There are numerous references to baseball throughout the Jewish holy texts and sources, including:
“Spherical, like a ball… “
Maimonides, Torah Laws and Principles, 3:4“Damages done at the time of the fall of the pitcher…”
Talmud, Tractate Baba Kamma“If the catcher moves to catch it, he is liable…”
Talmud, Tractate Shabbos“On a diamond, one must be a maven.”
Discourse by R. Shalom Dov Ber of Lubavitch“Four cubits was the length of one base…”
Kings I 7:26“The path of the righteous runner is beset on all sides by the inequities of running surfaces…”
Ezekiel 25:17“One man would remove his glove and hand it to his neighbor… such was the practice in the House of Israel…”
The Targum on Megillat Ruth“Inadvertent errors may be forgiven…”
Leviticus, Chapter 4And, finally, that all-time favorite:
“In the big inning… “
Genesis 1:1
In 1920, Henry Ford, a renowned antisemite, wrote: “If you want to know the trouble with American baseball, you can have it in three words: too much Jew.” (Of course, in Ford’s world, every trouble was somehow “too much Jew.”) Antisemitism played a major role in the history of baseball, including the famous case of Red Sox Owner Harry Frazee being bombarded by the Dearborn Independent as the “Jew who traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees” in 1921. (The only problem was that Frazee was Episcopalian, but that did not stop the Jew-haters.) Of course, there have been countless Jews in baseball, beginning with Lipman Pike (the “Iron Batter”) from 1871-1887, including players, management, broadcasting, etc., but this story is not about them. It is about a song.
Everyone knows the music. Everyone knows the tune. Everyone loves the song. Many accounts characterize it as the third most popular song in the United States, after the The Star Spangled Banner and Happy Birthday to You. But few know that the music to the “Unofficial National Anthem of Baseball” was written by a Jew and was first sung by a Jew.
In 1858, when amateur baseball teams in the northeast established the first baseball league, the National Association of Base Ball Players, a player from the Buffalo Base Ball Club published The Baseball Polka, the first known piece of baseball music. Since then, over a thousand baseball songs have followed, some composed by the players themselves, some by their sponsors, several by well-known musicians, and others by unknown fans, but none have come close to attaining the fame of Take Me Out to the Ball Game, which composer Albert Von Tilzer and lyricist Jack Norworth submitted to the United States Copyright Office on May 2, 1908.
Norworth (1879-1959) had quickly jotted down the words to the song on a sheet of paper after he saw an advertising sign at the subway for a baseball game at the Polo Grounds in 1908. Remarkably, he had never seen a baseball game and did not attend his first game until 32 years later on June 17, 1940, when he saw the Brooklyn Dodgers defeat the Chicago Cubs 5-4. (That scribbled sheet, a copy of which is exhibited here, is currently on exhibit in the permanent collection of baseball memorabilia at the National Baseball Hall of Fame.)
In 1909, Norworth wrote another baseball song, Let’s Get the Umpire’s Goat, but it never went anywhere. Similarly, many songwriters attempted to ride on the coattails of Take Me Out to the Ballgame, including I Want to Go to the Ball Game, with music by Al W. Brown and lyrics by C.D. McDonald; He’s a Fan, Fan, Fan (1909) by Florence Holdbrood; Stars of Our National Game, by Anna Caldwell; and Take Your Girl to the Ball Game, by the legendary George M. Cohan. But these, too, could never even approach the popularity of Take Me Out to the Ball Game.
Excited about the new lyrics he had written and needing a melody to go with his words, he contacted Albert Von Tilzer, a friend and Tin Pan Alley composer in New York with whom he had previously collaborated. (Interestingly, and for reasons unknown, they never again collaborated on another song.) Von Tilzer (1878-1956) – born Albert Gumm, he took his mother’s maiden name and added the “von” title to make his name sound less Jewish – did not attend his first baseball game until 1928, twenty years after he wrote the music to the song.
Although the foregoing is the generally accepted account of the origins of the song, Von Tilzer tells a different story: he says that he wrote the tune around the phrase “one, two, three strikes you’re out…” and handed it to Norworth to flesh out the lyric. This is actually a far more likely story; as Andy Strasberg, Bob Thompson, and Tim Wiles point out in Baseball’s Greatest Hit, there was never a mention of the “Norworth on the subway” story until 1958, when Norworth told the story for the first time in an interview. They further note that they could not find any support for the proposition that there was ever an ad that read “Come to the Polo Grounds” on any New York subway in 1908.
Take Me Out to the Ball Game was first introduced to the public through a phenomenon known as “illustrated song play” in movie theatres nationwide, where a primitive slide projector was set up; “magic lantern slides” of the Polo Grounds were projected onto the screen; the theater’s pianist played the song’s music while the lyrics were simultaneously projected onto the screen; and the theater crowds joined in a boisterous chant of “buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack, I don’t care if I ever get back.” The song was first sung by Norworth’s then-wife, Nora Bayes (nee Leona Goldberg, a Jewess) and it went on to become popularized by many other vaudeville acts.
The first known time that the song was actually performed in a baseball stadium was in 1934 – at a high school game in Los Angeles – but it was also sung that year by St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Pepper Martin during the fourth game of the 1934 World Series, in which the Cardinals defeated the Detroit Tigers. The “seventh inning stretch” can be traced back to 1869, when Hall of Fame player Harry Wright of the Cincinnati Red Stockings wrote, “The spectators all rise between halves of the seventh [inning], extend their legs and arms, and sometimes walk about. They enjoy the relief afforded by relaxation from a long posture upon the benches.” Take Me Out to the Ball Game, which was first broadcast during the seventh-inning stretch in Pacific Coast ballparks in 1945, has become the standard and will likely remain so for all time.
The first recorded version of the song was by Edward Meeker, who recorded it for the Edison Phonograph Company. It was the number one song of 1908, selling some six million copies of sheet music, and it was selected by the Library of Congress in 2010 as an addition to the National Recording Registry. However, there have been countless covers of the song, notably including a version sung by Frank Sinatra at the start of the MGM musical film, Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949). Its most famous recording was credited to Billy Murray and the Haydn Quartet, even though Murray did not sing on it; however, the misperception was so extensive that when the song was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America as one of the 365 top “Songs of the Century,” it was credited to Murray as having received the most votes among songs from the first decade of the 20th century.
Although Cracker Jack had been launched in 1893, it became a commercial behemoth after the release of Take Me Out to the Ball Game. The song won the Songwriters Hall of Fame Towering Song Award in 2008 and Von Tilzer, a charter member of the Association of Songwriters, Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), was elected a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame. On June 27, 1940, the Brooklyn Dodgers hosted a special day for Von Tilzer at their home park at Ebbets Field, and in 1958 – the 50th anniversary of the song – Major League Baseball awarded Norworth a gold lifetime ballpark pass. (He would have only a year to enjoy it before his death).
In 2001, the Recording Industry of America ranked Take Me Out to the Ball Game as No. 8 in its Songs of the Century list. In the mid-1990s, a Major League Baseball ad campaign featured versions of the song performed by musicians of several different genres, including versions by the Goo Goo Dolls and by Dr. John and Carly Simon, who recorded the song for Ken Burns’s PBS documentary series Baseball. In 2001, Nike aired a commercial featuring a diverse group of Major League Baseball players singing lines from the song in their native languages, including Ken Griffey, Jr. and Mark McGwire (American English), Alex Rodriguez and Ivan Rodriguez (Caribbean Spanish), Chan Ho Park (Korean), Kazuhiro Sasaki (Japanese), Eric Gagne (Québécois French), Andruw Jones (Dutch), and John Franco (Italian).
While almost everyone knows the renowned baseball anthem, few realize that the lyrics they sing regularly is only the chorus of the song. The song’s stanzas tell the story of a young woman named Katie Casey – perhaps her name was taken from Ernest Thayer’s famous poem, Casey at the Bat? – a passionate baseball fan who, when her young beau invites her to accompany him to a play, responds that she prefers to attend a baseball game. Katie’s knowledge of the game, its players, its minutia, and its rhythms are such that she uses the song itself to encourage her team and cheer it on to victory:
Katie Casey was baseball mad,
had the fever and had it bad.
Just to root for the home town crew,
ev’ry sou Katie blew.
On a Saturday her young beau,
called to see if she’d like to go
to see a show,
but Miss Kate said “No,
I’ll tell you what you can do:”Chorus
Take me out to the ball game,
take me out with the crowd;
buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,
I don’t care if I never get back.
Let me root, root, root for the home team,
If they don’t win, it’s a shame.
For it’s one, two, three strikes, you’re out,
at the old ball game.Katie Casey saw all the games,
knew the players by their first names.
Told the umpire he was wrong,
all along,
good and strong.
When the score was just two to two,
Katie Casey knew what to do,
just to cheer up the boys she knew,
she made the gang sing this song:Chorus
Take me out to the ball game…
(etc.)
In 1927, Norworth rewrote the verses to the song such that the woman, now named Nelly Kelly, when asked out by her boyfriend, this time to go to Coney Island, begins to “fret and pout. And to him I heard her shout,” whereupon at this point the classic chorus cuts in:
Nelly Kelly loved baseball games,
Knew the players, knew all their names.
You could see her there ev’ry day,
shout “hurray”
when they’d play.
Her boyfriend by the name of Joe,
said “to Coney Isle, dear. Let’s go.”
Then Nelly started to fret and pout,
and to him I heard her shout:Chorus
Take me out to the ball game…
(etc.)Nelly Kelly was sure some fan,
she would root just like any man.
Told the umpire he was wrong,
all along,
good and strong.
When the score was just two to two,
Nelly Kelly knew what to do,
just to cheer the boys she knew,
she made the gang sing this song:Chorus
Take me out to the ball game…
(etc.)
While the commentators generally agree that Katie Casey and Nelly Kelly were both fictional names that fit well into the song’s meter, they disagree about Norworth’s motive for changing the lyric (the music remained the same, so there was no need for additional input from Von Tilzer). Some authorities note that Norwood divorced in 1927 and remarried a year later, theorizing that the name “Nelly Kelly” and her character may have reminded him of his new girlfriend/wife. Others suggest that the new lyric was a clever business decision that earned Norworth a second copyright. In any event, it is only the chorus – which was the same in both iterations – that most people know and which is still sung today.
Born Albert Gumm in Indianapolis, Indiana, to polish immigrants Sarah (nee Von Tilzer) and Jacob Gumbinsky, Von Tilzer and his four brothers all went on to success in the music business. Albert, who had taught himself to play piano, dropped out of high school to work in his father’s shoe store and he worked briefly as a musical director for a vaudeville group before taking a position in 1899 as a staff pianist for the Chicago branch of the Shapiro and Bernstein firm. In 1900, he moved to New York City, then the center of the music publishing industry, but he continued to support himself as a shoe salesman in a Brooklyn department store until his brother, Harry, joined him in New York; opened his own music publishing house, the Harry Von Tilzer Music Company; and published Von Tilzer’s early songs. Von Tilzer later formed his own firm, The York Publishing Company but, by 1913, he had closed the company and joined his brother’s firm. He became a top Tin Pan Alley tune writer, producing numerous popular music compositions for more than half a century, spanning the turn of the twentieth century through the early 1950s. He collaborated with many lyricists, and many of his compositions have withstood the test of time and are still performed.
Take Me Out to the Ball Game brought Von Tilzer great fame and, by the 1920s, he was no longer writing for vaudeville. He was now composing full scores for Broadway and then, after moving to Hollywood in 1930, he wrote songs for motion pictures.
Take Me Out to the Ball Game, which was adopted as “the official baseball song” by both the American and National Leagues in 1933, has been featured in well over 1,200 films, television shows, and commercials and has been recorded by more than 400 artists across every musical genre. Although twenty-four of Von Tilzer’s songs sold more than a million copies, he will always be remembered for one song which, even over a century after it was written, remains one of the most beloved and well-known songs of all time.
On the eve of the 1956 “Subway” World Series between the Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers, Von Tilzer was watching the Ed Sullivan Show and, when Sullivan introduced several ballplayers from both teams, the band broke out into a gentle rendition of Take Me Out to the Ball Game. Ironically, this would be the last song Von Tilzer ever heard; he died before the next morning. The song that made him famous was played at his funeral, when he was buried in a family plot in the New Mount Carmel cemetery in Glendale, N.Y. The headstone, simple in design with only a name and date, does not make any mention of Judaism or his part in celebrating America’s pastime.
According to the Baseball Hall of Fame, although Von Tilzer’s contribution to baseball is worthy of being remembered, he is not eligible for induction as an honoree because he does not fit into any of the four categories recognized by the Hall of Fame: player, umpire, ownership, and pioneers. Similarly, Von Tilzer remains unrecognized by the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame and Museum in Commack, N.Y., whose goal is to foster “Jewish identity through sports” and which is located less than forty miles from Von Tilzer’s burial site.
In 2008, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp commemorating the 100-year anniversary of the song, but it makes no mention of the songwriters. According to sources inside the United States Postal Service, when the proposal for a Take Me Out to the Ball Game was first brought to the Stamp Advisory Committee, the group spontaneously burst into singing the classic song. Although the USPS receives some 50,000 proposals a year and selects less than 0.1% of them, Take Me Out to the Ball Game was a shoo-in.
