The 2025 World Series has been an eventful and historic showdown between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays. Game three of the seven-game series lasted a whopping 18 innings, making it the second-longest World Series game in the championship’s 122 years.
The game was so long that the traditional seventh-inning stretch was repeated for the fourteenth inning. Dodgers organist Dieter Ruehle performed “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” for a second time.
The song has long been associated with the mid-game ritual, but have you ever wondered where it came from?
In 1908, Tin Pan Alley songwriter and vaudeville performer Jack Norworth needed a new song for his act. While riding the subway to Manhattan, he saw a sign that said “Baseball today – Polo Grounds.” That inspired him to jot down a song quickly, but there’s more to it than you think.
What we sing today is actually just the chorus of the song. Much like the Great American Songbook standards “Stardust” and “But Not For Me,” “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” has a verse that leads into the melodic hook we all know and love. The exposition tells the story of Katie, a fan who has “baseball fever.”
Norworth tapped his friend Albert Von Tilzer to write the melody, and Norworth’s wife sang it for his vaudeville show. Edward Meeker was the first to record it for Edison Records.
The whimsical waltz quickly became a hit and was recorded by various artists over the years. (It was even the basis of a 1949 film starring Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly.) Musically, the chorus melody has all the ingredients to be an earworm. It begins with an octave leap and descends utilizing a pentatonic scale, creating a memorable hook with simple and pleasing note choices. It later uses non-diatonic neighbor tones to add sonic flavor.
Its harmony also keeps things simple. It moves quickly from the I chord to the V chord. Tilzer then creates some tension by using secondary dominant chords, which are dominant seventh chords that serve as the V of any chord besides the tonic. By utilizing non-diatonic chords, he builds harmonic motion to keep the song moving.
While the song itself is catchy, it didn’t become a staple of every baseball game until the ’70s. Chicago White Sox announcer Harry Caray popularized its use when he began singing it during the seventh-inning stretch in 1976.
“Today the song has permeated baseball and American culture (as well as several other nations) at an incredible level,” the Baseball Hall of Fame writes. “Across the nation and world, the 7th Inning Stretch is rung in by playing of the iconic song. While each stadium and team may have their own traditions regarding how the song is sung, or if the line ‘home team’ is replaced with the team name, ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ is a song that can (for a minute) unite fans of even the largest rivals.”
Get into the spirit of baseball with the sheet music for “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”:
