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  • Take Me Out to the Ball Game: The Story of the Sensational Baseball Song
  • Tim Wiles
Amy Whorf McGuiggan. Take Me Out to the Ball Game: The Story of the Sensational Baseball Song. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. 123 pp. Cloth, $24.95.

Like a baseball game, McGuiggan’s book is organized in nine chapters. Like many a ball game, however, it doesn’t start out well for the home team. The first chapter is a brief history of baseball’s early years, from rounders to Spalding, Mills, and Chadwick to the founding of the American League in 1901. While essentially true, the history is very brief, and what it has to do with the book’s eventual subject is debatable. It is of little use to baseball’s scholarly community, as the information is widely known. The writing sets the tone for the book’s workmanlike, documentary style, which plods along competently without getting too excited about anything.

However, a couple of runs score in the second inning, as the author describes the bustling new century into which “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” would arrive, telling the story of westward expansion, immigration, emerging technology, [End Page 166] the rise of women and ethnic groups, and the role of baseball and vaudeville as entertainment for the masses who are melting into the pot. It’s a nice bit of stage-setting, even if it still reads a bit like a term paper. Women—the untold story behind Katie Casey, the heroine of “Ball Game,”—receive two sentences of coverage in this seven-page chapter. Hmmm. (They will appear again later, but still too briefly for this reviewer’s taste).

The book hits its stride in chapter three, giving an excellent general introduction to vaudeville and brief biographies of Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer, the writers behind the song. The excellently chosen and researched illustrations which this book provides are particularly well-utilized here. But the chapter ends with a teaser about how neither Norworth or Von Tilzer had ever been to a baseball game. The author would have been free to use, or even comment upon, another book’s contention that this was not true, but rather a bit of promotional genius dreamed up by Norworth decades later—after Von Tilzer had died.

The next chapter zeroes in on society and baseball in 1908. In baseball we hear about the dead ball; the imminent rise of concrete and steel stadia; the Mills Commission; the death of Henry Chadwick; and the great pennant race between the Cubs, Giants, and Pirates, including the infamous Merkle incident. Mention is made of the portentous subway ride of Jack Norworth, who saw “a gaudy, lithographed poster of a silk-hosed baseball player standing with a bat on his shoulder,” and was inspired to write the song (49). Having researched and written a book on this same subject, it seems a good time to point out that McGuiggan’s book, from an academic press, has no footnotes. Instead, it has a bibliographic essay which mentions four sources for this chapter—none specifically referenced as the source of this intriguing lithograph. For an issue as central as what inspired the song’s composition, it would have been nice to be pointed directly to her source and to have reproduced the lithograph or a source quotation within the book.

A chapter about baseball’s relationship to music in general follows. Like the whole book, it’s good, but too short. There is much more that could have been entertainingly said on this subject. The next chapter focuses on the song itself, and this is essential reading for anyone interested in “Ball Game.” Much is done with the timetable of the song’s writing, the debut date and place, and the complicated interrelationships of Norworth, the Von Tilzer family, George M. Cohan, and the singer Nora Bayes, Norworth’s wife and “Shine On Harvest Moon” songwriting partner. The chapter is well written, researched, and illustrated. Its only flaw is the scant attention it gives to the song’s “career” between 1908 and 1976, when it was reborn.

Harry Caray and Bill Veeck appear...

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