Baseball seemed to reinvent itself in 2023. There were new rules, new stars, new teams on top and new teams on the bottom. And there were new songs, thanks toBaseball inspires more and better songs than any other sport, but just as the game needs a new crop of rookies, it also needs a new crop of tunes each season.
Wynn and McCaughey aren’t the only ones creating cool baseball songs in the 21st century. Folk-punk singer/songwriter Dan Bern released, a terrific compilation of his own baseball songs, in 2012, and he continues to pen new ones foron Apple Podcasts. Such Bern numbers as “The Golden Voice of Vince Scully,” “Sunday Never Comes” and “Seven Miles an Hour” are gems of the genre.
The true baseball fan resists radical rule changes, because one doesn’t want one era of the game to be too different from the others; one wants to be able to make comparisons across history. Shohei Otani’s season this year—at least before he blew out his elbow—was fascinating precisely because one had to reach back to Babe Ruth’s early career with the Boston Red Sox for such a combination of high-caliber pitching and high-caliber hitting from the same player.
“Eccentrics are just more fun,” adds McCaughey. “That’s why it’s more difficult to write about the modern player. They are under so much pressure to succeed that they tend to get homogenized—afraid to step across any lines. Rube Waddell didn’t care about rules or being hungover or getting to games on time. Let’s face it—he was a mess and wouldn’t have a chance in today’s world.”
Like Christmas songs and bad-pun tunes, baseball songs are often labeled and dismissed as mere “novelty numbers.” But like genre fiction, the best baseball recordings transcend their supposed subject matter to tap into something deeper about human nature. Fogerty’s “Centerfield,” for example, sounds at first like just simple enthusiasm for the game. But the narrator is clearly desperate for a chance to get off the bench, an opportunity to prove what he can do.