Hold Steady frontman — and devoted Minnesota Twins fan — Craig Finn fielded an age-old question during a recent online chat at ESPN.com.
In so many words: What do artist types have against sports?
“I can admit to liking to eat wings and watch baseball, but a lot of rockers just have a hard time doing that,” Mr. Finn replied.
Rock musicians, he surmised, often feel compelled to live up to rock’s rebellious roots, and American sports are the quintessence of the mobbed-up mainstream.
Yet, as Mr. Finn’s answer exemplifies, baseball has proved a conspicuous exception to the rule of resistance among indie rockers of late. Stephen Malkmus of Pavement fame, singer-songwriter Joe Pernice, Dave and Serge Bielanko of Marah, Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo (whose very name — Spanish for “I’ve got it!” — is a baseball homage) — they’re all out and proud.
Closer to the mainstream, Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder recently penned a song, “All the Way,” in tribute to the Chicago Cubs and their century-long World Series drought. Nils Lofgren wrote “Yankee Stadium” to commemorate the closing of the storied New York venue. (Both tracks are available for download at the artists’ respective Web sites.)
It should come as no surprise: Baseball, with its contemplative pace and foundation of statistical probability, has long appealed to American writers, aesthetes, number crunchers and anyone else of an intellectual bent.
It was no accident, for instance, that one of Major League Baseball’s most famous commissioners, the late Bart Giamatti, had been an epic poetry egghead at Yale University. Bernard Malamud produced a great baseball novel (1952’s “The Natural”). Poet E. Ethelbert Miller just published a memoir, “The Fifth Inning,” using the seemingly timeless life-as-baseball metaphor.
Yale historian Donald Kagan and columnist (and Princeton doctoral degree holder) George F. Will spilled much ink in the Public Interest in 1990 arguing whether baseball was a game of magical heroes or, as Mr. Will argued in his best-selling book “Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball,” a more earthly, if extraordinarily demanding, pursuit.
Seen in this light, indie rockers’ enthusiasm for baseball makes perfect sense.
A few have gone so far as to make an album devoted entirely to baseball. The Baseball Project, they call themselves: singer-guitarist Steve Wynn, formerly of the influential ’80s college rock band the Dream Syndicate, and his drummer wife, Linda Pitmon; Minus 5 singer and R.E.M. sideman Scott McCaughey; and R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck.
The Baseball Project’s “Vol. 1: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails” — 13 story-songs about diamond legends such as Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays and Curt Flood — came out on Yep Roc Records; its release was pegged to the All-Star break.
The tracks are rootsy in instrumentation and mostly midtempo — the better to take in the offbeat humor and often obscure history. Baseball junkies will revel in such tales as “Harvey Haddix,” whose namesake pitched 12 perfect innings for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1959 — only to lose the game in the 13th. (Talk about bad run support!)
Mr. Wynn says he completely understands the diffidence of which Mr. Finn speaks. Musicians “look warily at people who are sports fans because they represent that thing we’re supposed to hate — the jocks, the dunderheads, the people with no sensitivity or humanity,” he says.
Yet there’s no suppressing a lifelong love of the game. Mr. Wynn, 48, grew up in Southern California in the shadow of Chavez Ravine, the site of Dodger Stadium.
“Baseball is different from the rest” of American sports, he says. “It uses all the same brain cells you use being a music fan. It’s there for people who want to sit around and debate trivial things all day.
“Which version of [Iggy and the Stooges’] ’Raw Power’ do you like more — the first version or the remix version? It’s the same thing as debating the designated-hitter rule,” he continues.
Mr. Wynn and Mr. McCaughey alighted on their mutual love of baseball at a party following R.E.M.’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year. “Somewhere between drink four and seven, we both realized we’d been thinking for a long time about doing a record about baseball,” Mr. Wynn recalls.
Their collaboration, he says, was like a Joe DiMaggio hitting streak. “The songs wrote themselves. Everything on this record is something Scott and I probably would talk about in a bar with someone who loved baseball as much as we do. This time, we just talked about it with guitars in our hands.”
R.E.M.’s extensive touring schedule prevented the Baseball Project from touring. Nevertheless, Mr. Wynn says successive volumes are in the works. Now that the secret’s out, we can expect additional artists to participate. “We have the ’blacklist,’” he jokes.
An unorthodox touring itinerary is another possibility.
“Maybe we’ll go busk in front of baseball stadiums,” Mr. Wynn says.
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