Ballpark music musings

After seeing the St. Louis Cardinals at Busch Stadium last night for the first time in a long while, I've had some thoughts about the musical aspects of the game:

• The Foo Fighters tune, "Everlong," worked surprisingly well as a ballpark organ instrumental...
• ...So did Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir."
• It's refreshing that Walter Wanderley's "Summer Samba" still makes the stadium playlist, after all these years.  Whenever I played it on WEW, I felt transported to Busch Stadium.  The arrangement is ideal for a baseball game.
• Although some listeners might find it dated, the main theme of Chicago's "Mongonucleosis" would work as between-innings music or as a player's walk-on theme.
• If you have any heart, you have to be at least a little moved when a children's band plays "God Bless America" in front of such a large audience.  
• During last night's "Name That Tune" contest, a fan was asked to identify a Motown tune in five notes.  I knew immediately that it was "The Way You Do The Things You Do" by The Temptations, but the fan guessed Van Morrison's "Brown-Eyed Girl." Given a second chance, he guessed "The Way You Make Me Feel."  The emcee said that was close enough and gave him a t-shirt.  That's not the ruling I would have made, but when your goal is to keep the fans happy and buying tickets, it's a smart good will gesture.
• Kudos to Fredbird, the Cardinal mascot, for showing the right combination of energy and tactfulness toward the fans.  When he pulled two very young fans up to play air guitar and dance alongside him, he didn't insist that they go all out.  He just led by example and let them contribute at the level that was comfortable for them.
• You know you're getting older when the number of times you yell, "Charge!" in response to the organist's cues plummets considerably from what it would have been as a kid.  Still, I shouted, "Charge!" once last night.  I'm not that much of a curmudgeon, after all.

A bonus musical memory from a Cardinal game I attended in 1999: John Denver's "Thank God I'm A Country Boy" played over the speakers between innings.  As it played, an animated graphic of Fredbird clapping along appeared on the stadium monitor; I thought that was a fun--and tactful--way of prodding fans to clap on the beat.