Take Me Out to the Ball Game

The story

"Take Me Out to the Ball Game" is a waltz song of 1908 by Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer that has become the unofficial anthem of North American baseball, although neither of them had been to a game before they wrote it. Norworth was inspired by a sign that read "Baseball Today – Polo Grounds", seen while riding a subway train; Von Tilzer set his words to music. Norworth and Von Tilzer saw their first Major League Baseball games 32 and 20 years later. The song was first sung by Norworth's wife, Nora Bayes, and made popular by many other vaudeville acts. With the sale of so many records, pieces of sheet music and piano rolls, it became one of the biggest hits of 1908. The Haydn Quartet, led by the tenor Harry MacDonough, made a successful recording for Victor; it became the most famous recording of the song but was credited to "Billy Murray and the Haydn Quartet", although Murray did not sing on it, and the confusion is so widespread that the song was credited to Murray when the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America chose it as one of the 365 "Songs of the Century". The first recording was by Edward Meeker, which the Library of Congress added to the National Recording Registry in 2010.

Norworth wrote a second version of the words in 1927, whose first verse Dan Hornsby recorded for Columbia. The song was first played at a ballpark, as far as is known, in 1934, at a high school game in Los Angeles, and later that year during the fourth game of the 1934 World Series. Its chorus is now traditionally sung during the seventh-inning stretch, with fans encouraged to join in, and at many ballparks the home team's name is sung in place of the words "home team". The custom spread through Harry Caray, the announcer of the Chicago White Sox, who began singing it during the seventh-inning stretch in 1976 and kept it up when he moved to the Chicago Cubs in 1982, whose games were broadcast nationally. It is counted among the three most recognisable songs in the United States, with "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "Happy Birthday", though most people know only its chorus: the verses, told in the third person, probably never caught on.

The song has been recorded and quoted countless times. Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra sing it at the start of the MGM musical Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949), directed by Busby Berkeley, with a reprise by Esther Williams; in A Night at the Opera (1935) Harpo and Chico Marx disrupt an opera by slipping its sheet music to the orchestra, and Abbott and Costello's sketch "Who's on First?" begins with Abbott singing it. Dr. John and Carly Simon recorded versions for Ken Burns's documentary series Baseball, and in 2001 a Nike commercial had Major League players sing its lines in their own languages, from Korean and Japanese to Dutch, Italian and Québécois French. Since 13 March 2015 its tune has been the departure melody of the Tokyo Metro Namboku Line at Kōrakuen Station, near the Tokyo Dome. In September 2016 the Miami Marlins played it on a trumpet in tribute to the pitcher José Fernández, who had died in a boating accident that month, and in 2019 the Hartford Yard Goats, who had banned peanuts at their ground over allergies, chose new, nut-free words for the line about snacks by a fans' contest. In 2008 the song received the Songwriters Hall of Fame's Towering Song Award, and Andy Strasberg, Bob Thompson and Tim Wiles of the Baseball Hall of Fame published its history, Baseball's Greatest Hit.

What it says

A light comic song of courtship and sport. The first verse tells of Katie Casey, a young woman mad about baseball who spends every penny cheering for her home side; when her young man calls to take her to a show, she tells him to take her to the game instead. The chorus is her request: to be out among the crowd, treated to snacks, cheering the home team and sorry if it loses. In the second verse she knows every player, argues with the umpire and, with the score tied, gets the whole crowd singing. The mood is cheerful and good-humoured.

The words