The Double Play

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In Robert Wallace’s The Double Play, the author writes a poem about a double play in baseball and uses similes to compare it do a dance. The poem takes the reader step by step through the entire play until the inning is over. It starts with the pitcher throwing the baseball towards the batter, and then it describes how the ball is hit. Soon after, the ball gets picked up by the defending player who quickly throws it to second base, and consequently the ball gets thrown to first base to finish the play. Right after finishing the ball everyone jogs off the field, letting the reader know that those were the last two outs and that the inning was over. Throughout the poem Robert Wallace uses different words to describe the sport of baseball, giving it a more artistic feeling while making a double play. In this simile, “In his sea-lit distance, the pitcher winding like a clock about to chime come down with the ball” (1-4), the author describes how the pitchers lines up and delivers the ball, releasing it at the sound of the chimes, meaning when it hits the top of the hour mark. Then Wallace uses another simile to explain the act of hitting the ball towards a defending player, “hit sharply, under the artificial banks of arc lights, bounds like a vanishing string…” (4-6). This reflects the speed in which the ball is being hit and projected in the field. The speed was so fast that it looked like a vanishing string and disappeared when it got picked up by the defensive player. Wallace also makes reference to dance moves used as part of the game like, “magically scooped, whirling above, pirouettes leaping, leaning-out, ends the dance,” giving the sport a more fancy point of
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