How "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" Became Baseball's Shared Song

In the spring of 1908, a songwriter named Jack Norworth was riding a New York City subway train when he noticed a sign that read "Baseball Today -- Polo Grounds." He had never been to a baseball game. Something about the sign stuck with him. By the time his ride was over, he had scribbled the lyrics to a new song on the back of an envelope.

He brought the words to his friend Albert Von Tilzer, a Tin Pan Alley composer. Von Tilzer set them to music. He had also never been to a baseball game.

The song was "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." It is the third most frequently sung song in the United States, behind "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "Happy Birthday." It is sung at major league ballparks across the country during the seventh-inning stretch. Almost nobody knows the verses. Everyone knows the chorus.

Katie Casey

The song most people know is just the chorus. The verses tell a different story, one about a woman named Katie Casey who was, in the words of the lyrics, "baseball mad." Her young beau calls to ask her out to a show. She says no. Take me out to the ball game instead, she tells him. Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack. I don't care if I never get back.

The second verse describes Katie at the park. She knew the players by their first names. She told the umpire he was wrong, all along, good and strong. When the score was just two to two, she rallied the crowd to sing the chorus.

In 1908, a woman at the ballpark, rooting and cheering and telling the umpire he was wrong, was not entirely common or universally accepted. Katie Casey was a statement about who belonged at the game. The verses never gained the popularity of the chorus, likely because they were written in the third person and did not lend themselves to communal singing. But the character they created, the female superfan who would rather be at the ballpark than anywhere else, was ahead of her time.

In 2008, George Boziwick, Chief of the Music Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, curated a centennial exhibition about the song and theorized that Katie Casey was inspired by a real woman, Trixie Friganza, a vaudeville actress and suffragist. Norworth, who was then married to actress Louise Dresser, was having an affair with Friganza. An original edition of the sheet music featured Friganza's picture on the cover.

Norworth revised the lyrics in 1927, changing Katie Casey to Nelly Kelly. Both versions are now in the public domain.

The Song Goes to the Ballpark

Despite becoming an instant hit on the vaudeville circuit and reaching the top of the sales charts in 1908, "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" does not appear to have been played or performed at an actual baseball game until 1934. Its first known use at a game was at a high school game in Los Angeles. Later that year, it was played during the fourth game of the World Series. From there, it spread.

The tradition of singing it during the seventh-inning stretch became universal over the following decades, cemented in the public consciousness by Harry Caray. In 1976, White Sox owner Bill Veeck secretly placed a microphone in Caray's broadcast booth at Comiskey Park and turned it on when the organist began playing the song during the stretch. Caray's off-key, full-throated singing delighted the crowd, and the tradition stuck. When Caray moved to the Cubs' broadcast booth in 1982, he brought it with him. His renditions from Wrigley Field became as much a part of the Cubs experience as the ivy on the outfield walls.

Norworth finally attended a baseball game in 1940, thirty-two years after writing the song. He went to a Brooklyn Dodgers game at Ebbets Field, and the Dodgers honored him for his contribution to the sport. Von Tilzer reportedly attended his first game roughly twenty years after composing the melody.

Two men who had never seen baseball wrote the song that defines it. The envelope Norworth wrote on during that subway ride is now in the permanent collection of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.