Ballpark Music — Baseball Bench Coach

Going to the ballpark has always been my getaway. For me there’s a certain serenity about sitting in the stands and watching the games unfold. I guess my earliest memory of sounds at the ballpark is hearing the thundering “Charge” at Cincinnati’s Crosley Field as the fans yelled for a Reds rally. I would make it a point to get popcorn early in the game so that I would have my own paper megaphone to join in the cheer. Music has certainly evolved at ballparks. Let’s take a look.

The “Star Spangled Banner”, our country’s National Anthem, first was played at a sporting event during the Civil War, in 1862, at a baseball game. The tradition of playing it took off during the 1918 World Series between the Cubs and the Red Sox. The country was at war, World War I, and in the throes of a pandemic, the Spanish flu. In a game in Chicago, a military band played the National Anthem during the seventh inning stretch. Players quickly put their hands over their hearts and fans joined in and sang. When the Series returned to Boston, the Red Sox owner, Harry Frazee, one-upped the Cubs by having the National Anthem played before the game. The pregame tradition did not catch on immediately for regular season games since most ballparks didn’t have great sound systems and teams couldn’t afford a band. It was not until the 1940s when the National Anthem was played before all MLB games.

On April 26, 1941, Wrigley Field became the first Major League ballpark to have organ music. Arrangements of fun music were played by an organist as he sat behind the Lowrey Organ, now in its rightful place in Cooperstown. The second Lowrey Organ (pictured) is the focal point of Wrigley music today. The ballpark’s most famous organist, Gary Pressy, entertained the crowd from 1987 to his recent retirement in 2019, spanning 33 seasons and never missing a day. In May 2019 Pressy reached his 2,633rd consecutive game, surpassing Cal Ripken Jr. as the “iron man” of baseball. Pressy was an avid baseball fan, using clever tunes based on player numbers, names, and even hometowns.

His New York counterpart, Eddie Layton, who played the organ at Yankee Stadium for over 40 years, was not a baseball guy. In fact, when Layton, a talented musician and organist, was hired by the Yankees for the 1967 season, he had never even been to a ballpark and knew nothing about the game. He soon learned, regaling the New York crowd with a variety of fun jingles until his retirement in 2003. On his retirement day, he played one final performance of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” with the fans chanting “Eddie, Eddie!”

“Take Me Out to the Ballgame” has certainly become the unofficial anthem of the MLB. The song was played for the first time in 1934 at a high school baseball game in Los Angeles, and then during the fourth game of the World Series that year. There are a couple tweaks to the original song at MLB ballparks, including replacing the words “home team” with the actual name of your home team. I sometimes catch myself singing “and it’s root, root for the Redlegs”, in memory of my late parents.

That doesn’t play well in Chicago, where fans have reveled in “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” since the days of Harry Caray singing to the crowd at Comiskey Park in the 1970s. After 25 years of broadcasting Cardinals games in St. Louis and one season in Oakland, Caray was hired by the White Sox in 1971. He became popular with the South Side crowd because of his wonderful personality and reputation for joviality. When Bill Veeck became owner of the Sox in 1976, he placed a live microphone in Caray’s broadcasting booth one game as Harry sang the famous song during the seventh inning stretch. Caray was embarrassed; the fans loved it. They encouraged him to sing game after game, and the tradition began. Caray brought the tradition to Wrigley Field in 1982 when he became a broadcaster for the Cubs. He always led the song with “All right! Lemme hear ya! Ah-One! Ah-Two! Ah-Three”. If his beloved Cubbies were tied or losing in the middle of the seventh inning, he would conclude with, “Let’s get some runs!”

Caray passed in 1998, but the tradition of someone leading the Wrigley crowd in “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” from the broadcasting booth lives on. Sometimes now, a video of Caray leads the crowd, but often there are guest singers, ranging from local sports figures in the news and even celebrities. My personal favorite is Bill Murray, actor/comedian, who just may be the #1 Cubs enthusiast in the country. This seventh inning stretch tradition seems to always provide an interesting sidelight, such as race car driver Jeff Gordon welcoming the “Wrigley Stadium” crowd (ugh; it’s a ballpark) and Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster ending his rendition with “let’s get some cookies!’ Two of the more infamous renditions include Bears legend Mike Ditka literally yelling the song in record time in 1998 and musician Ozzy Osbourne forgetting the words in 2003.

Organs at baseball parks have now been mostly replaced by canned music – often, loud; let’s admit it, very loud. A newer tradition is that players come to the plate or enter the game with their own “walk-up” songs as background music. Chipper Jones of the Braves allowed Ozzy Osbourne to save some face at the ballpark by selecting Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” as his walk-up song during the entirety of Chipper’s 19-season career. Yankee greats Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera made famous “This is How We Do It” and “Enter Sandman” as their respective walk-up songs. While fictional, I must admit that I loved Charlie Sheen’s character Ricky Vaughn in the baseball flick Major League entering the game to the tune of “Wild Thing”.

Yes, the serenity of the old ballpark and its gentle organ music may be things of the past, but I always enjoy going to the ballpark. I still love hearing the crack of the bat, old ballpark sounds of vendors exhorting “Hot dogs here” or “Cold beer”, and singing “Take Me Out to the Ballpark” arm and arm with family or friends. It remains my happy place. Every sound is music to my ears.

Until next Monday,

your Baseball Bench Coach