His first lyric talks about enjoying a ball game as an escape from a miserable job and a girlfriend who left him when he refused to subsidize her coke habit. Nobody buys it. His second draft asks the listener to glory in the antics on the field and not to worry about the fate of the Hatians in the baseball factory or about one player and all his pregnant mistresses in each American League city or about all the former players who wasted their best years between AA teams and injuries. His manager tells him to keep trying. He manages to mention the game a little more in his third lyric, where he wishes he could soar away like a home run instead of living the life of a ball at batting practice.
Every record company turns it down, even Homestead.
Finally, he comes up with a song mentioning nothing of his own job or his ex-wife. In the Stands. Fighting every impulse, every learned behavior, he succeeds in writing only positive statements about the fantasy world in the ballpark, the great sights, sounds, and smells, where winning is heaven and even losing isn't that bad. At the pleadings of his aghast agent, he does one more rewrite, trying to be simple and heartfelt about grand slams, no-hitters and double plays. Yet even in this whitebread version, he ends up praising the underpublicized joys of ground rule doubles and pop-up flies to the shortstop.