Category Archives: Baseball

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter: Bullpen Carts

mets_cart.jpgYesterday, I wrote about stadium organists, a feature of the game that is quickly dying out. Another aspect that’s already dead is one that probably shouldn’t have lived to begin with: bullpen carts. Yes, once upon a time, relievers were shuttled from the bullpen to the mound in vehicles of varying size–sometimes a full-sized automobile, but more often golf cart-type contraptions.

In a weird way, the bullpen cart feels like it should be a more recent innovation. After all, today’s athlete is supposed to be spoiled rotten, so it would stand to reason they would insist on being chauffeured to the mound like the fancy boys they are. But no, it was the supposedly blue collar relievers of yesteryear who were slowly puttered onto the field in embarrassingly tiny go-carts.

Paul Lukas of Uni-Watch wrote an exhaustive history of the bullpen cart a few years ago. My favorite tidbit:

1986: With happy fans spilling onto the field after the Mets’
division-clinching victory on Sept. 17, Mets fan and former Shea
Stadium vendor Eric Bennett heads straight to the bullpen, where he hijacks the team’s bullpen buggy. He takes it for a brief outfield joyride before the engine conks out.

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter: Organ Music

janejarvis.jpgLast week, Jane Jarvis passed away at the age of 94. Jarvis was Shea Stadium’s first organist, from 1964 all the way through 1979. She’s still remembered by fans who heard her as a delightful and witty practitioner of that uniquely American art form, stadium organ music. Marty Noble wrote a remembrance of her, and shared the tidbit that during the 1977 blackout, Jarvis entertained the sweltering Shea crowd with such ironic song selections as “White Christmas” and “Jingle Bells”

I’m not old enough to have enjoyed Ms. Jarvis’ stylings, but I do miss ballpark organists. Most MLB teams still have an organist, but their playing time has reduced significantly in favor of prerecorded music instead, which is a shame. Both New York teams still have organists, but I can not tell you the last time I actually heard one play at either stadium.

I’m not too old school when it comes to most things in baseball; I think the game is more often hurt by its emphasis on tradition than it is helped. But there are two points where I see eye-to-eye with the Get Off My Lawn crowd: the DH is an abomination, and stadium organists are vastly superior to any other form of in-game entertainment.

In the long history of baseball, organs are a relatively recent feature of the game experience. The first stadium organ didn’t appear until 1941, when the Cubs installed one in Wrigley Field, and they didn’t really catch on elsewhere until after World War II. But the organ has become a sound as associated with the game as the crack of a bat. Playing “charge!” on an organ is musical shorthand for “there is a baseball game being played right now”.

I have a feeling that the almost exclusive use of prerecorded music is a relatively recent phenomenon, one that crept slowly into the game in the last 15 years or so. While compiling The 1999 Project, I listened to and watched a whole bunch of games from that season, and noticed that Shea was still very organ-centric back then. Pitchers and batters entered the game to their own hand-picked tunes, but all other musical cues came from an organ.

In that spirit, please enjoy this video about Lambert Bartak, the man who has manned the organ for the college world series for the last 50+ years.

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter: Mel Allen for Atari + “Gathering Crowds”

Mel Allen, longtime Yankees broadcaster and the voice of This Week in Baseball, did many a commercial in his day. Enjoy this one from the early 80s, in which Mr. How ‘Bout That shills for an Atari baseball game with an unhealthy amount of reverb on his voice. Realistic graphics!

Speaking of This Week in Baseball, I have several episodes of it from the late 80s and early 90s in The Vast and Dusty Scratchbomb VHS Archives. I would love to digitize and share them with all of you, really I would. But as I’ve said many times, MLBAM would come down on me like a ton of bricks for doing so.

As a meager substitute, please accept “Gathering Crowds”, the TWIB end credits theme song used for, oh, about 900 years. This song actually makes me mist up a little bit. DON’T JUDGE.

Also, don’t ask me to explain the assemblage of still images in this “video”. I am not responsible for its visual content, but I am grateful for the audio.