Please Bring Back ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’

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The New York Sun

Five years on, can we have “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” back?

Everyone is irritated by different changes in the texture of baseball games over time. The new bleachers in Wrigley Field are offensive; the LCD screen below the venerable year’s famed scoreboard more so. Still, one understands. Concessions must be made to changing times if dollars are to be made; if the choice is between some extra seats above the batters’ eye and a new Chicago ballpark, the choice is clear. There are more than enough people in Wrigley Field on any given day who will tell you that baseball under artificial lights isn’t baseball to remind you that change is simply to be accepted.

With the singing of “God Bless America” as part of the seventh inning at Yankee Stadium and many other parks, though, it’s not too late to act. There is an entire generation of baseball fans that think this most unnatural ritual is somehow normal. We can do something to preserve a proper baseball experience for them and their children.

Where to begin with the objections? The main problem is that it’s incredibly inappropriate. The Yankees and other teams began playing the song in fall 2001, when people were still shaken by terrorist attacks, with many dreading and even believing that worse was coming. At the time it was moving, a token of baseball’s collective understanding that it is really just a quite insignificant game, a distraction from the cares of life and a reminder that there are events from which there can and should be no real distraction. There was even a touch of defiance in the sight and sound of tens of thousands of New Yorkers singing along with Irish tenor Ronan Tynan as he mournfully struck the high notes in the playoffs that year. It was chilling.

Whatever meaning there was in that passed quite some time ago; the playing of the song at Yankee Stadium (and, unbelievably enough, elsewhere) has long since meant every bit as much as the YMCA dance the grounds crew does, or the playing of “Cotton-Eyed Joe.” I happen to think it a gratuitous and maudlin intrusion on the game, something that reduces history to the level of middle-aged men pretending to be the Village People, but you don’t have to find it actively offensive to find it unbelievably ridiculous. The tinny voice of Kate Smith singing over a marching tempo that sounds as anachronistic as the dancing in an early newsreel is kitsch, and not the good kind. “Irish tenor Ronan Tynan” became a running joke among my friends as early as 2002; the doughy singer is a human version of one of those bald eagles teams set soaring over stadiums on patriotic holidays.

The basic surreality of the whole thing is summed up in the spectacle of thousands of people and all the players, umpires, and coaches on the field doffing their caps respectfully, as if for the national anthem, while a show tune Irving Berlin wrote for “Yip, Yip, Yahank” plays over the loudspeakers.

If we’re going to sing an unofficial national anthem during the seventh inning, let’s sing “This Land is Your Land;” it’s a brighter and better song whose democratic populism fits better with the feeling of the game. Still better, let’s have “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” back. Let’s remember that the seventh inning, far from being a time to sing solemn sings of any stripe, is a time for drunks to race to vendors for more beer before sales are cut off at the end of the inning. It’s also worth remembering that the tradition supposedly began with William Howard Taft being too fat to sit in his chair for an entire game after shifting around for a while he couldn’t take it anymore, and got up to leave after the top of the seventh, whereupon the whole crowd at the game stood up in deference.

While you’re not going to find many people with much good to say about “God Bless America” at the ballgame, you sure will find a lot for whom “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” (which is just as kitschy in its own way to be sure, just in the good way) is associated with all sorts of good cheer — memories of sunny afternoons at the ballpark with your parents, of eating peanuts and Cracker Jack even if you didn’t like them because that’s what you do when you go to the game, maybe memories of Wrigley Field, with Harry Caray or some ridiculous Chicago pseudo-celebrity drunkenly slurring the half-remembered words from the broadcast booth high above home plate. Isn’t that what baseball is really about — those happy moments and silly rituals, like licking that stubby little pencil you get with a scorecard, or giving Mr. Met a high-five in the aisle, or chanting Derek Jeter’s name from the bleachers? Let’s have one of those back, please; save Irish tenor Ronan Tynan and the bald eagle for Memorial Day.


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