Alex Cooper, host of the popular Call Her Daddy podcast on Spotify, struck out while singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the Chicago Cubs’ game against the St. Louis Cardinals at Wrigley Field in Chicago on Sunday.
Cooper, 30, seemed to thoroughly enjoy her own performance, laughing throughout. But the performance was so sloppy and ragged, many probably didn’t get the joke, if that’s what it was.
Cooper was cheered as she was announced over the loudspeaker as the latest guest to lead the stadium in the song, which is a seventh-inning-stretch tradition.
“All right, Daddy Gang and Cubs fans, are you ready? You’ve never seen something like this,” Cooper said with a laugh before launching into the song, joined by two companions.
Cooper’s version echoed Roseanne Barr’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a San Diego Padres game in 1990. In both cases, the stars were probably just trying too hard to be funny and irreverent. If humor seems forced, it often falls flat.
“Take Me Out to the Ball Game” isn’t the National Anthem, but it’s just as well-known and may be even more beloved.
The song, composed by Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer, is pure Americana. Three separate versions of the song, by the Haydn Quartet, Harvey Hindermyer and Edward Meeker, were popular in 1908. The Meeker version was inducted into the National Recording Registry in 2010 and the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2019.
In 1949, Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra performed the song in a film of the same name that was produced by MGM and directed by Busby Berkeley.
R&B/jazz instrumentalist Roy Ayers included the song on his 1979 album, Fever, which rode the Billboard 200 for 15 weeks.
In the mid-1990s, a Major League Baseball ad campaign featured versions of the song performed by musicians from several different genres. An alternative rock version by the Goo Goo Dolls was also recorded.
Louisiana singer-songwriter Dr. John and pop icon Carly Simon both recorded the song for Ken Burns’ 1994 PBS documentary Baseball.
In 2001, Nike aired a commercial featuring a diverse group of Major League Baseball players singing lines of the song in their native languages. Ken Griffey Jr. and Mark McGwire sang lines in English, joined by Alex Rodriguez (Caribbean Spanish), Chan Ho Park (Korean), Kazuhiro Sasaki (Japanese), Graeme Lloyd (Australian English), Éric Gagné (Québécois French), Andruw Jones (Dutch), John Franco (Italian) and Iván Rodríguez (Caribbean Spanish).
In 2008, Andy Strasberg, Bob Thompson and Tim Wiles (from the Baseball Hall of Fame) wrote a comprehensive book on the history of the song, Baseball’s Greatest Hit: The Story of ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’. The book, published by Hal Leonard Books, included a CD with 16 different recordings of the song.
In 2001, the song ranked No. 8 on “Songs of the Century,” a joint project by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America. In 2008, the song received the Songwriters Hall of Fame’s Towering Song Award.
Eddie Vedder performed the song at Wrigley Field during the seventh-inning stretch at Game 5 of the 2016 World Series between the Cleveland Indians and Chicago Cubs.
In October 2016, actor and SNL alum Bill Murray, a Chicago Cubs fan, impersonated Daffy Duck as he performed the chorus of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” while at game 3 of the 2016 World Series, held at Wrigley Field. But Murray is a trained comedian.
