Brass Trax

Baseball and American popular music have long been co-conspirators. Folk singers, blues musicians, rappers, and punk rockers have all taken a swing at the sport. Some of their efforts, like Steve Goodman’s “A Dying Cubs Fan’s Last Request” or Dropkick Murphys’ “Tessie,” a song about the Red Sox’ Royal Rooters fan club, have become part of the game’s lore.

But baseball has also been an occasion for pop musicians to explore other aspects of the American experience. Faith, love, and racism have all been captured, at one time or another, in baseball metaphors. As the 2009 baseball season opener looms, here are three baseball songs that you probably won’t hear in the ballpark and that aren’t really about baseball.

“Life is a Ballgame”

by Sister Wynona Carr

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American gospel music has never been a genre to shy away from florid metaphors, and baseball probably hasn’t been the most outlandish stand-in for the battle between good and evil. “Life is a Ballgame,” originally titled “The Ball Game,” was Sister Wynona Carr’s biggest hit, a nugget that made it to the gospel charts in 1952, even as Carr’s own career floundered.

Carr was from Cleveland, Ohio, long a baseball stronghold, who came up touring the Baptist churches of the Midwest. In 1944, she settled in Detroit where she started her own touring group, the Carr Singers, and by 1949, she was cutting records. Despite a striking voice with a versatile range, Carr’s initial releases sold sluggishly, and “The Ball Game” would be her first sliver of commercial success.

“The Ball Game” was released five years after Jackie Robinson first crossed the foul lines at Ebbets Field. It was the year of Willie Mays’s rookie season. Recognition was finally dawning across the U.S. that baseball was as much a part of the African American identity as the white one, and black players were finally becoming a part of the game at its highest levels.

Whether or not Carr had these historic developments on her mind when she penned “The Ball Game” will likely remain a mystery. The song itself certainly doesn’t offer much of a hint. It’s pure religion.

Carr sets up the diamond for you: temptation at first, sin at second, tribulation guarding the bag at third, and, of course, Jesus at the plate. Satan pitches to Job, who launches a homer, Solomon umpires the game, and St. John’s vision is the walk-off RBI that seals the game.

“Love is Like a Baseball Game (Three Strikes You’re Out)” by The Intruders

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By the late sixties, the sweet gospel music had infused the secular sounds of soul, and it was commonplace to find metaphors that once represented divinity standing in for more earthly matters. The Intruders’ “Love is Like a Baseball Game” is “The Ball Game” brought down to earth.

The Intruders were a group of Philadelphians who had been making music together since 1960. They picked up strands of Philadelphia’s street corner doo-wop, added a sweet gospel inflection, and laid the groundwork for what would be called Philadelphia soul. They had the harmony of the Impressions (though not the vocal versatility or songwriting prowess of Curtis Mayfield) and the swing of a gospel choir. The Intruders toiled in relative obscurity until 1968, when two hits would bring them to the national stage.

“Cowboys to Girls” was the first and bigger hit. But “Love is Like a Baseball Game” was a smoother song; its harmony was fused with a sweeping melody that carries you along, without eddying in place. It’s a pop tune that’s as refreshing as a cold drink at the ballpark. The lyrical conceit is a somewhat convoluted story involving a love at-bat that results in a love strike out instead of a love run; whether the narrator got caught love looking or went down love swinging is left unclear.

“Just a Friendly Game of Baseball”

by Main Source

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Baseball is about as central to the New York experience as police brutality, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that somebody would get around to rapping about both at once. “Just a Friendly Game of Baseball” was Main Source’s contribution to the baseball songbook. There have been enough baseball-inspired on- liners in rap to fill a textbook, but few rappers have extended baseball metaphors quite as far as Large Professor did in 1991.

The Flushing Queens native came up within sight of Shea Stadium, home of the Mets, whose run during the late nineties (a World Series victory in 1986, a division championship in 1988, Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden) couldn’t have escaped Large Pro’s notice. But the rhymes he wrote for “Just a Friendly Game of Baseball” are anything but a celebration of the sport. The song is a searing indictment of police brutality and American racism.

Main Source strung the beats together in the best early-nineties fashion, in layers of samples so thick that they would bankrupt a label that bothered trying to clear them. Lou Donaldson, James Brown, 9th Creation—they’re all in there. Large Pro, whose delivery tends to be affable, drips menace on the mic, working rhymes like “To the cops shooting brothers is playing baseball, and they’re never in a slump. I guess when they shoot up a crew, it’s a grand slam, and when it’s one, it’s a home run.” And cops aren’t the only ones who get in on the game. “The umpires are the government,” and even those watching the news at home have a role to play—spectators of a racist pastime.

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