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Baseball holds many distinctions among American sports, not the least being its enshrinement as America’s national pastime and its status as the oldest of our major team sports. It also has been long recognized as the poet’s game. There is much that is poetic about baseball: its elaborate mythology of a desired return to some sort of golden age; the slow, ritual nature of games; the rural, pastoral setting, even within large concrete and steel stadiums; and individual contests between pitcher and hitter reminiscent of ancient battles between epic heroes. Whatever the reason, poets have long found in the game of baseball a kindred form of expression.

That connection between baseball and poets goes back to the 19th century with one of our nation’s first great poets, Walt Whitman. As a young man, Whitman exercised his pen as a sports reporter for Brooklyn newspapers while also playing baseball with his brother, Thomas Jefferson Whitman. The bonding and fellowship involved in the game especially appealed to Whitman and helped him develop a lifelong connection to the broad spread of humanity he later described in his classic volume “Leaves of Grass.” In his own conversation, he liked to employ baseball terminology, such as “on the fly” and “home stroke.”

One of baseball’s innovations, though, saddened the poet: the development of the curveball, which Whitman thought was deceitful and dishonorable. At its best, baseball for Whitman represented America itself. As he wrote, baseball “has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere-belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.”

Americans old enough to remember the presidency of John F. Kennedy likely also recall that cold January day in 1961 when President Kennedy was inaugurated. Robert Frost, certainly the best known American poet of the time, was asked to participate. He tried to read a poem at the inauguration, but the wind and bright sun made the task difficult, even with Vice President Johnson using his top hat to shield Frost’s pages from the sun. Frost did not finish reading the poem that he had intended as a preface to “The Gift Outright,” but he did successfully recite the latter from memory.

President Kennedy’s sport of choice was football, but his admiration for Frost was not diminished by the poet’s preference for baseball. Some 40 years earlier, Frost had written in the poem “Birches” of branches bent by a boy “too far from town to learn baseball.” Just a few years prior to the Kennedy inauguration, Frost had expressed his fondness for the sport even more explicitly by writing an essay on baseball for “Sports Illustrated.” In the essay, he noted that he seldom felt so at home as when at a ballgame.

Not only male poets choose America’s national pastime. Marianne Moore, like Whitman and Frost, regularly included in poetry anthologies, was so widely recognized as a baseball fan that the Yankees invited her to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at their home opener in 1968. Decades earlier, she had been taken to a Giants’ game by a writer named Alfred Kreymborg, who, apparently a bit jealous of Moore’s wide range of knowledge, wanted to find something she knew little about. Yet Moore, who had never before seen Giants’ ace Christy Mathewson, quickly identified him when he started throwing. The reason for her easy identification baffled Kreymborg until she explained, much to her companion’s amazement, that she had read Mathewson’s book about pitching and recognized him from his description of his own pitching mechanics.

Not all baseball poets, of course, have been as accomplished as Whitman, Frost, and Moore, but that has not prevented an occasional lesser poet from achieving poetic fame that even Homer or Shakespeare would have appreciated. One of the best known poems in the country still today is “Casey at the Bat,” penned by Ernest L. Thayer in 1888 for his newspaper column in the “San Francisco Examiner.” Anyone who doubts the poem’s popularity need only begin reciting the opening lines (“The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day. . . .”), and virtually anyone within earshot will nod in recognition.

So connected are poetry and baseball that some magazines exist exclusively to publish baseball literature, including a lot of baseball poetry, for example, “Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine” and “Elysian Fields Quarterly.” So the baseball poets out there should keep their pens (or laptops) right next to their bats, balls, and gloves. They belong together.

Edward J. Rielly is a Westbrook resident, English professor at St. Joseph’s College, and widely published author with two books on baseball and American culture.