Throughline - How baseball got its beat

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

Major League Baseball’s postseason is just a few weeks away, and here on Throughline we know the power of a good walk-up song. But how did baseball become such a musical sport? And where did the idea for walk up-music come from? Guests:John Thorn, author and Official Baseball Historian for Major League BaseballNancy Faust, former organist for the Chicago White SoxSupport public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

I didn't care much about baseball for a lot of my life. But a few years ago, one song helped change that. Let me take you back to 2022. The Mets, the team I kind of adopted when I married a diehard fan, while they were having an unusually good season. Struck him out. Back-to-back strikeouts for Diaz. And a big reason for that was this pitcher on our team back then, Edwin Diaz.

He struck him out. And the ball game is up. Edwin Diaz making it look easy. Diaz was our closer, which meant he would come in late in the game, usually at a critical moment. Bringing Diaz off the bench was the Mets way of saying to the other team,

funds over, this game is ours. And so part of his job was to exude confidence, to put all the pressure on the other team's batter. And Diaz had a specific way of doing that, a way that commanded the whole stadium's attention. Now, Timmy Trumpet takes center stage. walk-up song. As Edwin Diaz gets ready to come in looking for a sing.

A snippet of music blasted over the stadium speakers to hype up the crowd. It's often a song the player has picked themselves that says something about who they are or where they're from. It can be earnest. Let's listen to Josh Reddick's new walk-up song. It's a favorite. Or cheeky. And Diaz's walk-up track was this song called Narco.

Clips of Diaz walking up to the mound while Narco played in the background went viral. The Mets started handing out plastic trumpets to fans. The team mascots, Mr. and Mrs. Met, these anthropomorphized baseballs, pretended to play along to the trumpet solo while strobe lights flashed in the background. And finally, it got so big that the team brought in one of the songs artists, Timmy trumpet, from Australia, to play the solo live while Diaz made his entrance. Well, until last night, the Australian Timmy Trumpet had never attended a baseball game. Now he will get his first view of an Edwin Diaz save opportunity. And if you were in the stands when that song came on, let me tell you, it was electric. And it kind of made me start to pay attention more and lean into the game.

If you really stop and think about it, this whole walk-up music thing, it's kind of of a weird ritual. But when you put it into context of all the other music you're hearing at the ballpark, it starts to make more sense. Like from the moment you step into the stadium, you're kind of surrounded by music. Tens of thousands of people are singing together. Fans feel like they're actually becoming a part of what's happening on the field. And so I wanted to know how and when did music become such a big part of baseball. I'm Randabed Fetah. It's playoff season for Major League Baseball, which the Mets, sadly, will not be playing in. Just not our year. On today's show, we're rewinding through more than 100 years of baseball history. And we'll do it with the help of two people who were there for some of the seminal moments,

Major League Baseball's official historian. So I take it you don't love walk-up music. I just want to get that on the record. I do not love walk-up music. And the organist who launched a thousand walk-up songs. It wasn't very nice. I don't know. I was a little bit responsible.

That's when we come back. Hello, this is Lissa Maloy from Charlestown, New Hampshire. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR. I love listening to ThruLine because it helps me question my own preconceived notion and form a deeper understanding of why and how things developed. Part 1. Take me out to the ball game. When I think of going to a baseball game today, I have this vivid image, right, of, like, the players are warming up.

We're in between innings. We've got, like, sweet Caroline playing with the speakers, and some people are singing, some people are dancing. It's a vibe, right? Well, I do comprehend that, But I can't say that I fully understand it because one of the joys of baseball to me is the silence between half innings. With walk-up music and non-stop audio, the need to secure attention, the attention of the fans

is relentless. And the idea of a kid going to a ballgame and being entitled to dream, that may be lost. John Thorne is a legend in the world of baseball history. He's Major League Baseball's official historian, and he writes a blog about baseball in the past called Our Game. The baseball John fell in love with as a kid sounded different than it does today. My first baseball game at a major league level was May 12th, 1957,

when I went to the Polo Grounds with my father, Johnny Padres, threw a shutout, Duke Snyder hit a homer, and I was in heaven. In fact, the thing that really captivated John was the silence. It made everything else sound so much louder and clearer. I think of the ball hitting the bat in a peculiar way. The sound the ball made when it hit the bat for Babe Ruth, it was there for Josh Gibson.

there was a sound off the bat. You might hear the leathery thud of a mitt cushioning a pop fly. A coach yelling at his player to keep running, steal second base. But there was music in baseball. If you knew where to listen for it, it had already been there for decades.

Okay, let's go back in time. Well, back in time is where I'm comfortable. Can you take me back to sort of the very beginning of where baseball and music collide. Where is the starting point? The idea that an anthem would be played at a baseball game dates to 1862. The first enclosed ballpark, William Kamire's Union Grounds,

opened on May 15, 1862, with a band present that played the Star-Spangled Banner. John says it's unlikely anyone was singing along. The closest thing to a sound system at the Union grounds in the 1860s may have been a guy in the field with an old-fashioned megaphone, but it introduced a ritual, a ceremonial place for music at the ballgame, especially John points out at important moments for the country. In a sense, music helped solidify baseball as America's pastime. The idea that the Star-Spangled banner and patriotism should be connected with baseball,

goes back to the height of the Civil War. But it was not universal until we had entered World War II in 1942. But during the decades, in between those two milestones, music made a creeping crescendo. The national anthem had opened the door, and new traditions marched in, like the seventh inning stretch. The idea of the seventh inning stretch goes back so far as to defy scholars. The seventh inning stretch started out as exactly what it sounds like, an opportunity to stretch your legs, get the blood pumping.

But it would become a musical interlude thanks to a song that came out in 1908, a song that would create both an industry and an invitation for more music at the ballpark. Take me out to a ballgame. which we think of as the seventh inning stretch response was actually a song about female suffrage. Take Me Out to the Ballgame was a suffrage at Anthem. Take me out to the ballgame, take me out to the ballgame. Buy me some peanuts and cracker. I'm just trying to, where is the... No, but you're reflecting on the chorus.

There are many other stanzas. and the original stanzas reflected an independent-minded woman who knows all about baseball and the players and wants to go to a game. Her name was Katie Casey. Katie Casey was baseball mad had the fever and had it bad

just to root for the hometown through every school, Katie Blue. When Katie's boyfriend asks if she wants to see a show. She says, nah, take me out to the ballgame. She knows all the players' names, and when the ump makes a bad call.

And crucially, when the game is tied, she knows exactly what to do. She made the gang sing this song. She made the gang sing this song. She made the gang sing, and thus was born a new genre of music, baseball songs. The combination of sheet music and cylinder roll and 78 RPM records, it was a deluge in the 1910s. Baseball music was really, really popular, not so much with fans as with publishers. So it was a marketing tool in some ways to get people to go to the games?

Yeah, in fact, there were so many Tin Pan Alley. Look, George M. Cohen wrote a song that he issued in very nearly the same week as Take Me Out. It was called Take Your Girl to the Ballgame. And it was quickly followed up by other copycats, like, I Want to Go to the Ballgame. The tune may sound familiar. But even with all this new baseball music produced by Tin Pan Alley, by and large, there still wasn't a lot of group singing going on at actual ballparks. John says a big reason for that was technical.

The sound systems were primitive. A brass band was still the best backing track available until the radio came around. It's possible this new radio audience was responsible for the fresh wave of baseball music released in the decades that followed. Radio brought us Joe DiMaggio's song. Hello, Joe. What do you know? We need a hit, so here I go. In 1941, Les Brown and his band of renown. And very stupid lyrics, exceedingly dumb.

But it's a catchy tune. And Simon and Garfunkel, what, 25 years later, sang, Where Have You Gone, Joe, Noggio? turns its lonely eyes to you. Well, that's what we do with baseball. We turn lonely eyes to the game. The game, its strength is in the past, not in the present moment,

so that marketers with relentless appeal to non-stop audio between innings, may be making a mistake. But all that audio stayed outside the ballpark for decades. The idea that radio came in in 1920 didn't mean that fans were bringing radios to the ballparks until the 1950s when transistor radios came in. At that point, fans sitting in the stands might hear a secondhand taste of the radio broadcast carried through the air from a few rows over, where someone had the sound on transistor radio turned up. The idea of upsetting your neighbors

by listening to rock music during the heat of a ballgame, must have been daunting. John says some people brought earplugs to the ballpark. So you would bring your transistor radio and everybody around you would be hearing the music that you're playing. Correct. Correct. And if fans thought that was annoying, while the volume was about to be turned way up.

The idea that you would let go, of attention and perhaps permit the strolling underneath the stands. This was a thing of the past. That's when we come back. This is Tom calling from Hudson, New York. I've been through line plus and through line supporter since the very beginning, and I love the way that the show always gives a context for what's going on today. I was delighted to hear one of my pieces of music on a recent podcast.

Love it. I love what you do. Keep doing it. Thank you. You're listening to ThruLine on NPR. Part 2. Hey, hey, goodbye. It's a hot summer evening in Chicago. July 1977.

Stadium lights blazed down on the baseball field, Jersey's sticky with the summer humidity. The White Sox are at bat. Two runs down to the Kansas City. City Royals in a game they want to win badly. But they've got to get something going. The stands buzz with tension. Fans jump out of their seats.

Beer and peanuts spill in the stands. The White Sox organist is beaming in her glass booth behind home plate. As the pitcher winds up for the next batter, she leans forward, her fingers hovering over the keys. The big, swung on line. The White Sox, that brother is on first and second. And that's when, creeping up in the background, you start to hear. A chorus of Nana goodbye sneaking through the crowd, getting louder and louder as the fans start to catch on. And he stands 45,000.

The announcer has to raise his voice to be heard over the tidal wave of singing. And this is when the White Sox explode. They load the bases, bat in four runs for the lead. The other team is forced to take out their pitcher. And as he steps off the mound, the Chicago fans serenade him off the pitch, even louder. When you start to play and the whole stadium starts singing along, what were you thinking? What were you feeling? I thought, am I hearing things?

I mean, I realized everybody's singing along. And it was more than just take me out to the ballgame to hear everybody singing along. It wasn't something I was used to. It wasn't very nice. It wasn't this kind of thing you'd typically hear at a ballgame. This was like taunting. And I was a little bit responsible.

Nancy Faust did not mean to change the way we hear baseball forever. In fact, she didn't even mean to become a stadium organist. Did you grow up rooting for the White Sox? Is that how you ended up working with them? It's funny, I was just thrust into this position because my family were not sports fans at all. My true love was always animals. I grew up thinking perhaps I could be a veterinarian. I had no aspirations to become a baseball organist.

But music ran in Nancy's family. Her mom was a professional organist. She taught Nancy how to play when she was four years old. When I was going to college, I was filling in from my mom when she couldn't make a job, playing music for luncheons or banquets. that was attended by the general manager of the White Sox. And so he heard me play, and that's how this whole thing developed. When Nancy Faust walked into the organist booth at White Sox Stadium for the first time,

she was 23 years old. Her short blonde hair was pulled back into pigtails. She hadn't been to a baseball game in years, and she didn't know it, but she was about to revolutionize the game. The booth was like a fishbowl, with big, single pane windows on the front and sides. Sitting behind her organ, Nancy could see the whole stadium surrounding her, thousands of seats. But Nancy says she wasn't that nervous.

I knew I'd played a really mean anthem. I knew that was really good. And I think it was the year of the lowest attendance ever. And so even though the organ was out there in Centerfield, there was very few people around me. So if I did mess up a little, nobody would have a lot of people. Yeah, less pressure. Attendance had been an issue. White Sox games for years.

Things were so bad in those days. I remember the general manager saying, oh, we had a crowd of 8,000 and we blew it. Nowadays, 8,000 just wouldn't cut it. It was an issue the team's previous manager had been obsessed with correcting. Bill Beck was convinced the answer was to juice up the fan experience.

He injected adrenaline into the stands whenever he could. Most famously, with the exploding scoreboard, a 130-foot-wide, electronic screen that launched fireworks, blasted sound effects, and lit up with pixelated pinwheels any time the socks hit a home run. And Beck was also thinking about music. The first organist at Kamiski Park was hired in 1959 or 60, actually. Bill Veckel on the team at that time. And he did something unusual. He placed the organ outdoors among the fans instead of in a booth, which is a

traditional thing that you would do. But Nancy says the organist's repertoire was still pretty limited. The national anthem and taking after the ballgame and about an hour as people entered the field. In her first few years, playing for the White Sox, Nancy stuck to the script she was given. But besides the musical skill set she'd been hired for, Nancy had a second talent. She's witty, quick on her feet. Her sense of humor has a surprising bite to it. So as she started to become more comfortable with the players and the mechanics of the game itself. Nancy let herself improvise more. She played off the things she saw happening around her.

And the third year that I was there, Dick Allen, was a sensational player, and he just commanded attention. And when he walked up to the plate, people left the bathrooms or left the popcorn stand. They wanted to see Dick Allen play because he was a great home run hitter. And so out of the blue, I played Jesus Christ superstar for him, because that was popular at the time. And it just seemed like I'd play it, and he'd hit a home run. And the place went crazy.

And if this story were a song, this is the moment where the whole orchestra would come in. The beat would pick up, the momentum would swell, because Nancy hit a groove. The fans who sat around her booth started coming to her with more ideas for other players on the team. They'd say, oh, that guy, he was in the watch department and the store closed, and he was stuck in the watch department so then I could play. Does anybody know what time it is, or something like that? When he'd come to bat. So you were choosing the songs for the players, basically, with collaboration from the fans.

Yes. And then it grew into, because I was the only music provider, you know, it'd see a rainbow in the sky or a cat run on the field or somebody throw an inflatable doll into the park. Somebody lost a ball in the sun. I were blinded by the light. And there was always just something kind of funny. or there was a song for whatever happened. It wasn't even just the ballplayers. Before we get too carried away here,

we should note, Nancy was not the first organist ever to do this. That honor goes to Gladys Gooding, who played the organ for the Brooklyn Dodgers three decades earlier in the 1940s and 50s. She also riffed off players' names and the mood in the stadium like Nancy would go on to do. But when the Dodgers relocated to Los Angeles in 1952, Gladys didn't go with them.

And the tradition apparently stopped. When Nancy Faust and White Sox fans picked it up back in the 1970s, something was different. Maybe it was the timing, the big marketing swings from baseball team owners. Maybe it was that the organs were more commonplace in stadiums now, and fans came to the game ready to party. Or maybe it was just thanks to the special connection Nancy built with the fans

surrounding her booth. The energy she brought to the game was contagious. It sounds like through your organ playing and the music, you were becoming almost like a part of the game. I guess you'd say that. I'd say I called myself a soundtrack for whatever was happening, even more than just ballplayers. I don't even know that the players were paying attention to what I was playing. I thought they had their mind on the game. But the players most definitely were paying attention.

In 1977, after that game, where Nancy Lerner, Led fans in a sing-along to hey-hey goodbye. A visiting pitcher told a reporter, You stand out on the mound with runners on bass and Zisk at the plate and the crowd of 30,000 singing Kiss it Goodbye and it shakes your confidence. I have read in books since then, people recalling the old days when the players would say,

oh, I hated to hear that. When I heard that, and I'm not goodbye, they'd just make them cringe. Meanwhile, Richie Zisk, the White Sox's big home run hitter, said of the same fans. I don't know whether they come to see us or we come to see them. But I'll tell you this.

It's helped to get you charged up. So I guess I had an impairment, but I just didn't know. You got in their head. You got in their head, Nancy. I have learned that. Along with the legendary White Sox commentator, Harry Carey, Nancy was part of cementing another tradition.

They started singing along to take me out to the ballgame during every seventh inning stretch. The two of them put on a double act that other teams across the country would be inspired to follow. And it's a duet Nancy still carries on today. On her home organ, with her dog Cooper, who perches on an ottoman, front paws in the air, as he sings along. And one of the most amazing parts to me about this story is Nancy Faust cannot read music. All those songs she played off the cuff over the course of her career,

She did all of that by ear. You sing her a few bars of anything, and she can play it back for you on the organ seconds later. So obviously, I had a request. So that's the, that's the main chorus of it, you know. I don't know, is that, how does that feel? Something like that?

Yes, amazing. Nancy Faust retired from her job as the White Sox organist in 2010. White Sox fan and former president Barack Obama set her a letter to personally congratulate her on her career. And that organ booth she occupied for decades is now dedicated to her. Is it just a great life? And every once in a while, Nancy comes out of retirement for special occasions, like... Pope Knight. So I've been doing my religious son.

You've got to have faith and don't stop believing. And yet, when she returns to the ballpark, there's a twinge of nostalgia. Most of the music is now planned ahead of time, loaded onto a soundboard. Eventually, when the parks had the ability to play can music, they asked the player, what would you like to hear, and this would inspire him. And so that's what they're doing now, and they call it walk-up music. So my job was more abbreviated then. Nancy is diplomatic in how she talks about this change.

John Thorne, Major League Baseball's official historian, is less so. Baseball's strength is in its past. He's nostalgic for that feeling of sitting in the stands, hearing that crack as a baseball bat makes contact with the ball. It can almost take you back in time. I mean the ability of baseball to connect generations of fans. It's the hand to the grandson at the ballgame. To John Thorne, the booming loudspeakers, the mascot races, the electronic cues to clap, the walk-up songs, they're all distractions, things that pull his attention away from the game he loves.

But for other baseball fans, I wonder if music has done the opposite, invited them in, forged the connection where they didn't feel one before. In one of your articles, you wrote that baseball music is memorable, neither for wit nor melody, but for its associations with the game we love. Can you describe what you mean by that? Baseball songs like baseball novels and baseball movies are by and large crappy. Steve Goodman, Dying Cub fans' Last Wish, and Simon and Garfunkel. Les Brown and his band of renown. These are all junk. These are all junk.

Every bit of it. I guess when you say most of the music is terrible, what's funny is like, I guess when I really think about it, I'm like, is sweet Caroline like the best song in the world? It's terrible. It's a horrible song. I mean, but then there's a deeper conversation about what gives a song its heft

or what makes it good. To me, one of the most nostalgic kind of sounds is the singing, the fans, people standing together, participating in something together, singing together, off-key, mostly, right? And I feel like, in a way, that act of standing and singing together is the thing that, for a lot of people, connects them to the past. I think you're right. And I think that the fan who experiences baseball only through video clips on his cell phone is missing the appeal. The appeal is to escape from yourself and be someone else at the ballpark or in front of the television and to commune not only with the past but with yourself. John, before I let you go, if there's one song that you would choose to walk up to, if you had to choose, what would it be?

It would be Sister Winona Cars, the ballgame. I actually don't know it. I'm not going to ask you to sing it unless you really feel compelled to. No, no, I will not volunteer. However, I do refer you to YouTube. Instead, we asked Nancy Faust to play us out. That's it for this week's show. If you have a favorite walk-up song, or if you're holding on to a musical sports memory that still gives you goosebumps every time you think of it,

we want to hear them. Email us at throughline at npr.org. Or call 872-588-8-805 and leave a voicemail. And don't forget to tell us your name, where you're calling from, and please say, You're listening to Throughline from NPR. Throughline was created by me and Ramtinada Blui.

This episode was produced by me and Sarah Wyman. Julia Redpath. Jasmine Romero. Molly Marcello. Amy Padula. Leanna Simstrom. Irene Noguchi. This episode was fact-checked by Kevin Vocal.

It was mixed by Jimmy Keely. Music by Ramtinada-Blui and his band, Drop Electric. Thanks also to Johannes Durgy, Cheyenne Butler, and Josie Gautel. I'm Randad de Fattah. Thanks for listening.