Song of the Day: Jack Norworth, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”

Editor’s note: Baseball’s so-called World Series begins tonight

Guest post by Nathan Arizona

Jack Norworth wrote baseball’s most famous tune on a New York City subway in 1908, but 22 years passed before the songwriter took himself out to a ballgame for first time.

He was inspired to write “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” by a sign he saw through the elevated subway window that said, “Baseball Today — Polo Grounds. He scratched out some lyrics on a scrap of paper and later got a Tin Pan Alley pro to write the music (that guy’s not famous even though he did half the work). Then he gave it to his vaudeville-star wife to sing.

It was an instant hit, but not at the ballpark. People heard it from the stage, between shows at movie theaters, on recordings and around the family piano. (The earlier “Base Ball Polka” never had a chance.) Norworth also wrote “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” another tune his wife, Nora Bayes, turned into a vaudeville favorite. The song also boosted sales of a relatively new snack called Cracker Jack, which the singer craves when somebody takes her out to a game.

Major League baseball got the idea to make “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” its “official” song in time for the 1934 World Series. The seventh-inning stretch had only recently become a thing, and that seemed like a good place to put it.

The stretch supposedly began after 350-pound U.S. President William Howard Taft asked for a game to be paused around that time so his attendants could help him to his feet. If he didn’t get up and move around for a while they might never get him out of his seat when the game ended. So other people started doing that too, as monkeys do. This story might not be true.

The song is a waltz all in one octave and easy to sing, at least the chorus is, and that’s the only part sung at the ballpark. There’s a long introductory verse in which “baseball mad” Katie Casey fields a date request. “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.” All together now . . . . (Norworth changed the words slightly in 1927.)

The song got a boost after announcer Harry Carey started singing it over the public microphone at Chicago White Sox games in 1976 (he took his act to the Cubs a few years later). Then they started asking celebrities to do it. For some people that seems more important than the game itself.

For the past couple of decades “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” has often had to share space with “God Bless America,” which has nothing at all to do with baseball and sort of makes you wonder whose America you want God to bless (or what God is being summoned, for that matter).

Phillies announcer, former pitcher and popular wise-ass Larry Anderson is not on the “Take Me Out” bandwagon.

“In the seventh inning,” he said, “the fans all get up and sing ’Take Me Out to the Ballgame,’ and they’re already there. It’s really a stupid thing to say, and I don’t know who made ‘em sing it.”

The rest of the Phillies organization apparently doesn’t agree. Here are the Phillie Phanatic and Philadelphia Orchestra music director Yannick Nezet-Seguin leading the crowd at a Phillies game. I’m waiting for Gritty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOn_-4sK4nE

Here’s a classic piece of Americana from “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1958. Norwood sings his song with Yankee greats Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford and the kind-of-great Moose Skowron. Norworth tells Ed he saw his first game in 1932, but most sources say it was two years earlier.

The Haydn Quartet, a popular singing group, did a brisk version on an early recording.

Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra made it a song-and-dance act in the 1949 movie “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”