Poetry slam

"When Howie Norsetter talks about hitting a baseball," Mark Metzler writes of the 29-year-old Madison West High School alum, "he quotes from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets": the act of whacking one into the stands is "at the still point of the turning world." Norsetter should know. Last season, playing for the Avenue Bar, he led the state's top amateur league with a .509 hitting average. "There is a level you can reach where your body and mind are acting in unison," Norsetter explains. "There is no competition at all. All there is, is reaction. Time really does stop. There's something mystical about it." Metzler notes that Norsetter has spent the past three winters playing for the Fitzroy Lions, winners of last year's B Grade Grand Championship in Australia's Victorian Baseball Association. Surviving a heart attack in 2002, Norsetter scours Canada and Australia for prospects as a scout for the Minnesota Twins and in June was named Scout of the Year by Slam Sports.