Fenway organist Josh Kantor is limbering up for Opening Day
In more than 20 years working for the Red Sox, Josh Kantor has never been to Fort Myers for spring training. “I usually tell people that my gigs in March are my spring training, when I get my reps in,” says Kantor, who is entering his 22nd season on April 9 as the game-day organist at Fenway Park. Instead of taking batting practice or shagging fly balls, Kantor will present “7 th Inning Stretch: Opening Day Edition” Wednesday at City Winery, with guests including Vance Gilbert, Kelly Hogan, and former Sox pitcher Lenny DiNardo.
That’s when Kantor will offer fans a sneak preview of some of the pop music nuggets he’ll be playing at the ballpark this year. With his wife, the Rev. Mary Eaton, Kantor has been streaming a live show on Facebook since the pandemic kept us away from the friendly confines back in 2020.
One song he’s revisited periodically over the years — “The Impossible Dream,” the “Man of La Mancha” standard that became the anthem of the 1967 Sox — might be a candidate for the rotation this season, given the depressingly low expectations for this year’s Olde Towne Team. But if there’s one thing Kantor has learned in his two decades at Fenway, it’s to never say never.
“They’ve rewarded my optimism more often than not over the years,” he says. “I’ve been super lucky. Between ’03 and 2011, they were somewhere between good and great every year.” Even the much-maligned Bobby Valentineled season of 2012 was, for Kantor, a plus: “I learned a lot about how to play for a grumpy crowd without insulting their intelligence.”
Kantor grew up in Athens, Ga., where his first allegiance was to the Atlanta Braves. The first girl he ever had a crush on — “We would hold hands on the playground in third grade” — bought him a pack of baseball cards, and he thought, “Well, this changes everything.”
Years later, the two constants in his life — baseball and music — have led to some impressive statistics. Kantor has performed with dozens of popular musicians, including Aimee Mann, Guster, Wilco, and the Old 97’s. He’s become friendly with his childhood hero, the retired Braves star Dale Murphy, and as an occasional call-up to the indie allstar band the Baseball Project, he has befriended fellow Athens natives Peter Buck and Mike Mills of R.E.M.
At Brandeis University, Kantor played in a band that called themselves Various Artists. The guitarist was Jason Victor, who went on to join the latterday version of the Dream Syndicate, whose Steve Wynn is a co-founder of the Baseball Project.
“Our original songs were usually about 30 seconds long, and then they’d morph into these 10-minute noise jams,” Kantor recalls. “We were really good at clearing a room.”
That’s the antithesis of the assignment at Fenway, where it’s Kantor’s job to punch up the action when it’s going well on the field and soothe fans’ frayed nerves when it’s not. Through the magic of social media, he interacts with fans in real time, taking requests.
And when his instincts align perfectly with the game’s details — the time, for instance, when he commemorated the major league debut of ambidextrous pitcher Pat Venditte with a rendition of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” — he’s made himself an integral part of the Fenway experience.
Over the years Kantor has written songs for comedians and occasionally participated in sketch comedy. Improv, he says, has been great training for his work at the ballpark, where he has to think on his feet.
Just as every player needs to understand the game situation, Kantor says, “You always want to have an idea ready that underscores the action. I’ve gotten better at figuring out what’s my
‘voice.’ ”
And just like any true Red Sox diehard, when he responds in the moment to the latest development on the field, “I will sometimes act more annoyed or beleaguered than I have any right to be, because it’s good for the joke.”