For our national pastime, it's deja vu all over again - ex-baseball player and songwriter Terry Cashman's love of baseball and old-fashioned ballparks

Insight on the News, July 4, 1994 by Pat Butters

Tunesmith Terry Cashman wrote the instant classic, "Talkin' Baseball," and his muse has returned - in the form of the new old ballpark in Baltimore.

Terry Cashman worked the mound for two seasons for the Detroit Tigers organization, but this southpaw is better known for pitching hits on Tin Pan Alley

The bearded 53-year-old Cashman has produced many successful recordings, most notably "Operator," "Time in a Bottle," "Don't Mess Around with Jim" and "Bad Bad Leroy Brown" for the late legendary Jim Croce. Before that, he sang with his own group, the Chevrons, and cowrote the No. 1 hit, "Sunday Will Never Be the Same," for Spanky and Our Gang.

But baseball was never far from Cashman's mind while he pursued his music career. A native New Yorker who regularly visited the Polo Grounds, Ebbets Field and Yankee Stadium, Cashman's love for the game was as natural as real grass. "We were Catholics and we were Giant fans, in that order," he says. "I thought everybody had a family like mine where when I'd come home from school the first thing my mother would tell me was the score of the Giants game."

Cashman managed to combine his two loves in 1981 by recording his first musical home run, "Talkin' Baseball," a nostalgic ode to baseball greats such as Duke Snider, Willie Mays, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Roy Campanella and Bob Feller. The record sold 200,000 copies, not counting the variations he's done for almost every major league team. He's also composed songs about Opening Day, the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y, and the Negro Leagues.

Take, for example, Cashman's "The Ballad of Herb Score." Score hurled for the Cleveland Indians in the mid-fifties before a line drive off the bat of Yankees' Gil McDougald hit him in the head and nearly killed him. The pitcher came back for a year but never equaled his earlier success.

Betcha never heard of Herbie Score, But after the winter of '54, The Indians said send us a kid with smoke, He blew'em away in '55, This red-head southpaw, man alive! Betcha never heard of herbie Score.

"It really didn't have to be about baseball"' says Cashman. "It's a song about someone who has great potential and all of a sudden it's taken away from him. And he winds up losing the thing he loved to do."

Happily, Score ended up as an Indians broadcaster, covering their games for 31 years. Cashman's song has been playing on Cleveland radio stations and will be part of a collection of his baseball tunes released this summer by Sony Music Entertainment. (In 1992, Metrostar Records released Terry Cashman's Greatest Baseball Hits, a 10-song compilation.)

As baseball's reigning musical ambassador, Cashman often attends the sport's premier events. Last year, while at the All-Star Game, he had a kind of epiphany. The game was held in Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards, a new stadium that is a throwback to the old parks of yesteryear, when people could see the ballplayers without binoculars.

The fact is, Cashman loves baseball stadiums almost as much as the game itself, and his New York accent becomes significantly more pronounced when the subject of 60,000-seat, less-than-intimate parks comes up. "Everything is predictable in these cookie-cutter shapes in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Philadelphia," Cashman says." I'm one of those people that hates indoor parks, artificial carpets, 330 down the line, 410 in the field, y'know?" He was inspired the minute he entered Oriole Park, the red-brick, 48,000-seat venue that was built between Baltimore's tony Harborplace and its Little Italy.

"I was so glad to see a real ballpark.... These fools in baseball, it took them all this time to realize that the reason Fenway Park is sold out all the time is baseball is fun!"

Yes, Fenway Park. The mere mention of the fabled home of the Boston Red Sox brings a twinkle to a baseball purist's eyes. But the Orioles' much ballyhooed ballpark, with its open-air views of the city and harbor breezes, has proved equally inspiring - at least to Cashman. After the All-Star Game, he rushed home to write "Oriole Park" in honor of the stadium:

Oh the city lights, And the harbor lights, And they come from everywhere To enjoy the game.

"Oriole Park" will be part of the Sony collection, and like "The Ballad of Herb Score," the song transcends the game. It's about families - parents and their kids sharing a day at the park. That's what Cashman really loves about baseball.

It's played every day, kind of like this drama that plays itself out over six months," he says. "That particular aspect makes the people that play baseball and that have something to do with baseball almost become a part of your family."