The 34-Ton Bat

by Steve Rushin

  “The floor area that held 20 seats in 1900, and 13 seats in 1990, today holds 10 seats,” stated the study by Theatre Projects Consultants. The primary reason, the report concluded, is obesity.

  Stadium seats are no different. They’ve grown bigger and fewer and more expensive. But despite their wider dimensions, seat makers and spectators alike want them to resemble the seats of a century earlier. On the hundredth anniversary of Fenway Park, Red Sox fans sat in seats still made by the American Seating Company. And though those seats were plastic, they were slatted at the back, to resemble the originals.

  The seats at Citi Field, home of the Mets, were made by the Irwin Seating Company, and slatted at the back, too. As the National League team in New York, the Mets are heirs to the Dodgers and Giants, the two teams playing at the Polo Grounds that fateful day in 1950. To reflect their heritage, the Mets had Irwin make the slatted seats at Citi Field a deep green, in homage to the Polo Grounds, where Barney Doyle died in his deep-green seat on that hot Fourth of July, so many years ago.

  Chapter 9

  RECESSIONAL

  Fans exiting the Polo Grounds that tragic Fourth of July in 1950 did so to the usual urban soundscape of car horn, bus wheeze, and the overhead thunder of an elevated train, the IRT’s Ninth Avenue El—the “Polo Grounds Shuttle”—rumbling onto its second-story platform at 155th Street and Eighth Avenue.

  That music was the only music, the Giants having abstained from a growing trend of the past decade—a live pipe organ to play their patrons home.

  Philip K. Wrigley had introduced baseball’s first organ to his eponymous ballpark in Chicago on April 26, 1941, with organist Roy Nelson playing classical music before and after the Cubs’ 6–2 loss to the Cardinals. In doing so, Wrigley was emulating the indoor arenas of the day, most conspicuously the one across town, Chicago Stadium, whose monstrous Barton organ—played by a bald and blade-thin Dane named Al Melgard—leaked through radios nationwide during the 1932 Democratic National Convention, when Melgard’s rendition of “Happy Days Are Here Again” became the party’s theme song.

  The organ maker Dan Barton of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, had principally built instruments for the great movie palaces of the silent-film era, when the organ scored every star from Garbo to Chaplin. It was a movie-palace organ that Barton constructed for Chicago Stadium in 1927, the year Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer introduced the talkie and began the demise of the silent-screen starlet—to say nothing of the silent-film organist. Among the latter was Gladys Goodding, who played for the Loew’s chain in New York City, whose many jewels included the pharaonic wonder of the Loew’s Pitkin Theater on Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn.

  Born and orphaned in Macon, Missouri, Goodding moved to Manhattan in 1922, when she was twenty-nine, with aspirations to be on the stage—in musical comedy or light opera—rather than beneath it. But she was newly divorced, and had two young children, and by the time she had taken up residence at the Belvedere Hotel on West 48th Street, across from Madison Square Garden, Goodding was content to pay the rent by playing for other actors.

  When Madison Square Garden owner Tex Rickard died in 1929, the arena temporarily trucked in a pipe organ for his memorial service. Rickard was a fight promoter who had built the third iteration of the Garden in 1925 and acquired for it, a year later, a National Hockey League franchise to compete with the Garden’s first hockey team tenant, the New York Americans. Everyone called Rickard’s new team “Tex’s Rangers,” and the name stuck. At his memorial service, Rickard lay in state on the arena floor, in a silvered-bronze casket, the organ providing a funereal air for the ten thousand visitors who lined Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets, a fitting turnout for a man who was then, and may yet remain, sport’s most successful purveyor of hype.

  Under his stewardship, the Garden fancied itself the world’s most famous arena. (When Rickard built an arena in Boston in 1928, he called it “Boston’s Madison Square Garden,” a name mercifully pruned to “Boston Garden.”) To be worthy of its own epithet, MSG needed an organ to compete with such modern wonders as the Cleveland Public Auditorium, which had a $100,000 organ with 10,010 pipes and 150 stops. It was the largest ever built by Ernest M. Skinner & Company, and everything about it was exceptionally loud. It drowned out the speakers at the 1924 Republican Convention, but there was no danger of the same happening at that year’s Democratic Convention, as the Times noted, for that would take place at the soon-to-be-replaced Madison Square Garden, which was bereft of an organ. Even the name of the Cleveland organ—the Magnum Opus 328—sounded ominous, quite possibly dangerous, like a handgun.

  As they did in the silent movie houses, these organs complemented the theater of sports. At Chicago Stadium, Al Melgard used the massive Barton both to stir and calm the city’s fans. When a riot broke out after a boxing match, Melgard stunned the crowd into peace by playing an earthshaking rendition of the national anthem. In his hands, “The Star-Spangled Banner” sounded more like Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor—the music we associate with Dracula’s castle and silent horror films—as Melgard’s vibrato-rich rendition shattered lightbulbs and a row of windows in the stadium.

  This was perhaps more power than was strictly necessary in a musical instrument whose primary purpose was to divert crowds during hockey fights. And so a Chicago polymath named Laurens Hammond set about inventing a pipeless organ. He already had a variety of creations to his name, including a silent, spring-driven “tick-less” clock; anaglyph glasses, with one red lens and one green, for the viewing of 3-D movies; and the Hammond Automatic Bridge Table, which magically shuffled and dealt four bridge hands in the way that Roger Owens would, in a single motion, throw three bags of peanuts to as many customers at Dodger Stadium.

  On April 15, 1935, at the Industrial Arts Exposition in New York’s Radio City Music Hall, Hammond tore the tarp off the revolutionary Hammond organ. It immediately wowed the music world, including Pietro Yon, organist at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and George Gershwin, who ordered one on the spot. Madison Square Garden finally succumbed, too, installing a Hammond and then installing, behind it, Gladys Goodding, who had only to cross the street from the Belvedere to go to work.

  At hockey and basketball games, Goodding used the organ as a wry commentary on players—as a form of musical heckling—in the way that Melgard did in Chicago. When thirty-eight-year-old Eddie Shore and the rest of the New York Americans took to the ice to face the Blackhawks in 1940, Melgard serenaded Shore with “Darling, I Am Growing Old.”

  When the Blackhawks were delayed getting into New York for a game against the Rangers, Goodding returned the favor, filling a two-hour delay with songs like “Waitin’ for the Train to Come In” and “Give Me Five Minutes More.” Baseball—a silent movie without a soundtrack—was missing out on a great deal of fun.

  And so Wrigley installed an organ at Wrigley Field in 1941, to popular acclaim. Then the following spring, Dodgers general manager Larry MacPhail put a state-of-the-art Hammond organ in at Ebbets Field, where he hired Goodding. A stout woman approaching her fiftieth birthday, Goodding also sang the national anthem on most days, accompanied by herself on organ.

  In Brooklyn, the organ was not quite an immediate success. At the start of that first season in 1942, a seventy-year-old former music teacher named J. Reid Spencer, who lived three blocks south of Ebbets on Lefferts Avenue, sued the Dodgers for violating the borough’s noise ordinance, claiming that Goodding’s organ recessionals after Dodgers games roused him from his afternoon naps.

  For some Flatbush killjoys, the organ was the last straw. “We’ve taken everything in stride—double-headers, night games, parking, everything,” said an Ebbets neighbor named Lillian Strongin. “But this atrocious music atrociously played is the limit.”

  “We like the music,” countered Mrs. John Lawlor. “My 90-year-old mother who lives opposite the ballpark thinks it’s grand.”

  Spencer, the plaintiff, begged the court not to think of him as “a crabbed man. I l
ike to think I am not.” But the infernal calliope, he said, also made it impossible for the cop in the apartment below him to sleep when preparing for his night beat, and for the infants of the building to take afternoon naps.

  Goodding received the lawsuit in her customary good humor, and even was inspired to biting musical satire by the litigation. She turned up sheet music for a 1914 composition called “Canzonetta in E-flat Major,” written by the plaintiff, retired music teacher J. Reid Spencer himself, and promised: “I’ll play this next Tuesday when the Dodgers return home.”

  And so she did. The judge, meanwhile, threw out the case when he noticed that Reid had to cup a hand to his ear even to hear the courtroom proceedings. Goodding was thus given license—literally and metaphorically—to pull out all the stops.

  Her songs sent out coded messages, inside jokes, and poison darts. She knew April 23, 1951, was Warren Spahn’s thirtieth birthday. When the Braves ace pitched fifteen and two-thirds innings at Ebbets Field that afternoon and still took a 2–1 loss, Goodding waited until the left-hander walked slump-shouldered from the mound before playing “Happy Birthday to You.”

  Her rendition of “Three Blind Mice,” played as the umpires convened before a game at home plate, upset crew chief Bill Stewart, to whom she apologized afterward.

  During rain delays, “Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella” rang out. When the Dodgers lost Game 7 of the 1952 World Series to the Yankees, she played “Yankee Doodle” and—by way of apology—“(What Can I Say) After I Say I’m Sorry?” Whenever Dodgers reliever Fireman Hugh Casey saved a game, fans exited—whether they knew it or not—to “Casey would waltz with the strawberry blonde,” the refrain from “And the Band Played On.” The song took on a terrible poignancy in 1951, when a Brooklyn woman named Casey in a paternity suit. From his hotel room in Atlanta, where he’d been demoted to the minors, the pitcher phoned his wife. As she pleaded with him on the phone, Casey took his own life with a gunshot to the throat.

  By tailoring her music to each player, Goodding pioneered what came to be known as “walk-up” music. When Los Angeles native Duke Snider came to bat, Goodding pounded out, “California, Here I Come”—a selection that would take on a terrible poignancy of its own on September 24, 1957.

  That Tuesday night, the Dodgers played their final game in Brooklyn. Only 6,702 spectators bothered to show, but Goodding gave them—and any open-windowed apartment dwellers within three blocks—an elegy in minor keys. Her playlist grew inning by inning into a lover’s lament: “Am I Blue?” gave way to “After You’re Gone” and “Please Don’t Ask Me Why I’m Leaving.” “Que Sera Sera” bled into “Thanks for the Memories.” “How Can You Say We’re Through?” yielded to “When I Grow Too Old to Dream.” After the Dodgers had beaten the Pirates 2–0, she played “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You” as the Ebbets grounds crew reflexively groomed the infield, in the manner of a chicken that doesn’t yet know it’s headless.

  And then “Auld Lang Syne” played as the closing credits rolled on baseball in Brooklyn, if not quite on Gladys Goodding, who continued to play at Madison Square Garden until 1963, when she died of a heart attack on a Monday, having played the Knicks’ win over Cincinnati the previous Saturday night.

  Her bench at the Garden was filled by organist Eddie Layton, who added Yankee Stadium to his duties in 1967, when the hidebound Bombers finally installed their own Hammond. His was a very 1970s kind of rock stardom, right down to the signature captain’s hat—Layton owned a twenty-six-foot tugboat—he wore nightly while playing to fifty thousand people and amplified by fifty thousand watts. Like other baseball organists, Layton even had his own original hits. It was Layton who composed that four-note progression—B-flat, F, G, A—that repeats over and over, and faster and faster, until reaching its climax of “Duh-duh-duh-DEEP-dee-dum—CHARGE!” Decades later, it remains instantly recognizable (and inexplicably unacclaimed).

  The Dodgers, meanwhile, struggled to fill Goodding’s girdle in Los Angeles, briefly alighting on a film scorer from 20th Century studios named Chauncey Haines Jr., who had once been an organist in that city’s grand silent-movie houses.

  This was baseball’s baroque period, the middle 1960s and ’70s, the ballpark organ’s golden age. Its Bach may well have been John Kiley, whom the Red Sox hired in 1953. Like Goodding, Kiley had once been a silent-film organist, at the Criterion Theatre in Roxbury, Massachusetts. By 1975 he was a Boston institution—“the only man to play for the Celtics, Bruins, and Red Sox”—equally nimble of finger and mind. When Carlton Fisk homered for the Sox in the twelfth inning of Game 6 of the ’75 World Series—waving the ball fair with the broad gestures of a silent-film star—Kiley played him home to Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.”

  Kiley doubled as a choirmaster, but that wasn’t unusual; the men and women who provided the soundtrack for ’70s baseball were a diverse collection of lounge lizards and church organists. The Pirates plucked Vince Lascheid from the Colony Restaurant in suburban Mt. Lebanon, and his own playlist embodied this high-low dichotomy: “Superstar” from Jesus Christ Superstar for Roberto Clemente, “Talk to the Animals” for Bob Moose.

  Shay Torrent commuted from Santa Barbara to Anaheim to play every Angels home game, a round-trip of 350 miles, in that icon of SoCal ’70s cool: a VW bus. When a power failure knocked the lights out at Anaheim Stadium in 1979—but failed to silence the Big A organ—Torrent played “You Light Up My Life.”

  And they did. Organists lit the lives of those whose ears were sufficiently sophisticated (or sufficiently unsophisticated, in many cases) to connect the tune they were hearing to the spectacle they were witnessing. When a streaker ran across the field at Veterans Stadium in 1972, Phillies organist Paul Richardson performed a musical emasculation: “Is That All There Is?”

  At Jarry Park in Montreal, the great Fernand Lapierre composed and played “La polka des Expos,” a Gallic-Polish mash-up that was one part francophone, two parts sousaphone. During conferences on the mound, Lapierre entertained the Expos faithful with “Parlez-moi d’amour” (“Talk to Me of Love”). It’s the song Sam is playing when Ilsa first walks into Rick’s in Casablanca.

  All these organists upheld Gladys Goodding’s grand tradition of gentle mockery. Nancy Faust of the White Sox was particularly adept at Gooddingesque puns, playing Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical,” for instance, when introducing shortstop Omar Vizquel. She was also heiress to Al Melgard’s seat at Chicago Stadium behind the mammoth six-deck Barton organ, a devilish instrument that finally found, after half a century, its own Faust.

  By tailoring music to individual athletes, these organists were playing their own elegy—though they had no way of knowing that at the time. In St. Louis, Ernie Hays, profane maestro of the Busch Stadium organ, played Franz Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” when Cardinals reliever Al (the Mad Hungarian) Hrabosky entered games. The organ—this staple of early horror films—was creating its own monster: a growing expectation that every on-field act would be preceded by music, or accompanied by music, or followed by a musical punch line.

  Those of us filing into the Met for Minnesota Twins games in the 1970s had our own walk-up music, the pregame standard of “Satin Doll,” by Duke Ellington, played with a Vegas vibe and bounce by Ronnie Newman. In fact, Newman had worked in Vegas and Tahoe with Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Tormé, not to mention Lenny Bruce, which was appropriate, as the organist was opening in Bloomington for another comedy act, the Minnesota Twins.

  Newman got the gig, for fifty bucks a game, in 1977, the year of Saturday Night Fever, when players and fans both wore double-knits during the games, and occasionally white shoes and belts. The Twins right fielder was called Disco Danny Ford. It was the last possible time in America that “Satin Doll” could be considered a stadium anthem, played on organ to pump up an audience for a sporting event.

  The song was already a quarter-century old that summer, composed in 1953, when baseball was still preeminent in American life. A photo from the m
iddle ’50s shows Ellington batting against his bandmates in the parking lot of a Florida motel whose marquee—ASTOR MOTEL—COLORED—makes a useful right field foul pole. Behind him, parked sideways, his tour bus doubles as a backstop.

  By the time my parents and brothers and sister and I were attending Twins games at the Met—sitting down the third-base line, the seven of us descending in height like organ pipes—Ellington was dead. But his ghost was resurrected in the summer of 1977, first by Ronnie Newman, and then by Stevie Wonder, whose Ellington tribute song—“Sir Duke”—went to number one that glorious June.

  On the broiling Sunday of June 26, the Met was sold out for its first Jersey Day, a Danny Goodman–pioneered promotion in which the Twins, in the unfamiliar position of first place, handed out cotton replica home jerseys bearing the number 29 of Rod Carew, the team’s only star. But what a star he was.

  Carew treated the batter’s box as a crime scene, as if determined not to leave prints. Toward that end, he wore two red batting gloves, like ruby slippers for the hands. What had drawn ridicule for Ken Harrelson had become, in a decade, an emblem of cool. But even in the gloves, Carew barely gripped his Louisville Slugger C243, squeezing it ever so lightly around the thin handle, as if it were an icing funnel he was using to decorate a cake. A wad of tobacco bulged the right cheek of the left-handed hitter, pulling the skin taut beneath his right eye, the one nearest the pitcher, the better to see what was coming. As kids in Bloomington, we did the same thing, wadding lunch meat in our cheeks instead of tobacco. Buddig brand pressed pastrami worked best, sliced thin as onionskin.

  In his familiar style—one hesitates to call it “inimitable,” since every child in the Twin Cities could and did imitate it—Carew went 4-for-5 that Sunday afternoon for the Twins, and raised his average for the season to .403. From my seat in the left field bleachers, I could lower a brown thermos jug to the center field commissary, where my brother Jim was working inside as a sixteen-year-old manager. He would fill it with Sunkist orange soda at half-hourly intervals and lob it back to me, a baseball grenade of a different kind.