“Centerfield” by John Fogerty

John Fogerty came back from a nine-year break in 1985 with an album called Centerfield, and he'd settled on that title before the song of the same name even existed. When it came, it came easy: he hit on the opening guitar riff while practicing, took it into the studio against a drumbeat, and the rest poured out. He wrote, arranged, produced and sang it, with Jeffrey Norman engineering.

It marries his two great loves, baseball and rock and roll, with a grin you can hear, all bright twang and rockabilly bounce, even if Fogerty fretted over how people would take it. First tucked away as the B-side of "Rock and Roll Girls", it has since become a fixture at ballparks across the country, and in 2010 the National Baseball Hall of Fame honored it at its induction ceremony, making Fogerty the only musician ever celebrated there.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.