Wild Pitches: Ozzy on the loose
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Jayson Stark
ESPN.com
Songbird of the month
Somewhere, Harry Caray was looking for an extra long, extra tall, extra cold beverage this week, because on Sunday, a man sang what music experts have identified as a rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" that made Caray sound like Frank Sinatra.
That man was Ozzy Osbourne. And on Sunday, the Cubs handed him the opportunity to sing Harry's favorite song during the seventh-inning stretch at Wrigley Field. Only over the next minute did we all discover this was like handing Evel Knievel the keys to your Bentley.
The song that followed was so unrecognizable that the Chicago Tribune actually felt obliged to print a transcript of it the next day, just so witnesses could verify they'd heard what they heard. Here goes:
"One. Two. Three.
"Let's go out to the ballgame. Let's go out to the bluhhhhhn.
"Take me a ee-yan eeya (humming) the field.
"I don't care if I ahh-uhn ack.
"Da da da da duh da da da eam. Duh ee, da da da da dahhh.
"For a fee, two, three strikes you're out at the old ballgame. Yeahhhhhh."
Now was that magic, or what?
"It was very interesting," Cubs outfield-witticist Doug Glanville told Wild Pitches. "I was looking around the crowd to see if anybody was actually following this, because there's always somebody.
"Then I saw a kid who was singing right along, verbatim. So I talked to the kid after the game, and I said, 'Where are you from?' He said, 'I should tell you where my parents are from. My mom was from the Western Milky Way, somewhere between Pluto and Neptune. And my dad is from the United States.'
"I asked, 'What state?' And he said, 'West Southern Idaho. That's kind of a new state.' So we didn't realize it at the time, but that language he was singing in was Plutonian-Neptunian-West-Southern-Idahoan. I think that explains it."
Then again, perhaps this rendition wasn't so much celestial as it was, say, bestial.
"I saw it as a call of the wild," Glanville theorized. "I was looking around to see if some herd of wild emu or wild water buffalo were coming to meet their master. But it never happened -- because he was so off-key. But I'm sure there are probably many wild habitats where, if you played that, they would have really felt it. They'd have formed all kinds of mysterious formations, I bet. So we need to take this tape and play it in various habitats and jungles, wild-animal environments, and see how everything responds.
"Or we could play it in space. Who knows -- Jupiter might change colors. We might have contact with some other life form. This could turn out to be cutting edge. It could signal a sequel to ET because I do believe, somewhere in there, he was phoning home."
And if, indeed, he was phoning home, he was no doubt saying, in his own special way, "Turn on the freaking VCR -- fast!!"
Got a link to it or can upload it or something? I'd really like to hear it again.