Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1535: Leave Me Out, Coach

Episode Date: April 30, 2020

Ben Lindbergh, Sam Miller, and senior writer for The Athletic Andy McCullough banter about the people they would be (or have been) most nervous about interviewing and two new noteworthy articles, then discuss Andy’s and Rustin Dodd’s highly controversial ranking of the 30 greatest baseball songs of all time, the dispute about John Fogerty’s “Centerfield,” […]

All I had to do was take a swim I'd hit that thing Anybody could But I've been in long enough to know When it's no good. I've been in long enough to know when it's no good. It's no good Andy McCullough, national baseball writer at The Athletic. Andy, hello. Hey, what's up, guys? Not much.

We're going to be chatting with our pal Andy about an article that he and Rusty Dodd composed about the best baseball songs ever. An article that I didn't expect to enjoy. And I did. You are clearly not an athletic commenter. Ah, the comments are a bit... I assume we will spend more time on the comments than... Well, maybe on the articles. Before we get to that, though, two things,

two articles that have been published on the internet that I have things I want to mention about. One is an article I wrote. It was inspired. It was prompted by, instigated by an email from listener Mark, who discovered this odd factoid on a 1987 Don Mattingly card and wanted me to investigate it. And so I did. I'm very proud of how that one turned out. And I hope you'll check it out. That's up at ESPN right now. But in the process of investigating this mystery, I got the privilege of talking to a bunch of people who were in the baseball card industry in the late 80s and early 90s, which is when I was an avid baseball card collector.

I mean, I probably would say an obsessive baseball card collector. My number one hobby was collecting baseball cards. My number two hobby was sorting baseball cards. baseball cards. My number two hobby was sorting baseball cards. And so I talked to this guy, Phil Carter, who was the sports editor basically for Tops at the time. So Phil is the guy who produced these cards, these sets of baseball cards. So every year a new set would come out and I'd go buy packs for a year and get thousands of those cards and stare at them and memorize them and then sort them. And of course, people were producing those.

I never really thought about it, but people were producing those cards. And talking to Phil Carter, I was surprised to say, was a very profound and somewhat nerve-making experience. I felt like I was talking to a bonafide celebrity in my life, in my childhood, a person who had a huge impact in my life. And now if I talk to a baseball player, I do not feel that way, even though they're famous and very successful. If I even were to talk to a baseball player who was huge in my childhood, I don't think I would really care. I don't think I'd have any particular emotion about it. Even if it was like Willie Mays, I don't think I'd really care that much. I might just think, ah, Willie Mays, that's going to be good content.

But Phil Carter, I was totally moved by talking to Phil Carter. So I wanted to ask each of you, I assume each of you is also somewhat numb to the experience of talking to ballplayers, but is there anybody in the game, in the sport, in any aspect of the sport, that you think if you were to interview them, you would actually feel a little bit of sweaty palms? I think I've had that experience with some people, and I think it's generally writers, right? It's writers I really admire because that's what we do. And so maybe we admire them because we aspired to be writers. I didn't really aspire to be a baseball player.

I know you did at one point, but I think for me it was when I met Roger Angel, which happened on two occasions. happened on two occasions and neither time did I feel like I really nailed it or somehow conveyed how much I care about Roger Angel in a way that would somehow cut through the decades and decades of accolades he has received and the people who've come up to him and said I love your work I doubt I made an impression and he will always remember the the that I said, the compliment I said. But I walked up to him once at Yankee Stadium when he was there for Derek Jeter's last game. And I was there writing about it too. And I just sort of accosted him and said something awkward because it was one of those things where I didn't have anything to say, really. But I just felt like I would kick myself later if I didn't say something. So I just kind of went up to him and said,

hey, I really like you and walked away. I don't know exactly what I said, but that's what it amounted to. I didn't have some profound observation about his work. I didn't have a favorite passage that no one else ever quotes. And I read it back to him and he said, yes, that's the best sentence I've ever written. And no one else has quotes. And I read it back to him and he said, yes, that's the best sentence I've ever written. And no one else has recognized that that was the pinnacle of my power. So nothing memorable happened. And then another time I met him at this coffee club

he belongs to, this like private club that my great uncle also belongs to. And so I went and it was like a watch party for Thelma and Louise for some reason. They do movies. This is the most like old New York shit imaginable. Good lord. like Thelma and Louise. So he was giving some introductory remarks about the movie, and then we put the movie on. And he got very upset during the movie because the screen was too dark,

and it was very dark. They closed the blinds and everything, but it was still very hard to see, and especially in the indoor scenes, you just couldn't see anything. And so I just watched the whole movie with Roger Angel muttering about how it was too dark and being too annoyed that you couldn't actually see the movie. So he wasn't in the best mood, but then I went up to him and after and just said something innocuous. I think, again, I failed to say anything memorable or insightful. And this was specifically a social club. So unlike J.P. Stadium, where you're a fan accosting him, in this case, he is there to be greeted by others who are there.

Sort of. Like he's a member of this and it's like a, I don't know, like a gentleman's club. It's not just for gentlemen, I don't think. What? Gentleman's club, Ben. Do you know what that word means? Do you know what that word means? Not that kind, but, you know, like one of those old school clubs where gentlemen go to sit in libraries and read books and have liquor served to them and cigars. Did you go to a burlesque show with Roger Angel? You know, Thelma and Louise is rated R, so you and Roger Angel were watching adult movies. Oh, my God. you and Roger Angel were watching adult movies. Oh my god.

Anyway, it's something he belongs to, and I don't, but I had basically like a guest pass, because my great uncle goes there, and so I think it's not the type of place where you are generally accosted by fans who are just eager to greet you, because it's maybe kind of gauche to do that

at this club, because there are probably other literary figures there, and they probably don't want fans coming up to them all the time and expressing their admiration but I kind of broke that rule because it's Roger Angel so anyway I've tried to formally interview him a couple times including on this podcast and that hasn't worked out but I have talked to him twice and it was if anything embarrassing for both of us. You also wanted to get him to blurb our book, and our editor said we were not allowed to reach out to him. Didn't we? I thought we sent a... Wait, what?

Is that true? I thought we sent a copy. Our editor came up, our editor told us to come up with a list of people that we would like to reach out to for blurbs. And basically said, there are two tiers here. They're the ones that you actually have a relationship with, them, and then like the moonshots. And they said, we will only allow you to reach out to one moonshot candidate. Because there's something like there's, I don't know, I guess there's something sort of transactional in the requests for blurbs right and they don't want to like have like you they they basically don't want every author asking michael lewis because they want to have like a like a we're still cool kind of vibe with michael lewis and so they only let us reach

out to one and roger angel was not the one. But I think Ben secretly had like a courier service deliver the book to him. I somehow conveyed a copy to him. I think it may have been through my great uncle. I think he maybe just handed off a copy at that club when he was there. By the way, Wikipedia page for Gentleman's Club. A Gentleman's Club is a private social club originally set up by and for British upper-class men in the 18th century and popularized by English upper-class men and women in the late 19th century and early 20th

century clearly the primary meaning of the gentleman's club all right I went to gentlemen's club calm it hit immediately. I swear to God, it sent me to Chatterbait dot com. So I think you might be wrong. I can't top that, but I can try. I once followed Gary Smith into a bathroom because I thought it was him. And it was. This was like right after I graduated from college and i was working at the

star ledger and it was in uh the 2009 world series when the and i was writing sidebars when the yankees were playing the phillies and gary smith had lived in philadelphia for a long time and he had been i guess he was getting started on some of the the work related to well i guess this was no this i don't know he was just there for the world the work related to, well, I guess this was, no, I don't know. He was just there for the World Series or whatever. And I saw him in the press box and I was like, is that Gary Smith? You know, because like Gary Smith doesn't show up in press boxes. And so I just, he was like walking away.

And so I just like kept following him until he just walked into the bathroom. And I was like, well, I'll just go wash my hands or something. And so I didn't say anything to him until a couple of years when I met him but I went with a good line I said you probably don't hear this very often but I'm a big fan of your work and he smiled and chuckled he's a very nice man did you tell him you had previously followed him into a bathroom no that seems like maybe a third conversation yeah type thing I do think I would get a little nervous if i was talking to like hank aaron or willie mays or sandy koufax but i like maybe once a year i write about poker and i end up talking to poker players poker is like my number one uh hobby and i'm not very good at it

but i always like find myself like stretching my own poke like just trying to show them that i know what i'm talking about so they don't like treat me like a rube uh but it just sounds so embarrassing it'll be like do you play poker i'm like oh yeah i'm like yeah yeah yeah man i yeah i'm i'm pretty uh i'm i've been playing the five five game at the bike. And yeah, they're like, oh, that's cool. Yeah, I play 100-200. So it's just – it's so embarrassing. Like my interviews with poker players are on the one hand fascinating to listen back to because I feel I'm just like enraptured by everything they're saying because I find it so interesting. And just impossibly cringy hearing my own questions. So yeah.

Yeah. All right. Okay. Good. We've answered that one. hearing my own questions. So, yeah. All right. Okay, good. We've answered that one. I mean, I would be... Keep it together when you talk to Phil Carter? Yeah, he was great. He was a fantastic interview.

So Dave Jameson had written the book that I mentioned recently, A Mint Condition, which is about the baseball card industry and particularly during the junk wax era. And he had had a line in there, I mentioned that tops like basically wouldn't comment on anything because like they're kind of a famously closed off company and their line to him was something like, you know, we might want to write a book

someday too, you know? And so I was sort of, uh, this was a tops baseball card and I was kind of expecting to get nowhere, uh, withps employees. And then I just cold called Phil Carter and he like gave me two hours and told me all sorts of great junk. So he was great. It's fantastic. Great. The other article on the internet is that Pedro, Pedro Mora, author of the sack of flour article at the athletic that we had talked about the secondary aspect of that article that he that he had just he had discovered the roaming chicken in the same game and pedro solved the mystery of the chicken as well which it's great it's a great article we'll link to it and you should read it and you know he talks the person who smuggled the chicken

in and describes how the chicken was smuggled in and all of that. And it's great. But I just think that the lead is fantastic. So I'm going to read the lead of this article. It's like the first like five paragraphs, basically. On September 4th, 1971, 19-year-old Charlie Roberts invited a young woman on a date to Dodger Stadium. A group of his buddies from his hometown planned to sit in the right field bleachers that night. But Roberts thought better of subjecting bonnie to his friends one of them a 19 year old named paul eldridge was planning to unleash a rooster onto the outfield so roberts and bonnie drove and sat separately

from the rest of the redlands crew the evening was going well when roberts decided in the bottom of the fifth to try to impress his date by alerting her that something wild was about to happen from their loge seats down the third baseline he pointed toward the outfield where eldridge had just dropped the rooster below the wall just then a massive sack of flour fell from the night sky onto the infield leaving players shaken on the field a plume of smoke in the air and confusion in the stands how did you know that was gonna happen robert's date asked in shock he didn't he said he had told her to look to where the rooster was they did not go on many more dates i mean it's like it really you could imagine feeling like you were in a simulation

if those two things showed up so precisely as Pedro recounts I mean if there had been a chicken four innings earlier in the same game that would have made for a weird night at the park but the fact that they came so coincidentally is some like you know opening opening sequence in magnolia sort of a vibe yeah imagine being upstaged like that you smuggle in a rooster rooster at the very moment that you unveil a sack of flour falls from the sky yeah i'd feel so cheated furious all right we're gonna talk about music here andy and rustin dodd who's also at the athletic wrote a list of the 30 greatest baseball songs of all time and i'll spoil the ending which a a lot of people were shocked by, twist, which is that they

were not reading a 29 song buildup to Centerfield at number one. But in fact, Centerfield is nowhere on the list. I want to talk about the concept of baseball songs and how you guys came up with this list and what standards you use to decide where songs would rank because there's like a real definitional problem here not not problem but challenge not just with the word baseball songs but also with the word greatest which um you can see there's there's some sort of inconsistency from song to song and i wondered how you guys square that but let's just first talk about center field. You were accused in the comments. By the way, if you want to know the demographics of your readers, this is a great exercise because I'm sure that we all think that we're writing for people who are kind of like us,

kind of our age, kind of cool, like us. We imagine that we have a sort of an idea. like us like we imagine that we like we we have a sort of an idea normal guys who watch selma and louise roger angel and follow gary smith in the bathroom exactly and then you write this article and then you write this article and you realize that you know we're all every baseball writer every baseball writer is like writing for 80 boomers and they all came out to yell at you for disrespecting John Fogerty. Oh my God. Yeah. Actually, the point you just made is an editor at The Athletic, Casey Borowski, made the exact same point to me and she said something to the effect of, you know, one of the big challenges of our jobs is I just never know who we're writing for.

And she was like, well, now I know. Like Now we have a really good idea who reads our site. Yeah. I have to say, I've read many athletic articles. I'm a subscriber. I've read many of yours. And almost unfailingly, I will see that some of the comments say, this is why I subscribe to The Athletic. Yep. Every single one. This is... We're famed for having the nicest comments, actually. I have a running thread on Slack with a colleague where we just exchange these very happy athletic subscribers who just can't stop saying that this is exactly why they subscribe because we just can't believe.

Like I edited Baseball Perspectives, Sam did too, and we had great commenters. But I don't recall seeing that often that commenters would say, this article justifies my subscription. And yet every other athletic comment says that. And so we've speculated, are they stuffing the ballot box here? Are they somehow having fake commenters who are saying that this is why that this justifies the subscription? Anyway, I see that all over the place.

I think this is the first athletic article where I've seen the opposite in the comments. There's definitely been some other ones, but this was definitely the one with the lowest stakes. This was the one that seemed to upset people for no real reason. Like we weren't making a big point. We just, you know, that song just sucks. I have to ask, how much of your motivation for this ranking was the big reveal at the end of trolling everyone by omitting centerfield? So you guys aren't going to believe this because I guess people just don't believe this.

I don't even think we had a conversation about it. Like we started talking about this maybe a week or two before it came out. Rustin sent me a text, you know, something to the effect of like, you know, we're in contact all the time just, you know, talking about whatever. He was like, you know, it'd be like a stupid idea for a story, but maybe it could work. Like, why don't we like rank the best baseball songs?

And I was just like, yeah, whatever. Okay. Because like, you know, look, these are, I mean this in the non sort of like in the, obviously we're all exceedingly fortunate to be in the positions where are they were able to work from home and you know, our health is, we're not having to put ourselves at risk professionally and all that sort of stuff, all the necessary caveats. But like, these are desperate times in terms of trying to come up with story ideas, you know, it's not easy. So like you kind of have

to, you know, throw some shit against the wall and see what sticks. And this was definitely, you know, this was Russ's idea. Like, hey, you know, we should, we should rank baseball songs. Like, okay, yeah, well, let's, let's do it. And, you know, he came up with the initial master list

of like, I don't know, it was maybe like 60 or something like that. And like, we kind of started pairing it down. And I don't even think, and we did a lot of this over text. And I, we kind of started paring it down and I don't even think, and we did a lot of this over text. And I think maybe one of us texted the other, like, yeah, center field sucks, leave it off. And then just like moved on. Didn't think about it at all. Like there was no like, Whoa, we might get some blowback or like, do you think we should put in a caveat or man, I think like maybe we should let people know why it was just like no that song

sucks like whatever and then the the story came out and it was just like you know chaos but yeah i mean ben gibbard from death cab put it on instagram and congratulated us on graduate level trolling yeah a little vitriol in there which yeah which uh like i guess like that is the best kind of trolling when you just do it like naturally you know like when you like that's that's actual trolling is when you know you're not doing it on purpose maybe but yeah like it our motivation wasn't to talk about like how centerfield sucks we just kind of like we're trying to come up with a story idea and we both like the mountain goats what was was centerfield sucks we just kind of like we're trying to come up with a story idea and we both like the mountain goats what was was centerfield one of the 60 uh i think so yeah

but it was but then we're like yeah that song that song sucks do you think if you had done the top 60 would it have made it probably but but yeah but it also it would have been like number 57 and people would have been like mad about that. Yeah. A lot of people were mad though, that you didn't even mention that it wasn't an omission. Like, I think, I think if we could do it over again, there were two things that I would do over again. I would probably have another Steve Goodman song.

I think it's called like a dying, a Cubs fans last wish or whatever, which is actually a really good song. And we just, yeah, we biffed that one. We should have included it. But we already had Go Cubs Go because I think Go Cubs Go whips ass, but whatever. And then we probably just should have put in like a note about center field. So it didn't seem like that was the whole point

of the story was to just like not have it, you know? And I don't know know we probably could have would have pointed out that rustin and i both at different times covered the kansas city royals and before every spring training game at surprise stadium they play center field and it yeah you know causes some serious you know like negative memories uh when i every time i hear those compressed drums that's the thing i think i mean i feel sort of the same way about centerfield and we talked about this sam i think because i remember saying that it's overplayed and i'm sick of it and i don't really like it and didn't you sort

of defend it because i i mean i think if we could all just have the the neuralyzer from men in black and hear centerfield for the first time yeah we would probably say, oh, that's a pretty good song. I mean, it's catchy, certainly. It's got a hook. It's got weird phrasing. It's awkwardly I mean, the lyrics, some of the lyrics are awkward, but if I could forget the fact that I've heard it at every

ballgame I've ever been to and it's been seared into my brain and I'm sick of it and I never want to hear it again, I think it would at least be in my top 30, probably. I'm sick of it and I never want to hear it again, I think it would at least be in my top 30 probably. Yeah, I'm going to answer that. But first, I would like to say I'm reading the comments in full. And here's a great comment. Very incomplete list. How about take me out to the ballgame? I'm not sure of the actual title, but it's baseball's anthem played and sung at most baseball games. Seventh inning stretch.

Andy, how'd you give it off? What is this guided by voices when you could have done, take me out to the ball game or whatever its actual title is. I got an incredible DM from, yeah, by the way, what would it, what would his actual title be?

That's a good question of what, you know, but I got an incredible DM from, uh, from Riley Breckenridge of, uh, you know, thrice and Productive Outs who said, you should do a follow-up story, the worst songs about baseball, that's just center field and take me out to the ball game. I mean, that would have been, you know, that's graduate level trolling, I guess. Yeah, I kind of feel like a lot of the reason that people hate centerfield is the repetition like Ben says I also feel like it's partly so of all the artists on this list

John Fogerty is the best artist he would be the single best artist on this list if if he had written a baseball song well okay except I guess Paul Simon's on there Paul Simon's on there and Bob Dylan's on there I mean not to be super sports writer-y, but like Springsteen's good. All right, but Fogarty is an all-timer, right? Fogarty's like, Fogarty's certainly one of the 30 best guys who's ever written a song about baseball. That's true.

I feel like the fact that this is... He's probably five or so. Yeah, whatever. Anyway, I'm cutting you off. The fact that it's a 1980s production by a great artist from a, you artist, like a great recording artist, gives it a cheese factor that if it were written by somebody else on here, like Terry Cashman, friends.

I mean, let's be honest. You have number three is Talking Baseball by Terry Cashman. Have you listened to Talking Baseball lately? I'm not denying i'm not denying that talking baseball is a good song i am saying that terry cashman wrote a novelty song there's a line i was reading about this and there's a line in the terry cashman wikipedia page while the song is well recognized today it was all but ignored by typical top 40 radio during its chart. Like, yeah, it's a trash song.

I like it. It's sort of cute and it hums, but it's not a good song, right? Like if John Fogerty had written both Centerfield and Talking Baseball, we would hate Talking Baseball way more than we hate Centerfield. The nice thing about Talking Baseball baseball it's endlessly adaptable so you get talking softball and you get the team specific versions of talking baseball so everyone gets their version i think yeah you've ever you've never heard put me in coach i'm ready to play second base i mean they've got one for every position ready to i can be second base i can be be offensive tackle. Designated hitter. There's one for all to every sport.

Sam, I think that there is a fact that- You're conflating John Fogerty's incredible output with this garbage song. No, no, no, no. I'm saying that it is the fact that we know that John Fogerty is way better than this, that we are angry that this song exists as arguably his most recognizable and most played song and so that's not a terrible thing like everybody's like you know Bob Dylan's very lucky that he wrote Catfish in 1975 and not 1985 because whatever production was happening to Bob Dylan music in 1985

would have also been like all time bad. And yet, you know, the chords would be the same. And there is a hook in that song. I don't hate it. Although I hate it a lot more now than I did the first time I heard it. It's not a song that I'm like dying to hear again. But so this goes though to the question, part of the question too, which is, did you and Rustin have any conversation about the value of the song versus the actual connection to baseball? Because like talking baseball, again, not a good song. Exactly. But it is very much about baseball. And other songs on here are good songs, and they're not at much about baseball. And other songs on here are good songs,

and they're not at all about baseball. Some of them are like the Sam Miller baseball movie applied to music. Yeah, like the Strokes song in here is not about the Mets at all. It's just called Ode to the Mets. And there's nothing about baseball in it at all. The Fall Out Boy song has absolutely nothing.

The lyrics do not include the title. It just has a baseball title. You have the Kanye song, Barry Bonds, which is just a pun on the word hit. And that's it. That's the entire use of baseball. And that's sort of a challenge. I mean, really, the number one song, the John Darnell song, is Cubs in Five. And that's one line about baseball

now i will say that it is by far the best line like musically like the high point of that song is when when he says chicago you know uh so like that it is i i think that qualifies i think all these qualify but i'm just wondering if if this was like kind of like there were two inputs and you tried to sum the inputs. So like better song, but less baseball or worse song, but lots of baseball. Did you talk about that? I suppose I could give a long answer to kind of unwind it, but no. Yeah.

I mean, we tried. Yeah, like I don't, we didn't really think about it on like a metatextual level i guess i think it was more it is a baseball card so like i was talking to it like feel you know the supreme court definition of pornography a couple of days before this ran i had actually been having a conversation with patrick dubuque who was talking about how there are no good baseball songs. And that has always baffled him. And so he wrote, he wrote, I can't figure out why this would be if Sufjan Stevens can write a song about Adlai Stevenson. I feel like someone in 2020 could sit down for a couple

hours and put together something about Lou Whitaker and Alan Trammell is take me out to the ballgame. So definitive a piece of music that other baseball songs have to sound like it? Or is it just that lyrically sports don't fit into the way most people write? I'm trying to think about sports songs in general. And the only one leaping to my head is This Sporting Life by the Decembrists. And I suggested that I said if someone I actually said if someone were to put together a list of the best baseball songs, I bet Mrs. Robinson would end up number three because it says the name joe dimaggio yeah and so you didn't include mrs robinson you did include a fallout song boy song that just uses

an illusion of uh so how did you paradise by the dashboard light that's not a baseball song well so paradise okay so we go to dude these are desperate times like like we're trying we're churning man trying to like come up with content like fuck there's no games so paradise by the dashboard light is uh basically it's like a like a seven minute song one one movement of that song is some voice in non-singing is like giving play-by-play to a baseball game. Phil Rizzuto, yes. Oh, okay. And that's a minute and a half of literal baseball being described. But it's also the very worst part of that song.

That's what I was going to say, yeah. Aesthetically, it's awful. So how did you, what did you throw out? I guess. What did you decide was not a baseball song? That's that Ramones song, Beat on the Brat, where he says beat on the brat with a baseball bat. Yeah.

What about Louisville Slugger by Eazy-E? No, that one didn't make it. The Beastie Boys song that referenced Sad sadahara oh sure but you did have you did have man here's another hit barry bonds yeah but that song's called barry bonds and i think and kanye i don't know i was reading like dude for this i was like reading like mtv.com articles from like 2008 and like you know watching p Wentz like videos with you know like alt-press like I was getting super deep into you know internet 2.0 culture on this one maybe 3.0 whatever yeah the Barry Bonds thing I guess there's like the idea was that you know bonds was the best hitter in

the world and you know that that's how far this this hit with Lil Wayne was gonna go it was gonna go Barry Bonds distance you know, that's how far this hit with Lil Wayne was going to go. It was going to go Barry Bonds distance, you know. Yeah. And there's some good songs that have baseball related lyrics, but you would not think of them as baseball songs like the like for the turnstiles, the Neil Young song from On the Beach and the last verses. What all the Bush League batters are left to die on the diamond and something else in the stands, the home crowd scatters for the turnstiles. I don't really think of that as a baseball song, and it doesn't come to mind when I think of baseball songs. But even that, that's an explicit baseball reference. It's a verse.

If you had put baseball in the title more explicitly, we might think of it as a baseball song. Yeah, I mean, if I remembered that song existed, it might have been like number four on this list. So you guys wrote this with an intro about how baseball and music go together. And like you've got this argument that the quote, the marriage between music and baseball dates more than a century. The attraction, John Darnell says, is simple. We all die. We all consider our own mortality. And athletes, they get old.

The implication is that you have found 30 good songs here, 30 good baseball songs here. And could you have rewritten this article with a intro that was all baseball songs are trash and here are 30 examples? You have a job, right? Your job is working for espn all right you like you don't need to edit the athletic all right pal uh yes i mean they're look i i did not expect this story to be um such a uh an aesthetic uh what's it called a firebrand or third rail yeah yeah i mean we really like you know i i did not expect this to be a talker as it were i think it's because because you called it or someone called it the 30 greatest baseball songs of all time

andy and rustin's list of 30 songs here are 30 songs that we just thought of when we were texting no i mean i'm i'm being a little more uh you know facetious i guess because you guys are my friends and but fuck i mean you know we're like we're just trying to come up with content you know to like keep every this is these are hard times yeah yeah we could have we probably if i if i would do it over again yeah there are three things now that i would change i'd add the a dying cubs fan or cubs fans whatever the fucking song's called uh would have put in a caveat about center field and we probably would have noted something in the intro about how songs about baseball actually would have noted something in the intro about

how songs about baseball actually aren't all that great. The problem is, you know, we're trying to draw eyeballs into our work and if we write a story that says, hey, here's the 30 best baseball songs, you should know this going in though. All these songs suck and you're not going to like any of them. And not only that, we left off the one you're thinking of. So please subscribe to The Athletic. It's a really good site.

It'll help you. You can read Ken Rosenthal. Night Game by Paul Simon is a masterpiece. That's a weird fucking song, man. That is a weird song. And yet number 20 behind the cheap seats by Alabama, which again, I'm trying to figure out how you sorted these. Did you give Alabama credit for being literal or what?

I think the main thing I said is we should have Go Cubs Go higher on the initial list and that we should have whatchamacallit and that Talking Baseball should be higher and Cubs and Five should be number one. Yeah, that's – yeah. Yeah, well, the rankings are maybe the least interesting part because I heard Joe Posnanski talk on his podcast about his Baseball 100 series where he just basically wrote War and Peace over the course of like four months where he just wrote essays about the 100 best baseball players and he had to order them and he had sort of a formula that was kind of war-based and he made some adjustments but he also just like stuck some guys in at certain numbers because it was their uniform number like he didn't take the

rankings all that seriously because he didn't want to devote large parts of his essays to explaining why he ranked someone here or why someone else was higher. And he didn't want to have to ding guys and say, well, this guy is lower than that guy because he didn't do this or that. He wanted to sort of celebrate what made them good and interesting. There was a war in every comment section about how this guy is 37 and that other guy is 39 or something. And I guess that just comes with the territory. And really, that's the appeal of this format. It almost presupposes that there is some objective hundred best, that there is some truth that we could access if we were just honest or diligent enough about it. And there is no way to do that. We're just honest or diligent enough about it. And there is no way to do that. But of course, that's the appeal of it is just the argument, the bar room kind of argument where you're saying this guy is better than that guy and someone else is going to argue

about that and they will click to hate read your ranking and hopefully they'll just enjoy the essay. But I guess that is part of it here. Like you had to decide this and it's song preference. It's so subjective and everything. And I could see if you maybe gave a bump to some songs that were worse songs but more baseball-y. Like if the baseball-ness of it was integral to the ranking, then maybe you could put Alabama higher than Paul Simon even though the song is worse. But it's more explicitly about

baseball. Give it some extra credit for that. I kind of thought the reaction to this story was going to be most people didn't care because no one cares about most things everyone writes. And then, you know, five people would say like, hey, cool, thanks for the music recommendations. And instead it was hundreds of people just all telling us to go to hell every person who signed up for joe's baseball 100 project and was brought into the site immediately tried to cancel their subscription out of you know fury yeah no i mean i think you know yeah by by nature if you do a list of something, you're just asking to upset someone. That's what's going to happen is that if you rank things, you will inevitably do things that get stuff wrong.

So I did one that was like the best players to wear every number. And I said that Carlton should be 32 and not sandy koufax which like whatever it's you know like either one's fine but there were people who were not thrilled with that decision yeah you know so you just i mean look we serve at the behest of the readers and you know i i genuinely you know enjoy the interactions uh with readers and i didn't take this one too seriously because the stakes are just so low I was just surprised that man people love that song people people love that song yeah I guess they do I don't know if it's just like a Pavlovian thing where you have to include centerfield because it's omnipresent there is something where like some of these songs are maybe not

great songs but they're part of like the culture. They're part of the experience of baseball. And so that kind of confers some sentimental attachment to them. If they were about something else and you didn't hear them at ball games at a time when you're treasuring the experience already and you're happy to be at the ballpark and this is a thing you like, then I think there's kind of a grace that's given to those songs. There's like a halo effect where we all love the song because it's about baseball and we love baseball. And if you just changed all the words, we would never listen to that song. But it's part of the culture, American fabric, and national pastime and our upbringing and formative years and all of that. national pastime and our upbringing and formative years and all of that.

I remember having an interaction on Twitter about 10 years ago where I tweeted something like, there's no way to make a bad song that has hand claps. If it's got hand claps, it's going to be a good song. And somebody, actually it was Matt Welch, who is an Angels fan and is, I think, the editor in chief of Reason magazine at the time replied Centerfield. And I think maybe what this song comes down to is that roughly half of the world believes that you can't ruin a song that has hand claps, that it has hand claps. It is therefore awesome. Like all hand clap songs are good because all hand claps are good and then the other half say hand claps are not enough this song is is otherwise trash and hand claps cannot save it so i uh i don't know i i do kind of feel like the handclap saved the song uh ah yeah i uh i i disagree um but you know one man's trash is another man's treasure

and uh a lot of folks treasure this song i would like to say thank you for two two musical recommendations though that are in here that I was appreciative of. One, the song Mickey Mantle by the singer, I guess, Waters. That song's a jam. I like it. And I hadn't heard it before. And then the Joltin' Joe DiMaggio by Les Brown and his orchestra.

That is wonderful. What a song. Yeah. You've never heard that song before? I had never heard that song before. Yeah, that's a real documentary. Yeah, there's a lot of like, have I heard this in a Ken Burns documentary before? You know, feel all those songs.

Yeah. Yeah, there's another one of those that you snubbed, I think, the Count Basie song. Did you see Jackie Robinson hit that ball? Kind of in that genre. Very catchy. Ben and I were part of a group effort at Baseball Perspectives about 10 years ago where we were all asked our favorite baseball song. And neither my pick nor Ben's pick made your list. Ben, do you remember what your pick was?

No, I have no idea. It was Baseball Boogie by Mabel Scott. Oh, okay. Which you then what? Wrote a whole article about, right? Did I? Maybe you didn't. Maybe this was after you'd written your sheet music article.

Oh, right. Ben had a phase where he was really into double entendre in old baseball music. Oh, no. And so this Baseball Boogie was part of that. Yeah. Mine was Walter Johnson by Jonathan Richman. Yeah, we should have included that one. Yeah.

It's a good song. Yeah. You don't like it. There's a Jonathan Richman Fenway song. It's not really a baseball song, but it mentions baseball. It's like about the neighborhood that I think is pretty good. But the Walter Johnson song. So for the most part, though, like we're talking about, there's like, there's sort of like

four kinds of song on here. I would say there's the one where the baseball is extremely tangential and where it's only a baseball song in the sense that it's an American song and American songs will take little parts of American iconography of which which baseball is it, part of it, and therefore a baseball reference gets in the song. Those aren't really baseball songs, although they're perfectly legitimate for your purposes here. And then there's the extremely baseball songs, and those songs are generally not very good here, but there might be good emotional connections to them because we like baseball and they're about baseball. And then there's the baseball novelty songs of which, like, Take Me Out to the Ballgame is one.

But, you know, so is Jolt and Joe DiMaggio. And, you know, so is the meatloaf song that we were talking about where, like, it's spoken word baseball or it's really it's a novelty song. And then there's the occasional actual song that's actually about baseball. Although, you know, usually more in a metaphorical sense, but Cubs in Five is kind of one of those and Night Game is one of those. Is it just unrealistic to think that you can write a song

that is explicitly about baseball and kind of consistently about baseball, not just one line as a passing metaphor, but about baseball all the way through with baseball players named and all that without immediately becoming a dorky novelty song? I mean, I think it depends on the subject matter. I think if you were, you know, writing a song about, you know, being a young kid and, you know, you wake up in the morning and the Sun comes out you know there's new grass on the field you know you're you're thinking about playing the game you know round and third and heading for home and

then when you're on your way you know you see a brown-eyed handsome man you know I think anyone can understand the way that you would feel if you were writing a song about that you know if you were writing a song about you know sort of the universal like sort of how the you know the um the the specific is universal you know because everyone can relate to that feeling of when you go to your coach and you say put me in coach i'm ready to play i'm ready to play. I'm ready to play today. You put me in coach. I'm ready to play today. I'm not only ready to play this position.

I am ready to become this position. I've been eating center field for breakfast. You know, here's a good song. There's a good song about baseball. My Slumbering Heart by Rilo Kiley. Do you know that one? good song there's a good song about baseball my slumbering heart by rilo kylie do you know that one i what is that about baseball in my dreams i see myself hitting a baseball in a green field somewhere near a freeway i'm all tan and smiling and running from third base wow what record is that on execution of all things that's a great song yeah but again it's it's about baseball for four lines in one verse.

I just, I don't know that you can do it without being, becoming too specific. There are no good songs about sports. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's just not, they're not, they're not like, there are good songs that are used in sports, but it's just very difficult to you know to write uh i mean is there a good song about football that fountains of wayne song that everybody was flipping out about uh last you know a week or two ago about the quarterback in the pocket yeah that's okay that's one that you know we were talking about for unfortunate reasons you know like it's it's a good song but yeah i mean um there's no good songs about for unfortunate reasons you know like it's it's a good song but

yeah i mean um there's no good songs about basketball well and adam schlesinger is like a you know it took a total genius to write one right right it takes like a you know a freak of nature who could write a great song about anything in order to do it i mean it's kind of the same way that john darnell you know wrote a great song about baseball it It's because it's John Darnell. Yeah, I'm more of a melody man than a lyrics man, generally. Maybe even more of an instrumentation man. Hi, Mr. Angel. My name's Ben Lindberg.

I consider myself a melody man. That's not the name of someone at the Gentleman's Club where we met. I just, I think, you'd think like I'm a writer. I appreciate wordplay. I might care about lyrics, but there are a lot of songs with terrible lyrics that I still love because I can sing along to them.

And often you can't even understand the lyrics. Sometimes it's hard to even tell what they are. And I still love the song. And it almost like distracts me from the music itself, whatever experience I'm having with the music on some kind of visceral level, if I'm also paying attention to the words. And there are exceptions. Of course, there are lyricists I like a lot in songs where lyrics are very important. But on the whole, if you had to give me great lyrics or great music, I'm going to go with the music every time. And so I'm not really giving

that much extra credit for the baseball content of these songs, even though I like words and I like baseball. And you'd think that I'd be really inclined to love those songs if the music's not there. It's just not going to do it for me. I'm not going to give you a pass because it's a baseball song. And I don't know whether sometimes people set out to write a baseball song. And so they're starting with the lyrics and maybe it's less organic because they're trying to fit the music around the lyrics. I don't know whether that happens or whether it's just hard to access like the pathos of sports or something when you're writing a song. I don't know what it is, but somehow it just almost makes it seem very mundane and humdrum when you're writing about sports in a song. And it just often

doesn't do it for me. Yeah, there's a song on the list by Peter, Paul, and Mary. And I didn't know that song and I went to watch it. And it is explicitly about baseball. It's called right field and it's all about playing right field and feeling like a loser because you're in right field. But you can tell that even they consider it, like they're singing it with a sort of goofy novelty song facial expression the whole time. You can really tell they're not taking it seriously in the way that they take hammers seriously and

dragons seriously yeah i think probably the only good baseball song is talking baseball and that might be like explicitly anti-labor uh or at least implicitly anti-labor uh so you know, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I have a couple quibbles here I will mention that are not related to centerfield. So I think that you have the wrong baseball project song on here. That's my opinion. You have to have some baseball project, obviously on a list of baseball songs, but you don't want to go too heavy on baseball projects. So you have, don't call them Twinkies, which is the collaboration with Craig Finn, the Hold Steady. And I'm not really a Bruce guy, and I'm not really a Hold Steady guy. And I think they're better Baseball Project songs. I think Ted Fucking Williams is a great Baseball Project song, and the Kurt Flood song that they have, Gratitude for Kurt Flood. Really, that whole first Baseball Project album is really very good.

And that's tough when your whole reason for being a band is that you're writing about baseball and you love baseball. That limits you a little bit in terms of the content of your song. And I do think that their best album is their first. And there are other people who have baseball-specific bands, like the Isotopes, the punk band. They've got some good stuff. And I guess I would have liked to see a Dan Byrne song on here. Dan Byrne is sort of like a Dylan-esque kind of singer-songwriter,

and he's written a couple baseball albums. He wrote a whole baseball album called Doubleheader that's just all baseball songs and some very good ones like Ballpark, for instance. So I don't know. I might put him on here just because he tried really hard. He wrote a lot of baseball songs. I'd be pretty demoralized if I had devoted entire albums to writing baseball songs and I couldn't get one on the top 30 given how bad that they are in general he also has some baseball songs on non-baseball albums which yeah i think there's something that i'm not sure those

songs are better than the ones on the baseball album but i kind of discount the baseball album ones a little bit as being too much about baseball like if you were to ask me what's your favorite song about Michigan? I would feel a little bashful taking it from the Sufjan Michigan album. You know, like it just seems a little too on the nose. Yeah. That's maybe that's the problem with baseball songs in general.

Just too on the nose. Yeah. One of the challenges here is that you would, I mean, you would like to have some hip hop on here because it's, you know, the dominant music over the past three decades. But very few songs.

There are a lot of like rap lyrics that refer to baseball players or refer to baseball things. But but I mean, it would be I mean, it would be hard to write a good baseball rap as Ken Griffey Jr. and Kid Sensation demonstrated. as Ken Griffey Jr. and Kid Sensation demonstrated. But I think that maybe the one exception is that the Wale song, MVP, is pretty close to actually about baseball, and it's a good song, so I would have put that on here. Yeah, and there used to be a ballpark, which is pretty maudlin. I might not put that on this list, even though I'm a Sinatra guy,

but I think maybe some damn Yankees. I don't know. Maybe You Gotta Have Heart could crack the list. It's a pretty good song. I'm not a big show tunes person, but I'd give that credit. And I think Van Lingo Mungo. I'd definitely put Van Lingo Mungo on here, the song by Dave Frishberg, because that song, it's a pretty good song. And it's also basically remembering some guys the song. He's just like naming names of old baseball players. It's a combination of remembering some guys and like looking up funny names on baseball reference and then setting it to pretty good music. So I think that's probably deserving. I don't know, maybe Meet the Mets, if you're going to go for a team-centric song, which are almost universally horrible. But Meet the Mets, that's pretty catchy, I think. And I don't know, the Todd Snyder song, America's Favorite Pastime, the song about Doc Ellis. Good Lord, how many?

That's a pretty good song. I will say, speaking of looking for content and being desperate, I recently thought maybe I'll write an oral history of Scott Stapp's Marlins Will Soar. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I would read the hell out of that. Yeah. contact his publicist to ask if I could speak to Scott Stapp because I don't really know how this song came together. I think I remember hearing somewhere that like Jeffrey Loria like ran into Scott Stapp in an airport or something and somehow a song came out of that and I guess Scott Stapp was a Marlins fan so he wrote this just you know so bad it's good anthem for the Marlins who have not soared since. And I think he adapted one of his existing songs and just set Marlins lyrics and, you know, like the most simplistic lyrics you could imagine in the inimitable Scott Stapp pronunciation that no one else has ever said words that way. So, you know, it's like double play.

No one would say double play except for Scott Stapp. Anyway, I contacted his publicist and she was like, I'm going to have to pass on celebrating that anniversary because there's no way to discuss this without it being at Scott's expense. Well, that's a good publicist. Yeah, I can't really argue with that. There's no way that Scott Stapp is going to come out of this article looking better, really. I mean, the more we all forget about Marwan Sulsor, probably the better for Scott Stapp.

I know all of the lyrics to that song off the top of my head. Do it. Perform it for us. Are we going to do it? Are we going to do it together? I don't think I have the legs committed to memory. You don't? Let's play ball.

It's game day. We want strikeouts, base hits, double plays. Take the field. Hear the roar of the crowd. Now, come on, you guys, come on, come on Come on, Marlins, make us proud Yeah, yeah, keep hoping and dreaming And you will soar

Keep hoping and dreaming and you will soar With a little faith and luck you will so yeah yeah um one strike two strikes swing away catch a stolen base yeah perfect game a triple play yeah yeah that's some good shit yeah two points quickly the best song about michigan is ball with a ball and uh one song that we did not include but we did link to that i genuinely love is d-back swing by roger klein and the peacemakers that's what the d-backs play after they win uh it's great. It's an earworm. Like, yeah, if you've ever, you know, covered a game at Chase Field,

like I got to the point near the end of my time on the beat where I would just openly root for the D-backs to win. So I could hear D-backs swing as I was walking down to the clubhouse. It's a great tune. All right. I really liked the song The Way by Fastball. Does that qualify? Love that song. yeah uh you forgot the

best baseball song sweet caroline and also enter sandman well i yeah i wondered if a song could be so affiliated with baseball like could like i that i just when when i saw bruce springsteen the first thing i thought was was no was this train you know like if you're if you're the if you're the official song if you're the official song of the postseason right exactly is light a mup mup mup a baseball song if you're gonna go with the

definitely yeah when I think about light and mups I exclusively think about baseball but then you could say like Dane Cook saying there's only one Octoberober is a baseball song you know yeah so no i think it just would have been then we would have been more like sweet caroline is a jock jam you know like i think there's a difference between songs about baseball and jock jams i think you could definitely get 30 jock jams, you know, the 30 best usages of music, you know, in sports or whatever. Like, yeah, that, that would be,

then there would be a little bit of overlap. Like maybe like go Cubs go would make that list, but yeah, like I think it's a different category. All right. I did like this. I thought it was great. Good. That makes one of the three of us who did all right what will your next project with rustin be he'll rank the i'm never working with him again man he's that guy's got terrible taste i told him i said yeah you should have blamed it on him you you tried valiantly to get center field in and Russ said over my dead body. I wish we had actually had a serious conversation about it. Did you?

Seriously, though, genuinely, did you average your votes together or did you just pick? I'm going to write about this one and we're on number 24. I'm going to write about this one. He sent me a list and said, how does this look? And I was like, move this here, move that there, move this here. Okay. And yeah. All right.

Okay. Yeah. All right. Well, you gave us all something to argue about. So thank you. Thank you guys. How are you guys doing? Are you doing okay?

Pretty good. Yeah. Not bad. Good. Okay. Good. Hang in there. All right.

And speaking of baseball songs, if you're interested in listening to or downloading any of the Stat Blast song covers that we've been playing song and the time Sam sang the intro song by himself, acapella, and the time someone remixed Sam's acapella intro. All of that is online for you to access. I also just polled our listeners in the Facebook group because I was curious about how their listening habits had been affected by the pandemic and by the way it's shaken up all of our lives and routines. So I asked regular listeners in our Facebook group to choose from one of five options. They are listening less than

usual during these strange times and they're planning to catch up later. They're listening less than usual and they're not planning to catch up. They're listening as much as usual, but at different times. They're listening as much as usual at the same times or they're listening more than usual. And as I record this, about 1,300 people have voted. And so far, the leader is listening less than usual, planning to catch up later. About 30% of people have chosen that. About 27% have chosen listening less than usual, not planning to catch up. Sad, but I can't blame you.

I'm falling behind on some podcasts myself. About 25% chose listening as much as usual, but I can't blame you. I'm falling behind on some podcasts myself. About 25% chose listening as much as usual, but at different times. About 14% chose listening as much as usual at the same times, so their routine has not been disrupted. And then about 4% chose listening more than usual. So that's not bad. About three quarters of the people surveyed are either still listening as much as usual or more than usual, or they're planning to catch up once they're able to listen more. So that's encouraging. Of course, this is sort of a selective sample. This is people who are members of our Facebook group and are regular listeners. But it is nice to hear that so many of you are sticking with us, even though you may not

have a commute, even though you may have kids to take care of 24-7, even though you have a spouse or a partner, possibly. You are hopefully not quite as likely to tune out as you care of 24-7. Even though you have a spouse or a partner, possibly, you are hopefully not quite as likely to tune out as you are your co-workers. So if you're still finding time for the podcast, and a lot of people posted about how they're finding time and the way that they've squeezed it into their routines, I appreciate that. And if it's brought you any distraction or entertainment or comfort

during this difficult time, I am very happy about that. I also want to tell you about an upcoming event this Friday, May 1st at 3 p.m. Eastern. Travis Sochik and I will be doing kind of a live video discussion of our book, The MVP Machine, which just came out recently in paperback with a new afterword. So if you want to submit some questions that we will answer live, you can do so now. It's through an interface called Crowdcast that our publisher set up. I will link to that on the show page as well and in the Facebook group.

So you can go in now and get your questions in and you can hear us and see us answer again Friday, May 1st, 3 p.m. Eastern. You can also support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up to pledge some small monthly amount and get themselves access to some perks. Sean McLaughlin, Daniel Enden, John Moore, KDB, and Tom Ahn. Thanks to all of you. You still have

time to sign up for May if you'd like to support the podcast. And thanks to all of you who have rallied around the podcast and fan crafts at what is a challenging time for a lot of people, both personally and professionally. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcast at Fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. And we will be back with one more episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. It doesn't matter if it's sunshine or cold There's nothing wrong, the game goes long Cause I'm sticking around to the fine linen

Yeah, I'm sticking around to find Lennon. Yeah, I'm sticking around to find Lennon. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. Here we go.