Listening To Baseball

IN THE 100 years since Take Me Out to the Ball Game was written, its status as the ultimate baseball song has never been seriously challenged. Which is sad but understandable: It must have become increasingly difficult to write a song about nine guys in matching polyester pants and shirts running in circles. Still, The Baseball Project has somehow made it look easy.

BP has some serious musical chops—it is led by Scott McCaughey of the Minus 5 and Steve Wynn of the Dream Syndicate, and it features REM's Peter Buck on guitar. Its first album, Vol. 1: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails, a collection of 13 original baseball tunes, is fun but surprisingly unsilly, only rarely threatening to veer off into novelty song territory. Maybe that's because the guys also have some serious baseball chops; you must to dream up a song about hard-living Hall of Fame outfielder Ed Delahanty. The highlight, though, is Long Before My Time, a bittersweet meditation on Sandy Koufax (right). It never mentions the pitcher by name, so it could be about anyone who's been forced to give up something they love before they're ready to let go. The baseball-as-life metaphor is nothing new—but it's never been this catchy.