Gloomy Tunes: Frank Sinatra, “There Used To Be A Ballpark”

It’s Opening Day, where every team is tied for first, and—in theory—has an equal shot at the pennant. That first “play ball!” is as much a sign that spring is here as Daylight Savings Time and cherry blossoms in Washington, DC.

But here at Obit, we’re really not big on beginnings; it’s endings that interest us, and Frank Sinatra’s elegiac “There Used To Be A Ballpark” certainly fits that bill. From his 1973 “comeback” album, “Ol’ Blue Eyes is Back,” the song, to use a baseball phrase is right in in wheelhouse, and he knocks it out of the park. Then again, there’s probably not a singer who did elegiac better than Sinatra, who despite the swinging “ring-a-ding-ding” good times of the Rat Pack and songs such as “Come Fly With Me.”  “The Lady Is A Tramp,” “New York, New York,” excelled at the melancholy, closing time tunes he called “saloon songs”: “”In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning,” “September Of My Years,” “It Was A Very Good Year,” and “Summer Wind” (the latter guaranteed to get tables of 4AM stragglers at an old man bar weeping after just a few bars are heard on the jukebox).

“There Used To Be A Ballpark,” written by Joe Raposo (the man behind “I Ain’t Easy Bein’ Green” and the theme music to WABC-TV’s 4:30 afternoon movie) is generally thought to be about Ebbets Field and the Dodgers, but Raposo says the inspiration was the Polo Gounds, the oddly shaped, mostly unloved, ball park by Coogan’s Bluff in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood, on 155th Street across the Harlem River from Yankee Stadium that was the home of the New York Giants through the 1957 season and the New York Mets their first two, hapless, seasons (hence the lyric “cause the old team just isn’t playing And the new team hardly tries”).

Whatever ballpark he’s singing about, Sinatra voice is filled with wistful nostalgia, remembering the good times, the 4th of July fireworks, the cheering good times, but no longer. “Now the children try to find it/and they can’t believe their eyes,” and noting that without it, the “summer goes so quickly.”  The Polo Grounds were demolished in 1961, replaced by the Polo Grounds Housing Project towers, and Shea Stadium, the Queens, NY park the Mets moved into in 1964, and where they won their only two championships,  was demolished in 2008. No one wrote songs about that.

So…play ball?

Steven Mirkin

Steven Mirkin’s diverse career has taken him from politics to pop culture to high art, offering him a front row seat to some of the most fascinating events and personalities of our time: writing speeches, fundraising appeals and campaign materials for Ed Koch, John Heinz and independent presidential candidate John B. Anderson; chronicling the punk/new wave scenes in New York and London; interviewing musicians such as Elton John, John Lydon and Buck Owens; profiling modern masters Julian Schnabel, Paul Schrader and Jonathan Safran Foer; and writing for TV shows including 21, The Chamber, Let's Make A Deal, and Rock Star: INXS.