Friday Five: Songs About Baseball

It’s that time of year again, folks: the World Series is right around the corner. Maybe you’re a diehard baseball fan, maybe you cheer for anyone but the Yankees, maybe you don’t care at all. Whatever your thoughts on America’s game, check out these baseball songs.

Honorable Mentions: Punch Brothers – “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”; Kenny Rogers – “The Greatest”; Wilco – “Joe Dimaggio Done it Again.”

• 5. “Cheap Seats” – Alabama
  “Cheap Seats,” the title track from a 1993 Alabama record is all about the joys of watching Triple A ball. Randy sings the praises of flat beer and dogs with mustard and relish, noting “We don’t worry about the pennant much/We just like to see the boys hit it deep/There’s nothing like the view from the cheap seats.”

• 4. “715 (For Hank Aaron)” – Peter Cooper

  Cooper looks at racism through the lens of America’s Pastime with this song about Aaron, a man who faced hate mail and death threats, but spoke “with his bat and not his mouth.” Remember when athletes did that?

• 3. “America’s Favorite Pastime” – Todd Snider
  On this bluesy track from The Excitement Plan, Snider relates the story of the late Dock Ellis, a Pirates pitcher who threw a no-hitter while allegedly on LSD. After he retired, Ellis became a drug counselor, interestingly enough.
• 2. “Iron and Diamonds” – The Gibson Brothers
  Upstate New Yorkers Eric and Leigh wrote this song about the region’s iron miners, who found some respite from their hardscrabble lives in baseball: “Sons followed steps down to the mines/Behind dads they never knew/They came alive between the foul lines/With pride and dignity/In the bleachers and the batter’s box/A miner could be free.”
• 1. “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request” – Steve Goodman
  My beloved Fightin’ Phils may be the losingest team in professional sports, but there’s a whole different kind of masochism involved in root, root, rooting for the Cubbies, a team who hasn’t won a World Series in over a century. The “City of New Orleans” scribe sings all about the heartache associated with the ballclub and “their ivy-covered burial ground” in this 1983 song.