Suggested Soundtrack: “Bathtub Gin,” 6-28-00, Homdel, NJ
Hi! It’s been a while! A lot has happened! So before we get to the main topic at hand, a quick word on baseball’s alleged return.
How does it feel?
Look, I have a LOT of feelings about everything that’s gone down with MLB over the past few months. If you’re a regular reader of this irregular newsletter, then you know where I stand on the Owners vs Union side of things (TL;DR if you’re new: Union Forever.) There’s nothing I can say about that fight that a dozen baseball writers haven’t already said in a much smarter, more detailed way. Suffice to say, there’s maybe going to be baseball in 2020 and we’re now on track for Labor Armageddon in Winter 2021 when the current CBA expires.
I say “maybe” because, right now, things do not look great. Coronavirus cases are exploding across many states, including Texas, Arizona, and Florida which you might recall were at one point floated as potential sites for an NBA-like bubble system. I’m sure MLB is now breathing a small sigh of relief.
But only a small one because already, several teams have reported players and staff testing positive for the virus, leading multiple teams to shut down training facilities. It’s such that the guys over at The Ringer’s Baseball BBQ (aka the same guys from the genius Cespedes Family BBQ Twitter account) actually discussed how to ethically enjoy the upcoming season (again, assuming there is one) given the dangers facing everyone involved.
Honestly, I don’t know how to feel. I love baseball. I miss baseball. I WANT baseball. But at what cost? Players and staffers risking their health and lives for, what, a 60-game season? With skyrocketing cases and more danger to players no matter what restrictions are put in place, it just doesn’t seem worth it.
Regardless, with players scheduled to report later this week, I’m going to ramp this back up to once a week. Even if we never see a season, I’ll do my best to make this more regular because, hell, it’s still fun to write. So without further ado…
I don’t care if I never get back
And it’s especially fun to write about when the worlds of Phish and baseball overlap, just like they did at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco on October 27, 2014. (Even though I was living in the Bay Area at the time, I wasn’t at that show, sadly).
That night was an off-night for the 2014 World Series. At the time, the San Francisco Giants were leading the Kansas City Royals three games to two and headed to KC for Game 6 and (after the Royals would eventually win that one) Game 7. But the frenzy over the Giants, who were about to win their third World Series in five years, didn’t escape the band.
Overall, it’s a pretty terrific show but the real treat comes with the first song of the encore: a brief, instrumental rendition of the baseball classic, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
According to Phish.net’s “Every Time Played,” the tune has been teased a number of times throughout Phish’s playing days (and even Trey’s solo shows) but this is the only time the band has ever played the full tune.
(Note: the video claims the song was played the on 10/28 but I’m like 99.999999% sure this is the 10/27 version and that it wasn’t teased or played at 10/28.)
Now, if you’re a Cubs fan like me, this song holds a special place in your heart because, well…
But the song, words by Jack Norworth and music by Albert von Tilzer, has an interesting history all its own, including the fact that Norworth once claimed he had never been to a baseball game when he wrote the song but simply needed a new tune for his vaudeville show.
Though it’s well over a century old and holding an official place in the Library of Congress, it’s only been recently that there’s been serious discussion about the song being a feminist anthem written by Norworth as an ode to his girlfriend, Trixie Friganza, who was both a vaudeville actress and suffragist.
A lot of fans (including myself until research for this newsletter) probably don’t realize that, like many old standards, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” has multiple stanzas; what we sing during the Seventh Inning Stretch is essentially the chorus. The two stanzas address the exploits of a woman named Katie Casey who was “baseball mad” and rooted on her favorite team. Here are the full lyrics:
Katie Casey was baseball mad,
Had the fever and had it bad.
Just to root for the home town crew,
Ev'ry sou
Katie blew.
On a Saturday her young beau
Called to see if she'd like to go
To see a show, but Miss Kate said "No,
I'll tell you what you can do:"
Take me out to the ball game,
Take me out with the crowd;
Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,
I don't care if I never get back.
Let me root, root, root for the home team,
If they don't win, it's a shame.
For it's one, two, three strikes, you're out,
At the old ball game.
Katie Casey saw all the games,
Knew the players by their first names.
Told the umpire he was wrong,
All along,
Good and strong.
When the score was just two to two,
Katie Casey knew what to do,
Just to cheer up the boys she knew,
She made the gang sing this song:
Take me out to the ball game,
Take me out with the crowd;
Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,
I don't care if I never get back.
Let me root, root, root for the home team,
If they don't win, it's a shame.
For it's one, two, three strikes, you're out,
At the old ball game.
Here’s the Smithsonian Magazine on “Katie Casey”:
Featuring a woman named Katie Casey who was “baseball mad,” who “saw all the games” and who “knew the players by their first names,” “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” tells the story of a woman operating and existing in what is traditionally a man’s space—the baseball stadium. Katie Casey was knowledgeable about the sport, she was argumentative with the umpires, and she was standing, not sitting, in the front row. She was the “New Woman” of the early 20th Century: empowered, engaged, and living in the world, uninhibited and full of passion. She was, historians now believe, Trixie Friganza.
If you want to get even DEEPER into the history of the song, there’s a terrific (and long) article from historian George Boziwick (via baseball historian John Thorn). It’s perhaps the most in-depth item about a song not written by Bob Dylan that I’ve ever read.
Boziwick addresses everything from the ethnic identity of “Katie Casey” and what it said about America at the turn of the century…
Who was the fictional Katie Casey in Jack Norworth’s song? By her name, she was likely Irish American. In 1908 she would have been at least second generation, already well assimilated to American culture and in her case, baseball. Assimilation for her and other Irish meant Americanizing without eradicating one’s cultural and religious “Irishness,” despite the fact that many Irish immigrants consciously turned their backs on a homeland that was still reeling from the effects of a catastrophic famine, poverty, and massive emigration…
With independence and mobility as byproducts of her Irish cultural, social, and religious upbringing, Katie Casey was likely to be single, working, and self-sufficient. Her desire to get to the ballgame and assimilate to the rooting crowd is recognizable as part of the very cloth of her Irish American feminine identity.
…to, again, how the song is actually a feminist anthem:
The message of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” stands alone when set in relief against these easily forgotten songs. It is the only song that asserts the unique message that a woman’s presence and participation at the ballpark gives momentum towards a relationship of equality with those around her. That relationship is legitimized in the stands when (as told in the second verse) Katie Casey leads her fellow fans in the song’s final chorus. No other baseball song places a woman in a position of leadership, which more than fulfills her need and desire to be part of the franchise, which, in this case, was the rooting crowd.
Incredible, right? The entire article is worth a read because of all the details and nuances and context that Boziwick gets into that I can’t even dream of doing justice to here.
If you ever find yourself re-watching Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary, as I did this past winter, you’ll find a few anecdotes about the song, including a bit about Norworth’s writing of the song, a 1908 performance, and the standard Burnsian tinkly piano version. Hell, Burns even got Carly Simon to perform a rendition!
But my favorite performance of the song from that doc will always be baseball legend Buck O’Neil.
There’s something powerful about O’Neil singing a song that seems to mean so much to him (and to baseball fans all over) given that O’Neil himself never played in the Majors because of baseball’s segregation practice. He did become the first Black coach in the Major Leagues back in 1962 with the Cubs but that was after a lengthy career as both player and coach with the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League. That O’Neil, like so many other black players before Jackie Robinson broke through, was turned away from the Majors as a result of the league’s (and our country’s) systematic racism and yet still found joy in both the game and this song about the game is a testament to baseball’s power.
As for the song’s modern day existence as the Seventh Inning Stretch staple, that didn’t happen until the late 1970s when the aforementioned Harry Caray was still an announcer with the Chicago White Sox and legendary owner Bill Veeck, who never met a stunt he didn’t like, coerced Caray into the routine.
When Caray joined the Chicago White Sox in 1976, team owner Bill Veeck noticed the announcer liked to hum the song with Comiskey Park organist Nancy Faust. Veeck asked Caray if he could give him a microphone so he could sing for the entire park. The announcer wanted no part of it.
"Harry was very vain," said Bill's son, Mike Veeck, who worked with his dad at the time. "He really didn't understand the concept that the people in the extreme bowels of the stadium, the people in the left-field upper deck because he was one of their own, how he would bring them together. He didn't quite get that if he could sing it, everybody could sing it."
Bill Veeck explained to Caray that he had already taped the announcer singing during commercial breaks and said he could play that recording if Caray preferred. Instead, Caray agreed to sing with Faust's organ.
There are a few variations of the story: some say Caray was good with it from the get-go, some say Veeck played the covertly-taped recording of Caray for the stadium without Caray’s consent and that Caray only agreed once he saw the crowd’s reaction. Regardless, it became a hit and when Caray headed to the North Side to announce for the Cubs starting with the 1982 season, he took the tradition with him where it became even more popular thanks to the Cubs broadcast on superstation WGN.
Following Caray’s death in February 1998, the Cubs started bringing in “guest conductors” to sing the tune, with results varying from the truly great to the truly awful. The best, in my opinion, is when they simply replay a Caray recording.
And, so, on that night in San Francisco in October 2014, the song remained so deeply rooted in our cultural consciousness that four dudes from Vermont busted it out for a brief moment as an homage to the hometown baseball team that was on the verge of another championship and everyone knew why and what it meant. That moment is cool enough, but having discovered some of the greater historical context now attached with this song, whether the writers intended it or not (something I’m sure the songwriters in Phish can relate to), it carries an extra bit of radness as far as I’m concerned.
For what it’s worth, it’s not the first time that the outside world, sports or news, has seeped into a Phish show in real time. From the “OJ Show” on June 17, 1994 in which the band made references to OJ’s infamous White Bronco chase as it unfolded to the NBA Finals references made during their June 22, 1994 show a few days later to even last summer’s performance of “Gloria” and “Loving Cup” to open the second set of their show in St. Louis after the St. Louis Blues won the Stanley Cup during the set break, the world around the arena has occasionally had an influence on the set list.
Those are pretty rare occurrences, though. Phish shows are, mostly, their own little bubbles where the outside world doesn’t often intrude. And, very often, it’s like that on purpose; let’s just leave the world behind and dance for a few hours. But when the band allows those moments to seep in, it can make for something special, like the 10/27/14 “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
Look, a Phish show and a baseball game are both hugely communal experiences, made up of shared moments that have a lot in common: the claps in “Stash” are like the call-and-response rhythmic clapping at a ballgame, the shouts of “Wilson” a perfect compliment to the “Charge!” call (which Phish has teased plenty of times before).
“Take Me Out To The Ball Game” is probably the most regular, communal experience you’re guaranteed to have at any ballgame (besides the national anthem but that’s pretty perfunctory and not without a dose of cynicism in 2020). You sing or shout along with the rest of the crowd, a large, united choir sharing a moment of joy while attending a three-hour event supporting a group you love. You can’t get more Phish-y than that.
To put a fun coda on all of this, the band was still playing in San Francisco a few nights later, October 29, 2014, when the Giants beat the Royals in Game 7 to clinch the Series. Phish, again, allowed the World Series to sit in as an unannounced guest.
At about the 3:33 mark below, you can hear the crowd start to roar in the middle of “Moma Dance,” the moment when the Giants won the Series. Thanks, smartphones and TVs at the bar! By the 4:15 mark, the band, realizing what happened, makes a transition that the moment deserves.
The band later acknowledged the Giants’ win to the crowd via some fun banter.
If you can’t quite make out what’s being said in the video, here’s a recap from Phish.net:
Immediately following the San Francisco Giants winning game seven of the World Series, We Are the Champions was teased by the full band in Moma. Yarmouth also included a We Are the Champions tease from Trey. Following a "let's go Giants" chant after The Wedge, Page congratulated the Giants, adding that he watched the whole series. Trey told the crowd that Page was a Mets fan and that Page watches every Mets game streamed on his phone with many of them on the organ while the band's playing. Page said "we can't be world champions all the time" with Fish adding "or ever." Trey then introduced The Line in honor of the losers in sports.
Look, I may not be a big Giants fan but any moment that brings about a quality Mets burn is worth it.
(A brief aside: if you don’t know the story behind “The Line,” watch this video and then read this article. It’s both heartbreaking and pretty neat, IMHO.)
(Yet another brief aside: Game 7 was played in Kansas City but that didn’t stop San Franciscans from being idiots and lighting things on fire which led to perhaps the most 21st San Francisco moment ever captured on camera.)
As I said earlier, these moments don’t happen often but when they do, they can make the show more special for a million different reasons. And while these 2014 shows don’t hold any sort of specific place in my heart (again, not a Giants fan and I missed the shows while contributing social media help to the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage of the Series), I still get it and appreciate it.
Like when Page made a reference to the Cubs during one of the band’s 2016 Wrigley shows; I still think about that from time to time because I was there, watching one of my favorite bands playing in the legendary stadium of my favorite baseball team who, lo and behold, would win their first World Series in 108 years a few months later, another event I was lucky enough to be in attendance for.
Me, post-2016 World Series Game 7, embracing the monsoon; Photo by Aubrey
These moments don’t make or break a show. But when they happen, they just add a little extra mustard that, along with everything else from that show — the friends you were with or the jams that still stick out in your mind — make things that much more special and memorable and you can forever link the band with those glorious moments of (sports) magic.
Phish and a World Series win?
I don’t care if I never get back.