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BARBARA KLEIN: The twenty-twelve Major League Baseball season is in, yes, full swing. The sport has long been a hit with songwriters. In fact, baseball has been celebrated in song almost since the first pitch was thrown out. "The Baseball Polka" was written in the late eighteen fifties.
Over the years, Irving Berlin and Bruce Springsteen have written songs about baseball. Singers as different as Frank Sinatra and Meat Loaf have sung about the game.
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BOB DOUGHTY: Mandolin player and singer Sam Bush is a huge fan of his favorite team, the Saint Louis Cardinals. His album "King of My World" includes a song he wrote called "The Wizard of Oz." The song is about Ozzie Smith, a former Cardinal great who played shortstop and did backflips on the field.
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BARBARA KLEIN: Ozzie Smith is in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Bob Dylan wrote a song about another Hall of Famer: Jim "Catfish" Hunter. Catfish Hunter was one the best baseball pitchers ever, and one of the most popular. His fifteen-year career included five World Series championships with the Oakland Athletics and the New York Yankees.
He once pitched a perfect game, not allowing a single opposing player to reach base. He also pitched five seasons in a row with twenty victories. But Catfish Hunter is also remembered for another reason.
On December thirty-first, nineteen seventy-four, he signed a contract with the Yankees worth almost four million dollars. That might not sound like very much with today's highly paid star athletes. But the contract set a record. It made Catfish Hunter the first multi-millionaire player in baseball -- the "million-dollar-man" as Bob Dylan called him. The contract was for five years but he retired early.
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2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25