Audio | Bruce Springstone, featuring Tom Chalkley: 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game,' from the album 'Baseball's Greatest Hits'
Audio | Lou Gehrig's farewell speech, from the album 'Baseball's Greatest Hits'
Audio | Dave Frishberg: 'Van Lingle Mungo,' from the album 'Baseball's Greatest Hits'
Audio | Teresa Brewer with Mickey Mantle: 'I Love Mickey,' from the album 'Baseball's Greatest Hits'
Audio | Lou Brutus: 'Bartman at the Bat,' from the album 'Baseball's Greatest Hits'
LISTEN UP
Play Ball will air all day Sunday on XM Satellite Radio channel 120. Non-subscribers can listen for free on the Internet via a three-day trial subscription available at http://listen.xmradio.com.Playing a record about Joe DiMaggio to commemorate Major League Baseball's opening day? Sure. Babe Ruth? Of course. Dizzy Dean, Yogi Berra, Willie Mays, Stan Musial? No baseball fan is going to beef about any of those. But Dock Ellis? An obscure 1970s-era pitcher for the Pirates and Mets? Why would anybody write a song about him in the first place, much less give it airplay?
''Are you kidding?'' replies an astonished Lou Brutus, the program director who put together XM Satellite Radio's Play Ball Channel. ``Dock Ellis, as the story goes, pitched a no-hitter while high on LSD. That's going to get you a song, I think. And no way were we not going to play it. My beloved Mets are still without a no-hitter after almost 50 years. But, dammit, Dock Ellis tripping got one. Go figure.''
Dock Ellis by Barbara Manning and the S.F. Seals (appropriately enough, it's a psychedelic rocker) is just one of 412 songs about baseball airing on the Play Ball Channel, which XM is running this weekend only in honor of baseball's return.
Interspersing oddities like Mickey Mantle's only hit record as opposed to record hit (1956's I Love Mickey, recorded with Teresa Brewer) with comedy bits (Abbott & Costello's Who's on First routine and Garrett Morris reminiscing that ''baseball been berry, berry good to me''), dramatic home run calls (Bobby Thomson's 1951 ``shot heard round the world''), farewell speeches (Lou Gehrig's ``luckiest man on the face of the earth'') and even poetry (no fewer than six recitations of Casey at the Bat, including versions by James Earl Jones and Bob Costas), the channel is guaranteed to drive baseball fans insane with joy -- and anyone else, just insane.
Brutus, whose main job is running XM's punk and heavy-metal channels, also puts up short-lived channels on themes or special events, often culling the play list from his enormous collections of offbeat records and sound bites. 'It started off as these random requests, like, `Could you do three days' worth of songs about cars?' '' he recalls.
But the chance to do a channel combining his two passions -- weird records and baseball -- nearly unhinged Brutus, who not only has an entire room of his house devoted to baseball memorabilia but also has even recorded a couple of baseball novelty numbers.
Most notable: Bartman at the Bat, a Casey parody dedicated to iniquitous Chicago Cubs fan Steve Bartman, whose interference with a catchable foul ball in the 2003 playoffs triggered a chain of events that ended with the Florida Marlins heading for the World Series while the Cubs went home in ignominious defeat. (''Somewhere fans are laughing and raise a victory cup/but there was no joy in Wrigley/Steve Bartman had fouled up.'') It will air this weekend.
''That's the great thing,'' Brutus says. ''We've got not just songs about famous baseball figures but the infamous and obscure, too.'' So there are songs immortalizing everybody from John Rocker, the Atlanta Braves pitcher notorious for his public rant about going to the stadium in New York ''like you're riding through Beirut next to some kid with purple hair,'' to Herb Score, a Cleveland Indians pitcher whose eye was knocked out by a line drive, to Eddie Klepp, ``the first self-proclaimed white man to play in the Negro Leagues.''
There's even Van Lingle Mungo, an eccentric bossa nova record whose lyrics consist of nothing but names of obscure baseball players of the 1940s.
And of course there's Take Me Out to the Ballgame -- 16 versions, none finer than the rendition by ''Bruce Springstone,'' a novelty artist parodying the song as if it were a Springsteen road anthem.
''That's my favorite version of the song,'' Brutus says. 'When that came out -- it was on the flip side of a 45 that sounded like Springsteen doing the theme song from The Flintstones -- the real Springsteen was making his album Born in the U.S.A. Bruce and the guys from the E Street Band are in the studio, getting ready to play, and all the sudden the engineer puts Take Me Out to the Ballgame on the speakers. And the band is standing around, everybody scratching their heads, saying, `Hey, when did we record that?' That's how good it is -- they thought it was them.''
