Take me out to the ballgame..

Baseball is music to me, the rhythm and words depict that song that I love.

The story, as Julian Casablancas tells it, is that he wrote the song “Ode to the Mets” on a subway platform after a disheartening trip to Citi Field. The track is not necessarily about the Mets; it does not mention baseball, Queens or even David Wright. No, it’s more about how one might feel while waiting for the train after a painful loss in October.

“They should play it after every Mets loss at the stadium,” Casablancas, the lead singer for The Strokes, said during a recent online listening party for the band’s sixth studio album, “The New Abnormal.” “You know, like they have celebratory songs for when the teams win.”
Casablancas, a child of New York, is a Mets fan. That much is clear. “The team of my youth,” he said. In 2010, he told Rolling Stone he wanted to write a theme song for the team (“I’m totally serious,” he said), and it seems as if the painful loss in question might have been the 3-0 loss to the San Francisco Giants in the 2016 NL Wild Card Game, though some of the details seem a bit hazy.
“I was waiting for the train,” he said. “That’s why we called it that. I assumed it would change and it somehow never did.”

   The Strokes are not the first member of the indie rock canon to find inspiration in the Mets — John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats released a song titled “Doc Gooden” last year — and Casablancas is certainly not the first famous musician to be charmed by the sport. Eddie Vedder and Billy Corgan love the Cubs. Ben Gibbard roots for the Mariners. Same for Jason Isbell and the Braves. Riley Breckenridge, the drummer for Thrice, played at Pepperdine and runs the Twitter account @ProductiveOuts with Kowloon Walled City bassist Ian Miller.
Stephen Malkmus (Pavement) has played in a fantasy baseball league with Mike Mills (R.E.M.) and Ira Kaplan (Yo La Tengo). And yes, Yo La Tengo is named for a (probably) apocryphal Mets reference.

   The marriage between music and baseball dates more than a century. The attraction, Darnielle said, is simple: We all die. We all consider our own mortality. And athletes, well, they get old.
  “I’m fascinated by sports because I assume if you are a pitcher, your craft gets better, but what doesn’t get better is your arm,” Darnielle said, while discussing his 2019 album, “In League With Dragon.” “(As a songwriter) your powers of writing and observation get better. I don’t think my oldest stuff is my best stuff at all. We face this as we go on. What’s the nature of our magic?”
   In this way, “Ode to the Mets” joins a very specific tradition of songs about baseball, about considering an athlete’s end and the experience of being a fan.
   “It’s more like something that you set your heart to and that you love unconditionally but that continues to disappoint you,” said Fab Moretti, the drummer of The Strokes. “Which was kind of what I gathered from the song, too.”
   With The Strokes joining the canon of baseball tracks, and the sport waiting to return, here are the 30 songs we believe stand above the rest.

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30. “3rd Base, Dodger Stadium,” Ry Cooder
Cooder, the legendary sideman, spent his youth in Santa Monica and graduated high school two years after the doors opened at Dodger Stadium. In 2005, Cooder crafted an album called “Chávez Ravine,” a series of songs, including this one, about the Mexican-American community that was displaced during the construction of the ballpark. Consider this record a companion to “Stealing Home,” the wonderful new book by Eric Nusbaum.
29. “Headfirst Slide Into Cooperstown on a Bad Bet,” Fall Out Boy
“If anyone knows anything about Pete Rose and gambling and where the Baseball Hall of Fame is, then they probably understand the title,” Fall Out Boy bassist and lyricist Pete Wentz said in a video for NME in 2008. “Otherwise, it’s like talking about Liverpool soccer club — Football Club to an American. We know little, and should not talk about it.” The song appears to have very little to else to say about Rose’s case — it is hard to apply lyrics like “tempest in a teacup, get unique; Peroxide Princess shine like shark teeth,” as John M. Dowd was balding and Rose these days always seems to be wearing a hat. For what it’s worth: Wentz has suggested Rose belongs in the Hall of Fame.
28. “OK Blue Jays,” The Bat Boys
In baseball, the range of team-centric motivational anthems spans from delightfully catchy to dolefully preposterous. “OK Blue Jays” resides closer to the former pole on that continuum. The kitschiness of the tune does not override how much fun it is to shout the chorus during the seventh-inning stretch at Rogers Centre. The song is dumb. The dance is dumb. It is timeless. It is baseball. —
27. “Right Field,” Peter, Paul and Mary
The theme is universal, applicable to the gawky, uncoordinated youth; to the hungover sophomore trying to aid his dorm’s softball team while not puking; to the creaky-kneed Boomer hoping to stay fit but avoid embarrassment. The apprehension of standing in the outfield, hoping the baseball is not hit your way. Have no fear, the story of our protagonist ends in joy, rather than despair:

Then suddenly everyone’s looking at me,
My mind has been wandering, what could it be?
They point at the sky and I look up above,
And a baseball falls into my glove!

26. “Ichiro’s Theme,” Ben Gibbard
The departure of Ichiro Suzuki from Seattle filled the Pacific Northwest with sorrow. Along with Félix Hernández, he had been a beacon for Mariners fans during an otherwise fallow stretch of baseball. When he requested a trade in summer 2012, an era came to an end.
There was one benefit, though. The deal inspired Gibbard, the Death Cab For Cutie frontman, to release a tribute he had written to Suzuki a few years earlier. Gibbard was in the stands at Safeco Field when Suzuki took the field with the Yankees.

“One day he was a Mariner, the next day he was walking across the field,” Gibbard said. “I had gone to that game, just because I had to see the spectacle of it all. I stayed to see one at-bat and then I was like, ‘I don’t feel good. I want to go home.’ That seemed like a good time to put it out in the world, out of appreciation for everything that he did in Seattle.”

The lyrics offer the bona fides of Gibbard’s fandom, with references to broadcaster Dave Niehaus and Suzuki’s cannon for an arm “throwing out runners on a frozen rope,” not to mention an allusion to Ichiro’s NPB club, the Orix Blue Wave. It is a jaunty little number from a legitimate fan: Gibbard in 2019 that Suzuki was his third-favorite Mariners player of all time, behind Alvin Davis and Spike Owen.

25. “Mickey Mantle,” WATERS
The footprints that ballplayers leave on our cultural memory extend beyond the diamond. For “The Mick,” his ability to carouse was almost as legendary as his ability to clout a baseball. Hence the line in this mournful tune from a band from Norway of all places: “I was feeling Mickey Mantle … wasted.”
24. “Bill Lee,” Warren Zevon
Consider this a product of mutual admiration. “The Spaceman” was in his final season with the Red Sox when Zevon released “Excitable Boy,” a record that included the smash “Werewolves of London.” Lee loved the album and started incorporating the lyrics into his already voluble, already chaotic interviews. When Zevon found out about Lee’s affinity for the music, he penned this song for his next record, 1980’s “Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School.”
The song lasts only 97 seconds. It says all you need to know about why Lee was an iconoclast, and why his memory endured long after his career ended.

You’re ‘sposed to sit on you ass and nod at stupid things,
Man that’s hard to do.
But if you don’t they’ll screw you,
And if you do they’ll screw you too.
And I’m standing in the middle of the diamond all alone,
I always play to win when it comes to skin and bone.

23. “Ode to the Mets,” The Strokes
The irony of “Ode to the Mets” is that the opening line is “Up on his horse, up on his horse,” and all I could think about was Wade Boggs and the 1996 World Series. The rest of the lyrics remain fairly ambiguous, though, so perhaps we can pretend that Casablancas was sitting on that subway platform, thinking about Endy Chavez “on his horse” while making that sensational catch during Game 7 of the 2006 NLCS.
22. “Doc Gooden,” The Mountain Goats
The Mountain Goats are the project of Darnielle, one of the most prolific and acclaimed singer-songwriters of the last 25 years. His 2019 song, “Doc Gooden,” from the album “In League With Dragons,” was not his first foray into baseball. But he found Gooden to be an intriguing character, and his career arc to be perfect subject matter for a song. The track is centered around the final years of Gooden’s career, looking back at his no-hitter in 1996 with the Yankees and his time as a star with the Mets in 1980. From the second verse:
Deluxe coach to the ballpark
There’s champagne on the snack trays
Summon up the spirit of a brighter time
Looked bad last week against the Blue Jays
“When you’re watching a baseball game, you have so much idle time, between pitches, between innings, to think about your life,” Darnielle said during an interview in 2016. “It’s one of the things about baseball.”
21. “The Greatest,” Kenny Rogers
The first single on Rogers’ 1999 album, “She Rides Wild Horses,” “The Greatest” is a nostalgic tale of a little boy and a baseball. It spent 20 weeks on the country singles chart, peaking at No. 26, which represented Rogers’ first chart success in seven years.
20. “Night Game,” Paul Simon
This was the final track on side A of Simon’s 1975 stunner, “Still Crazy After All These Years.” It is a strange one. Simon charts the passage of the seasons through the on-field death of a player. “There were two men down, and the score was tied, in the bottom of the eighth, when the pitcher died,” he sings. Over the strum of a guitar and Toots Thielemans’ harmonica, Simon speaks of the stars and the moon before wrapping up. “There were three men down, and the season lost, and the tarpaulin was rolled, upon the winter frost.”
19. “Don’t Call Them Twinkies,” The Baseball Project
If you are a fan of Minnesota Twins references and the music of The Hold Steady, this may be your favorite song of all time. The Baseball Project is a supergroup of musicians and baseball fans (including Mills and Peter Buck of R.E.M.), and it has released three albums of baseball-themed songs. Yet their best is likely their 2011 collaboration with Craig Finn, leader of The Hold Steady.

The opening line verse:
In 1965, I wasn’t quite alive yet
But I’m told they gave the MVP to Zoilo Versalles
Oliva hit the singles and Harmon hit the homers
Mudcat Grant won 20 games and they didn’t play in a dome yet
Finn has roots in the Twin Cities and a long-time affinity for the hometown team. So, as the song says, “grab yourself a 3.2 beer, raise a toast to Gardy.”

18. “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio,” Les Brown & His Orchestra
They don’t make ditties like they used to. This right here is a ditty. It sounds like a song you fall asleep listening to in the back of your eighth-grade history class. The lyrics tell the tale of Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak — and it would have ranked higher if the band found something to rhyme with “Ken Keltner.”
17. “The Cheap Seats,” Alabama
Is “The Cheap Seats” good? I’m not exactly sure, though I do know that if you go to a college baseball game, there’s a 97 percent chance you will hear this song played between innings. In fact, my high school baseball team would play it on a stereo during batting practice. It was released in 1994, just a few months before a strike ended the major-league season, and was the title track on an album of the same name.
The song is set in a “middle-size town in the middle of the middle-west.” According to the opening line, “This town ain’t big, this town ain’t small.” The folks in said town note that their “ball club may be minor league but at least it’s Triple A.” Scholars have guessed that “The Cheap Seats” is likely set in Des Moines, Iowa.
16. “Glory Days,” Bruce Springsteen
Even amidst the pop sheen of the “Born in The U.S.A.” album (which has “Dancing in the Dark” and “I’m Goin’ Down”) “Glory Days” feels particularly hokey. There’s that opening guitar riff and the reference to the kid who “could throw that speedball by you, make you look like a fool, boy.” There’s also the music video, which features Springsteen on a baseball field, throwing pitches up against a wooden backstop (and a reference to Graig Nettles!). There’s something about it, though. I once saw a Springsteen concert in Phoenix during spring training and ended up sitting about 10 feet from a veteran major leaguer. He was there with family and stayed rather reserved the whole night, but when “The Boss” started playing “Glory Days,” they all went nuts.
15. “Dream of Mickey Mantle,” Bleachers
Jack Antonoff, lead singer of Bleachers, sometimes producer of Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey and others, grew up in New Jersey. His first experience with death, as he recalls, was when Yankees legend Mickey Mantle died in 1995. “That was the first memory I had that anything could leave,” he said in 2017, “that things weren’t permanent, was Mickey Mantle.” The memory inspired the leadoff track on Bleachers’ 2017 album, which features this lyric: “Mickey Mantle left on a Sunday, and all of the neighborhood rushes home to pray.” For a heavy tune, it’s quite anthemic.
14. “Look, It’s Baseball,” Guided by Voices
Guided by Voices were one of the seminal acts of the indie underground in the 1990s, and in late 1996, the band released a limited-edition vinyl LP with a song about baseball. The album was called “Tonics & Twisted Chasers.” The song was called “Look, It’s Baseball,” and it referenced “candlestick parks” and what appears to be a night out at the ballpark.
It’s unclear where the inspiration came from, but Guided by Voices frontman Robert Pollard was once a college pitcher at Wright State, talented enough to throw a no-hitter against Indiana Central in 1978. And this isn’t even the most impressive Guided by Voices athletic feat: The band once defeated members of The Smashing Pumpkins and Beastie Boys during a pickup game at Lollapalooza.
13. “Major Leagues,” Pavement
Not explicitly a baseball song, “Major Leagues” appears on the 1999 album, “Terror Twilight,” the fifth and final album from indie rock pioneers Pavement. The lyrics are slightly ambiguous but the chorus is pretty straightforward (“Bring on the Major Leagues”). At various points in his career, Malkmus, the frontman, has embraced (and played down) his obsession with sports fandom. But he remains an astute tennis analyst via his Twitter account and a fantasy baseball veteran. “Don’t pick pitchers early, you know?” he told Paste Magazine in 2018. “People who have Max Scherzer or Corey Kluber might disagree with me. You can also wait for people to get impatient and drop people. That’s my advice: Swoop in, especially in these first two months, and look at the peripherals. If the skills are there, the luck will even out. Hopefully.”
12. “Ty Cobb,” Soundgarden
Originally titled “Hot Rod Death Toll,” the lyrics and themes from this 1996 song from Soundgarden reminded bassist Ben Shepherd of Ty Cobb, the Hall of Fame outfielder who collected more than 4,000 hits and a reputation for being a misanthrope. Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell, who wrote the lyrics, once told British magazine Kerrang! that he didn’t know anything about Cobb and that the song is about a “combination of a lot of people I’ve met and didn’t like.” Listen to the chorus, however — “hard-headed (expletive) you all” — and you can see how Shepherd would have thought of Cobb. The real-life historical record of the Tigers great is slightly more complicated than the song, which is frenetic, aggressive and, in the words of Entertainment Weekly, “like metal bluegrass.”
11. “Barry Bonds,” Kanye West
In summer 2007, as West prepared for the follow-up to his genre-redefining records “The College Dropout” and “Late Registration,” Bonds entered the final stages of his summit on Hank Aaron’s home run record. A week after Bonds swatted No. 756, West revealed he had invited Lil Wayne into the studio to record a song commemorating the achievement, with the swollen slugger serving as an avatar for West’s gift for forging gems: “Here’s another hit — Barry Bonds.”
In a way, the song presaged the chaos that often accompanied West’s releases in the 2010s. The hype — Wayne had recently released “Da Drought 3,” and was at the height of his powers — did not exactly match the finished product. But it was still a good time.
10. “Go Cubs Go,” Steve Goodman
Music can serve as an act of communion, the connective tissue binding us. In a moment like this, it is hard not to feel the heartstrings tug when watching this video from the 2016 World Series. We long for those days to return — not just in Chicago, but everywhere — for the chance to share moments with others once more.

9.”Batter Up,” Nelly
The first image in the video for “Country Grammar” is the grin of Cornell Haynes, soon to be known to the world as Nelly, wearing a St. Louis Cardinals fitted beneath the Gateway Arch. He stomped into the public consciousness draped in the garments of his hometown. His charm was enough to coax a hit record out of his pals, the St. Lunatics. There are a variety of baseball metaphors in here, most of them crude. Nelly also vouches for the restorative power of Wheaties.
8. “Tessie,” Dropkick Murphys
“Tessie,” a 2004 song by New England punk band Dropkick Murphys, is a spiritual cover of a 1902 song, “Tessie (You Are the Only, Only, Only)” from the musical “The Silver Slipper.” The earlier “Tessie” was adopted as a rally song by the Royal Rooters, a fan club of the then Boston Americans, who became the Red Sox. The leader of the Rooters was a man named Michael T. McGreevy, a saloon owner who is a central character in Dropkick Murphys’ version of the song. The band recorded the track in 2004, and according to the liner notes from its 2005 album “The Warrior’s Code,” it told “anyone that would listen that this song would guarantee a World Series victory.” The Red Sox ended their 86-year-old drought that fall, coming back against the Yankees along the way, and “Tessie” is now synonymous with the franchise. The song was added as a bonus track to “Warrior’s Code” in 2005; the album also featured “I’m Shipping Up To Boston,” which is not about baseball but did provide Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon with one of the best entry songs in the sport’s history.
7. “Say Hey (The Willie Mays Song),” The Treniers
What better time than now to watch Ken Burns’ “Baseball”? You’ll hear this one in it. There is something soothing about hearing Claude and Cliff Trenier opine about “The Say Hey Kid” running the bases like a choo-choo train and making the turn around second like an aeroplane.
6. “Joe DiMaggio Done it Again,” Billy Bragg & Wilco
In 1998, British singer Billy Bragg and the band Wilco collaborated on an album called “Mermaid Avenue,” which took previously unknown lyrics from Woody Guthrie and put them to original music. The first album gave birth to the song “California Stars,” which became one of Wilco’s best-known songs. It also led to a “Mermaid Avenue Vol. II” in 2000, which included a song about Joe DiMaggio.
Just 2 1/2 minutes, “Joe DiMaggio Done It Again” chronicles a star in his final years. The lyrics, in fact, were reportedly written in 1949, when DiMaggio came back from a painful heel injury and hit .346/.459/.596 at 34, leading the Yankees to a World Series championship.
Wilco, of course, has associations with the city of Chicago, though front man Jeff Tweedy, a native of Belleville, Ill., is on record having grown up a Cardinals fan. 
5. “Piazza, New York Catcher,” Belle & Sebastian
Stuart Murdoch, the frontman of the Glasgow indie-folk band Belle & Sebastian, began following the Mets in the late 1990s when he joined a friend for a game at Shea Stadium. He instantly noticed catcher Mike Piazza. “That’s the thing about him,” Murdoch told Rolling Stone a few years ago. “He was a talisman wherever he went. He was the kind of player people tended to follow, and we thought he was a good guy.” The feeling eventually turned into the 2003 song, “Piazza, New York Catcher,” which features a reference to a Giants and Mets game in San Francisco, a playful nod to the Willie Mays statue outside the park, and a rather infamous line about a Piazza tabloid story that had played out in New York the previous year. In addition, there’s also a fifth verse in which Murdoch sings about Piazza’s exploits (“The catcher hits for .318 and catches every day”) and an unnamed pitcher who “puts religion first and rests on holidays.” The consensus, of course, is that the latter line is about Dodgers legend Sandy Koufax, and gazing at Baseball-Reference, the other line might be a Dodgers reference as well. Piazza only hit .318 in a season once, when he played in 149 games for the Dodgers in 1993, his first full season in the big leagues.
4. “All The Way,” Pearl Jam
A tribute to his childhood team (and conceived at the request of Ernie Banks), Pearl Jam’s Vedder debuted “All The Way” at a concert at Chicago’s Vic Theatre in August 2007, a warmup before a bigger show that week at Lollapalooza. The song had an official release the next year and became an instant staple in Cubs world, and in 2013, Vedder played the song during a summer concert at Wrigley Field, sharing its origins. “You know, the Cubs need a song,” Vedder recalled Banks telling him. “Wrigley Field needs a song. You know, all about the feeling and spirituality and the ballpark and the fans, and as he was saying it, I realized that — I wasn’t going to interrupt — but in my mind, I was thinking: that’s an impossible thing to do. It’s just too grand and too sacred. But it was his birthday, and when Ernie Banks asks you to do something … you go home and do it.”
3. “Talkin’ Baseball,” Terry Cashman
This song, objectively, slaps.
It also offers a tour through baseball history. Cashman wrote the song during the 1981 strike. He saw a picture of Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Duke Snider standing together in the outfield. The chorus for this song soon followed. Cashman strung together references to Ted Kluszewski and Dan Quisenberry, while managing to rhyme Roy Campanella with Bob Feller. It is quite charming.
The song tanked upon its initial release, but eventually found purchase among baseball fans. In 2011, the Hall of Fame invited Cashman to perform at the annual induction ceremony. Not bad for a song Cashman has said he wrote in 20 minutes.
Bonus points if you memorized all the words to “Talkin’ Softball” in your youth.
2. “Catfish,” Bob Dylan
In 1975, as Dylan was writing and recording many of the songs that would end up on his 1976 album, he wrote a bluesy number about pitcher Catfish Hunter, who had moved from A’s to the New York Yankees the same year.

Lazy stadium night
Catfish on the mound
“Strike three,” the umpire said
Batter have to go back and sit down
Catfish, million-dollar-man
Nobody can throw the ball like Catfish can

The song references his work on “Mr. Finley’s farm” and that the “old man wouldn’t pay,” so Hunter ended up in New York.
It is slow and brooding, and it would be covered by Joe Cocker, but it would not receive a proper Dylan release until 1991, when it ended up on

1. “Cubs in Five,” The Mountain Goats
Yes, another Cubs song. There is something about the Cubs and music. When the team returned to the World Series in 2016, I interviewed Darnielle about his song “Cubs in Five,” which originally appeared on the 1995 EP “Nine Black Poppies” and became a cult classic among Mountain Goats heads and people who enjoyed lo-fi indie rock. According to Darnielle, he became a Cubs fan during childhood after reading a story in My Weekly Reader. He followed the team from afar on WGN, and he wrote “Cubs in Five” while finishing up school at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. It is very much a Mountain Goats song — it includes guitar, bedroom-quality production, a harmony vocal with friend Peter Hughes and an incredibly memorable chorus.

“And the Chicago Cubs … will beat every team in the league, and the Tampa Bay Bucs … will make it all the way through January, and I will love you again, I will love you like I used to.”
In the song, Darnielle lists off a series of highly unlikely occurrences (“They’re gonna find intelligent life on the moon” or “Bill Gates will single-handedly spearhead the Heaven 17 revival.”) On the day he wrote it, he knew he had something. Darnielle has said “Cubs in Five” was actually about an on-again, off-again relationship that had gone south. Which wasn’t too hard to discern. But it was much like his connection with his favorite baseball team.

 He could never stay angry for long.
“Because that’s how it is when you’re a fan,” he wrote in a piece for Slate before the 2016 World Series. “You keep cheering, even when the circumstances might tell a less devoted partisan to seek out fairer pastures. You play nine innings. You keep hoping.”  

But the real number one is Take me out to the ballgame.....