Pandemic needs 7th-inning stretch
Baseball’s on hiatus, but we need a sense of community more than ever
Would I be up for urging readers to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” on what should have been Opening Day?
I pounced on that question like Manny Sanguillen fielding a bunt.
Cheryl Towers, of Shadyside, inspired by Europeans singing from their balcony windows during the pandemic, suggested this American twist — and she didn’t have to ask me twice.
I love “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” It’s a great communal moment, a rite of spring and summer where even people like me, who couldn’t carry a note in a bucket, joyously belt out this century-old song in kinship with an unabashedly swaying crowd of strangers.
This coming Thursday should have been the Pirates home opener, but all the seats in PNC Park will be empty. This COVID-19 spring, being in a crowd means risking illness, death or becoming the carrier of death.
Most of us are waiting this out at home with our families or, worse, alone. But what if Pittsburgh got up and sang? What if we recorded ourselves singing this American standard? What if somebody spliced pieces of all those singers into one seamless montage of the song?
I contacted Brian Warecki, the Pirates senior vice president of communications, and included a video of musicians from the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra playing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” from their bedrooms and living rooms. A tech whiz fit those pieces into a virtual orchestra that has enraptured tens of thousands online. Other symphonies and music schools have spawned similar magic.
Mr. Warecki liked what he saw, but was savvy enough to suggest that often with such projects “people want to see it but don’t want to do it.”
If I can persuade enough readers to sing and record the song, he said, the Pirates would love to try to put something together. “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” video can be shared with the Pirates via Twitter by tagging @Pirates and using the hashtag #Letsgobucs. Or it can be sent via email to socialmedia@pirates.com. Fans can send the file itself, file upload links from Vimeo and/or links to their YouTube posts, he said.
I know many in my Sunday print audience, as technologically challenged as I, are about as likely to try that as they are to put their tongue on a flagpole come winter. But I also know Pittsburgh and plenty of small towns in the Tri-State area are filled with real neighborhoods where people know each other. There are places — the North Side, Lawrenceville, Friendship, Dormont, Aspinwall, others — where homes are close enough that someone with a smartphone could record a chorus for the ages. Or at least for this Thursday.
When to do it? Whenever you want. Today’s good. So’s tomorrow if you care to make some calls and ask, “Hey, you wanna go outside, stand 6 feet apart and sing with me?” Or if you just wanted to solo in your living room, that’s cool, too.
I’m hoping this thing can be as communal as the situation allows. If you don’t know the words to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” somebody on your block does. (If no one does, seriously consider moving.)
The home opener against the Cincinnati Reds had been scheduled for 1:35 p.m. Thursday, so if the Pirates do cobble together a video, it ought to be released between 3:30 and 4 p.m., or about the time of the seventh-inning stretch.
Even if I could, I wouldn’t want to micromanage this effort. It ought to be like pickup baseball in the old days. Knock on some doors, virtual or real, and see if you can get up a game. Most of what people submit will necessarily be left on the proverbial cutting-room floor, so the singalongs themselves need to be the real prize.
The soft spot in my heart for this song only deepened when I heard some years ago that a childhood friend, Danny Hoffman, used to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” to his daughters when he was putting them to bed. Many years later, they sang that to their father at his wake.
I can still get teary when I think of that.
I know that if any city can pull off a grassroots baseball event, it’s Pittsburgh. The tradition of Pirates fans gathering each Oct. 13 at the remnants of the Forbes Field in Oakland began only because Saul Finkelstein was having a bad day in the fall of 1985. He took a folding chair and a recording of the seventh game of the 1960 World Series out to what’s left of the old brick wall so he could again hear Bill Mazeroski hit the home run that beat the Yankees. Mr. Finkelstein kept returning and word spread to the point that probably a stadium’s worth of Pirates fans — including Mr. Mazeroski himself — have made the pilgrimage one year or another to hear the game where it happened.
“It’s gone from cassette to CD to iPod,” said longtime organizer Herb Soltman, 84, who was at the game in 1960. “Since the early ’90s, we’ve never had a rainout, which shows God’s a 1960 Pirates fan.”
Baseball’s on hiatus, but we need a sense of community more than ever. So why not get up and sing? I expect like you, I do care if I never get back.