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Among the headliners of this year’s Twangfest is The Baseball Project, a switch-hitting supergroup featuring Steve Wynn (late of the Dream Syndicate and currently a solo artist); Scott McCaughey, (Young Fresh Fellows, Minus 5); Peter Buck (R.E.M., Minus 5); and Wynn’s wife, Linda Pitmon (Golden Smog, Miracle 3). Currently, Buck’s R.E.M. bandmate, Mike Mills, is touring in his stead.)
As its name suggests, The Baseball Project offers the bandmembers a chance to step outside of their usual gigs and address one of the their mutual passions—baseball—in rock songs. They’ve released two albums: 2008’s Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails and High and Inside, which was released earlier this year.
Last year, I was writing a piece about John Fogerty’s Centerfield, which was being honored at baseball’s Hall of Fame, and I spoke to Wynn about that song as well as his own band and their interest in the game and some of its greatest—and most eccentric—characters. Here’s that conversation in full.
The complete Twangfest schedule is available here.
How did the Baseball Project come to be?
Scott and I have been friends for a long time. We met about 20 years ago. For whatever reason, we never talked about baseball. I think we just knew each other from rock bands, the indie rock scene. When R.E.M. got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, they had a big blowout party the night before at a restaurant in New York. I think Scott and I were two of the last ones standing by about two in the morning and we got into a baseball conversation and that was that—we were off and running. We’re both pretty geeky fans. I think it came up at some point that night that we both had been thinking about doing a record about baseball. And once we each knew that the other was going to do it, I think it was kind of a race to the finish line. And rather than both of us doing records and competing against each other, we decided to do it together.
If you two did your own records and a few others jumped in, it could have been a whole new genre.
It could have been. It was pretty weird, because Scott and I are both pretty prolific. We both put out a lot of records. We’ve always got ideas on the back burner that we’re going to do someday and we’ll get around to. I think for the both of us, the baseball record was that kind of thing. “Now as soon as I finish my next four records, I’ll do a record about baseball.” So I don’t know if we ever would have gotten to it apart from the fact that we decided to meet up and do it together. It gave us each a little momentum to get in there and start writing the songs. So really, he went home from New York and a couple weeks later, he sent me an email with two songs he’d just written. When I heard those, I said, “Oh my god, he’s serious.” I sent back a couple of my own, and from that point we were just writing it and planning it by email and then got together in the studio a few months later.
Do you remember which two those were?
I know one was “Satchel Paige Said” and I think the other was “Past Time.” I think those were the first two he sent to me.
They’re both great songs.
It’s funny, because in terms of writing songs about baseball, not many people have done it. Since we formed this band, it’s given me a chance to think about how many there are, and you can kind of name them on two hands.
There’s “Catfish,” which Bob Dylan wrote, but I heard Kinky Friedman’s version first; Warren Zevon did “Bill Lee”; Steve Goodman did “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request.” And of course, there was John Fogerty’s “Centerfield.”
Right. There are plenty of older songs and then team songs. I grew up with the Dodgers song. It was played every day on the radio. And then there are older songs with a ‘40s and ‘50s kind of sound. But there haven’t been that many rock bands or pop bands that have taken on the subject.
Fogerty made the point to me that, especially during the early years of his career, rock and baseball did not go together. Compared to your stuff, “Centerfield” is pretty down the middle.
It’s a, yeah. It’s a mainstream pop rock song. It’s very straightforward. But the thing I like about “Centerfield”—that we also did on the Baseball Project album—is, he’s using baseball as kind of a metaphor for something else he wants to sing about. “Centerfield” is about baseball, but it’s also about John Fogerty getting back into music. It’s a very personal song. He’s not writing an academic tome about the 1963 World Series. He’s writing about John Fogerty. I think that a lot of the songs on the first Baseball Project record, and the one we’re working on right now…if you really listen to them, they’re as personal and as emotional and direct to our own feelings about things as anything we did in our regular bands.
They’re not just about guys who are in some kind of idyllic game, but are in the middle of their lives, too. Certainly that’s the case in the Sandy Koufax song [“Long Before My Time”] and the Curt Flood song [“Gratitude”]. They’re facing larger issues at hand.
The Curt Flood song being very close to the hearts and minds of your readers. I think we’re up to three Cardinals songs. We had the McGwire song [“Broken Man”] and the Curt Flood song on the first record. And Scott’s written a great Pujols song for the new record. We’re being true to St. Louis.
Does that one have a title yet?
Yes. I think it’s called “El Hombre.”
Uh-oh. Watch out. He doesn’t like being called that because Stan Musial is already “The Man.”
Scott addresses all of that in the song.
Wow. You guys do your research.
We try.
Note: The song didn’t make it onto the new album, but a live performance of it can be seen here:
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The McGwire song—you could pick apart that situation in St. Louis forever. By the way, they took down the street sign.
But he’s back on the team!
Yeah, he’s back and they took down the sign.
That’s a mixed message.
The whole McGwire thing is a mixed message, I think.
The Curt Flood thing, the funny thing about it, as I said, we were kind of writing back and forth from—Scott was in Portland, I was here in New York and we were passing stuff back and forth by email. At some point, we realized we were both writing songs about Curt Flood. That was pretty funny, of all the things to write about. But it is a great story. I’ve always been curious about his whole history. And he really did sacrifice his career for something that wasn’t accepted at his time, but has come to be commonplace a couple years later. It’s a tragic story. And it really hit me. You know, he died a few years back, I can’t remember how long ago – five, six years? But when he died, I remember reading about his funeral and that there were very few baseball players there. It just made me kind of sad. Every player playing today owes their gratitude to Curt Flood. He’s probably in some ways the most important player in the history of baseball, just because of the impact that he had on the game.
You grew up a Dodgers fan, but now you’re a Yankees fan. What about the rest of the band?
Scott is a mariners fan now. He grew up in the Bay Area, so he likes both the Giants and the A’s. When push comes to shove, the Giants are his team. Linda grew up in Minneapolis and is a Twins fan. She likes the Yankees, too, but the only fights we ever have are when the Yankees play the Twins. Pete – he’s our friend. Peter’s in about 10 different bands with Scott. He is less of a baseball geek than the rest of us. But I think he appreciates baseball on the level of American culture, as subject matter for a lot of literature and movies. Since the band has been going on, he watches a lot more games.
There’s so much potential subject matter. Ideas are probably hitting you all the time.
No shortage at all. It’s a very easy thing to write about. And like I say, I think when we write the songs, we try to make them something covers the history and is the kind of thing a baseball fan would enjoy. But we also try to make it bigger than the subject matter. For example, the Curt Flood song is about anybody who pioneers something that is unpopular in its time and has to sacrifice their own popularity to push that across. Well, that can be in any field. In music and in politics. It’s the kind of thing we did as musicians playing kind of a wild garage rock music at a time when everybody was listening to A Flock of Seagulls. It’s a universal feeling. Or the Sandy Koufax one: The idea that when you hit that wall like, “I feel like I’ve lost the thrill and the motivation, but I’m going to keep going forward because that’s what I’ve always done.” Not that we feel that way. That doesn’t apply to our own thing. We’re all past 50 and still loving music.
You guys have an interesting mix of songs where you’re reporting on a scene or describing something in the third person. And then other songs get in the heads of your subjects. Is that a difficult thing to do?
That’s what we do all the time. It just happens to be jumping into the heads of baseball players. That’s kind of a new twist for us. But it’s something I think all of us have done in songwriting. You could be wiring about a killer or a bank robber or a wounded lover and you’re kind of inhabiting that character anyway. So instead, we’re inhabiting Fernando Valenzuela.
Who was also a Cardinal for a short time. So that’s four Cardinals songs.
Right. Although that’s not what the song is about.
The thing about baseball, and the reason it’s so easy to write songs about it, is that it’s a very human game. More than basketball or football or hockey, where it’s more about the team and players are sort of a cog in the machine, baseball is really about individuals trying to overcome things and deal with their own frustrations and celebrate their own victories. You really get a feel for the individual. One thing about baseball that I really love is that it’s the only team sport I can think of where you can excel regardless of the quality of your team. If you’re a great home run hitter, even if your team stinks, you’re still going to hit home runs off the opposing pitcher. That makes baseball unique and it also makes it the game where individual players do stand out a little bit more.
