AI Summary
5 min readHow baseball got its beat
A few years ago, a song helped change one reporter's relationship with baseball. In 2022, the Mets were having an unusually good season, and a big reason was their closer, Edwin Diaz. When Diaz came in late in the game, the stadium blasted a snippet of music called "Narco" over the speakers. Fans sang along. The team handed out plastic trumpets. The mascots pretended to play the trumpet solo while strobe lights flashed. It got so big that the team flew in one of the song's artists, Timmy Trumpet from Australia, to play the solo live while Diaz made his entrance. If you were in the stands when that song came on, the reporter says, it was electric. But the ritual of walk-up music—a player picking a song that says something about who they are or where they're from—only makes sense when you put it in context of all the other music you hear at the ballpark: tens of thousands of people singing together, feeling like they're becoming part of what's happening on the field. So how and when did music become such a big part of baseball?
The silence before the sound
Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.
Read Full Summary →Free • No credit card required
Never miss an episode of Throughline
Get every new episode summarized in your inbox — free, ~5 minutes to read.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
What you'll learn
- 1 Main Outline
- 2 (00:23) **The Hook: Edwin Díaz and "Narco"** - Host Randha recalls how a single walk-up song, "Narco" by Timmy Trumpet, transformed Mets closer Edwin Díaz's entrance into a stadium-wide spectacle in 2022.
- 3 (03:47) **Introducing the Question and the Guides** - Randha sets up the episode's mission: to trace 100+ years of baseball music history, guided by MLB's official historian John Thorn and former White Sox organist Nancy Faust.
- 4 (07:18) **John Thorn's Baseball: The Sound of Silence** - John describes his first game in 1957, emphasizing that what captivated him was the quiet of the ballpark—the crack of the bat, the thud of the mitt, the coach's yell.
- 5 (08:53) **The First Collision: Baseball and Music in 1862** - John traces the origin of music at baseball games to the Civil War era, when the first enclosed ballpark opened with a band playing "The Star-Spangled Banner."
- 6 (10:44) **"Take Me Out to the Ball Game": A Suffragette Anthem** - John reveals that the iconic 1908 song was originally about an independent-minded woman named Katie Casey who knew baseball and wanted to go to a game, not just stretch.
- 7 (13:20) **The Technical Barrier: No Sound Systems** - John explains that for decades, group singing at ballparks was rare because sound systems were primitive; a brass band was the best available backing track.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Guests:
John Thorn, author and Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball
Nancy Faust, former organist for the Chicago White Sox
Support 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.
Correction: An earlier version of this episode incorrectly said that the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1952. The team moved ahead of the 1958 season.
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
More from this podcast
Throughline →