January 2026

A Baseball Life: Henry Schipper’s The Ball Dreams of the Sky

by William Meiners

Henry Schipper can trace his life through baseball. Like mapping the long arc of an upper-deck shot, he sailed from Little League in Detroit through a teenage stint as Babe Ruth phenom in Wisconsin to the senior softball leagues of the Golden State. Along the way, he sold beer at Wrigley Field for a couple of seasons in the mid-1970s while attending the University of Chicago. In Los Angeles, making a living as a journalist and documentarian, he followed the Angels, not the Dodgers (and the Clippers, not the Lakers) — choices he confessed to suffer for.

His first love came naturally, as Schipper had been the kid with a golden arm. A hurler of consecutive no-hitters in Wisconsin, he bicycled to and from his suburban play, mostly victorious but occasionally crestfallen, unaccompanied by any family members. And he shared no news of what transpired on the diamond with parents or sister. His book of poems, The Ball Dreams of the Sky, shortlisted for the Casey Award as Spitball Magazine’s “best baseball book” of 2025, would bring him back to his summer days in Detroit.

The collection, Schipper told me just days after the Dodgers squeaked by the Blue Jays in a heart-pounding World Series, had been on his mind for about a decade. “Then out of the blue, I had to have double bypass heart surgery,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘Shit, I never wrote that baseball book.’”

Upon recovery, Schipper said he went about writing and rewriting the poems that could “translate life into baseball,” noting the framing that would take the reader from birth through death in a baseball context. The nuance of the language alone, like the old possibility of an endless extra-inning game, seemed limitless.

With some 50 gathered poems, a few of which follow, Schipper’s debut poetry collection is arranged under the sections of Early Innings, Middle Game, and Late Life. Of course revisiting what he first thought might be the “halcyon days” of his baseball youth, Schipper was surprised just how much trauma he drummed up.

Body and soul

The bat is physical,
inches and ounces,
swollen at the head,
all about the grip,
and hitting.

The glove like the brain,
a complex web with separate lobes,
layers of stitching,
organically poised
to catch a thought.

The ball comes to life in flight;
its essence is its potential,
like spirit it soars.

Both bat and glove dream of the ball;
the ball dreams of the sky.

 

If God played ball

If God played ball,
would He hit home runs
and catch them all?

would He steal signs,
or just Know?

would He prefer power
or speed, the blast
or the blur, the big bang,
or the burning whoosh?

would He take the mound against Himself?
and foul off pitch after pitch,
forever?

is that what He’s doing now?

He made the game;
it’s possible this is how
He spends His time.

would He quietly one day
turn to small ball —
advance the runner,
find the holes, express perfection
in sacrifice and team play?

would He ever slump, or pretend to,
strike out, flub one in the field,
come up short in the clutch?

of course He would,
feeling our pain, our loss,
our longing, letting the fans down.

He’d have to;
without imperfection
there is no game.

or need for Him
to wait at the gates,
and sign autographs
one at a time.

Schipper noted that the book’s title, also that last line from the “Body and soul” poem, had not been the original. “Translating the Game” had been an early challenger. Then he considered “There’s No Holocaust in Baseball” as the collection’s title poem. Though that particular label, he reasoned, would put a significant weight on the book.

His mother, from Vienna, and his father, from a Polish border town, had narrowly escaped the holocaust. They met in Palestine in 1939, huddling in the horror of nearly entire families lost to murder. Soon after, they made their way to America and Detroit.

“Because my parents were immigrants, they didn’t know anything about baseball,” said Schipper, the star of his neighborhood living in a “complicated house” where his parents, both European intellectuals, shared affection without understanding of their son’s game. “Little did they know that I was channeling all the ghosts in the house.”

But there was a catch

The stadium was packed
and I was rapt as I watched
my first game, a boy
among Gods, astonished
to see that it really existed,
this larger-than-life, this radio dream,
and I could be here, I could sit
in the heart of the diamond,
the shimmering world,
and see myself in it,
shining one day.

But there was a catch —
as I followed each play
the ball disappeared, again and again,
through the gates of a geist haus,
a spirit home, full of those
I never knew, bubbes and zeydes
from Vienna and Przemysl — eight aunts,
seven uncles, eleven cousins — Ephraim,
Siddy, Lev, Naftali. Salomea who
fell with her husband in Warsaw.
Jenta, Leah, Rivka, Chaim. Max
who made it to Shanghai where
he starved to death, along
with his kids. Erika, Arnold,
Rafat, Regina, Moses, Ida, Dobra,
Zvi, shot, gassed, burned, all of them
gazing right through me, stunned
at the lost horizon of their field of dreams.

The field I raced to every day
was just beyond the cherry tree
that I picked clean before I played,
edging out to the furthest limb,
risking all to get my share, to taste
the best, and in this delicate measure
of weight and balance and stretch
and slip, I honed the skills that would serve
in the dirt, as I measured the pitch,
measured the hit, measured the dive
and the slide and the distance between
where my story began and I now stood,
in the shifting sand of memories
I never had.

Perhaps in spite of historical family trauma, Schipper found his own lifelong love in baseball. Something beyond the escape of throwing the horsehide around the backyard. Through all that simile and metaphor his book explores romance, creativity, how so much depends on the weather (for everyone from infielders to farmers), and simply loving a game that’s rife with heartbreak.

Indeed, “Senior Softball” begins, “After all these years/do we still have to keep score? The game/is fun in so many ways/that have nothing to do with win/or lose. I used to come to be a star./Now I come to feel a star/the warm one, and to move/and mingle with others who shine,/basking in the field of play.”

With pitchers and catchers reporting for spring training in the not-so-distant future, and fans dreaming of hot stove turnarounds, The Ball Dreams of the Sky could be a hopeful St. Valentine’s Day gift for the baseball lover in your life.

Playing with words

Pen in hand, he lofted a fungo to right;
the words gathered underneath,
each one crying “mine!”

his spikes dug into syllables
of dirt, spewing letters, dollar signs,
quotation marks and exclamation points,
as he rounded the bag

he turned the pages of his wind-up,
and let the delivery write itself

the webbing of the rhyme
was old and scarred,
like fingers broken many times

in china they have a language of codes,
of blinks and bluffs that catchers
and coaches understand

the rain came down in hyperbole
and booze, and sheets of nostalgia
that rewrote the night

the poet yawned between every pitch,
foregoing perfection in uniforms of verse
don’t lose me in the sun, she cried,
and he swore he would not,
but he did

flirting with a game of words
in a field of lines, he pressed his face
inside his glove, the glove that holds
the gloves that hides — he caught himself —
and said goodbye

 

Managers & farmers

The faces of managers
when the season goes bad, befuddled but stoic,
like farmers with weather
they can’t understand.

They pulled the right strings the part that was theirs,
and July stood high
with the harvest to come.

When out of the blue
the Gods came to play,
with bloops, and hops,
and swinging bunts, freakish
breaks that blighted the game.

And they counted the losses
and gauged the time,
squinting, puzzled
at the edge of reproach,
but always within the code
of no blame, that’s baseball
you take whatever you get.

Like Job they bent
but did not break.
The utopian game
was thus maintained,
with the helpless gaze
of unfathoming faith.

William Meiners is the founding editor of Sport Literate.

Henry Schipper, an award-winning filmmaker in Los Angeles, has written and produced more than 125 primetime documentaries. He once held the Babe Ruth League record for consecutive no-hitters in Wisconsin. The Ball Dreams of the Sky is his first book of poems.