OK, Cubs fans. Yeah, you. The ones who have argued so passionately about how to handle the seventh-inning stretch with Harry Caray gone. Quick question for you.
Why?
By which we do not mean, “Why worry about what to do with Harry Caray in the Great Broadcast Booth in the Sky?” But simply, “Why do we stretch in the seventh inning at all, ever?”
Though the stretch has become a ballpark tradition, if not a pop-culture staple, nobody knows where it started or why it is done.
Baseball legend has it that the stretch began on Opening Day 1910 with portly President William Howard Taft, sometime after he became the first president to throw out the first pitch and before he ate his 19th hot dog of the afternoon. Taft rose, the legend goes, and the crowd stood in deference to him.
Though many fans accept the Taft story, it is truly a stretch.
“There is no question he did it,” baseball historian Paul Dickson says. But “he didn’t invent it.”
Who did?
“I have no idea,” says author Roger Angell, the New Yorker’s baseball sage. “I would be amazed if anybody knows how it started.”
Or why it is done. The stretch won’t help anybody work off that extra order of nachos.
“We debated it back and forth and decided there really is no benefit to the seventh-inning stretch,” says Tricia Sulita, a physical therapist at the University of Illinois Medical Center. As far as “circulation in the backside . . . it does help stretch out the back. We do encourage people with back problems to change positions. Especially in watching the Cubs, they don’t get to stand up and cheer that often.”
Because its origins are unknown, and few can explain its relevance, perhaps it is time to lose the tradition altogether. With games dragging on for upwards of three hours these days, shouldn’t the stretch be eliminated?
“That is faulty thinking there,” Angell says. “They should have two stretches.”
If so, would they sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at each one? And why ask to be taken out to the ballgame when you’re already there?
These and other mysteries of the baseball world may never be solved. But we definitively can say that “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” was written by two guys who thought a wild pitch was a crazy way to sell something.
Jack Norworth never had been to a baseball game when he penned the lyrics in 1908, and it would be years before he became a fan. Albert von Tilzer, who supplied the music, never had set foot in a ballpark. But eventually their song was played on the organ in the middle of the seventh inning at almost every major-league park, a tradition that continues at many of the parks today.
Some clubs have adopted separate rituals. When the Orioles play in Baltimore, the fans sing along to John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” That started two decades ago when Denver befriended then-Orioles shortstop Mark Belanger.
The St. Louis Cardinals, owned until recently by the Anheuser-Busch brewery, long have played a tape of the Budweiser song: “Here Comes the King, Here Comes the Big No. 1.”
Nobody thought much about any of this until the Big No. 1 himself, Harry Caray, left St. Louis and eventually landed in Chicago, where White Sox owner Bill Veeck piped out his off-key rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” to the fans. Thus, a tradition was . . . well, noticed, if not begun.
But it had started long before, more than a century earlier. This can be surmised from an 1869 letter Cincinnati Red Stockings star Harry Wright wrote to a friend.
“The spectators all arise between halves of the seventh inning, extend their legs and arms and sometimes walk about,” Wright wrote. “In so doing they enjoy the relief afforded by relaxation from a long posture upon hard benches.”
A long posture upon hard benches? To whom was he writing? Dickey Simpkins?
Wright, who would end up in the Hall of Fame, didn’t reveal why the seventh inning was chosen. But his letter contains the earliest known mention of the seventh-inning stretch. It was written 40 years before Taft became president and 100 years before Harry Caray came to Chicago.
Caray is gone now, and the Cubs have asked his widow, Dutchie, to lead singing of the song at their home opener Friday.
Throughout the season the Cubs will invite various celebrities to sing during the stretch. After this year, the ritual certainly will live on. Perhaps other methods will be needed to shorten the games.
“How about speeding up the (singing of the national) anthems?” Angell asks. “Everyone makes the anthems slower and slower and slower.”
Speed up the anthems? But that would be messing with a good thing . . .
