Junto Boys

THE CROON MONSTER

On the subject of baseball... Great piece this morning on NPR about baseball's great mysterious traditions, namely in this case the Fenway Park crowd singing along to Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" in the middle of the 8th inning of every home game. The curious reporter tried to get to the bottom of it by listening to the song itself for clues (no apparent connection to Boston, the Bosox, or baseball), asking an encyclopaedic Fenway tour guide, asking the organist, asking David Wells, and asking the park's music director. Several theories were suggested, ranging from pure guesswork to plausible. The search ended with a previous music director who explained simply that she played the song one day, people liked it, so she kept playing it, and soon it became a tradition, its origin in mere whimsy.

The piece concluded with the Neil Diamond snippet, overlaid with Red Sox fans singing along, joyfully and poorly, during a lopsided Sox win over the Royals. I smiled. A day at the park is still such a wonderful slice of American life, for reasons that are hard to understand and harder to explain.

Why do they sing that particular song? Just because they enjoy it. I'm kind of glad it wasn't anything more serious than that.

UPDATE: I found myself humming this song a couple times this morning, and sure enough it is a very happy tune.