The Boys of Summer

In-between meetings this morning I stopped my friend B at work who is a huge Cardinals fan and posed this question—if you had to pick a song that would play as you were walking up to bat, what would it be? He said he had spent hours considering this, and hadn’t come up with a good answer. Last night the family and I went to a Cardinals game and it got me thinking about the first game H and I attended as we contemplated moving to St. Louis four years ago. Not being much of a sports fan, what kept me interested in the game were the songs picked by the batters to announce that they are now at bat. What would my song be? This seemed WAY more important than what happened at bat since this was after all, their calling card. During the game I narrowed it down to two songs – The Jackson 5’s I Want You Back or The Clash’s London Calling which both have distinctive openers. Last year when my nephew D came to visit and we went to a game, he and I both rolled our eyes and snickered when Scott Rolen took the field to Limp Bizkit’s Rollin’. He could be the best player in the world but it was all diminished by his lame and weirdly obvious choice. A couple of years ago when I was visiting my friend R in Baltimore who is a big baseball fan I posed this question to him and with a blink of an eye he answered, “AC/DC, Thunderstruck”. Ahh, his choice made me realize why this would never be a real dilemma:
1. I’m a girl.
2. It didn’t even occur to me to pick a song based on bravado or intimidation because again, I’m a girl.
I was planning on writing down the names of all of the songs that the Cardinals used to walk to the plate but most of the songs were hip-hop so I was mostly clueless except for recognizing Brass Monkey and Ridin’. But one Cardinal took it to the next level and paid dearly for his actions. Catcher Gary Bennett walked to the plate to the sound of a cowbell. Yes, his song was Nazareth’s Hair of the Dog. I don’t know if it was the cowbell or the chorus lyrics, “now you’re messin with a son of a bitch” but the third pitch hit him in the head and he almost had to be taken off the field. You don’t throw down Nazareth like that and expect to walk away without consequences. --J

P.S. B sent me this link to a good article regarding this topic. Check it out.