TOC: Did you find anything about a curse between the song and the team?
Tim Wiles: Well, we didn’t find anything, but others have suggested that Merkle’s “Boner Play” that was doped out by Johnny Evers, basically was, uh, I have to be careful with how far I go with it, some have suggested that Johnny Evers’ um, “cleverness” in exploiting the rules as he did, was not really fair. Some other commentators have suggested that that’s why we haven’t won the World Series since 1908, because we kind of stole that one. There’s a little logical inconsistency in there in that we stole the pennant; we didn’t steal the World Series. We won that. If it were a curse, perhaps that would have taken effect in the first week.

TOC: Was it tough to get this much material out of such an innocuous song?
Tim Wiles: We get into so many different subjects: the movie industry, the sheet-music industry, the two movies that have been made based on “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” in 1910 and 1949, the over 500 people who have recorded the song. What I think is the biggest stunner is that most baseball fans of today are probably my age or younger, 43, and most of them, because of Harry Caray and [former White Sox owner] Bill Veeck, assume that we’ve always sung “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the 7th-inning stretch. But really, it just dates back to the White Sox in 1976.

TOC: What was Harry Caray’s role in making the song so popular?
Tim Wiles: It’s in Chicago where the match catches fire; it goes into hyperspeed. It happens at Comiskey, 1976. And the story is that Harry liked to sing the song in the booth, and the couple rows of fans right below him would hear him singing it to himself. Bill [Veeck] asked Harry if he would sing it into a mike, and Harry wanted nothing to do with that. Then Bill and Mike Veeck said, “We have secretly taped you, and we’re just going to play the tape, and you’ll be singing anyway, so you might as well do it live.” So Harry said, OK, I’ll go ahead and do this.

Of course it caught on with the White Sox. Then eight years later, in 1982, he goes up the road to Wrigley, and they’ve got the national cable deal. And all of a sudden everybody around the country, major- and minor-[league], is doing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” The average baseball fan today thinks that it’s happened at every ball game since 1908, which is a natural assumption. To us, it’s a big surprise that it’s really as late as 1976 that this gets cemented into the ritual of the 7th-inning stretch.

TOC: Who would you bring in to sing the 7th-inning stretch at Wrigley?
Tim Wiles: Well, one more time, of course, would be Harry. I guess my dream ticket is I would like to see, just once, the entire song be sung at Wrigley Field, so that people would know that there are two verses to the song and that the song is sung from the point of view of a woman. That’s my agenda…just as a curiosity and an educational piece.

Click here to view the complete lyrics to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” Baseball’s Greatest Hit is out Tuesday 2.