A sold-out crowd at Beijing’s Wukesong Baseball Field didn’t know it, but on March 15 they kicked off the celebration of the 100th anniversary of a great American tradition, two weeks before March 31’s Opening Day on U.S. soil. During the seventh-inning stretch of the first Major League Baseball game in China, between the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres, several thousand Chinese fans swayed back and forth to the tune of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
It was a tribute that composer Albert Von Tilzer and lyricist and singer Jack Norworth couldn’t possibly have expected when “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” was published as sheet music in the spring of 1908. In fact, the song that would become the third-most-performed tune in America — after “Happy Birthday to You” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” — wasn’t a hit until people heard it performed. In late October of that year, just after the World Series, two recordings of the song — one by a singer named Edward Meeker and another by a group called the Hayden Quartet — vied for the top of the pop charts and continued to sell right on through the winter holidays.
By the 1910 season, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” was being sung at all the major league parks and on its way to becoming baseball’s unofficial anthem. According to Tim Wiles, director of research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and co-author of the recent “Baseball’s Greatest Hit: The Story of Take Me Out to the Ball Game” with Andy Strasberg and Bob Thompson, the song is performed about 2,500 times a year at major-league games.
Exactly why is a puzzle to baseball historians. Jerry Silverman, musician, musicologist and author of “The Baseball Songbook: Songs and Images From the Early Years of America’s Favorite Pastime,” says, “There was a lot of competition out there. In 1906 there was a song called ‘It’s Great at a Baseball Game,’ which anticipated not only the mood and meter of ‘Take Me Out’ but its menu as well.” Instead of the familiar peanuts and cracker jack, the lyrics called for “hot buttered popcorn and peanuts.” But that song, says Mr. Silverman, never caught on.

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