Baseball’s Greatest Hit: The Story of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game
by Andy Strasberg, Bob Thompson, and Tim Wiles
New York: Hal Leonard Books
224 pages
Hardbound: $29.95
This year “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” celebrated its 100th birthday, and this sweet-swinging story traces it from its birth to its current status as the third most-often sung tune in America.
“The experience of large masses of human beings singing together is predawn. We experience it in our religious ceremonies, at birthday parties and other rites of passage, in cultural and artistic celebrations, at mealtimes and other family gatherings, and of course, at the ballpark,” writes Bob Thompson, one of the three writers who assembled this tribute.
Richly enhanced with vintage photos and postcards, sheet music replications, record sleeves, newspaper headlines, movie stills, and baseball cards, it also sports a 16-track CD with everything from the earliest recorded versions to performances by Bruce Springsteen, Dr. John, George Winston, a fellow playing a musical saw, and, of course, its most famous practitioner, the late Harry Caray recorded live at Wrigley Field.
The perfect Christmas stocking stuffer for folks with very wide, long, and flat feet, Baseball’s Greatest Hit is a delight from its foreword by Carly Simon, who recalls living with the Jackie Robinson family in 1955 and sitting on Pee Wee Reese’s lap in the Brooklyn Dodgers dugout, to its conclusion, a boggling 30-page discography of every known recording of the tune, from piano rolls and wax cylinders to CDs.
The illustrations, beginning with the scratchily revised original lyric holograph by Jack Norworth and a photograph of Harry’s last seventh-inning stretch singalong, are a pennant-winning pinnacle of pop culture. This book belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, where co-author Tim Wiles, a Peoria native and a Bergan and ICC journalism graduate, is director of research.
Norworth wrote the lyric on New York’s 9th Avenue subway in 1908 after seeing an advertisement for a game at the Polo Grounds. Co-author Albert Von Tilzer added the melody. Heroine Katie Casey starred in two now-forgotten verses leading up to the famous chorus.
Its lilting waltz tempo and one-octave range makes it singer-friendly. The opening octave leap of “Take me” replicates two other beloved American songs, “The Christmas Song” and “Over the Rainbow.”
A sing-a-long staple during the silent film era, the tune was featured in more than 1,200 movies and television shows. But it wasn’t until 1976 that it became a seventh-inning-stretch ritual with Caray leading the White Sox faithful at Comiskey Park.
