In the spirit of the first day of the Baseball Season (for those of you who aren’t from New York or Boston), I decided to do a little bit of digging into the perennial ballpark favorite and eyewateringly hokey piece of Americana “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”. It turns out the cracker-jack ridden song was actually written for a Vaudeville routine in 1908, by two men in New York, neither of whom had ever attended a baseball game. The full song is much longer and a good deal less catchy, and includes a few verses about a female fan in the stands, doing such ballpark-friendly activities as fretting, pouting, and knowing the players names. The whole thing gets somewhat less interesting from there. However, when the song started being played at ballparks in the 1920’s, the sale of the generally unknown candy corn “Cracker Jacks” went completely through the roof. Today, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” is the third most recognizable song in America, after “Happy Birthday” and “The Star Spangled Banner”. And hey, they turned the song into a movie with Frank Sinatra!
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