WORCESTER — According to Oxford Dictionary, baseball refers to both the game and the ball used in it. It’s a popular sport played by two teams of nine players, who take turns batting and fielding. The game involves hitting a ball with a bat and running around four bases before the other team can return the ball.

But according to three local poets, baseball is more than a sport and more than a ball. For them, baseball even surpasses its long-held ranking as America’s “national pastime” — it’s an art form, a metaphor for life, a gentleman’s game, a memory, a force for connection, or an opportunity to coach and be coached.

Erika Higgins Ross of Deerfield, Darlene Elias of Holyoke and Kevin Hodgson of Leeds were all recognized earlier this month at the third 2025 National Baseball Poetry Festival held in Worcester on May 2-3. Out of 200 applications from 37 states and four countries, these three poets from western Massachusetts were recognized as part of a pool of 20 awardees, with young people from eight states also being recognized. In attendance were recipients from Jacksonville, Florida to Los Angeles, from Prince Edward Island in Canada to New York City and Charlotte, North Carolina, among other places.

Higgins Ross received accolades for her work, “The Connection.”

Quoting Natalie Goldberg, Higgins Ross said that, “Writers live twice,” and her poem was for her a practice in nostalgia — an opportunity to travel back to the boxed, black-and-white television with rabbit ears that was in her childhood living room.

In her poem, she has a line about baseball’s “rainbow colors” — a line that was inspired by seeing the loud uniforms of the 1970s she saw in magazines.

She remembers the Astros — their vibrant yellows, oranges and blue, as well as the lime green and yellow uniforms of the A’s. She is also nostalgic for the contrast of these uniforms with the clean-shaven, pinstriped Yanks whom her dad was a fan of.

“For me, baseball is a gentleman’s sport. … It was the one sport in my house. It was the acceptable sport,” said Higgins Ross, who is now married to a baseball fan.

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She explained how over time, “Baseball became the place of connection for my dad and I when other connections were hard,” she said.

That connection brought about by baseball has been almost always rock solid, except for when she disappointed her Yankee-loving father by coming out as an Angels fan while living on the West Coast.

“This kinda took a toll on our relationship,” she joked.

Higgins Ross is a fan of poetry who also loves writing to a prompt, and she felt compelled to make a submission for the baseball poetry festival. She said composing her prose required zero outside research. Instead, she said, composing the poem was “almost time travel.”

While thinking of these old memories, she was also pursuing new things by submitting.

She said she has been more intentional about her writing the past few years, and sees herself as being in her “second or third act as an emerging writer.”

Elias was recognized for her poem, “Tomboy,” a piece that, like Higgins Ross, took her back to being a young girl, a time of “really rich memories,” she said.

But those rich memories were not the product of being rich; they were the result of being a young girl and a poor tomboy. Now she sees how growing up poor actually gave her what she considers to be privilege today.

“I grew up in the Bronx as a young girl. I was able to have fun. Stick ball, playing in the water from a fire hydrant, kickball, dodgeball, handball were all things I loved doing well into being a teenager,” she shared, lamenting that the children of today won’t have the same things to brag about when they look back on their childhoods. “As an adult, I really miss that. But I miss seeing kids doing that stuff. They might have a park or amusement parks or something.”

Elias, who holds a master’s degree in social work and now works mediating cases in Hampden Probate and Family Court, remembers her first time at a professional baseball game in Boston’s ancient baseball mecca, Fenway Park.

“I lived in the barrio and wasn’t afforded the same opportunities to attend ballgames. I remember when I went as a young adult I saw the privilege of that.”

She said the poem she submitted for the contest is, in many ways, a reflection of “how the experience of playing ball is different for different people.”

Elias said she submitted her poem for the fun of it, and the baseball prompt blended her two favorite childhood activities: sports and literature.

As a child she spent hours outside the New York Public Library. “When I wasn’t sitting out on the front step playing I was reading,” she said.

Her final product was only a second draft, with most of the first being revisions to grammar. She remembers the joy of getting notified that her poem made the cut.

“I was tickled pink that I was recognized. It’s not a piece I belabored,” she said.

“I am going to be Emily Dickinson,” she said, clarifying that “she only published 10 poems in her lifetime.” Elias hopes to add to her collection of writings in the future.

Hodgson, a sixth grade teacher at the William E. Norris School in Southampton, was recognized for his poem “A Famous Change Up,” which was inspired by a Northampton youth baseball coach.

“I learned about the National Baseball Poetry Festival from an educational colleague way out in California, oddly enough, and thought, Worcester? But of course, that is the birthplace of the famous ‘Casey at the Bat’ poem,” he said.

“I had this idea for a poem about Jim Mias, celebrating his days of running unofficial Summer Ball on Northampton baseball fields for a good 15 to 20 years, which he no longer does. All three of my sons played Summer Ball, and I was always taken by Jim’s love of the game and how fun he made it, particularly all of the crazy rules changes that he threw into the mix. The poem sought to capture that style of play.”

Mias also lives in Leeds, but grew up in Worcester before later moving to Northampton. Mias saw Worcester’s Polar Park, which was erected in 2021, for the first time on May 2 when Hodgson had him as a guest for a Woo Sox game winning poets were treated to.

“I took him on Friday night to the National Baseball Poetry Festival events as my guest, and as we were driving in to Worcester, he reminded me that he started Summer Ball way back when because he remembered all of the pick-up baseball games of his youth, and wanted to bring that spirit to the young kids of Northampton,” Hodgson said.

When the winning poems were read off in the stadium, Hodgson said, “I read the poem about him to the crowd at the poetry reading and felt like my poem honored him a bit, in his hometown.”

Here are the poems from the three winners:

Take me out to the ballpark,

was all about playing stickball

with the boys on the block,

on the street,

in between passing cars.

It was yelling at those ugly faces,

“Hold my place”

while running back upstairs

to the apartment,

so, I can pee,

then back down again,

across the street,

before my turn, and

the next home run.

It meant the boys yelling,

“Go away, you can’t play.”

“You are a girl!”

But I was whip,

as smart they come. And said,

“Go tells it to your momma!

If you don’t want me to beat you!”

That usually did it,

until I stole first base,

one more time,

and the brutes accused me

of cheating.

My fist always clenched,

ready to give anyone some

lumps.

The girls always wondered,

why I wanted to play,

with the boys,

instead of jumping rope.

Double Dutch was my thing,

I liked much more beating

the boys at their game, because

I wasn’t supposed to,

Especially wearing white cloth

skippy sneakers instead of

pumas or adidas,

the way I was supposed to.

My long pigtails gave me strength

that was unheard of.

At night I imagined myself like

Pippi Longstocking,

with strong arms,

lifting boys instead of horses,

waving my fist and scaring them

away if they tried to.

The moon was filled with dings,

from the balls I hit up there, with

my big anything is possible stick.

The balls didn’t come back down,

just made the moon wink,

smile, and say, “I got you!”

Her father is a patient teacher —

inning by inning with pencil and graph paper

he shows her how to keep score

with slashes and dashes and

Ks in eraser-smudged boxes.

Her father is a gentle man

who loves literature and opera.

Mahler and Dostoyevsky in the living room

baseball in the basement.

It’s the only sport he’ll watch.

Their thirteen-inch television

with tinfoil rabbit ears

is black and white so she

doesn’t know uniforms make a rainbow —

red orange yellow Astros green As blue Expos.

She inherits her father’s team and muted pinstripes — staid businessmen amidst the flash

her father calls them “a class act”

and lets her stay up way too late

to cheer them on in ‘78.

She doesn’t know that’s the closest they’ll get.

She grows to love music and books

but not the right ones.

The word cleave means to separate and to bind.

Life with her father is both.

Tearing away from his judgement.

Coming together when pitchers and catchers report.

They watch on her large flatscreen now.

Rainbow reflected in his glasses.

Sandy dirt and green sod their common ground.

Remembering now

all the zany rules

he’d shout at the kids,

the sound of his voice

off a pitching perch

at Arcanum Field —

Jim, rubbing the ball with dirt

and the bottom of his shirt,

fabric stained with sweat, as he

warmed up his arm, set to throw for

one — two — three hours, straight,

pitch after pitch over the plate —

he’d be calling out rules

off the top of his head, like:

all runs now score double, and

one-pitch inning — no whining, neither — and

fly ball in the trash can wins a Little Debbie, and

a catch over the homerun fence is an out, then

run the bases forward, in reverse, and, then

run the bases backwards, forward, and

on and on and on it went,

a laugh with every rule shift

— such a gift —

those kids, throngs of ballers

waking up early on Saturday mornings

just to play the game with Jim

— and a few other adults, too, but mostly,

they sleepwalked or pedaled there for him —

those players who went with the groove,

waiting for a famous change-up,

the one that kicked off an inning

on the field, in August

Dedicated to Jim Mias and Robin Forsythe-Mias