I was holding off on this in hopes that I could track down a fairly accessible audio and/or video clip, but I'll try and do that later. I don't know if either any of my readers are baseball fans, but one of the lowest points in my own personal history of baseball happened on Sunday.
Bear in mind that I'm a lifetime, diehard fan of the Chicago Cubs. There aren't a lot of summer options for sports fans who grow up in Iowa. Nevertheless, most summers we managed at least one trip into Chicago, and took in a day game at Wrigley Field. After Harry Caray passed away, the Wrigley folks took to inviting celebrities (some more celebrated than others) to home games to lead the crowd in singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," one of Harry's signature traditions.
Now, far be it from me to place the words "dignity" and "Harry Caray" in the same post, much less the same sentence, but there was something kind of dignified about this new tradition, especially in an era of sausage races, sushi bars, and swimming pools. It was/is a nod to tradition in a sport that's been painfully quick sometimes to abandon tradition, and correspondingly slow to replace it with anything equally compelling.
On Sunday, Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne were invited to lead the crowd. The result? Here's the Chicago Trib's transcript of Ozzy's version:
"One. Two. Three.
"Let's go out to the ballgame. Let's go out to the bluhhhhhn.
"Take me a ee-yan eeya (humming) the field.
"I don't care if I ahh-uhn ack.
"Da da da da duh da da da eam. Duh ee, da da da da dahhh.
"For a fee, two, three strikes you're out at the old ballgame.
Yeahhhhhh."
Don't get me wrong here. I laughed so hard I think I burst a blood vessel. But at the same time, I can't help but think that the only reason they were there was that Sharon (the odds-on favorite for most of the major categories at this year's Kato Kaelin awards) is hosting a new talk show, airing (quel surprise!) on WGN this fall. And Ozzy is simply pathetic. I don't really feel any better about laughing at someone who is clearly brain-damaged because it was self-inflicted. It still feels vaguely cruel and uncomfortable to me. And the end result of this is that I feel a lot more jaded about that particular Wrigley tradition than I used to. Mike Ditka and Bill Murray may have butchered the song as well, but they're both Chicago celebrities who can lay claim to more than the paycheck that the Osbournes received for their shameful performance.
Here's ESPN's Jayson Stark on the debacle. I know that I'm taking it too seriously, but hell, that's (also) what weblogs are for...
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