Lambert Bartak, the College World Series organist for more than 50 years, playing a 1935 Hammond organ at Rosenblatt Stadium.
OMAHA — People always ask Lambert Bartak about the time an umpire tossed him from a baseball game, a dubious distinction for an organist.
But that was just one song — a perfectly timed rendition of the Mickey Mouse Club theme (“M-I-C-K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E”) after a controversial call 20 years ago — among the countless ditties he has played in more than 50 years at Rosenblatt Stadium. Bartak, a vibrant 89, knows hundreds of songs by memory, or at least his fingers do. He remembers only a handful of the precise moments when a particular song was played.
There was the time when the Kansas City Royals’ Class AAA affiliate, as part of some promotion, asked Bartak to play “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” — backward.
“Buh, buh, buh,” Bartak said on Friday, trying to sound out the final three notes of the chorus in reverse order. Everyone, now: Game, ball, old ...
“Oh, it’s a horrible-sounding thing backwards,” Bartak said.
He sat, shoeless, in an enclosed booth, just a man and his weathered 1935 Hammond organ, alone and anonymous in their timeless endeavor. A ballpark organist is part of the unobtrusive background of baseball, or used to be, until most were quietly silenced by time and outsourced by recorded music.
But after decades of playing largely behind the scenes — as an accordion accompaniment to Johnny Carson’s early magic shows (both spent childhoods in Norfolk, Neb.), as a studio musician for a radio station and as a ballpark organist here during the College World Series — Bartak can finally be seen as something more than a lithe-fingered provider of space-filling background music.
He is a reminder of how ballparks used to sound, and feel, and how they increasingly do not.
According to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, organs gained a place at ballparks after the Chicago Cubs brought one to Wrigley Field for a game in 1941. It was instantly popular. In 1942, the Brooklyn Dodgers added a full-time organist at Ebbets Field.
Other teams followed, and the trend peaked in the 1960s and 1970s. Their numbers have dwindled since. The Hall’s director of research, Tim Wiles, traced at least part of the beginning of the end to a change in ownership for the Mets after the 1979 season. The longtime organist Jane Jarvis was nudged out at Shea Stadium in favor of canned music. Teams wanted their music to rock, not reverberate.
Most major league teams do not employ organists anymore. Even the Omaha Royals, Rosenblatt’s primary tenants, stopped using Bartak a few seasons ago. It is possible that none of the players on the eight teams that made this year’s College World Series have played in another stadium with an organist.
The slow death of organ music may soon hit this event, where the organ still thrives as if there were no tomorrow, only yesterdays. A new stadium is planned for downtown Omaha in 2011, and Bartak doubts that there will be a spot reserved for an organist.
Until then, he punctuates every third out with a three-chord coda, and fills part of the still air between innings with a three-song medley. He does not plan the song lists, relying simply on some indescribable intuition and the hundreds of song titles he has scrawled before him.
Some are written on a yellow sheet from a legal pad. Some are on a manila folder. Some are on random scraps of paper. Some are on a Newsweek subscription card, the kind that spills from magazines.
Inexplicably, Bartak has homemade sheet music for a few songs, including the national anthem and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” The sheets are withered and yellowed, and the ink has run. Bartak does not glance at them.
“I know them all,” he said. “It’s really just a crutch.”
At one break between innings, his medley included “You Are My Sunshine,” “You Don’t Know Me” and something else vaguely familiar, which is the way most organ music sounds.
“What else did I play?” Bartak said, repeating the question, trying to jog his short-term memory. “I don’t remember. I probably just made it up.”
The organ at the stadium, the same one that has been there all along, is in need of a makeover. Its pale paint is cracked in spots, worn away in others. For years, it sat above the stands along the third-base line in a booth with a leaky roof and unmannered pigeons.
Now it is well protected, almost like a museum piece, in a cramped glass-walled booth inside one end of Rosenblatt’s press box above the first-base side. The organ blocks Bartak’s view of home plate, and he waits for a raised arm from a man nearby who runs the stadium’s sound system to start playing.
Bartak plays in his stocking feet, because it is easier to move about the pedals. A bowl of peanuts sits on the piano. A pillow is taped to the wall as a backrest, and another pillow makes the bench softer to sit on. Inside the bench is more music, some newspaper clippings, crossword puzzles, pretzels and M&Ms.
For most of the game, Bartak’s playing causes no ruckus and barely garners attention in the stands. That is both the organ’s charm and its curse, depending on your appetite for distraction. But he is well known here, and receives warm applause when he is introduced before games.
When the seventh-inning stretch arrives, the first few notes of “Ball Game,” as Bartak’s handwritten sheet music calls it, lifts more than 20,000 people to their feet and gets them singing. For a moment, the organ is not just part of the ambient sound, but is plugged into the fans.
The video scoreboard shows Bartak playing, and he gives a wave and returns the applause when the song ends. The game continues and Bartak disappears into the background, waiting for the signal to play again.
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