Hal Leonard has issued a new book "Rhythms of the Game: The Link Between Musical and Athletic Performance,” written by the former baseball player Bernie Williams and two musician friends, Dave Gluck and Bob Thompson. Below is an article that The New York Times recently published discussing this book.
Ballplayers Who Hit the Right Note
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
Published: June 24, 2011
The former Yankee Bernie Williams, above at a concert in Manhattan, is an author of a new book on the connection between music and sports.
MUSIC and baseball have been playing duets for a long time.
The Library of Congress holds a vast collection of sheet music for baseball songs. The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., boasts nearly 1,000 recordings. Scientists have studied the percussive sounds of ball on bat. Musicologists could turn their attention to the tunes blasted in the stadium to represent particular players. (For Bronxologists the best-known would be Mariano Rivera and “Enter Sandman.”)
The Marx Brothers, in “A Night at the Opera,” produced perhaps the greatest intersection of baseball and music: the overture to Verdi’s “Trovatore” slides into “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at measure 35, inspiring Chico and Harpo to leap up in the pit for a game of catch and Groucho to hawk peanuts down the aisle.
Now add this to the syllabus: “Rhythms of the Game: The Link Between Musical and Athletic Performance,” soon to be issued by Hal Leonard Books. Written by the former baseball player Bernie Williams and two musician friends, Dave Gluck and Bob Thompson, it is a grab bag of inspiration, self-help, history and anecdotes that focus on the kinship of baseball and music.
Mr. Williams, who gets lead billing, is certainly qualified to write it. During 16 seasons as a New York Yankee he played the guitar seriously and released an album in 2003. Since his baseball career ended in 2006, he has become an active jazz guitarist, performing regularly in clubs and releasing a second album, “Moving Forward,” that was nominated for a Latin Grammy.
Baseball (like other sports) has long had music makers. They go at least as far back as Eddie Basinski, nicknamed the Fiddler, a trained violinist who played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1944 and 1945. The ill-tuned fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers Sym-Phony are part of its lore, along with a tradition of barbershop quartets.
Denny McLain, who pitched for the Detroit Tigers in the 1960s, played the organ, and Carmen Fanzone followed four years as a Chicago Cub in the 1970s with a jazz trumpet career. More recently, Bronson Arroyo of the Cincinnati Reds released an album as a vocalist.
Mr. Williams, in a recent telephone interview, spoke of “that relentless pursuit of perfection” of the professional ballplayer and the serious instrumentalist.
“You can see it as far as the way that you react to a low-and-away pitch, the way you have to wait for it and have a perfect swing and hit it on a line drive the other way,” he said. That swing is the result of detailed practice.
“It’s an art,” Mr. Williams added. “It’s poetry in motion.”
The two fields have common sensations. A perfectly hit ball, right in the sweet spot, is “very similar to when you improvise over a set of chords, and you’re in a zone, and you nail every note and hit every pattern,” Mr. Williams said. “It’s like you’re in a trance,” he added.
The chief commonality of music and baseball is rhythm, Mr. Williams said. “Everything in baseball for me was rhythm.” Hitting depended on perceiving the pitcher’s rhythm, which is also the starting point for playing the outfield, Mr. Williams said. “You’re playing off the pitcher and the movement of the bat” to get the best possible jump on the ball. (Even the sound of the ball hitting the bat is a musical cue to where to move.) Making a throw from the outfield, he added, depends on a “certain pattern of steps you have to take, and they’re all rhythmically involved.”
Stealing a base — which Mr. Williams acknowledged was not his strong point, despite his great speed — also depends on the pitcher’s rhythm. Would-be base stealers can be thrown off their rhythm by the “hold play,” when a pitcher holds the ball interminably. He likened the tension of the delay to the space between notes in a jazz solo.
Mr. Williams, a thoughtful craftsman who speaks casually of Dorian modes and flatted seventh chords, plays in the genre of smooth or Latin jazz, and the book mostly invokes jazz and rock music. What about classical music? The authors compare fielders, who have to master the art of turning their concentration on and off with every pitch and may not have a crucial moment for a long stretch, to brass players in the opera pit, who may have a half-hour of waiting before an exposed solo. Mr. Basinski, 88, the former Dodger, spoke of the relationship between fiddling and fielding. Reached at his home in Milwaukie, Ore., he said: “I had great quickness because of the bowing and the fingering, which just has to be lightening quick. There is a great correlation. And how about timing and making the double play, your footwork and all that?”
Mr. Basinski, a shortstop, said he studied violin for 16 years, practicing three or four hours a day before making it to the Dodgers in 1944 out of the amateur circuit. Word got around about his violin-playing, and players ribbed him mercilessly.
“A lot of people think musicians are pantywaists,” he said. “That’s a bunch of” nonsense.
Mr. Basinski said he had to convince a dubious manager, Leo Durocher, that he could really play the violin. One day he put on his uniform and strolled into the Ebbets Field clubhouse playing Strauss waltzes. Durocher walked in. “He stopped and looked at me and said, ‘Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,’ ” Mr. Basinski recounted. “While he was shaving, I was right next to him, giving it to him with my violin.” He recalled another recital, performing at home plate between games of a Pacific Coast League doubleheader. “I got a tremendous ovation, and had a good doubleheader too,” he said. Sports can have its hazards for musicians. The Pittsburgh Pirates’ Johnny Barrett once slammed into Mr. Basinski to break up a double play. Barrett drew blood with his spikes and broke a finger on Basinski’s bowing hand. His Dodgers teammate Eddie Stanky got revenge later in the inning by leaping onto Barrett’s chest on a steal attempt. “He was bleeding like a pig,” Mr. Basinski said.
Mr. Williams said he never worried about his hands, and he now feels lucky he suffered no serious injuries to them. He said he also never suffered abuse from other ballplayers for being a musician, because the guitar has a populist appeal and figures in the music of the clubhouse: heavy metal, blues and rock. Are there cosmic connections between the diamond and the concert stage? Well, given baseball’s role as national muse, it’s not hard to uncover them, especially among the many classical musicians who are also baseball nuts. David Lang, the composer, wrote an essay on NYTimes.com last month describing the reverence for the past that classical music lovers and baseball fans share. (He worried that in the case of music, it was interfering with an appreciation of the present.)
Baseball and classical music both claim an open-ended sense of time. Just as no clock rules a baseball game, “there are no definites to the length of a musical phrase,” said the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, whose father-in-law was a professional pitcher in Japan.
“No two performances are the same,” he added, “just like no two innings are the same.”
Similarities of form also exist. A team and an orchestra are both a “pack of individualists” who work together, Mr. Davies said. An individual can always play well and sound good on a mediocre night for the collective. An infield is like a chamber music group: in both cases, he said, “their instincts are predicated on what they know their teammates are going to do.”
James Ehnes, a Red Sox fanatic and violin soloist who moved to Bradenton, Fla., to be near spring training (along with his future wife), found common ground in the power of moments between pitches of both sorts. “In music it’s not the notes themselves, it’s the space between,” he said. “It’s what connects them.”
Of course music and sports are vastly different on many levels. Great baseball plays give an edge over an opponent. Great musical moments derive from the desire to communicate something. Baseball players, no matter how good, are slaves to the unexpected variable. Musicians can control much more of a performance. Mr. Williams pointed to another difference.
“I’ve had some bad days playing baseball,” he said. “I can’t say that I’ve ever had a bad day playing music.”
A version of this article appeared in print on June 26, 2011, on page AR16 of the New York edition with the headline: Ballplayers Who Hit the Right Note.
