Take Me Out to the Ball Game: The Story of the Sensational Baseball Song »

Amy Whorf McGuiggan is a freelance writer and the author of My Provincetown and Christmas in New England. She lives in Hingham, Massachusetts.

Mike Veeck is president and co-owner of six Minor League baseball teams and the author of Fun Is Good: How to Create Joy & Passion in Your Workplace & Career.

For anyone who has ever sung “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh-inning stretch and wondered why we sing it when we are already at the ball game, this entertaining book supplies the answers. And why did this song become the sport’s anthem rather than one of hundreds of other baseball songs, such as George M. Cohan’s “Take Your Girl to the Ball Game,” written the same month? This story, told here in full for the first time, evokes the bright hope of turn-of-the-century America, the backstage drama of vaudeville, and the beguiling charm of baseball itself.

Amy Whorf McGuiggan supplies the fascinating details behind the song’s beginnings in 1908, when Jack Norworth, a vaudeville headliner and Tin Pan Alley songwriter who had never even been to a game, was inspired by a subway advertisement to create the song that, though a hit in its day, did not become a time-honored tradition until broadcaster Harry Caray and team owner and marketing genius Bill Veeck Jr. reintroduced it during the 1970s. Here is America’s game and the American century seen through the prism of one impossibly catchy tune and illustrated throughout with vintage photographs, advertising images, and sheet music culled from America’s premier collections.

Ernie Harwell

“McGuiggan has painstakingly researched the cultural and historical times from which the beloved song emerged and has given baseball fans her own picturesque play-by-play of the making of the hit song. If the song vividly captures the experience of going to the ball game, so too does this book capture the spirit of the times. A home run!”

—Ernie Harwell, National Baseball Hall of Fame and Radio Hall of Fame sportscaster, songwriter, and longtime voice of the Detroit Tigers

Foreword Mike Veeck Veeck, Mike

Introduction Up with the Curtain; On with the Show

1 The Early Years: A Brief History of Baseball 1

2 The New Century 11

3 Ladies and Gentlemen, Please Take Your Seats 19

4 1908: The Year of the Song 39

5 Baseball and Music 51

6 Take Me Out to the Ball Game: The Sensational Baseball Song 61

7 Let Me Hear You Good and Loud... A-one, A-two, A-three 89

8 Baseball as Vaudeville 99

9 Exit Smiling 113

Bibliographic Essay 119