Live organ music was sacrificed for scoreboard expansion
Baseball is a sport built on tradition. One of the game’s great traditions is the in-stadium organist, a staple of the ballpark atmosphere for the last 85 years. But a short little article in last week’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel confirmed something that perceptive Brewers fans may have noticed in the past year: the club no longer employs an organist.
Milwaukee’s Dean Rosko was hired at just 18 years old to be the Miller Park organist in 2003 and worked in the stadium through the 2023 season. Unfortunately, when the Brewers expanded their center field scoreboard and added one in right field, they needed more space in the control room, and the stadium organ was sacrificed. Now, any organ heard in the stadium is pre-recorded. It’s too bad.
The organ has been an integral part of the baseball stadium experience since the early 1940s, when Hammond Organ Company invented an electric organ (versus earlier designs, which operate by moving air through large pipes). The electric model could be hooked up to a stadium’s public address system, and it was also much smaller than a typical pipe organ.
Organs were somewhat ubiquitous in the first half of the 20th century. Most people are familiar with the organ’s most common usage in churches, but during the silent film era, small theaters were typically outfitted with a smaller instrument commonly called a “theater organ.” While the big cinema palaces in major cities could afford entire orchestras to accompany major films of the 1910s and 1920s, theaters in smaller towns across America would employ a single organist who would do the job of providing a soundtrack for silent movies. Sometimes, those organists would add extra percussion to their setup so that one person could operate almost as a small orchestra—this was spoofed in “I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson”.
Hockey games started using organs for accompaniment as early as 1929, but it wasn’t until Hammond’s technological breakthrough that baseball games took advantage. Wrigley Field was the first major league park to very briefly use an organ in 1941, but copyright concerns limited that experiment to just two games. A year later, Ebbets Field in Brooklyn was the first to have one installed on a permanent basis. The Dodgers’ organist, Gladys Godding, was a hit with fans and began the practice of playing walk-up music for players and playing music during the seventh inning stretch. After the Dodgers left for Los Angeles in 1957, Godding continued accompanying events at Madison Square Garden.
After their move to Los Angeles, the Dodgers had a series of notable stadium organists. Helen Dell was the organist from the early 1970s until 1986, when she retired and was replaced by Nancy Bea Hefley. Hefley, who just passed away at the end of March at age 89, was a fan favorite as well, and when she retired in 2015, she was replaced by Dieter Ruehle, a Los Angeles musician who also accompanies L.A. Kings games. To this writer, Ruehle is the best of the current crop of stadium organists; a close listen to a game in Dodger Stadium will reveal not only an eclectic variety of good songs but a finely tuned sense of humor as well.
Closer to home, the Braves got in on the trend when they arrived in Milwaukee in 1954 and hired a local pianist named Jane Jarvis to be the first organist at County Stadium. Jarvis performed at Braves games for eight years, and after she moved to New York, she was later hired at Shea Stadium. She also had an accomplished career as a jazz pianist.
As Rosko himself noted in a 2018 interview with OnMilwaukee.com, “the real advantage [to having an in-stadium organist]… is having a live musician and the ability of that live musician to play to whatever action is happening on the field, on the fly, in a way that’s more effective than you could really ever get with a recorded piece of music.” This has led to moments of great comedy: an umpire ejected Phillies organist Wilbur Snapp in 1985 for playing “Three Blind Mice” after a controversial call.
That live element is something I’ll personally be missing at Brewer games. Will the average fan notice that the organ is now “canned?” Probably not, and the use of stadium organists around the league has been on the decline—as of last season, only nine teams employed full-time organists. But the playful melodic banter and thrill of the live experience that Brewer fans have been treated to since Rosko began in 2003 are no longer part of the atmosphere at American Family Field.
It’s also one less job for a live musician in an industry whose rank-and-file often struggle to make ends meet; an industry in which the CEO of its most prominent distributor is worth $7.5 billion while that company pays out somewhere between $0.002 and $0.006 per stream to the musicians whose work made him absurdly wealthy.
A major thank you to Dean Rosko for the 21 years he spent playing at Brewer games! Hopefully, the team will find a place for the organ and bring back that wonderful baseball tradition in the future. Also, go see live music! And buy a CD, even if you aren’t going to listen to it. Buying one album directly from a musician is worth about 5,000 streams.