Donald Hall Was Baseball's Unlikeliest Biographer

Donald Hall, former New Hampshire Poet Laureate and U.S. Poet Laureate, has passed away at the age of 89.

Hall was a significant fixture in poetry for more than six decades going back to his days as the poetry editor for the Paris Review. Known for his confessional style, some of his most memorable works came in the last two decades of his life particularly concerning the loss of his wife Jane Kenyon, a formidable poet in her own right.

But I shall always associate Hall with baseball. Hall would make a significant contribution to Ken Burns' 1994 documentary Baseball. He was also the most unlikely baseball biographer in history with his 1976 book Dock Ellis In The Country of Baseball. It was in the revised 1988 edition of the book in which Hall revealed that Ellis had thrown his 1970 no-hitter on LSD. He had initially stated Ellis was drunk when he walked eight and struck out six San Diego Padres on June 12, 1970.

Here is an excerpt of Hall's unique perspective on one of the unique characters of baseball:

Dock's speech is emphatic. Trying to render his speech, I use so much italic that his conversation looks like Queen Victoria's letters. It is difficult to render anyone's speech in print; Dock's is impossible. He is emphatic, he mimics, he uses grand gesture and subtle intonation and eloquent facial expression. He also varies swiftly from black vocabulary and syntax to academic or legal white, with stops at all stations on the way. His language is so varied that, if he were a fictional character, he would be inconsistent and unrealistic. Sometimes, maybe, Dock is unrealistic. But Dock is real. 

I thought about wanting to hang around baseball. I thought about the enigma of Dock himself -- here was this supposedly bad man, this hostile screaming crybaby of the sports pages; and he yet seemed to me funny, sophisticated, and friendly. I decided to do a little hinting of my own.

"You know that book you might do?" I said the next morning. "If you ever want anybody to read it for you, you know, to help you revise it or anything, I'd be happy to do it."

Dock turned it back, with one of his apparent changes of mind. "Oh, I won't write a book," he said. He might do a book, he wouldn't write one. "You're a writer, aren't you?"

We had smoked each other out.

Only a Poet Laureate could have written Dock Ellis' biography. R.I.P.