The Sadistic Stadium Organist

Sometimes it pays to follow your intuition … and wait.

I’m not a big baseball fan. Never have been.

To me, taking in a baseball game is about as exciting as watching an IKEA table collect dust.

Granted, there are nuances to the game that I fail to – or admittedly refuse to – appreciate. For example, how a team’s manager positions his players on the field, depending on the pitcher, the batter, the score, the base runners – hell, let’s get creative here – the relative humidity, the lunar cycle, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, whatever.

To baseball purists (and I deeply respect each and every one of you), the game is an engaging, high-stakes chess match, a chess match pitting athletic multimillionaires against one another.

To me, the game is like, well, a freakin’ chess match. The only difference: Chess matches move more quickly, and the grandmasters don’t spit on the ground between moves.

However, I’m happy to relate one notable exception. What I saw during a televised baseball game one June day in the early ’80s nearly knocked me out of my well-worn La-Z-Boy recliner.

I’d just fired up my recently purchased Mitsubishi 18-inch color TV (which weighed the equivalent of three cinder blocks and sold for $550). The Los Angeles Dodgers were playing the San Francisco Giants up in the Bay Area.

Just as I tuned in, Dodgers 3^rd baseman Ron Cey slapped a slow ground ball to the Giants’ shortstop and was thrown out at first. I reached for the TV clicker, hoping I’d stumble across something more exciting, like a televised examination of inductive versus deductive reasoning.

However, something deep within me – an intuitive, odd “spidey sense” that to this very day I can’t fully comprehend – told me to stick around and watch the game.

I’m glad I did.

The next Dodger, all-star first baseman Steve Garvey, approached the plate, bat in hand. As he did so, music throughout the stadium began to play a very specific “batter-walk-up song.”

In case you don’t know this, “walk-up songs” – snippets of traditional baseball tunes such as “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”; “Eye of the Tiger,” by Survivor; or “We Will Rock You,” by Queen – are played as an athlete takes his final warm-up swings and heads toward the batter’s box. Today, I imagine most walk-up songs are pre-recorded, but 40 years ago, an actual in-stadium organist tickled the keys.

And this particular organist had a real mean streak.

Just as Garvey headed toward home plate, the organist knocked out a few bars from composer Scott Joplin’s 1902 ragtime classic “The Entertainer,” definitely not your typical baseball ditty.

That’s when my jaw hit the floor. This cannot be a coincidence. I thought to myself.

Why, you ask?

Let’s just say it had to do with one man’s, shall we say, “libidinous misstep” and another man’s Academy Award–winning soundtrack.

Stick with me, folks, there’s a connection here. And, given Garvey’s wide-ranging fame at the time, it didn’t take a baseball fan to put 2 and 2 together.

As for Garvey’s first at-bat, which followed “The Entertainer” snippet, I don’t recall whether or not he got a hit, struck out, popped out, did the Hokey-Pokey and turned himself around, or whatever. It didn’t matter. For I was riveted, waiting for one event: Garvey’s next appearance at the plate.

During the interim, as other players from both teams took their at-bats – and as I fought heroically to stay out of a baseball-induced coma – the Giants’ organist played a variety of ordinary, traditional walk-up songs.

Not Garvey. When he headed toward the batter’s box for the second time, there it was again: a 10-second refrain from Joplin’s “The Entertainer.”

Later that game, it happened a third time.

Okay, here’s the connection that blew me away.

Steve Garvey’s wife, Cyndy, had recently caught the Dodgers first baseman having an affair with his secretary, apparently swinging his rather famous bat in a different direction, as it were. It eventually ended their marriage.

Steve Garvey with his famous, and occasionally wayward, bat

Cyndy Garvey very soon took up with a certain fellow named Marvin Hamlish.

And who, pray tell, was Marvin Hamlish? He was a noted composer who had adopted ragtime music for the 1973 Oscar Best Picture winner, “The Sting.”

And the most noted song in the movie’s soundtrack? “The Entertainer,” the very same song used every single time Garvey entered the batter’s box that day in San Fran. You’d think that a musician who’d made it to the Major Leagues would be forgiving of a fellow professional who’d mishandled his organ. Sadly for Garvey, this wasn’t the case.

And there you have it, folks: a snarky – one could argue downright vicious – slice of sports history.

Not to burst your bubble, but the sadistic stadium organist never converted me into a baseball fan.

Still, I learned an important lesson that day so many years ago: Trust your intuition. Listen to your gut.

And I can’t help but wonder if Garvey would’ve been better served had he moved the source of his own intuition above his waist.

---

Kudos and hugs to members of my Write Hearted community who went over early draft: Rachel Parker, Kathy Ayers, Simon Emslie and Dana Allen. And a special shout-out to Rick Lewis, who provided valuable feedback and furnished a few clever zingers that I incorporated into this essay.