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Two cheer ditties

Here are some "Cheer ditties", as I imagine them being phased as I am sitting in the stands in any ballpark. The first one is based on "Let's go [home team], clap, clap, clap-clap-clap" (or, as my wife sometimes sings, "Duck the Fodgers"), especially employed by those nutty "Bleacher Creatures" in Yankee Stadium, where each player is chanted ad infinitum until he acknowledges them. The second is a percussion riff oft played at the Oakland Coliseum. So in a few weeks my wife and I will be at PacBell Park, cheering on her Giants and enjoying Orlando Cepeda's "Cha-cha bowls" (see you in the food section).

String Sextet

So all that is going on is series of string chords punctuated by pizzicato (left hand), with an interruption in the middle. The material was chosen this way: I followed the 1991 season for the National League (by way of copying the results from microfilm - remember those things?). Since there were twelve teams (the Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins joined the league in 1993; Interleague play did not begin until 1996), I assigned a specific note to each team (e.g. the Giants was always G#, the Pirates was A; the notes had nothing to do with the team names, but simply based on stacked fourths and the schedule for the last weekend of the season). Each player has two notes: top note for the visiting team, the bottom the home team, the dyads ranging from a minor second to a major seventh. Further, the bowed note was the winning team and the pizzicato the losing team. There were also days where no games were scheduled and that was simply an empty measure. Looking at the season, there were no scheduled doubleheaders, making it easier to organize. When a game was rained out, I then went to the date that the game was made up, whether it was on an off day and as a doubleheader, then put back to its original scheduled date (there were only a few ocassions at the end of the season that there were some rainouts that were just simply cancelled). And what did I do for the All-Star Break in the middle of July? Find out... (all right, all right, I have the familiar seventh-inning stretch tune in six different keys, in pizzicato, and all rubato, just for fun; it comes at 6:17).