My wife and I attended a symphony concert yesterday at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall. And believe it or not, in the process we learned things about baseball that we never knew.
The event happened to be one of the relatively few stops for the traveling musical multi-media show called The Baseball Music Project that features music associated with baseball – America’s pastime.
My son Doug and his wife Jamie took us to the Concert as my birthday present for this year. It was perfect for an old baseball crony like me.
Using images from the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, the program skillfully blends the visuals with a wonderful variety of music related to the game of baseball (there are hundreds of songs out there).
The Project is the brainchild of Robert Thompson, who travels with the show and guest-conducted the Seattle symphony orchestra for its three performances.
Thompson, a passionate baseball and music aficionado, says, “We love baseball for reasons and purposes we don’t entirely understand ourselves… there’s mystery in the game. We believe that Shoeless Joe Jackson could come walking out of a cornfield in Iowa at any moment.”
Among other interesting lore, we learned that the lyrics for Take Me Out To The Ballgame, the third most widely sung song in America (behind the National Anthem and Happy Birthday) were written on a New York subway car in 1908 by one Jack Norworth, after his train passed a sign that simply said “BASEBALL GAME TODAY at the Polo Grounds” (then the home of the NY Giants).
He scribbled the words while his train car continued it's lurching ride down the tracks (there’s a photo of the original script in the program whose cover is pictured above – that’s Babe Ruth at the piano). Composer Albert Von Tilzer soon added the music that resulted in the now famous sing-along melody.
The late Chicago Cubs announcer Harry Caray helped to make it a national ballpark tradition by leading Cub fans in singing the song before the home half of every seventh inning. Games were televised nationally on super station WGN-TV, and it caught on at parks around the country.
One of my favorite visuals in the program was the famous Willie Mays back-to-the-infield catch of Vic Wertz’ line drive to deep center field in the 1954 World Series between the Giants and Cleveland. I’m old enough to remember listening to that World Series on radio which the Giants swept, incidentally.
Hall of Famer Dave Winfield narrated the show, and guest vocalists were the talented Misty Castleberry and Forrest Mankowski.
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