REPORTING FROM ...
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
(W/BONUS CLIP REEL!)

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"If the moon was made of spare ribs, would you eat it?"

In this age of performance enhancing drugs and their accompanying Congressional fallout, an exhibit honoring the 100th anniversary of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts stands as a testament to a simpler time—a time when men were men and women, uh, couldn't vote.

The exhibit, titled "Take Me Out to the Ball Game": 100 Years of Music, Musicians, and the National Pastime, traces the history of the bond between baseball and the performing arts, which runs far deeper than one might expect. (Most famous example? The sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees by Sox owner and Broadway producer Harry Frazee to help finance a production of No No Nanette.) But it is the sheet music that lines the walls of the small Manhattan gallery where the evolution of our national pastime is most apparent.

Thanks to Harry Caray, everyone knows the refrain to Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer's ode to the ol' ball game—it's the third-most sung song in America behind "Happy Birthday" and "The Star Spangled Banner". But few know about tunes like "The Racine Belles March," which lead the Racine Belles of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League onto the field, or "Brother Noah Gave Out Checks for Rain," which spotlighted black baseball players years before the founding of the Negro Leagues.

But why has "Take Me Out to the Ball Game", the lynchpin of the exhibit, endured for an entire century?

"When you've got entire crowds of people singing it—players and fans alike—it creates a kind of democracy," says NYPL Music Division Chief George Boziwick, who has been working on the exhibit for over a year and a half. "Everybody can sing it. It's not like the 'Star Spangled Banner.' "

Norworth's complete lyrics, which don't make the seventh-inning stretch these days, tell the story of "baseball mad" Katie Casey, who demanded her suitor take her to the ballpark in lieu of the theater. In many ways, that plea for peanuts and Cracker Jack was actually a call for reform.

"It was a reluctant signifier of social change," Boziwick says of the tune, which spawned several knock-offs of similar subject matter in 1908. "Men and women were getting used to the idea that there were going to be women in the stands at games."

Perhaps it's an unlikely anthem for women's rights, but the 19th Amendment was just 12 years away when the tune first debuted on the vaudeville circuit.

"You have to wonder," Boziwick says, "if [Norworth] ever thought it would get like this."

Or that Mandy Patinkin would one day record a version entirely in Yiddish.

CLIP REEL

For years, countless celebs have served as guest conductor of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" during the seventh-inning stretch. Here are a few highlights (and lowlights):

• Harry Caray
  (Bonus: Ryan Dempster's impression of Harry Caray)
• American Idol's Kellie Pickler
• American Idol's William Hung (booed mercilessly)
• American Idol's David Cook
• Ozzie Osbourne
• Eddie Vedder
• "Rock 'N Roll Legend" John Fogerty
• Frank Caliendo and band of merry characters
• Buck O'Neil
• Devin Hester
• Danica Patrick
• Jeff Gordon (booed mercilessly)
• Jerry Lee Lewis and Neil Sedaka
• The Budweiser Lizards (remember them?)
• Mike Ditka's legendary rendition
• Misc:
  • As played on a soprano recorder (basically what it would have sounded like if it were played in Middle Earth)
  • A clip from the film of the same name
  • Harpo Marx plays it on the Harp
  • Karaoke Version on a Hammond A100 Organ

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