Q&A: Scott McCaughey on pulling a doubleheader with The Baseball Project, The Minus 5

Somewhere in Europe, there exists live footage of an unreleased song about Roberto Clemente, penned by R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills.

The Baseball Project — a music supergroup now comprised of R.E.M.’s Mills and guitarist Peter Buck, guitarist Scott McCaughey of The Young Fresh Fellows, guitarist Steve Wynn of The Dream Syndicate and drummer Linda Pitmon of Filthy Friends — played their first full show ever back in 2009 at a festival in Spain, with the show broadcast on national TV.

“Peter couldn’t come to that. So Mike Mills came to play that show with us, because he wasn’t in the band yet then, but he’s a big baseball fan and a great friend of ours, so it made sense,” McCaughey recalled. “But he had a song that he wrote about Roberto Clemente, and we played it at that show. It was about a fathers-and-sons thing, on his personal experience, but Clemente was heavy in that for him.

“So yeah, we did have that song. We never recorded it for some reason, but there’s one out there that’s written by Mike Mills. Maybe we’ll get to it sometime. Maybe we’ll revamp it or get it for the next record or something because Clemente is amazing.”

The Baseball Project visited the Clemente Museum with Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto a few years back after a show, and McCaughey still wears a black-and-gold 21 hat from the museum. (He even sported it on The Young Fresh Fellows’ “Loft” album.”)

It’ll be a twinbill in a Sept. 20 show at Mr. Smalls Theatre in Millvale, with all five band members playing an opening set as The Minus 5, another McCaughey band which just released a new album in May, followed by a longer set by The Baseball Project.

In a call from Portland, Oregon, before the tour started, McCaughey spoke with TribLive about three songs featuring the Pittsburgh Pirates, doing double duty, the Minus 5’s new album and more. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below.

From looking through the music, it looks like you have three songs that directly deal with the Pittsburgh Pirates. I was wondering if you would be able to go through those three songs. The first one is “The Day Dock Went Hunting Heads.”

Yes, that’s one of mine. People always come up to us, ever since we started the band, and they say you should write a song about so-and-so. Of course, nobody needed to urge us to write one about Dock (Ellis). But I thought I wanted to take a different angle from the LSD game – that’s of course mentioned in the song – but I realized there’s this whole other game that was almost as crazy, as incredible, so I wrote about that one. (laughs) I just think he was a great player and a great character and a fascinating person to write about and to draw the sort of parallels or non-parallels of how the game was back then compared to how it is now. In that game, he threw directly at the first five or six batters of the game, and he didn’t get thrown out of the game. (laughs) Which you do that now, one or two, you’re gone, and there’d be a big fight and all this stuff. But none of that happened, which is pretty amazing. We could probably write an entire album about Dock because he’s really a character. I love the end of the song where you realize he became a drug counselor and all this stuff so it’s a full circle kind of thing.

There’s also “Harvey Haddix”…

Steve wrote that one about his famous perfect game that wasn’t a perfect game that happened in Milwaukee in 1959, I think. I should know because he says it in the song (laughs) but ‘58 or ‘59, and that was just an incredible, incredible story. He pitches 12 perfect innings, but he doesn’t get credit for a (perfect) game. But that was, again, a totally different time. You’ll never get a guy pitching 12 innings again.

I don’t know if we’ll get anybody pitching nine innings anymore.

Right, right. And I think that whole game was probably two hours, so fast, and he probably threw 100 pitches or something. They worked differently back then. He pitched to contact. He wasn’t a big strikeout guy. The great thing about that story is that at some point, somebody who heard about the song knew Harvey’s wife. And he got in touch with her, he knew her, I guess, and played her the song and she loved it. She said, ‘Oh, that’s Harvey’s kind of music. He would have loved that.’ It was really, really sweet. She wrote a really nice letter, and it was really fantastic. Yeah, that’s a great song. We still play that one all the time. It’s a really fun song.

The other song I was going to ask about is “The Yips” because Steve Blass was a Pirates pitcher.

That was another one that Steve wrote, but Steve said he made a mistake on it with Steve Blass. He said there’s some factual error in that song about it, which I’m not sure exactly what it was. I think he had a year wrong and he got the yips later than what Steve credited him for in the game or something. So we slip up every once in a while. (laughs) I’ve made an error in songs too, but in general, we’re pretty well-researched, but “The Yips” is a really fun song because it’s just such a weird thing, and it still happens.

All three of those songs are obviously about certain baseball situations, but they also seem to also have real-life applications too.

Right, that’s kind of our goal with our songs. They don’t have to be that way, but we’ve always found when we’re writing a song about a situation that happened in baseball that it can apply to general life or just the way people react to each other. I really like that about our songs. I always say our baseball songs aren’t just rah-rah baseball kind of songs. They’re really looking at the people who play it and just the way it reflects on life in general.

Do you think that you’ll ever run out of material with baseball and songs, or does it feel like there’s so much there?

I don’t think so because it’s ongoing. It’s still happening, although it’s not as much fun to write about current players because they’re kind of boring compared to the old timers. (laughs) I guess they have to be. I mean, there’s some that aren’t, but in general, the pressure is so great on them that they just have to really be in shape. There’s just not going to be a bunch of guys who go out barnstorming in the offseason and are hanging out in bars and just getting in trouble and stuff like that. It doesn’t really happen that much anymore, which is probably a good thing. The pressure is so intense and the money they make and everything. It’s kind of crazy, but I don’t think we’ll ever run out because there’s always new things happening and there’s always old things we discover and old stories we haven’t explored yet. You’re talking about 175 years of baseball, and it’s ongoing.

Related

• Review: Blink-182 rocks 1st day of Four Chord Music Festival
• Q&A: Guitarist Ryan Lee Crosby on how he discovered Bentonia blues
• 2025 Pittsburgh area concert calendar

To stick with the baseball theme, it seems like you’ll be pulling a doubleheader on this tour with The Minus 5. What’s that going to be like doing the two shows for you?

It’s nothing to us. I say that for me because I kind of conned everybody else into doing The Minus 5 (laughs) because I’ve got a new record out, and Peter and Linda are all over the record too. They’re a huge part of the record. It just made sense to me because we’ve toured in the last couple of years with The Baseball Project. We don’t have a new record out. The last couple of tours, we played two sets: we played an hour and then take a break and come back and play another hour with The Baseball Project. So this is just breaking it up in a little different way. We’ll play 40 minutes with The Minus 5 and then take a little break, come back and play 75 minutes with The Baseball Project or something like that. So it won’t be a lot different. It’s asking them to learn more songs, (laughs) which is hard because we all play in so many bands. It’s really confusing.

Have you ever had that happen, where you’re like, where do I go from here in the middle of the song?

So many times. So many times, especially since I had the stroke because now it’s like I can’t remember words and everything like that. But I’m doing pretty well with it. It’s really confusing. Peter and Linda and I have all kind of realized we’ve reached a level where we can stuff this many songs in, and then when we have to stuff other ones, we have to drop the other ones in the back of our brain. We have to make room for it. We can’t just keep them all in there permanently. That just doesn’t work anymore. (laughs)

The new album (from The Minus 5) “Oar On, Penelope!” came out recently, so what were you hoping to accomplish with that? And do you think that you hit the mark with it?

I do. I feel like I totally hit the mark. I just wanted to make a really immediate record that could grab you immediately like it sounds. It feels like a bunch of people playing in a room, which is what it was. I didn’t labor over it too much. We just played the songs pretty much live. I re-sang them, added Debbi Peterson doing vocals on all the songs, which I really had that planned as part of my idea for the record. I just wanted it to be a really uplifting record for me because some of my records feel like they’re kind of downers. I don’t know if the lyrics are that different in this, but the feeling of the record just feels more positive and enthusiastic and up because everything’s kind of messed up now. And I just wanted to have a positive thing. I think it really turned out great. It’s the first record in a long time I had somebody else mix it. I had Ed Stasium mix it, who’s a super well-known guy who did Ramones and Talking Heads and Smithereens and so many great bands. So I had him mix it, and it just gave it that extra something. It sounds like a classic record, something that I don’t really know how you do that, (laughs) because I’m sort of a novice at mixing, I just kind of learned myself doing it here in my dungeon of horror, as I call it. I handed it over to Ed Stasium, and he was just amazing. I think it’s a great sounding record. I think it feels really good to listen to. I don’t get tired of it at all. I love playing the songs live, too. They’re really exciting to play.