Moore, the 1952 Puliter Prize-winning poet, was an avid Dodgers fan until they left Brooklyn. She switched her allegiance to the Yankees and threw out the first ball in their 1968 opener. A Bryn Mawr graduate, she taught English at Carlisle Indian School, where Jim Thorpe was one of her students. One of her favorite players was Whitey Ford: “Like Whitey’s three kinds of pitch and prediagnosis with pickoff psychosis…” She liked the precision positions of pitcher and catcher: “It’s a pitcher’s battle all the way, a duel; a catcher’s, as with cruel puma paw Elston Howard lumbers lightly back to plate.” And she described a catch by Mickey Mantle: “Mickey, leaping like the devil, why gild it, although deer sound better, shares what was beating toward its treetop nest, one-handing a souvenir to be, meant to be caught by you and me.
