Fresh Baked:
The Baseball Project
Volume 1: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails
2008 | Yep Roc
B+

There are few things I love more than baseball and music. I love both for many of the same reasons; to paraphrase the great Tim Kurkjian, every day there is the ability to see something that you have never seen before and will never see again in every single baseball game; in a similar way, every new record has the opportunity to change the world the way that “Love Me Do,” or “Smells Like Teen Spirit” did. Both are full of flashes in the pan who impress one day and bore the next, but there is also that illusive player or band every few years that is a great surprise and continues to delight for years to come.

However, besides for a few, mostly cheesy, songs, or the occasional reference here or there, rock and roll has steered clear of baseball as source material. It is not hard to see why - in the wrong hands, baseball songs could become easy hero worship and cheerleading. But is it really much cheesier than yet another sappy love song? Or another anti-establishment anthem? Is potential cliché on its own cause enough to shun an entire profession from being rarely written about? Yet despite not writing about it, such luminaries as Jeff Tweedy, Stephen Malkmus, Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo (whose band name is a baseball reference!) and Craig Finn of the Hold Steady are self-professed fans of the game.

So it was only a matter of time before someone decided to try their hand at a legitimate rock and roll record about baseball. The Dream Syndicate’s Steve Wynn and the Young Fresh Fellows/Minus 5’s Scott McCaughey started The Baseball Project for just that reason. For a baseball nerd like me, this is manna from heaven.  However, and this is the big question, can a non-baseball fan enjoy this album?
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