It’s another monsoon-like early morning here in Berkeley and Larry and I went to our favorite local breakfast spot, Sunnyside Cafe (they’re an unpretentious place and don’t accent the “e”). Larry had the smoked salmon scramble. For toast, he asked if they had bagels. “No,” answered the waitress, “but we have English muffins. Same shape without the hole.” Pretty good for 8:30 on a Saturday morning.
While waiting for his English muffin, Larry asked me if I had ever heard the word bagel as baseball slang; I hadn’t. When a really good hitter has no hits against a pitcher, the pitcher has “dropped a bagel on him.” I thought of this visually, as in encircled the hitter’s arms so he couldn’t hit, but Larry says it’s just a big fat zero (and a donut is a round weight you put on your bat for practice swings.) I looked online for some bagel poems and found this. Which just goes to show…something, but I’m not sure what