The Baseball Project

Add Date: February 22

Artist: The Baseball Project

Album: Volume 2: High and Inside

Label: Yep Roc

Genre: Rock, power pop, baseball

Comments: You don't need me to tell you how dominant sports are in American life. But even within our sports-centric (SportsCentric?) culture, baseball fans are a different breed. They're certainly no more passionate than, say, your average Cheesehead or Kentucky basketball nut. But that passion seems to play out in a different way: second-guessing, years later, a base coach's decision to send the runner in Game 2 of that playoff series, or the manager's failure to lift the starting pitcher in the seventh inning of that game in June. "Minutiae" isn't in your baseball diehard's vocabulary.

So it's hard to imagine something like "The Football Project" or "The Basketball Project," without thinking of really campy tribute music. But The Baseball Project works. Now, it certainly helps that the quartet features alt-rock veterans like Steve Wynn and Scott McCaughey, as well as R.E.M.'s Peter Buck, and that the guest list includes The Hold Steady's Craig Finn (on Minnesota's anthem from the 2010 playoff push, "Don't Call Them Twinkies"), Death Cab's Ben Gibbard, The Decemberists' Chris Funk and John Moen and Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan. (As a YLT fan, I can tell you that their name is derived from an episode involving Ira's beloved Mets, but that's a story for another day...)

And so when the group sings about Mark Fidrych's spectacular 1976 rookie season, Jack Hamilton's infamous beanball on Tony Conigliaro in 1967, or (in Finn's case) the '87 and '91 World Series champion Twins as if these things happened yesterday, it's neither cheesy nor surprising. It's baseball. Check out tracks 4, 3, 8 and 1.