The two men behind baseball's song had never been to a game

In 1908 Jack Norworth, a songwriter and vaudeville performer, was riding a subway train when he saw a sign advertising baseball that day at the Polo Grounds. He wrote a song about a young woman named Katie Casey. When her boyfriend calls to ask her out to a show, she says yes, but only if he takes her to the ball game instead.

Albert Von Tilzer, a Tin Pan Alley composer, set the words to a waltz tune. Norworth married the singer Nora Bayes that year, and she sang the song first. Other vaudeville acts picked it up.

Neither man had been to a game. Norworth saw his first major league game in 1940, 32 years after he wrote the song. Von Tilzer saw his first 20 years after.

The best-known early recording was credited to Billy Murray and the Haydn Quartet. Murray did not sing on it.

The first known time it was played at a ballpark was in 1934, 26 years after it was written, at a high school game in Los Angeles. Later that year it was played during Game 4 of the World Series.

Singing it during the seventh-inning stretch caught on thanks to a broadcaster. Harry Caray, who called Chicago White Sox games, used to sing it to himself in the booth during the stretch. The team's owner, Bill Veeck, heard him one day and had Caray's microphone turned on so the whole ballpark could hear. Caray started doing it in 1976, and kept it up when he moved to the Chicago Cubs in 1982, whose games were broadcast nationally.

In 1958 Norworth sang the song on The Ed Sullivan Show with four New York Yankees, including Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra. He died the next year. He is buried in Anaheim, California, across Interstate 5 from the Angels' ballpark.