MANCHESTER, NH – One of the purposes of minor league baseball is to give its players time to hone the skills they’ll need to make it in the Big Show. For example, pitchers might be working on a secondary pitch, or hitters might be tweaking their swings while getting experience at the plate.
But all minor league players share another singular goal: To find the perfect song to blast through their home stadium’s PA system while they walk up to the batter’s box, or they’re introduced from the bullpen.
“Many of our players live and die by their walk-up songs,” said the New Hampshire Fisher Cats’ general manager Taylor Fisher. “They love it.”
And players may choose these walk-up songs for a variety of reasons.
For many players, the walk-up song is a way of establishing an identity and showing fans something about their personality.
“One of the goals is to engage with the fans,” said Fisher. “[The walk-up song] is something that the player is passionate about, and if you can get the fans into it as well, it’s a fun 10 to 15 second introduction.”
And for some players, particularly those who hail from other countries, their walk-up songs may pay homage to their culture, and for others players it might reflect their faith or religious beliefs.
Baseball players are also renowned as some of the most superstitious athletes in all sports, so players will often change their walk-up songs to “change the vibe” if they’re slumping, said Fisher. He said that a text message goes out to the team before each homestand asking the players if they want to mix things up with their walk-up songs.
In baseball’s long, storied history, players choosing their own walk-up songs is a relatively recent phenomenon, beginning in the 1990s, although the relationship between baseball and music can be traced back to the first World Series in 1903.
During the series between the Boston Red Sox and the Pittsburgh Pirates, a group of Sox fans who called themselves “The Royal Rooters” followed the teams around singing the song “Tessie” from an obscure play titled “The Silver Slipper” to taunt the Pirates.
The Red Sox won the World Series five games to three in the best of nine.
The Royal Rooters stopped singing “Tessie” circa 1918 then, in 2004, the Dropkick Murphy’s rearranged the song and recorded it in an attempt to reverse The Curse of The Bambino.
It worked.
But the origins of the modern walk-up song started with a Chicago White Sox organist named Nancy Faust in 1970, according to Major League Baseball. Faust started improvising songs in the old Comiskey Park to compliment the radio announcer Harry Carey’s call of the game.
Eventually, Faust started playing songs on the organ that thematically introduced the players coming up to bat, although the batters had no say in the matter.
Then, in 1989, the film “Major League” helped usher in the individual walk-up song when fictional pitcher Ricky Vaughn (Charlie Scheen) enters the game with the entire Cleveland Indian crowd singing a raucous version of The Troggs’ “Wild Thing.”
By the 1990s, the Seattle Mariner’s Ken Griffey Jr. was walking up the plate at Superdome with Naughty by Nature’s “Hip Hop Hooray” playing, and in 1995, New York Yankees rookie shortstop named Derek Jeter requested that “This Is How We Do It” by Montall Jordan was played for his inaugural plate appearance in June.
Over the years, some walk-up songs have become iconic. For example, whenever Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” played at Yankee Stadium, the opposing team knew that Hall-of-Fame closer Mariano Rivera was coming into the game and their chances of winning were then slim-to-none.
And many Red Sox fans fondly recall Shane Victorino walking up the plate to Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” in their improbable 2013 World Championship season.
As this correspondent watched—and listened—to the Fisher Cats play the Binghamton Rumble Ponies in a Sunday matinee, paying close attention to the Fisher Cats walk-up songs, I certainly started to feel my age.
While many of the players from other countries and cultures, largely Spanish-speaking, chose songs that I definitely wouldn’t know, most of the walk-up songs—largely contemporary rap, hip-hop and pop—I couldn’t identify at all.
The only walk-up song this old man knew belonged to second baseman Ryan McCarty, who entered the batter’s box with “Kickstart My Heart” by Motley Crue blaring.
Still, walk-up songs pose a broader, existential question for all of us: What if you, even those of you who will never set foot on a baseball diamond, could choose your own walk-up song?
Fisher said he would choose “Lose Yourself” by Eminem. “It’s a song that pumps me up,” said the general manager. “Any time something important is happening in my life, I throw it on.”
Kyle Heavey, the host of the 95.3 WMNH sports’ radio program “Off the Mark” on Sunday mornings, said he would choose New Found Glory’s “My Friends Over You.”
“It has a fast beat that would get the energy going as I walked up to the plate. And it’s fun to sing along,” he said.
As for me, that is an easy one—“China Cat Sunflower” by The Grateful Dead.