The Baseball Project

Even a completist could be forgiven for not keeping up with all of Scott McCaughey’s projects. The main force behind quirky, power pop veterans the Minus 5 and the Young Fresh Fellows is also a member of Robyn Hitchcock’s band, the Venus 3, and tours with R.E.M. Oh, and he loves baseball. So much that he’s spent the better part of 2011 hopping between spring training, minor league parks, major league stadiums, and rock clubs in support of his OTHER group, The Baseball Project. McCaughey reunited with buddies Steve Wynn (formerly of The Dream Syndicate), Peter Buck (R.E.M.), and drummer Linda Pitmon (Miracle 3) to record the project’s second collection of hardball-themed rock songs, Volume 2: High and Inside. “Chin Music” glorifies the great intimidating pitchers in history, “Look Out Mom” serves as a public service announcement for paying attention to foul balls in the stands, while “Ichiro Goes to the Moon” is a speedy pop-rocking ode to the Mariners great with Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard on backup vocals. D.C.’s transient fan base (and the
Nats’ marketing team) might like “Fair Weather Fans”, a sweet tune about moving from city to city and loving each home team along the way. But you care about the game or not, the Baseball Project never let their obsession get in the way of catchy melodies and interesting songwriting narratives.

So where are you right now?

I’m in Portland, Oregon. That’s where I live.

So you all head out for a tour in the next week?

Yeah, I’m heading out on Monday to New York, and we’ll have a couple days rehearsal, then we’ll do our little ten-day, two-week swing, and that’ll probably be it for the Baseball Project. We’ve been hitting it pretty hard. But I don’t think we’ll do anything else unless something magical comes up before the season ends.

Is that kinda the “cap” on the Baseball Project, April to October?

Well, not necessarily, but it makes sense. This is the first time we’ve really had the opportunity to actually tour a lot during the baseball season, which is great for many reasons. Not only that it makes sense, but we can actually go to games on our days off. We end up at major and minor league games, we do things where we play before and after games, we play during games, we sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”, we’ve thrown out the first pitch. So that’s a lot of fun for us and, I suppose, gets our name out to more baseball fans than if we just play the usual rock clubs that we play on tour.

I loved that you all did a tour of Cactus League spring training stadiums in Arizona. How did it go?

It was great. We had a blast. We saw a lot of games. It was a little surreal at times because, you know, you’d be playing at eleven o’clock or noon before a game, and some of the ballparks are right by Sun City and there are a lot of elderly people who go to the games. They were kinda looking at us like, “What is going on here?” But then people would realize we were singing songs about baseball, and they’d go, “Oh, this is cool,” and we’d end up selling CDs and t-shirts and all that. I mean, it was an experiment that was a little strange and probably wasn’t done before, but it was a lot of fun.

I always wanted to set aside some time and hit a bunch of spring training sites.

That aspect of it was so great because I’d never done it before, I’d only ever seen one spring training game when I was a little kid. To be there every day made me want to go every year, you know? Just go to games and maybe not be working as much as I was, but it was really fun, great experience.

Do you get out to many games in Portland? I know you’re a big San Francisco Giants fan.

Well you know, up until this year, we had the AAA Portland Beavers, who were San Diego’s AAA team, but we lost them this year because we got Major League Soccer and they couldn’t work out a way to share the stadium, so that kinda sucks. But I just caught in the last two and half weeks five games up in Seattle at Safeco Field, and Mariners won all five. What are the odds of that? It was kinda crazy, two of them were against the Red Sox. And the Mariners’ lineup is virtually a AAA lineup, as of about a month ago.

Are baseball songs something you’re always writing? Or do you make a point of
saying “it’s time to right some baseball songs now”?

Well, it’s a little bit of both. You know, when I get an idea for a song, maybe it’s the same with Steve, we tend to stockpile them and then hit it hard when we say “okay, let’s go in and make a record.” But I have to R.E.M.ind myself that it’s okay to write songs that aren’t about baseball. I just got so deep into it for a while I wasn’t writing any other songs. I think to myself, “Geez, I should really do a Minus Five record or something.” Now it’s become sort of a constant thing, but we definitely focus on it a lot more when we know we’re going to make a record.

To what extent do you see baseball as a trope or a motif or something you can use to write about bigger themes?

Yeah, it is like that. It’s good to have any kind of inspiration to write a song. I mean, if you say, “let’s write a song about baseball,” it opens up a new world to me, and yet you want the songs to be usually a little more than just here’s a song about a guy who played baseball. We try to pick subjects that at least have some meaning outside the baseball context.

What’s the challenge to writing these first person songs, especially when the subject is a real legend?

That’s something I do in songwriting outside the Baseball Project. You can’t just write about yourself all the time. I mean, you can, but it makes it a little more interesting for me to imagine a character and inhabit that character. That’s something people always say to Michael Stipe from R.E.M.: “Why did you say this in this song?” And he says, “Well, I’m a character, you know? I’m writing from someone else’s point of view, it’s not my point of view.”

You know, it is a challenge when it’s someone really famous, but then again, its just a song, its just an opinion. I feel like we can take any kind of liberties we want with baseball songs. As far as I’m concerned, we could write songs that were completely fictional.

Do you ever hear from fans who are overly defensive of or antagonistic toward a particular player or team?

We get stuff like that sometimes. The biggest example is on the “Don’t Call Them Twinkies” song, where Craig Finn of The Hold Steady wrote the lyrics. He wrote them from the perspective of being a diehard Twins fan, and there’s a whole verse about them beating the Braves in the Series in 1991. Mike Milles of R.E.M. is a lifelong Braves fan, and he’s played with us before, and he takes big exception to that song, especially to the line, “Ron Gant was clearly out.” So there were times when he would refuse to play that song, and he’d be yelling at us from the audience and booing. But then when he was filling in for Peter on the last tour, he made up his own bridge so he got to kinda have his say about it in the song. That was kinda cool.

I really like your song “Pete Rose Way”. The consensus seems to be — and maybe I’m just hanging out with too many Reds fans — that he is forgiven and it’s just a matter of time before he’s forgiven.

We tend to like to take characters who would be easy to vilify and write sympathetic portraits of them, like “Broken Man” about Mark McGwire and “Twilight of My Career” about Roger Clemens. People you can easily vilify are sort of more fun to look at from both sides. For Pete Rose, to me, I can really relate to that. To Cincinnati fans, he’s a hero, you know, they love him. There’s not really that much ambivalence. They forgive him for whatever fuck-ups he had. It’s kinda like being a Giants fan with Barry Bonds, you know? Giants fans still love him even though he’s kind of a prick and he probably cheated and all that stuff. But they still love, whereas everyone else hates him. So I can relate to the Pete Rose thing by being a Giants fan. There’s always two sides to a situation, and its too easy to write a song saying what a jerk somebody was.

And I think Pete Rose should be in the Hall of Fame, personally, and I actually think Bonds should be in the Hall of Fame too, despite the steroids stuff. I mean, he was a Hall of Fame player before that happened, probably.

Do you think the tide will eventually turn for Bonds too then?

It’s gonna be hard. There’s so much animosity built up in the baseball world against him. In many many years maybe, but I think its going to be difficult for people to get back to that, to accepting what a great player he was beforehand. Even though he was on steroids, he had a couple years where I don’t care how juiced you were, it was just unreal. He would hit every pitch that was available to him to hit. They intentionally walked him, what, 100 plus times in a season? And he still hit everything available to him to hit. I don’t really think steroids can make you do that, but you know what? He was just an amazing player.

Do you guys get out to see games while you’re on the road?

I need to go to both Camden Yards and the Nationals stadium, those are two glaring ones that I haven’t been to. But I’ve been to a high percentage of them. I probably love AT&T Park in San Francisco, that’s probably my favorite, and not because I’m a Giants fan. It’s really an amazing park. There are so many really nice ones now. The Pirates park is fantastic. The Phillies park is great, Coors Field is nice. And of course the classics, Fenway and Wrigley and all that. But my favorites of the old parks were old Comiskey and Tiger Stadium in Detroit. I really loved both of those and was sad to see them go, although Comerica Park in Detroit is really really nice.

When I first moved to DC, we went to a ton of games while the Nationals were playing in RFK…

I’ve seen a game there. I saw the Senators play there in, like, 1968 or something.

I lived in the neighborhood and they’d lower seat prices to $3 halfway through the season. There was no reason not to go. I grew up going to these big, functional stadiums like Riverfront in Cincinnati and so that was what I was used to, so I’m kind of nostalgic for these really awful concrete stadiums.

Oh yeah, I know what you mean. I moved to Seattle and I went to the Kingdome all the time. Some friends thought it sucked but I didn’t care, I just wanted to see as many ballgames as I could.

The Hold Steady are playing at the 9:30 Club the night you play at the Iota. Any chance Craig Finn stops by to do vocals on “Don’t Call Them Twinkies”?

Wow, that would be amazing. I had no idea they were here at the same time. I’m guessing the timing would make it difficult. They’re playing at the 9:30? Wow, that’s a great gig, we should’ve been an opening act on that show. Craig has come up to sing it with us a few times. Earlier, we were up in New York and he came up to sing it with us for a few shows and it was awesome. If there’s anyway we can work it…but I imagine the timing will make it pretty difficult.

Are there other hardcore baseball fans in the rock world who have approached you about doing a song?

Umm, not so much. We have a pretty good idea of people we know, musicians we know, that are actually baseball fans. We got Craig and we got Ira Kaplan from Yo La Tengo and Ben Gibbard from Death Cab for Cutie and Steve Berlin from Los Lobos. These are all people we know and knew were fans. I don’t think anyone’s really come out of the woodwork yet saying they want to do a song. But you know, if Geddy Lee gives us a shout and wants to do a Blue Jays song or something, we’d be all over it.

“Fair Weather Fans” hits a soft spot for me because I’ve got quite a few friends who
tell me that I’ve turned my back on the Reds, my team growing up. But are there any
teams you could never see yourself rooting for?

Dodgers would be real hard for me, real hard for me. I grew up hating the Dodgers and the Lakers and kind of everything L.A., being a San Francisco guy. I like going to games at Dodgers Stadium, it’s a beautiful park, so I’d probably go if I was there but it would be really hard for me to be a Dodgers fan. I appreciate their history and all the great players they’ve had, but that would be a stretch for me. I think the Yankees would be hard too, despite the fact that they’re always good and everything. It would be hard for me to root for them. But you know, Steve and Linda lived in New York for twenty years and they became huge fans.

Have you followed the Nats at all this year?

Yeah, sure. Mike Morse, man. I’ve got him on two of my three fantasy teams.

Whoa, you’re up to three fantasy teams?

Yeah I know, it’s ridiculous. I held off for years saying I’d never even do one because I’d spend too much time on it, but I ended up with three. But yeah, Michael Morse has been great. I remember him from the Mariners. He came up with the Mariners a couple times but never really got any real regular playing time, but I was real happy to see him find a place where they were gonna let him play and he’s been awesome.

They’ve had some bad breaks with Strasburg and all that. But they’ve got some good young players. Like that guy Tyler Clippard, that guy is awesome. He’s just a workhorse in the bullpen, he’s so consistent. And you know Storen’s been good. Werth has been a little bit of a bust but you could sort of see that one coming.

The Baseball Project plays Iota in Arlington on Thursday. Show at 8:15 p.m., $20.