God I love baseball.

– Roy Hobbs

For me, baseball is an eloquent metaphor for life. It’s a team sport built entirely about two individuals facing off against each other. The best hitters are only successful about a third of the time, and even the greatest teams lose a third of their games. It’s a sport rooted deeply in hope – until the last out is recorded you can’t really be sure you’ve won, and you can’t quite be sure you’ve lost. And in its purest form it’s not always fair, as anyone who has watched an umpire miss a crucial call can attest.

A Centennial Start

This beautiful, unpredictable game has grown hand-in-hand with the history of our country. While baseball as we know it was first played at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, NJ in 1846, it reached a milestone just thirty years later. In 1876 – the exact Centennial of the United States – the National League was founded, making it today the world’s oldest extant professional team sports league.

Since that Centennial milestone, and with the formation of the American League 25 years later, close to 250,000 Major League baseball games have been played in the USA. And that number easily grows into the millions when adding in minor league circuits, and countless more when including games played in other countries.

And yet, despite all of the changes to both the country and the game over the last century and a half, if you walk into almost any of those stadiums today you will hear the same 1908 anthem sung by everyone during the seventh-inning stretch: Take Me Out to the Ballgame.

An Untold Story

The irony of this universal anthem is that it was written by two men – Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer – who ho had never attended a baseball game.

While their iconic chorus is one of the most recognizable melodies in America, the verse is a completely untold story to most casual fans. The song actually tells the story of young Katie Casey and her love of the game. When her beau offers to take her to a theater show, Katie has her own ideas on how to spend the afternoon, proudly telling him to skip the theater and take her to the ballpark instead.

When curating the tracks for AMERICA: 250 Years Young, I knew I wanted to include Katie’s story as a tribute to our National Pastime. While the arrangement may start out small, don’t be afraid to join along in the final chorus – just don’t forget your peanuts and Cracker Jack.

Listen Now

You can stream Take Me Out to the Ball Game on AMERICA: 250 Years Young, available now on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and more.