Neuman's Own: Baseball Recordings No Longer Inside Baseball
posted in: Features
No sport has a sacred soundtrack like baseball. Baseball has inspired a litany of songs that go back to the origins of the game itself. To be sure, other sports have inspired music, but so much of it is aimed at touting individual achievement or prowess”think of the Bears famous We Are the Bears and the copycat songs it spawned, or the storied and dialectical relationship between the NBA and hip hop going back to Kurtis Blow’s 1984 single Basketball.
But the music that baseball inspires is less about self-aggrandizement than self-exploration”less about expressing individual accomplishments than communicating universal questions: From The Intruders Love is Like a Baseball Game (1968) to Bruce Springsteen and the East Street Band‘s Glory Days (1985), songs about baseball take aim at so much more than what happens on a baseball field. This very fact is institutionalized in the sport itself during seventh inning stretch of every game when we sing along to Take Me Out to the Ballgame. Baseball doesn’t just entertain us with outstanding athletic achievements, it constructs us as social beings”being taken out to the ballgame is as much about being taken out to the crowd as we all acknowledge in the first two lines of the song. Why baseball is such a ripe metaphor is unclear, but it’s distinct cultural cachet cannot be argued. Can you imagine, for example, Simon & Garfunkel singing Wilt the Stilt has left and gone away?
Enter The Baseball Project (Yep Roc), consisting of Steve Wynn, Scott McCaughey, Linda Pitmon, and Peter Buck (yes, that one) who collectively up the ante with an entire album of baseball-themed songs.
It’s actually the second album from the group (the first one without R.E.M.’s Buck), but it’s even quirkier than the first with songs about loveable eccentrics like Mark The Bird Fidrych and Tim Lincecum, overlooked stories like the pitch that struck and killed Ray Chapman and fallen heroes like Roger Clemens and Pete Rose. With contributions from Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan and The Decembrists’ Chris Funk and John Moen, the album has pinch hitters packing a wallop, and the thirteen songs are a delightful post-modern addition to the baseball music canon. SPIN said the album delivers affectionate chin music. Rolling Stone even covered its recent performance at SXSW. Just listen to the raucous Ichiro Goes to the Moon about Seattle Mariners outfielder Ichiro Suzuki. The Baseball Project is no vanity project.
Precisely thirty years ago, Terry Cashman released a song called Talkin’ Baseball, a honky tonk trip down baseball memory lane, which you can still hear once in a while in ballparks across the land with it’s arcane references to the Scooter, the Barber and the Newc. The song was huge in baseball circles, but never made it out of the novelty section of the record store. While just as esoteric and quite literally as inside baseball, The Baseball Project is being taken much more seriously than Talkin’ Baseball ever was. Much of this, of course, has to do with the level of musicianship exhibited on The Baseball Project, but the rise of the Internet has something to do with it too. The Internet has spawned virtual altars to the debris of fading memory. In 1981, fashioning a pop tune about Ichiro might have felt kitschy, but today, it’s pure rock ‘n’ roll.