Baseball Song
Weird fiction piece by Clark Humphrey
6/24/92
A struggling songwriter comes up with a great idea, from a career standpoint. He will write an upbeat, wholesome pop song about baseball, one that every team will want to play in the stadium between innings, a song that could get used in commercials or in movies. A song that could earn royalties for 10, 15 years or more. A song that would provide him with a modest but steady income – at least enough to tie him over during the really lean times. The problem is that he can’t break out of his established songwriting style: morose dirges about the underside of life.
His first lyric talks about enjoying a ball game as an escape from a miserable job and a girlfriend who left him when he refused to subsidize her coke habit. The song’s signature theme is the “Charge” fanfare, transposed to a minor key. Nobody buys it.
His second draft asks the listener to glory in the antics on the field and not to worry about the fate of the Hatians in the baseball factory or about one player and all his pregnant mistresses in each American League city or about all the former players who wasted their best years between AA teams and injuries. His manager tells him to keep trying.
He manages to mention the game a little more in his third lyric, where he wishes he could soar away like a home run instead of living the life of a ball at batting practice. Every record company turns it down, even Homestead.
Finally, he comes up with a song mentioning nothing of his own job or his ex-wife. He creates a stunning, rousing melody line, playable by r&b bar bands and stadium organists alike. He comes up with a suitable title, “You’ll See Me In the Stands.” Fighting every impulse, every learned behavior, he succeeds in writing only positive statements about the fantasy world in the ballpark, the great sights, sounds, and smells, where winning is heaven and even losing isn’t that bad. But his most sincere praise came for the images other baseball songwriters ignore: the spitting, the cup adjustments, the fights in the stands, the chance to lip-read managers’ obscenities on the big scoreboard screen, the pleasant burps with each king-size hot dog, the chance to get drunk in the sunshine in a crowd, until even a White Sox-Indians double-header seems lively. At the pleadings of his aghast agent, he does one more rewrite, trying to be simple and heartfelt about grand slams, no-hitters and double plays. Yet even in this whitebread version, he ends up praising the underpublicized joys of ground rule doubles and pop-up flies to the shortstop. The guy’s agent is in the process of signing the song over to a major record producer when the agent gets in trouble with his coke supplier and gets sold something that puts him out of commission for a long time. The song eventually does get recorded, by the songwriter himself, but does not go far.
