Baseball related songs: Sweet Caroline

In Baseball related songs, we pay attention to perhaps the greatest hit for Neil Diamond: Sweet Caroline. The song was released in 1969.  The explanation of how Neil Diamond got the inspiration for this song is rather contradictory as you will learn later in this blog post.

The song reached the fourth spot in the Billboard Hot 100 on August 16, 1969, and eventually turned into platinum as it sold over a million copies.

Neil Diamond stated in an interview in 2007, he was inspired by Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the former US President and his wife Jackie. At the time the song was released, the girl was eleven years old. According to the singer, he saw her on the cover of a magazine, sitting on a horse with her parents in the background. This created an image in his mind. The song came together five years after seeing the picture.
However, in 2014, Diamond said that the song was about his then-wife Marsha but he needed a name with three syllables to fit in the melody.

Still, the song itself doesn’t have anything to do with baseball. So why a blog post about it? Well, as you all may know, this song is very popular in Fenway Park. The song is played in the home of the Boston Red Sox since at least 1997 and on a regular basis since 2002 as the fans sing along in the middle of the eighth inning.

But why is this song played at Fenway? Rumor has it that Sweet Caroline” is played at every Red Sox game before the bottom of the 8th inning because the song was requested by former Red Sox announcer, Ed Brickley as a tribute to the newborn daughter of Billy Fitzpatrick, a 20-year employee of Fenway Park.
In reality, Sweet Caroline became the official song of the Red Sox because a woman named Amy Toby liked the song, played it during a game, and it stuck. According to the Boston Globe, the song was first played at the park, it was only during random games, between the middle of the 7th and 9th innings and it was only played if the Red Sox were ahead in the game. Toby saw the song as a good luck charm and, in 2002, “Sweet Caroline” became an official Fenway tradition. One got to admit when looking at the video; when Fenway Park sings along, it is quite a festive atmosphere.

After the Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013, the New York Yankees made an exception to play the song as well as a tribute to the victims of the bombing.