May 24, 2006, was a fairly uneventful Wednesday in Major League Baseball. Future Hall of Famer CC Sabathia was the day’s top performer, tossing a shutout in Cleveland’s 11-0 road win over the Minnesota Twins. Meanwhile, in Miami, Florida Marlins third baseman Miguel Cabrera had two hits plus a pair of walks, pushing his batting average to .335 and his OPS to 1.031. The two best records in baseball belonged to the Detroit Tigers (32-14) and the St. Louis Cardinals (31-16), each of whom won road contests at the Kansas City Royals and San Francisco Giants, respectively. In fact, these two teams would go on to meet in the World Series, where the Cardinals would upset the Tigers four games to one.
Still, even if May 24, 2006, was unremarkable on the baseball diamond, something Hall of Fame-worthy did happen on that day. At 10 a.m. ET, XM Satellite Radio broadcast the fourth episode of “Theme Time Radio Hour.” The show first aired a few weeks earlier, and, from the outset, it featured a peculiar format: After a noir-ish introduction, beginning with the smoky, sultry lines of a female narrator (“It’s nighttime in the big city”), a series of roughly 15 songs followed. These songs were not gathered according to genre, nor were they sequenced in chronological order. Rather, they were put together thematically. For example, “Theme Time Radio Hour’s” inaugural episode was titled simply “Weather.” Its first song was “Blow Wind Blow” (1953) by Muddy Waters, and its final track was “Keep on the Sunny Side” (1928) by The Carter Family. In between, songs by guitar legend Jimi Hendrix and R&B pioneer Stevie Wonder also appeared, though, despite their respective greatness, Hendrix and Wonder weren’t the biggest stars of the show. That honor would belong to none other than the DJ himself — American singer, songwriter, poet, actor, author, and all-around cultural icon Bob Dylan.
“Theme Time Radio Hour’s” second episode centered on the theme of “Mother,” its third on “Drinking.” But Episode 4, which aired just a few hours before Sabathia’s dominant start in Minneapolis, was dubbed “Baseball.” For those who know Dylan’s work, it’s hardly surprising that he would dedicate an episode of “Theme Time Radio Hour” to the national pastime. Perhaps most famously, he and stage director Jacques Levy (1935-2004) wrote the song “Catfish” in honor of Hall of Fame pitcher Jim “Catfish” Hunter (1946-99), who retired in 1979 as an eight-time All-Star and five-time World Series champion. Dylan recorded the song in July 1975, right in the middle of Hunter’s first year with the Yankees — a forgettable season for the Bronx Bombers but another stellar one for Hunter, who led MLB in wins for the second time in his career. Dylan’s song, however, is less about Hunter’s on-field accomplishments than his path from small-town North Carolina to the bright lights of Yankee Stadium. Over a bluesy acoustic guitar and harmonica, Dylan juxtaposes Hunter’s rustic love of the outdoors with his newfound status as the highest-paid pitcher in MLB history. Yet, the gravelly insouciance of Dylan’s voice suggests that Hunter is worth every penny. As he sings in the chorus, “Catfish, million-dollar man / Nobody can throw the ball like Catfish can.”
Dylan’s appreciation of Hunter appears to have been sincere, since his interest in and love for baseball have turned up at various points in his career. In his peculiar 1987 interview with playwright and actor Sam Shepard — which, notably, Shepard later rewrote as a one-act play — the subject of baseball comes up. Dylan, identified only as “Bob,” recalls his childhood in Hibbing, Minn. When asked if he harbored dreams of being a musician even as a boy, Dylan talks about having “radio-station dreams,” staying “up late in bed, listening to the radio, and you sort of dream off the radio into sleep.” When his interviewer says, “I used to fall asleep listening to baseball,” Dylan adds, “Yeah. Same thing.” Nearly two decades later, the topic of baseball came up in another interview, this time with Jonathan Lethem of Rolling Stone. The occasion was the latest leg of Dylan’s “Never Ending Tour.” Starting on Aug. 12, 2006, and running through the second week of September, Dylan played a series of shows in baseball parks, including Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, Mass., Doubleday Field in Cooperstown, N.Y., and Howard Wood Field in Sioux Falls, S.D. Although he complained about the sound quality of these venues (“The best sound you can get is an intimate club”), Dylan added a few casual remarks about baseball in general. For example, he said that free agency had dissuaded him from rooting for a single team: “All the players get traded, and what your favorite team used to be — a couple of guys you really liked on the team, they’re not on the team now — and you can’t possibly make that team your favorite team.” That said, Dylan confessed to being a Detroit Tigers fan, which, in fact, makes sense, since the Washington Senators did not relocate to Dylan’s native Minnesota until 1961 — the very year that Dylan famously moved to Greenwich Village in the Manhattan section of New York City. Still, among the then-current players, he singled out New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter as a personal favorite: “I’d rather have him on my team than anybody.”
These remarks, like the baseball-themed episode on “Theme Time Radio Hour,” came on the heels of the 2004 publication of “Chronicles: Volume One” — Dylan’s much-feted memoir covering various periods of his long career. Perhaps the process of writing “Chronicles” is what nudged Dylan towards his overt embrace of baseball culture in 2006. The game doesn’t play a central role in the narrative, but it’s clear that Dylan sees it as part of his story. Baseball turns up a number of times in “Chronicles.” In one early scene, Dylan recalls meeting the dancer and choreographer Judith Dunn (1933-83), who was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater, a postmodern troupe based in Greenwich Village, which strove to bring choreography and everyday life closer together. Dylan seems to remember this detail, as he points out that Dunn’s “dance pieces were based on sports activities like wrestling and baseball.” To be sure, as Dylan later explains, baseball was woven into the fabric of American life at the time. Growing up in Hibbing, located even farther north than notoriously frigid Duluth, Dylan insists that every kid had “to know how to skate and play ice hockey.” Still, he says, baseball was both a popular sport to play and a local pastime. Highlights of Minnesota’s short summers were drive-in movies, “dirt track stock car racing,” and an annual visit by Eddie Feigner (1925-2007) and his barnstorming fastpitch softball team known as “The King and His Court.” As Dylan reminisces:
“The most thrilling event of the summer was when The King and His Court fastpitch softball team came to town and challenged the best players in the country. If you liked baseball, this was the team to see. The King and His Court were four players: a pitcher, a catcher, a first baseman and a roving shortstop. The pitcher (Feigner) was awesome. Sometimes he pitched from second base, sometimes blindfolded, at times between his legs. Very few players ever got a hit off him, and The King and His Court never lost a game.”
Of course, barnstorming teams such as Feigner’s remain popular in American society, as the recent success of the Savannah Bananas demonstrates. Yet, in Dylan’s youth, prior to the advent of television, barnstorming wasn’t just entertainment. It was a way of connecting baseball to the rural heartland and of helping players earn extra money. Several of the greatest players in baseball history, including Grover Cleveland Alexander, Babe Ruth, and Satchel Paige, barnstormed at one time or another. In this way, they became veritable folk heroes, popping into small towns such as Mauston, Wis., Perry, Iowa, and Versailles, Ky. Tall tales of daring and prowess followed in their wake, as with Ruth’s estimated 650-foot home run in an October 1926 exhibition in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Of course, there were legends off the field as well, including the mythical story told by Yankees slugger Bob Meusel (1896-77), who claimed that on a 1921 barnstorming tour Ruth smoked seven cigars in a single night — one for each woman whom he had bedded.
That Dylan views baseball as an integral aspect of American folklore is made clear in the very last paragraphs of “Chronicles.” Recalling that Tin Pan Alley music publisher Lou Levy (1910-95) had once suggested that he write songs about baseball, Dylan drifts into a kind of reverie about Levy’s miscellaneous connections to the game. There was Levy, Dylan muses, “puffing away on a big stogie filling the room with formless clouds” and lamenting the rise of the home run in baseball and extolling the greatness of former Pirates outfielder Paul Waner (1903-65). As Dylan writes, “Lou said Paul was a hitter who could blast a ball back at a pitcher 150 miles an hour and break his face. He was that accurate. Opposing pitchers were scared to ever dare brush him back at the plate, and that Ted Williams could do that, too.” But baseball legends were not just a thing of the past. Dylan remembers that, just as he was getting settled in New York City, another native of Hibbing was embarking on another mythical quest. His name was Roger Maris, and on October 1, 1961, he would break Ruth’s MLB single-season home run record. “On some level,” Dylan adds, “I guess I took pride in being from the same town.”
In light of these various recollections and points of contact, it is not surprising that Dylan would ultimately dedicate an episode of “Theme Time Radio Hour” to baseball. The show itself consists of 16 songs in all, if one includes Dylan’s own a cappella rendition of “Take Me Out To The Ball Game.” Below I have put together a handy, if not quite complete, playlist on Spotify:
The songs are mostly taken from the so-called “Golden Age of Baseball,” which can be dated from Ruth’s first season with the Yankees (1920) to some point in the 1960s, when the careers of postwar superstars such as Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays began to fade. The show begins with a number of broadly baseball-themed songs, which collectively demonstrate the extent to which baseball had become woven into American popular consciousness. Chance Halladay’s bluesy single “Home Run” (1959) treats baseball as a metaphor for sex (“C’mon, baby, let’s cross home plate”), while Sister Wynona Carr’s gospel-infused “The Ball Game” (1952) envisions baseball as a spiritual allegory: Satan is a filthy pitcher, who tries (but fails) to strike out biblical heroes such as Daniel and Job. Next, Dylan transitions to a series of tracks dedicated to individual players, from Jackie Robinson to Joe DiMaggio (Dylan selects two songs for “the Yankee Clipper,” in fact) to Don Newcombe and even to Ozzie Smith, who starred for the Cardinals in the 1980s. Finally, the show ends with a pair of eclectic offerings. On the one hand is the elegiac “3rd Base, Dodger Stadium” from Ry Cooder’s 2005 concept album “Chávez Ravine” — a work that traces the commercial development of the eponymous canyon in Los Angeles, whose Mexican-American residents were displaced by the construction of Dodger Stadium. It is followed by “Heart” from the 1955 Broadway musical “Damn Yankees,” which puts a distinctly American spin on the Old World legend of Faust.
Of course, throughout the entire episode, the star of the show is Dylan himself, who, with an almost palpable smile, chimes in with lessons on baseball history, Beat poetry, and the curious practice of releasing the same single (in this case, “Say Hey (The Willie Mays Song)” by The Treniers) in different phonographic formats. The show’s transcript, while an enjoyable read, does not do justice to Dylan’s real-life turn as “Theme Time Radio Hour’s” raspy raconteur, in which he partly plays the role of famous disc jockey Wolfman Jack (1938-95) and partly the role of noted American folklorist Benjamin A. Botkin (1901-75):
And yet, that’s just another way of saying that Dylan was indeed the perfect man for the job — not just a baseball fan, but a fan of American culture writ large, who has spent an entire career exploring and, in turn, expanding on the American story. And that story, as “Theme Time Radio Hour” definitively memorializes, cannot be told without baseball.
