Dear listeners,
I’m back! A big thank you to Jon Caramanica, Marc Tracy and Dave Renard, the three guest playlisters who filled in for me while I took a few weeks off. The Amplifier returns to its regular schedule today, though, just in time for … I don’t know, anything important going on this week?
Ah, yes, of course! It’s the first official week of Major League Baseball’s off-season.
The M.L.B. playoffs were particularly thrilling this year, and for a moment it looked like we might get a New York miracle: a Subway World Series. Alas, it wasn’t to be. Despite deep postseason runs from the Yankees and my beloved Mets, the Los Angeles Dodgers ultimately prevailed and won it all. At least we Mets fans got to see The Temptations serenade Citi Field with the shortstop Francisco Lindor’s beloved walk-up song, “My Girl.”
Those two great American pastimes, baseball and pop music, have long gone hand in hand. (Or is it hand in glove?) In honor of another great season in the books, today’s playlist is a collection of just a few of the many songs that refer to great ballplayers, with era-spanning tunes from The Treniers’ novelty hit about Willie Mays up through Bad Bunny’s many recent shout-outs to modern superstars. You’ll also hear tracks from the Beastie Boys, Faye Webster and Belle and Sebastian, among others.
You certainly don’t have to know anything about baseball to enjoy this playlist. If you’re a fan, though, I hope it helps you endure the long offseason drought. When times get difficult, just remember: Pitchers and catchers report in mid-February.
Life outside the diamond is a wrench,
Lindsay
Listen along while you read.
1. Beastie Boys: “Sure Shot”
Several different Beastie Boys songs could have made the cut here — see also: “Hey Ladies,” which contains a line about having more hits than Sadaharu Oh — but let’s kick things off with this eternally cool leadoff track from “Ill Communication,” which features a nod to a prolific slugger: “I got mad hits like I was Rod Carew.” (That’s 3,053 hits, to be exact.)
2. Simon & Garfunkel: “Mrs. Robinson”
“Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? / Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you,” Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel sing in one of the most memorable lines of this era-defining classic. What did Joltin’ Joe think of the song? Well, shortly after DiMaggio died in 1999, Simon wrote a guest essay for The New York Times in which he recalled a somewhat awkward encounter with the former ballplayer at an Italian restaurant. He remembered DiMaggio saying, “What I don’t understand is why you ask where I’ve gone. I just did a Mr. Coffee commercial, I’m a spokesman for the Bowery Savings Bank and I haven’t gone anywhere.” Simon clarified that he “didn’t mean the lines literally, that I thought of him as an American hero and that genuine heroes were in short supply. He accepted the explanation and thanked me. We shook hands and said good night.”
3. Bad Bunny: “Ronca Freestyle”
Bad Bunny is such a baseball fanatic that his latest album “Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana” contains references to nine different players. But as a Mets fan, I’m particularly partial to his 2020 track “Ronca Freestyle,” which places our own Francisco Lindor in a lineage of great New York shortstops: “Jeter se retiró ahora el que los mata es Lindor.” (“Jeter retired, now the one who kills them is Lindor.”)
4. A Tribe Called Quest: “Check the Rhime”
“Got the scrawny legs but I move just like Lou Brock,” Q-Tip raps on this lead single from Tribe’s great sophomore album, “The Low End Theory.” The group’s members also sport some baseball swag in this song’s music video, which features Tip pairing a Yankees jersey with — shockingly, unconscionably — an Atlanta Braves cap.
5. Faye Webster: “A Dream With a Baseball Player”
Speaking of the Braves (sigh; must we?), the Atlanta singer-songwriter Faye Webster has confessed that this swooning highlight from her 2021 album, “I Know I’m Funny Haha,” is about her crush on outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr. They met briefly when Webster was invited to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at Truist Park; Acuña told her, “Thank you for the music.”
6. Belle and Sebastian: “Piazza, New York Catcher”
Though best known for its unfortunately catchy lyric speculating about Mets legend Mike Piazza’s personal life, this ballad from Belle and Sebastian’s 2003 album, “Dear Catastrophe Waitress,” also acknowledges Piazza’s impressive batting average: “The catcher hits for .318 and catches every day.” Carson Cistulli, writing for Fangraphs, once tried to deduce if the song was about a specific Mets-Giants game, but concluded that it was probably an amalgamation of several games during the 2002 season. Poetic license is allowed in songwriting, if not in baseball.
7. Warren Zevon: “Bill Lee”
This brief, piano-driven tune from Warren Zevon’s 1980 album, “Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School,” is named for the eccentric, outspoken left-handed pitcher Bill Lee. “Sometimes I say things I shouldn’t,” Zevon sings from Lee’s perspective, before a cheeky harmonica riff plays as a stand-in for those unsayable things. Zevon invited Lee over to his Los Angeles home and played the song for him before it was released; this meeting of the minds reportedly resulted in “three days of debauchery,” but also cemented a longtime friendship.
8. The Baseball Project: “Oh Oh Ohtani!”
Formed in 2007, the Baseball Project is a kind of sports-rock supergroup featuring members of R.E.M., the Dream Syndicate and the Minus 5. They have released four albums and a handful of EPs — exclusively containing songs about baseball. Although the Baseball Project has written plenty of odes to the old heroes (“Ted [Expletive] Williams” is a fan favorite), the group’s most recent single pays tribute to a current superstar, this year’s likely National League M.V.P. and a first-time World Series champion, that once-in-a-lifetime two-way player, Shohei Ohtani.
9. The Treniers: “Say Hey (the Willie Mays Song)”
Finally, we conclude with this spirited 1954 novelty song by the R&B group the Treniers, in honor of two American cultural titans we lost in 2024. The first, of course, is the Say Hey Kid himself, Willie Mays, who died on June 18 at 93. The second is the song’s arranger who, at the time of the recording, was just getting his start in the music industry: the great Quincy Jones, who died Sunday at 91. Say a hearty hey for them both.
The Amplifier Playlist
“9 Great Songs That Mention Baseball Stars” track list
Track 1: Beastie Boys, “Sure Shot”
Track 2: Simon & Garfunkel, “Mrs. Robinson”
Track 3: Bad Bunny, “Ronca Freestyle”
Track 4: A Tribe Called Quest, “Check the Rhime”
Track 5: Faye Webster, “A Dream with a Baseball Player”
Track 6: Belle and Sebastian, “Piazza, New York Catcher”
Track 7: Warren Zevon, “Bill Lee”
Track 8: The Baseball Project, “Oh Oh Ohtani!”
Track 9: The Treniers, “Say Hey (The Willie Mays Song)”
Bonus Tracks
“Say Hey” was just the beginning: As a producer, an arranger and an artist in his own right, Quincy Jones had one of the most impressive careers of any 20th century American musician. Ben Sisario put together a playlist of 14 of Jones’s (many) essential tracks and wrote an appreciation of his particular prowess in the recording studio. Wesley Morris also penned a beautiful appraisal of Jones’s career: “Delight,” he writes, invoking Jones’s incredibly appropriate middle name, “is a prime engine of his artistic achievement.”
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