Eight songs I never want to hear at the ballpark again

As noted in a blog post last year, one of the perils of holding season tickets for a Major League Baseball team is that by the end of the season you’ve gotten a thorough dose of all the franchise’s between-innings entertainment gimmicks. The Hot Dog Derby. The Wee Tyke Home Run Challenge. The Shrieking Host Trivia Game. And most of all, any song that gets played on a regular basis.

Even a song you like turns stale after it’s played over and over. Further, at Kauffman Stadium – home of the perpetually cellar-dwelling Kansas City Royals – the combination of a good song and a heapin’ helpin’ of rotten baseball can turn into a Ludovico Treatment experience.

If such a thing can happen to a good piece of music, then songs that were nerve grating to begin with … well, consider these eight specimens.

 

Centerfield – Dreadful songwriters everywhere take note: if you have nothing but bad music in your soul but still want to share your “gift” with the world, just stick a baseball reference into your work somewhere. Sing about being an all-star, or making the batter swing, or similar cliché. Back in the early 80s a talentless hack named Terry Cashman not only wrote a bad song about the sport – “Talkin’ Baseball” – but also adapted it with a different version for each MLB team. Now that’s marketing genius.

The all-time champ of this trick is former CCR front-man John Fogerty. “Centerfield” is the most goshawful parade of random clichés ever set to music. Honestly, this song could have been written by jotting baseball items – the sights and smells of summer, the names of some great players, references to “The Mighty Casey” and the like – onto index cards, shuffling them and putting pen to paper. Baseball fans are a sentimental lot, liable to go all teary-eyed over any reference to our beloved pastime. But surely we aren’t too simple minded to see through schlock like this. 

And if it was just ill-informed schlock, that might have been endurable. But Fogerty waves his ignorance around like a mascot with a victory banner after a home team win. The second verse is the main source of offense. It starts with the crap about Casey. Then it goes on to say “Say hey, Willie, tell Ty Cobb.” Even mentioning Willie Mays in the same breath with the virulent white supremacist Cobb is enough to toss the whole mess in the trash forever. But just to emphasize that he has no idea what he’s even singing about, he pronounces the racist bastard’s name “Tee.”

The final line in the verse is “Don’t say it ain’t so, you know the time is now.” Once again the songwriter’s stupidity rears its ugly head. I imagine a young fan looking up at Shoeless Joe Jackson and pleading “Don’t say it ain’t so, Joe.” Somewhere in that double negative, the tyke is begging his hero for assurance that he was indeed neck deep in a gambling scandal. Stupid stupid stupid.

The Boys of Summer – Taking the “baseball reference” thing one step farther, it turns out you don’t even have to make the song about the game. Just adding a familiar phrase or two is apparently enough to get your crap played at the ballpark. Take Eagles alum Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer.” This song has nothing to do with baseball. But because “boys of summer” is by sheer coincidence also a reference to baseball players, we have to spend season after season listening to Henley whine about getting old.

The Summer of 69 – And here’s another one. The Kansas City Royals franchise was founded in 1969, so maybe we’re the only ones who get stuck with this (or perhaps it plays in Queens as well in honor of the “Miracle Mets”). So Bryan Adams misses being a shiftless teenager? What the hell does that have to do with baseball?It isn’t even nostalgia for adolescence in 1969, when Adams was nine years old (and on that basis you can probably figure out for yourself what the number actually refers to).

Crazy Train – This Ozzy Ozborne tune has even less to do with the game than the last two put together. Indeed, if it didn’t start with Ozzy yelling “All aboard!” it would have no relevance at all. However, those first two words make in ever-so-mildly apt when the situation calls for the home fans to gloat because their team just loaded the bases. It’s a small silver lining on a big, dark cloud for Royals fans, because this happens so seldom that we don’t have to endure the song too frequently.

The home run theme from The Natural – At least this one has a legitimate baseball connection. The folks in the booth tend to play it at the obvious moment: as a player is rounding the bases after hitting one out of the park. This wouldn’t bother me at all except for one thing. Back in 1999 Royals great George Brett was selected for the Baseball Hall of Fame. They hyped his induction heavily that summer, and the plugs included this tune in the background. Thus in my mind it’s associated with the team’s glory days. Listening to it after some expensive free agent has-been or I-29 ping-pong ball accidentally clears the fences is bittersweet with emphasis on the former.

And now we come to the real heart of the problem. The franchise makes a little money from people who show up to watch the game. The family fun zone draws out a few more customers. But after observing crowd behavior at the ballpark for nearly 40 years now, I’ve reached a conclusion about which I am quite certain: the primary source of revenue for the Kansas City Royals is the mob of beer-swilling mooks who treat the ballpark as a giant, expensive bar with an outrageous cover charge.

Here class warfare rears its ugly head (not that drunken assholism is limited to a single class). I respect the right of the lumpenproletariat to listen to their music of choice while consuming their beverages of choice. But in a large public venue such as a stadium, some accommodation should be made for those of us who don’t care for redneck drinking screed any more than we want to hear the Phelps cult’s opinions about homosexuality. I’m willing to put up with at least some songs I don’t like because they may give pleasure to those around me. But a few cross a line that shouldn’t be that hard to draw. These final three, for example.

Sweet Home Alabama – If Alabama was the entire United States, this would be our national anthem. It’s geographically inappropriate in a world that includes plenty of songs about Kansas City, the Show Me State and the Sunflower State (hell, there’s an entire band named after Kansas). But for the most part it’s a relatively inoffensive little tune.

When it isn’t being highly offensive, that is. I care less than nothing about an ideological feud between the likes of Neil Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd (aside from the suggestion that if someone makes a legitimate criticism of your state that sometimes it’s better just to take the hit). But a couple of verses later we’re confronted by the following observation “In Birmingham they love the governor (ooh ooh ooh).” That thought and the rest of the verse aren’t exactly strong praise for Wallace, but at the very least they’re an expression of a preference for segregation over Northern liberal meddling.

But that evades the real issue. Why disrupt a ballgame with a song that even mentions segregation? Or if the topic needs to be raised for collective edification between innings, why present anything other than a sound condemnation of the practice? Would we have to hear this song if the lyrics went “In Berlin they love the Fuhrer (heil heil heil)”? And if you’re about to point out that comparing anything to Hitler is automatically rhetorically invalid, please ponder this: how many centuries of slavery and genocide are the moral equivalent of a decade and a half of Nazism (especially when that selfsame apartheid is apparently a “going concern”)?

They never have the time to play the entire song anyway. So why not just cut the verses that suck?

Whiskey for My Men and Beer for My Horses – This thing makes “Sweet Home Alabama” sound like “We Shall Overcome.” Any song about ordering alcohol is a natural at a venue that depends heavily on beer sales, so the chorus fits well enough as ballpark fare. But the rest of the lyrics … seriously, did anybody bother to listen to this song before putting it on? This asshole is singing about how great it would be if we could only solve the nation’s crime problem by saddling up and going out lynching. Whenever it plays I’m brought mindful of Hang ‘Em High, a movie about an innocent man lynched by a pack of morons. He survives the ordeal and spends the rest of the movie exacting revenge. The thought of Clint Eastwood blowing Toby Keith’s head off fills my heart with cheer.

Friends in Low Places – Several years ago a terrible thing rose out of Fenway and spread across the land: the unofficial ballpark song. After discovering that the bean-eating throngs loved to sing along with “Sweet Caroline,” the Red Sox powers-that-be saw to it that it was played at every game. Fortunately for the Royals’ faithful, we didn’t get saddled with Neil Diamond. Unfortunately for us, we got saddled with Garth Brooks. Once a game beers are placed temporarily in cup holders so everyone can wrap arms around one another and sway back and forth to the charming tale of some drunken bozo who ruins his ex’s social event.

I hit this one hard last year, so I’ll sum up by standing on my previous statements.