Welcome to the song of the day, where we feature a single track, whether its brand new or older than us, overlooked or overplayed, our favorite or no one’s favorite; as long as its interesting, it can be the song of the day.
It’s April 27 and baseball season is in full swing. There’s not many bands better for baseball than The Baseball Project, a band made up of Peter Buck and Mike Mills of REM, Scott McCaughey of The Minus 5 and sometimes of REM, and Linda Pitmon and her husband Steve Wynn of The Dream Syndicate.
The band has three full albums entirely of songs about baseball, ranging from the earliest days of the game (“The Death of Big Ed Delehanty”) all the way up to the present (“Ichiro Goes To The Moon”). There’s a few songs about players that played for the Phillies, but I’ve gone with “The Pete Rose Way” from the band’s second album, Volume 2: High and Inside.
Pete Rose played most of his career in Cincinnati, but was in Philadelphia from 1979 through 1983, eventually retiring in 1986 with the Reds as the all-time leader in career hits, with 4,256. He and Ty Cobb are the only players ever to have over 4,000 hits, though Rose is famously not in the Hall of Fame after he was found to have gambled on games that he played in.