ll jump a mile and shout.
And I’ll say, “Oh yeah, my apartment does that sometimes.”
And then they’ll remember the urgent thing
They had to do somewhere other than my apartment.
And every time I see them after that,
They’ll flinch a bit before they say hi.
“Surprised to see you’re still alive,” their eyes will say.

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