I get e-mails from the History Channel. I must have signed up for their newletter at some point in the past, but I couldn’t say when that was. Normally, I just delete them, unless the subject line looks interesting. And yesterday, I got a very<\/i> interesting one. To me, anyway.<\/p>\n
“Forgotten Baseball Poet Receives Star Treatment”<\/b><\/p>\n
Surely it wasn’t “Casey at the Bat,” and while I wrote about “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon<\/a>” a few weeks ago that poem is of interest really only to :cubs: fans.<\/p>\n This e-mail? Well… I’ll let it speak for itself (text courtesy of the History Channel):<\/p>\n Baseball’s National Anthem<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n Everybody knows (or should know) “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”. But what about the guy who wrote it?<\/p>\n Jack Norworth<\/a> was a vaudeville-era songwriter and performer who was inspired to write his epic by a sign touting “ballgame today” he could see from his New York City subway car. “Ballgame” alone should have garnered him a spot in the Songwriters Hall of Fame<\/a> — in 1908, it was the second most popular song at ballparks, following only the national anthem — but he also knocked a little ditty titled “Shine On, Harvest Moon” that pretty well sealed the deal.<\/p>\n Ironically, Norworth’s grave sits within spittin’ distance (that’s OK, this is baseball) of Angels Stadium<\/a> in Anaheim’s Melrose Abbey Memorial Park<\/a>. Largely ignored over the years, this past July — in conjunction with the All-Star Game being played there — fans cleaned up his gravesite and installed a 5-foot granite monument to the tunesmith. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I get e-mails from the History Channel. I must have signed up for their newletter at some point in the past, but I couldn’t say when that was. Normally, I just delete them, unless the subject line looks interesting. And yesterday, I got a very interesting one. To me, anyway. “Forgotten Baseball Poet Receives StarContinue reading “On Baseball’s National Anthem”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[4081,4110,4098],"class_list":["post-5262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baseball","tag-baseball","tag-history","tag-music","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5262\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}