Weekend America 2007.07.14 – “Listening In at Fenway Park”
When you go to a major league baseball game these days, it is a highly mediated affair, with video and audio woven seamlessly into the live action. Recently, players have taken to personally selecting their “at-bat” song, that booms through the stadium as they walk out of the dugout and up to the plate. Players get real specific about what they want to hear – often sending a CD up to the control room before the game with a note: “Queue up track 3, 20 seconds in.” I got to speak to some of the Boston Red Sox about their favorite walkup songs. Mike Lowell, Alex Cora, Coco Crisp and All-Star slugger David Ortiz (pictured) all weighed in on the tune that gets them psyched up to hit. Megan Kaiser, the Sox music programmer, was my guide to the soundtrack of a baseball afternoon on the fabled field at Fenway.
I was watching poker on TV, and I noticed that the players, many of them, had headphones on. I was, like, “Really? You can do that? You can listen to music at the table?” And then I was wondering, “What would a professional player listen to during a high stakes game?” So I went to the Foxwood Poker Classic on the Mashantucket Pequot Indian Reservation in Ledyard, Connecticut. The Foxwoods Poker Classic is a stop on the 
Music seemed to play a lot of different roles for players. It’s certainly about emotional control – getting you up when your energies down, keeping you down when your energy’s too far up. It keeps you focused, like when you’re driving hundreds of miles and you need to keep mentally alert. Sometimes it’s about superstitition, sometimes its about the lyrics. Sometimes all it’s about a little humor to keep you going. “Another One Bites the Dust” – and just about anything from Queen – seemed to work well with the poker set.
In this episode of Listening In, we put out a call to Weekend America listeners: “What is a good song for falling asleep to?” In the conversations that ensued, we heard about many different kinds of songs that worked – it wasn’t all Pachelbel’s Canon and whale songs. I sat with sleep specialist 
A Walkman Busting, iPod Jacking spree in the vast open spaces of Philadelphia’s 30th Street train station, the day after Christmas. Roaming among the crowds of holiday travelers, each tuned to their own holiday music, I tapped into the personal soundtracks of Trevor Keal and David Montañez. Both Trevor and David are Philadelphia natives; their lives couldn’t be more different, their soundtracks, eerily similar and on message for the holidays. Hope you enjoy listening with them as much as I did. All the best for the new year.
