Jim Caple presents his list of the best baseball songs. Craig Calcaterra disagrees with the choice of Centerfield as #1. I’m with Tango, I like Centerfield. (Peter Gammons didn’t like the reference to coach in the song. Managers are called skipper. I chalk this up to artistic license.)
My three colleagues, however, all left out the greatest baseball song of all time:
I don’t know how they got Phil Rizzuto to do this. As a father of three daughters, I thought he’d be a bit more conservative on the subject. 🙂
Jonathan Coulton totally gets baseball. A list without Kenesaw Mountain Landis is no list at all: here
Rizzuto claimed he did not understand the lyrics, though Meat Loaf disagrees
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Rizzuto
“When Rizzuto recorded his piece, he did not know the double entendre nature of his spoken contribution. He reported that he kept asking Meat Loaf about the song but Meat Loaf playfully put him off. When the song broke, Phil said his parish priest called him in shock. “Phil was no dummy,” said singer Meat Loaf. “He knew exactly what was going on, and he told me such. He was just getting some heat from a priest and felt like he had to do something. I totally understood.” “
Jim O’Har » Thanks. I would find it tough to believe a former baseball player would not understand the double meaning of the lyrics. The guy did play with Mickey Mantle, after all. 🙂
I always thought the “put me in, Coach” reference in Centerfield was because the player was not a pro. In college or most any other level of baseball, the “manager” is called a coach. Of course, John Fogerty could have written “put me in, Skip” and the line would have scanned just fine.