Britton graduate and Detroit Tiger’s pitcher Duane Below comments on 100th anniversary of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”

By CRISTINA TRAPANI-SCOTT

The sounds of summer are emerging—the crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd and the sound of the organ wafting through stadiums playing that old standard “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” This year, the song that is most associated with America’s favorite pastime and the seventh inning stretch, unless you are a Red Sox fan, is 100 years old.
Written in 1908 by then well-known songwriter Jack Norworth, also credited with writing “Shine on, Harvest Moon,” and set to music by Albert Von Tilzer, the song was not initially played at games. In fact, Norworth had never been to a baseball game. He wrote later that the song was inspired by a sign on a subway train that read “Baseball Today – Polo Grounds.” Neither he nor Von Tilzer attended a game until decades after the song was written.

What’s sung and heard at ball games today is the chorus of the tune. Most people are not familiar with the verses of the song, which is about a baseball-mad woman named Katie Casey in the original version. In 1927, Norworth changed the verses a little and Katie Casey changed to Nelly Kelly. Casey, or Kelly, depending on the version, is obsessed with the game of baseball, preferring America’s pastime to a show, and she sings the chorus to let her beau know and to cheer on the players when she does get to the ball game.

Although, it wasn’t initially played at early baseball games, the song was a hit in 1908. Norworth was hardly an obscure music talent. According Sunday Morning on CBS’s profile of the song and its composers, Norworth and his wife, Nora Bayes, a popular vaudeville singer at the time who was the first to sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” were the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie of their time.