This summer, I have been updating the Music Division’s 1991 baseball music bibliography, which identifies over 400 baseball-related titles in the division’s holdings. Much like a scavenger hunt, my internship involves thinking about where baseball songs might be in the collection, as well as what keywords or search terms might lead to copyright deposits for previously unknown baseball songs. My goal is to at least double the bibliography’s size to provide a robust resource for Library staff, academic researchers and anyone who wants to know more about baseball.
Among my many interesting finds, songs about umpires especially stand out for me. I research U.S. popular culture and baseball labor history, and umpire songs offer a fascinating glimpse into both.
Today, the umpire is frequently an object of fan ridicule. But long before instant replay destabilized umpires’ authority, early baseball fans—and Tin Pan Alley songwriters—looked for ways to ridicule “the man behind the plate.” I have yet to find a song written from an umpire’s perspective, which suggests songwriters thought depicting umpires as humorous or pitiful would have better popular culture traction than attempts to rehabilitate the umpire.
The chorus to the 1909 title “Let’s Get the Umpire’s Goat,” written by Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth (a co-writer of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”), shows how fans expressed their frustration with the umpire:
Let’s get the Umpire’s goat, goat, goat
Let’s make him go up in the air
We’ll yell, Oh you robber! Go somewhere and die
Back to the bush, You’ve got mud in your eye
Oh, what an awful decision!
Why don’t you put spectacles on?
Let’s holler like sin, and then our side will win,
When the umpire’s nanny is gone.
The 1905 title “The Umpire Is a Most Unhappy Man” suggests that driving a hearse was the only profession worse than being an umpire. The chorus asks
How’d you like to be an umpire
Work like his is merely play
He don’t even have to ask for
All the things that come his way
When the crowd yells, ‘knock his block off’
‘Soak him good,’ says ev’ry fan
Then who wants to be an umpire
The brickbats whiz when he gets his
For the umpire is a most unhappy man.
Even the famous “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” includes a passing reference to umpires. The song’s main character, Katie Casey, “saw all the games” and “told the umpire he was wrong, all along good and strong.”
Though entertaining, early 20th-century songs about umpires also reflect changes in popular culture and a period in American labor history rife with worker strikes and labor activism.