Missing baseball? Fenway Park’s organist is playing classics and requests on Facebook

The Major League Baseball season won’t begin until at least mid-May due to the coronavirus pandemic, and needless to say, fans are bummed.

But they can still enjoy the trappings of America’s pastime while maintaining social distance thanks to organist Josh Kantor, who is learning: If you play it, they will come.

Kantor plays the organ at Boston’s Fenway Park where the Red Sox were set to play their home opener on April 2. Now, he’s taken the show home, playing the organ from his living room in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and streaming it on Facebook, NPR reported.

He calls it the 7th-Inning Stretch.

“I realized I was really missing baseball and really missing getting to do that job,” Kantor told WGBH. “And I could see just from online communications that a lot of other people were also missing baseball and were keenly aware. It felt like there was a void, that it wasn’t there in conjunction with the arrival of spring.”

Everyday at 3 p.m., Kantor sits down at his keyboard to play old favorites and take requests for roughly 30 minutes.

Initially, Kantor said he didn’t expect many people to take notice, according to WGBH.

“I figured one or two people would pop in and make a request and I would play for 10 minutes,” he told the outlet. “And instead, we got roughly 100 song requests. I realized at that point how much I had missed it and how much I kind of needed it.”

Viewers suggest songs on the live chat and his wife Mary Eaton — who he refers to as Reverend Mary — passes them along on sticky notes, NPR reported.

Kantor’s repertoire is vast, having played songs from Bob Marley, Queen and Smokey Robinson, even plunking out a portion of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” according to the outlet.

His show has garnered him a number of fans, including some giants in the music industry such as R.E.M. manager Bertis Downs and Cáit O’Riordan, former bassist for Pogues, The Washington Post reported.

Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy referred to Kantor’s ability to play songs by ear as “freakish,” according to the outlet.

“It’s freakish, to be honest,” Tweedy told the outlet. “Like a tape recorder. I’ve had him come up onstage with us at different times. ‘Do you know this song?’ He’s like, ‘Can you play it for me?’ And I’d play it for him for like 20 seconds and then he comes onstage and nails it.”

While this makes Kantor the king of requests, he says he does like to make sure the classic seventh-inning stretch tune “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” stays in rotation, WGBH reported.

“I guess it’s my ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ ”

This story was originally published April 8, 2020 at 12:22 PM.