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Take Me Out To The Ball Game

Because actually, I’ve never been

William Mersey
2 min readJun 2, 2022
Photo by Jakob Rosen on Unsplash

Don’t look now, but almost 1/3rd of the way through the regular season, both the NY Mets and NY Yankees top their respective divisions. And by a lot. Whether you love or respect baseball in the modern era what with knowing that mostly, ballplayers are whores with loyalty only to the size of their contracts, one fact is pretty much undebatable: The #1 song about baseball is undeniably “Take Me Out To The Ball Game.”

I mean — how could you miss with an opening verse:

On a Saturday Night her young beau

Called to see if she’d like to go

To see a show but Miss Kate said no

I’ll tell you what you can do…

And then comes the chorus which I won’t even copy because everybody knows it.

I can’t even attach a dollar value to how much free marketing Cracker Jacks received from being included in that chorus, not to mention the entire peanut industry.

The song was actually written by two adopted New Yorkers, one of whom had already composed “Shine On Harvest Moon.” The other was a shoe salesman who also moonlighted as a songwriter.

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William Mersey
William Mersey

Written by William Mersey

"The spry old guy on a bike." New York Greenwich Village ex-hippy. Daily Beast, NY Daily News, Daily Mail, Independent contributor. I've been around the block.

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