I drove an hour to sing a song. It’s a July Friday evening in Colorado Springs, and the ballpark is packed with sweet old couples and chirpy children and weak-willed mothers who, when the cotton candy guy strides by, are reduced to automated teller matriarchs. I’m here to experience the seventh-inning stretch. I’m here to see how they cook it up down here, at a minor-league park. I’m here to belt out “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
Now, the seventh-inning stretch is a bit bizarre — fans suddenly standing up and singing a song about attending the very event they’re at — but it’s our bizarre. The seventh-inning stretch is a ritual that makes baseball baseball, with its history and shared experiences.
“The interesting part of the seventh-inning stretch is that baseball’s foundation is tradition,” said former all-star pitcher Ron Darling, now a TBS analyst. “As a kid, I’d go to Catholic church, and there’s a moment where everyone shakes hands and says, ‘May peace be with you.’ And in baseball, that’s kind of what it is: You’re sitting in your own seats, but the seventh- inning stretch is a time to stand up, look around, see who’s around your seat, give them a nod and say, ‘Isn’t this a great day?’ ”
The Sky Sox’s ballpark in Colorado Springs is called Security Service Field, which sounds like some drab industrial bowl of concrete, not the glistening green gem it is under the lights this night. On the main concourse giddy kids pose for pictures with the team mascot, Sox the Fox. The right-field wall advertises mulch and soil. At the concession stands, a Coors costs $7.75, which seems a tad high.
It’s now 8:48, and the sky is the blue color of the NHL’s Avalanche. The visiting Oklahoma City sluggers are shellacking the shell-shocked Sky Sox. But few fans seem to care. It’s the weekend and the weather is nice and there are fireworks after the game and Mom can I have some cotton candy, pleeeaaase?
In fact, it’s a beautiful 68-degree evening, an ideal temperature for baseball, one of those times Ernie Banks might have suggested his famous “Let’s play two!” The Sky Sox actually are. They’re making up a rained-out game by squeezing in two seven-inning games. As such, we will stretch in the middle of the fifth.
A cartoon pops up on the big screen as the top of the fifth mercifully ends. It’s a dollar bill with arms and legs, being stretched, because at Arc Thrift Stores, you can stretch your dollar.
“All right, everybody — seventh-inning stretch in the fifth inning! Stand up and streeeeetch out,” explained the exuberant emcee, Jon Eddy. “I’m up here in the Memorial Hospital Suite. … They’re going to help lead us in a little ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game.’ All right, folks! 1-2-3 …”
Suddenly, we’re an a capella group of 8,364. I contribute with some peculiar sound of scratchy soprano. A few fans twist white towels in the air, and when it comes time to count the strikes, many fans hold up one, then two, then three fingers.
“It’s OK to be a kid sometimes. Even adults can be kids,” said Sky Sox fan Sharon Starkey, 52. ” ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ just makes you want to get up, get into the game and get into the crowd. It makes everything ‘baseball.’ “
Starkey is seated to the left of her 15-year-old son, Christopher. She attends 10 to 20 Sky Sox games a season. She has a thin, long tube connected to her nose.
“It’s oxygen,” she said. “I got COPD from chronic bronchitis, so now I have to really watch my breathing, so I carry around oxygen when I go places.”
I wonder whether the breathing affects her singing.
“Nothing’s gonna make me not sing!” she said.
* * * * *
So, when was the first seventh-inning stretch?
No one seems to know.
The most popular theory involves plump President William Howard Taft, the commander-in-beef. According to accounts from a game in 1910, Taft was wedged in a wooden seat, so in the middle of the seventh inning he arose to stretch his muscles. Out of reverence, everyone else stood up once the president did.
Yet there are previous accounts of midseventh shenanigans — as far back as 1869, when a gent named Harry Wright wrote that Cincinnati spectators “all arise between halves of the seventh inning, extend their legs and arms and sometimes walk about. In so doing they enjoy the relief afforded by relaxation from a long posture upon hard benches.”
According to “Baseball’s Book of Firsts,” Brother Jasper Brennan at Manhattan College in 1887 “used the gathering at ballgames to promote his physical-fitness regime. Students arose in the Manhattan half of the seventh to perform calisthenics.”
But the truth of that account sounds, well, stretched.
* * * * *
Baseball is an escape — you hide from the real world and catch a game. And the seventh-inning stretch is an escape within an escape — at Coors Field, you try to catch a bag of Cracker Jack while singing along.
“People in the expensive seats get really excited about potentially getting a free bag of something they could’ve paid 75 cents for outside,” said Rockies fan Lauren Cronin, perhaps bitter because one time, during the Cracker Jack toss, a fan accidentally smacked her in the face.
Each city and team splashes its flair upon the seventh-inning stretch. Deep in the heart of Texas, for example, Houston Astros fans sing “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” New York Mets fans go crazy for “Lazy Mary.” And at Coors Field, broadcasters throw Cracker Jack bags from the booth during “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” which is followed by a poppy rendition of the 1960s Bruce Channel jukebox song “Hey! Baby,” performed by an Austrian named Gerhard who goes by DJ Otzi.
Heeeeeeey — hey baby! Ooooooh-aaaaaaaaaah!
On a recent night at Coors Field, the forecast was cloudy with a chance of caramel-coated popcorn and peanuts. Jack Corrigan, the longtime KOA broadcaster, comes out of the bullpen 81 games a year to pitch the middle of the seventh — Jack hurling Cracker Jack.
“Before you throw it, you try to balance the Cracker Jack in the bag, to make it more aerodynamic,” explained Corrigan, in his trademark broadcaster voice. “The flatter the better. And I’m right-handed, but I throw them left-handed. For whatever reason, they go farther.”
On occasion, there will be blood, as Cronin’s nose knows. Arms are flying and flailing. Sometimes an exuberant fan will catch the bag with two hands, popping it, and Cracker Jack shoots out like it’s from a bazooka.
The boys in the KOA booth have a running bet: If you can launch a bag into the walkway, the one near the backstop, you get a dollar. It looks easy, I assert. They laugh at my braggadocio.
“Our old engineer, Mike Rotolo, he’d cut a hole in the bag to get all the air out,” KOA broadcaster Jerry Schemmel said. “And then you can compress it and make it flatter. He’s tried some other things. He’s put paper clips on them, trying to get more weight. He’s a cheater.”
* * * * *
There is popular, and then there was Harry Caray in Chicago.
“Cab drivers stall traffic to hail him,” wrote Ron Fimrite in Sports Illustrated.
Harry made the seventh-inning stretch an event, a civic duty. Even in the years Chicago had future Hall of Famers, Harry was the most famous Cub of them all, his summer serenades cementing his status: the Sinatra of the seventh inning.
All right! Lemme hear ya!
The hollering, jolly man with white hair and black glasses leaned out of the broadcaster’s booth, switching the microphone from his right to his left hand.
A one …
He motions with his right arm forward, one finger out, and pulls back, like he’s starting a lawn mower.
A two …
He’s feelin’ it now!
A three …
Harry is 10 again. We all are.
TAKE!
ME OUT!
TO THE BAAAALL GAAAAME!
“Harry Caray singing was so cool because he was larger than life,” said Nate Kreckman, a Cubs fanatic and Denver radio host. “He was a broadcaster that wore his heart on his sleeve and always said exactly what he was thinking. In the day and age of team broadcaster as de facto team salesman, it’s hard to remember there was a time when broadcasters like Harry lambasted lousy play or opined about exorbitant contracts for underperforming players. He was one of us.
“And when he exclaimed ‘Let’s get some runs’ after the song, usually because the Cubs were losing, it fired up the fans and gave you that last glimmer of hope — before an inevitable 1-2-3 seventh.”
* * * * *
The abomination begins in the bottom of the first, the Rockies’ Charlie Blackmon at bat, as she belts out his walk-up song: “I don’t wanna lose your love toni-iiiight!“
“I have,” Cronin admitted, “a fairly terrible voice, as anyone who sits within a section of me learns the first time Charlie Blackmon comes up. …
“And singing ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ is, for me, a chance to have a bit of ridiculous fun.”
At the ballpark, it doesn’t matter if you sing alto or awful. Nine American idols on the field; none in the stands.
“If I’ve learned anything about baseball over the years, it’s that it’s best enjoyed if you embrace the absurdities,” said Cronin, 30. “The tall socks, the all-star ballots in April, the chance to stand up and join in a tradition where for one minute, we can all get along — even with the Cards fans or Dodgers fans.”
Lauren’s father taught her fandom, taught to him by his father, John Joseph Cronin.
Lauren’s only memory of her grandfather is his funeral.
“As I’ve grown up and learned more about him, I’ve come to realize that we would have been the best of friends, because we would have just spent entire summers at the ballpark together,” she said. “Going to the games makes me feel like I’m carrying on a tradition.”
Cronin often goes to games with her dad, Ed. Other times, she’ll just take their two tickets in Section 129 and go by herself — though, there are moments when it feels like Grandpa is in the other seat. She gets to know him better by experiencing baseball.
“I’ll see something amazing at a game, and think, ‘Grandpa JJ would have loved this,’ ” she said. “I think being at the park, which is my cathedral — I’m not religious — makes me feel closer to him, as I know we would have spent countless hours there together.
“And heading into the (World) Series in ’07, I thought — there’s no way I couldn’t have scripted this better.”
She was raised on the Rockies, but Grandpa JJ was all Red Sox. He was born in 1919, the year after the Boston Red Sox won the World Series, never seeing a title upon his death in 1987, the year after Bill Buckner and Boston lost it, yet again.
When the Sox finally won it all in 2004, she visited her grandpa’s grave at Fort Logan, just to tell him.
And in 2007, Lauren’s Rockies, of course, won their first pennant and played the Red Sox in the World Series.
“It made me believe in the gods of baseball,” she said.
And there’s Lauren on this July night in 2015, Section 129, singing merrily during the middle of the seventh.
“When it’s time to sing ‘root, root, root for the Rockies,’ ” she said, “I essentially scream ‘ROC-KIES’ as loud as I can, head tilted back, hands cupped to make a megaphone.”
And Grandpa JJ is there next to her, surely singing off key too.
* * * * *
I peered upon the Coors Field crowd from the radio booth, clutching a bag of Cracker Jack, standing tall — honestly, I felt 5-foot-9, maybe even 5-10.
It was the seventh-inning stretch, and the KOA broadcasters gave me the honor of throwing some bags. The power of throwing Cracker Jack to fans is unexpectedly intoxicating.
But this moment wasn’t about me, and it wasn’t about the fans. It was bigger than that. It was about winning that dollar for flinging the bag onto the walkway behind the backstop.
I reared back and flung it sidearm, as if I were turning a double play.
The Cracker Jack bag soared toward the walkway.
Could it?
This thing just kept going.
Guys …
The bag started to drift downward, headed right for the walkway. It was happening. I was to be the envy of broadcasters across the league … when some dude reached out and snatched the bag.
“You got Bartman’d!” Corrigan exclaimed.
* * * * *
The sky is, well, sky blue. And the clouds look like they’re hanging just so, like on a set in a high school play. It’s a July Sunday afternoon at Coors Field, and it’s glorious.
During the seventh-inning stretch on Sundays, the Rockies’ repertoire includes “God Bless America.” Chris Hammiel is a technical sergeant in the Air Force. He’s also a Falconaire, a trumpeter in the Air Force’s jazz ensemble. He’s standing on the field near the backstop, neatly in uniform.
At this moment, we’re not ballplayers or umpires or ushers or fans; we’re Americans, and we all take off our hats.
“It’s exhilarating performing that song,” Hammiel said.
Fans sing along — “laaaaaand that I loooooove” — and when they do the line about the mountains, Coloradans follow up with a quick, high-pitched “wooooo!”
The song ends and the crowd erupts in applause, honoring Hammiel, who remains poised and proper. He then takes a quick bow.
And then, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” begins. The spectators sway back and forth, singing, while some fans reach up with both arms, hoping to catch Cracker Jack, falling from the sky.
Benjamin Hochman: bhochman@denverpost.com or twitter.com/hochman
