Baseball's Greatest Hit: The Story of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" (review)

When my daughter was an infant, "Take Me Out to The Ball Game" was her lullaby.

We took her to her first professional baseball game on her second birthday, a minor league affair in Binghamton, New York. When the seventh-inning came around, the crowd rose to join in the traditional tune. The look on her face was one of amazement, that so many people also knew this song.

Two thousand eight marks the centennial of what baseball fans believe to be the true "national anthem," and authors Andy Strasberg, Bob Thompson, and Tim Wiles have done the ditty proud. Each of them comes with his own set of bona fides, which qualify them to write on this topic. Strasberg is acknowledged as one of the foremost authorities on and collectors of the song. Thompson is co-producer of the Baseball Music Project, a series of theatrical concerts with the national pastime as its theme. And Wiles is director of research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Together, they make up a Tinkers-Evers-Chance combination, each using his particular area of expertise to produce the final product, which is tremendously enhanced by the work of graphic designers Bernadette Malavarca and Damian Castaneda.

The choice of publisher is also interesting. The authors could have sought a more popular house, but Hal Leonard, known as a musical publishing house, lends a special air of authenticity to the volume.

Baseball's Greatest Hit includes "everything you always wanted to know" about the song, and then some. There's a lot of legend and lore about the songwriting team of Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer, including their general lack of knowledge about the national pastime (neither attended a major-league game until decades after the song came out) and the sudden burst of inspiration Norworth received while traveling on the New York City subway from an advertisement that read "Baseball Today—Polo Grounds."

Baseball's Greatest Hit breaks down the issues surrounding the song into several areas, including a look at how each major-league team handles its seventh-inning stretch. Prior to 9/11, "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" was a staple. But as the nation and the national pastime struggled to return to normalcy, it was replaced by the more patriotic "God Bless America." While many teams have returned to Norworth and Von Tilzer's song, some have continued the tribute to the country.

The authors provide a timeline and complete discography of the famous tune, as well as a list of every baseball song in the collection of the Library of Congress. Fans of old movies will recall the eponymous film starring Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, Esther Williams, and Betty Garrett, which is fondly brought back in the book. There are also a few parodies provided for the reader's amusement (my favorite is the Passover seder version). Baseball's Greatest Hit also includes a tribute to the late broadcaster Harry Caray, who "gave the song back" to the fans, and a chapter on collectibles with a "Take Me Out" theme. The book also features a bonus CD with several versions of the song. At first blush, this seems like a great idea, but, presumably due to copyright reasons, most of the renditions are not from "name" performers; the most recognizable turns come from Dr. John and Harry Caray.

Finally, and perhaps with a nod for Hal Leonard's usual audience, we have "Professor Hedlam's Formal Musical Theoretical Analysis of 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game.'" The authors provide a "warning" for those with a less than serious approach to musical theory: stay away.

When I first heard about this book, I didn't have high expectations. In 2003, the University of Wisconsin Press published Don Cusic's Baseball and Country Music, an unimpressive little paperback, and another scholarly treatise of [End...