The Baseball Project is Back

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Baseball box scores are disappearing (even whole sports sections actually) from America’s newspapers, and viewership for the sport continues to rapidly decline, but one band is still fighting the good fight to spread the word about the grand old game.

The Baseball Project is back with its fourth album, Grand Salami Time!, and returns to Milwaukee tonight at Turner Hall.

The supergroup, featuring Scott McCaughey, Linda Pitmon, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Steve Wynn, came together for the album after releasing its last album in 2014. Several factors caused the nine-year gap between Third andGrand Salami Time!, including the members’ busy schedules with various other musical efforts, unsuccessful recording attempts, the pandemic, of course, and McCaughey’s stroke in 2017.

Finally last year, they joined with producer Mitch Easter at his Fidelitorium Studios in Kernersville, North Carolina, to record the new album. The experience was a reunion for Mills, Buck, and Easter, who famously produced some of R.E.M.’s earliest efforts, as well as bands like Let’s Active, Game Theory and dozens more. 

Scene of Earlier Triumphs

Being in the studio with Easter, recording again with the Baseball Project after all the time, and “bringing Mike and Peter to the scene of their earlier triumphs,” was amazing, says McCaughey.

“It took a lot of effort to get to that point,” he says. “It was tricky, but we managed. But it was worth the wait I think.”

Worth the wait indeed. Grand Salami Time is filled with fun rock songs (experiencing a low ebb like baseball), like the boisterous, brain busting title track that opens the album, stringing together “genius/knucklehead” catchphrases from announcers: “Everybody's got a favorite catch phrase, my oh my/Clear the deck, cannonball coming, you can kiss it goodbye/Now the sacks are drunk and so am I, so am I/Get out the rye bread and mustard grandma, it's grand salami time!”

A song with so many words might be hard for anyone to remember, but it’s particularly impressive for McCaughey, yet no less difficult, he says.

“I’ve have a lot of trouble anyway remembering words since I had the stroke,” he says. “That one is really, really hard. It’s so rapid-fire, one thing after another, and they don’t really make sense. It’s a real struggle, but I’m getting pretty good at it now.”

Ball Four

Another standout track is “64 and 64” about pitcher Jim Bouton, who wrote the notorious Ball Four, an inside and sometimes unflattering look at baseball players that served to inspire McCaughey, who says there might not have been a Baseball Project without the book. He explains that he and Wynn bonded over the book at the start of the band.

“He was talking about Ball Four and what a great book it was, what a great source of stories it was, and how it really changed how he thought about baseball as a kid,” McCaughey says. “You know, we love the sport. We’re crazy about baseball. At the same time, we realize not everything is right with baseball, not everything is perfect with the characters who play baseball. We kind of make it pretty obvious that we were going to write songs that were maybe a little unsavory about baseball. 

“A lot of them are like, yeah, this was a great player. But we also wanted to be true to ourselves and true to the game, which Bouton kind of exposed a little bit when he did Ball Four.”

An earlier Baseball Project song, the incredibly catchy “Ted Fucking Williams,” written by Buck, was also inspired by Bouton and Ball Four, McCaughey says.

The band’s Bouton-inspired approach has not kept away Major League Baseball. Several teams, including the Brewers, have invited the group to perform at their stadiums. The Baseball Project sang the national anthem at then-Miller Park on July 27, 2016, during a tour they did with Milwaukee/Minneapolis band The Woolridge Brothers.

“We’re big Brewers fans,” says McCaughey. “I wrote a song for the third album called ‘82 Brew Crew,’ maybe we’ll put that out some day.”

McCaughey has other connections to Milwaukee. After his stroke, it’s one of the first places he played when he was able to go on the road again. The Baseball Project did a series of shows in Milwaukee, Madison Chicago and elsewhere in the Midwest.

“I really associate that with the Baseball Project and the Milwaukee and Madison area,” McCaughey says. “I remember how exciting it felt, and people came out and were really wishing me the best. They were really moved that I was there, and I was moved that I was there. 

“I didn’t know I would ever get back to the point of being able to travel. I was really thankful for everyone who came out and made me feel so good.”

The Baseball Project performs at 7 p.m. Monday, Aug. 28, Turner Hall Ballroom. Milwaukee’s Trapper Schoepp opens.