“We played at the Rock Hall for three days in a row,” says McCaughey in a recent phone interview from his Portland, OR home. The Baseball Project returns to Cleveland this month and performs on Thursday, Aug. 24, at the Beachland Ballroom. That same day, the band will attend the day game that pits the Guardians against the Dodgers at Progressive Field. Mills will throw out the first pitch, and the band will sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the 7th inning stretch. “That was amazing. That was a great five days in Cleveland with the baseball action and rock ’n’ roll. We played the Happy Dog one night, and Peter [Buck] and I played a house concert.”
The band first came together when Wynn told McCaughey that he wanted to do an album of songs about baseball. McCaughey said he had the same fantasy. The group started with just the two of them.
“We knew that Linda would want to do it,” says McCaughey. “We thought Peter [Buck] would want to play on the record even though he doesn’t care about baseball. He became part of the band but couldn’t go on tour a lot of the time, so we got Mike [Mills] to fill in on bass. We knew he was a huge baseball fan.”
The band then started making records with all five members. Both 2014’s Third and the recent Grand Salami Time! feature the five musicians.
“It’s a mighty arsenal of rock,” McCaughey says of the lineup. “We weren’t sure how this baseball business would go over with the indie rock fans, but a lot of them really dig it. I think some people who love baseball but don’t care about our music have gotten into it too.”
It’s been nine years since the band’s last album, and McCaughey says the group had planned on getting together to write and record during that time but didn’t have an entire album written. Once they headed North Carolina to record with producer Mitch Easter (R.E.M.), they started assembling songs with more of a sense of urgency.
“Steve had five that he knocked out,” says McCaughey. “I had some that I was kicking around but weren’t ready. I came up with song about [Los Angeles Angels pitcher Shohei] Ohtani. We always get dinged for writing songs about old white people who are dead. I wanted to make it a little more contemporary. There are still plenty of songs about old dead people, but we have some fresh stuff too.”
Mills wrote a song on the album, and Buck wrote music for a handful of songs too.
Stuck at home during the pandemic, he worked specifically on musical arrangements that fit the Baseball Project.
“At one point, Steve even said, ‘Why don’t you send me a song that sounds like R.E.M.?’” says McCaughey. “Peter said, ‘No problem.’ He then banged out ‘Journeyman,’ and Steve came up with the lyrics. Linda offers a lot, too. She doesn’t get the writing credit, but she has a lot to do with arrangements and is very involved in editing the lyrics.”
Mills and Buck haven’t worked with Easter since their R.E.M. days, and McCaughey says the album gave them a good chance to return to their roots.
“The whole thing was to get those guys back to where they made Murmur and Reckoning,” says McCaughey, referencing the first two R.E.M. full-length releases. “They had not been together in the studio with Mitch for 40 years. Mike had done some stuff for one-off songs here and there, but Peter and Mike hadn’t been there in forever, and it was just really fantastic. It was so easy and comfortable. It was so great to be in a room with people recording. I had done two years of distant recording. It was me in my basement by myself. When we started recording, it immediately sounded like a record. We did 16 songs in ten days.”
“Erasable Man” rocks really hard and even features some woozy saxophones courtesy of Steve Berlin (Los Lobos).
“Steve is a good friend of ours,” says McCaughey. “He’s in our fantasy baseball league, too. There wasn’t much that I thought the record needed, but Steve and I both thought it would sound really good with a baritone sax. We got Steve on the horn. He did it and sent it right back. He’s a great guy. He’s the man when it comes to saxophone.”
“Disco Demolition,” another album highlight, references a Chicago White Sox promotion that went awry.
“Steve had been thinking of that song for a long time,” says McCaughey. “He thought it would be great to have a disco song. What better solution than to have it be about that incident? That was such a crazy, crazy happening.”
For the current tour, McCaughey says the band will rehearse about 30 songs and then add more to the mix as the trek progresses.
“We’re quick learners,” he says. “Well, everyone else is. I’m somewhat damaged goods. We’ll probably bring more in. They’re all favorites. We’ll do an evening with, so we can play two sets, and it’ll be a good evening of baseball music.”
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This article appears in Jul 12-25, 2023.
