by Word “Smitty” Smith

April 24, 2012: Yuma, AZ — Last night, John Deere Stadium was transformed into a Renaissance Faire.  The stadium parking lot was draped in banners and flags and pennants, all bearing the image of William Shakespeare – but sadly, he wasn’t riding a John Deere bulldozer.  Inside the ballpark, prior to the game, a John Deere tractor pulled a trailer to the middle of the diamond.  When the trailer sides opened to reveal a mobile stage for Shakespearean plays, the crowd was treated to several scenes from the Bard’s plays.

Minstrels wandered the aisles, soothing the souls of faithful fans who anticipated nothing more than a seventh consecutive defeat of their Bulldozers at home.  Vendors sold the usual foodstuffs of Renaissance and Medieval Fairs: under-roasted pig, beef ribs dripping with anachronistic barbecue sauce, and mugs and mugs of mead.  It’s no wonder fairs celebrating merry olde England are annual events: the human digestive system could not survive them more often.

The occasion for all the rigmarole was William Shakespeare’s death day.  There are no records of the Bard’s birthday, only a church notation that he was baptized on the 26^th of April in 1564.  But by the time of his death, the poet and playwright from Stratford-on-Avon was famous in London and the surrounding region, so the date of his death is duly recorded: the 23^rd of April, 1616.

Why bother celebrating a death from nearly 400 hundred years ago?  Is it because his poetry continues to be studied, memorized and performed?  Or because he remains without peer, the most influential and oft-produced playwright in the English language?  Because his words have inspired generations of writers?  Or because, after the King James Bible, Shakespeare’s works are the most often quoted in English?

Nah, it’s just an excuse to wear costumes, behave boorishly, and drink mead.

The Yuma Bulldozer front office hoped Shakespeare Day would feed fan support for the team, but the attendance totals from yesterday’s box score don’t bear out their hopes.  Just short of 26,000 fans showed up, the second-smallest crowd of the season on the most publicized special day.  It would appear that the declining fortunes of the Dozers baseball club have more bearing on attendance than a quasi-celebratory, quasi-sentimental, quasi-sanitary Renaissance Fair.

Which may bode well for the Dozers since, against all odds and contrary to all expectations, they won!  7-5, in fact, over the Canton Longshoremen for Yuma’s first win at home in 2012.  Talk about an upset!

Maybe it was the recitation of Shakespeare’s enduring words between every inning, or the pre-game performances, or just the festive spirit of the Renaissance Fair, but the Dozer offense was inspired to rally from behind in the seventh inning on doubles by John Copestake and Aubrey Clark and an RBI single by Randy Harris.  And though the Bard never heard of the game of baseball, his magic rubbed off on the down-in-the-dumps Dozers.

Shakespeare was on his game.

When it was announced prior to the start of the game that one of the umpiring crew was too ill to take the field, a bold young scholar in the stands shouted out a rarely quoted passage from the Bard’s comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor: “There is three umpires in this matter.”  Indeed, for the remainder of the game, there were.

Inevitably, when the first strike of the game was called on Longshoreman Jack Miller, a young fan called out, “Strike!” and then offered a copy of the play Richard III to those doubting he was quoting Shakespeare.  When, in the bottom of the first, Yoichi Inoue became the first strikeout victim of the game, a wittier fan shouted, “And what a pitch!” (from Henry IV, part 1).  The cry was echoed inning after inning as the strikeouts mounted.  Yuma’s starting pitcher, the recently sonnet-ized Mark Wood, fanned four, while Canton’s starter Pedro Cruz fanned five, keeping the crowd busy yelling.

The first foul ball of the game, struck by Glenn Wood in the bottom of the first, elicited the anticipated response from the witches in Macbeth: “Fair is foul and foul is fair.”  And though the fans repeated the cry after each of the 36 foul balls, the three umpires refused to reverse a single call, thereby denying half the Shakespearean equation.

When Yuma second baseman Juan Quiñones lined the first hit of the game into left field, several young wits stood and called out that memorable line from Hamlet, “A hit, a palpable hit.”  But in the second inning, when Jeff Newth singled home Clark to give Yuma a 2-0 lead, a more subtle scholar quoted Henry VI, part 3: “Watch him how he singled.”  That raised cries of protest from some who thought the scholar had made it up, but he instantly produced two more apt quotes: “We will be singled from the barbarous,” from Love’s Labour’s Lost, and, “You are singled forth,” from Titus Andronicus.  That silenced the illiterati seated near him, so the scholar concluded his tour de force performance with a trio of lines from Shakespeare’s love poem Venus and Adonis: “The hot scent-snuffing hounds are driven to doubt, / Ceasing their clamorous cry till they have singled / With much ado the cold fault cleanly out.”

The scholar had come to the park singularly prepared.

The Dozers doubled their two-run lead in the third on a two-run dinger by Aubrey Clark, the player of the game.  But the Longshoremen offloaded some runs of their own in the fourth, two of them coming on Albert Rishworth’s yard shot, cutting Yuma’s lead to one.  Canton tied the game in the sixth when, after giving up a walk and single, starter Wood was replaced by Yukio Fujita, who gave up the tying run on a sacrifice fly.  If you listened carefully, you could just hear the handful of Canton fans shouting joyously, “Sweet sacrifice,” from the play Henry VIII.

In the top of the 7^th, the Longshoremen took the lead on a solo shot by Mitchell Hunt.  The Yuma crowd grumbled about reliever Fujita’s betrayal.  “They that pitch will be defiled,” an angry fan called out, echoing the sentiment in Much Ado About Nothing.  The fans appeared ready to carry out the threat when, miraculously, the Bulldozers began to plow the bases.  Quiñones got things started with a slicing drive to left field that Bill Rice dropped for an error.  The Longshoremen’s brand new General Manager, Michael Schroeder, threw up his hands in exasperation.  He’d read enough Shakespeare to know when the curtain was about to fall.  “O hateful error,” Schroeder muttered, quoting from Julius Caesar.

Two pitches later, Copestake doubled home the tying run.  Someone seated with the new GM in the Canton skybox was overheard to wish for a quick end to the Yuma rally as they quoted from Macbeth: “If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly… that but this blow might be the be-all and the end-all here.”

But it wasn’t over.  The be-all and the end-all were still two outs away, and before the final out was recorded, Clark bashed the second double of the inning, driving home what proved to be the winning run.  Canton fans were gnashing their teeth while the Yumians chanted like Macbeth’s witches: “Double, double, toil and trouble!”

The Dozers tacked on another run on a single by Harris and then coasted through the final six outs behind the un-Dozer-like relief pitching of Carl French.  The entire team applauded French’s saving effort by quoting Hamlet: “For this relief, much thanks.”

And the Dozer faithful staggered home triumphant, exuberantly singing the lines from As You Like It: “O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all hooping!”