Baseball Project preps 'Broadside Ballads' project

The progress reports from the Baseball Project camp have been disappointing in only one respect: we’ll have to wait until 2011 to hear the crack of the musical bat… or will we?

The group — Scott McCaughey (The Minus 5, R.E.M., Young Fresh Fellows), Steve Wynn (The Dream Syndicate, Gutterball, Miracle 3), Linda Pitmon (Miracle 3, Golden Smog) and Peter Buck (R.E.M.) — is working on the official followup to Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails, which isn’t scheduled until next year. However, the foursome recently announced that they would be doing some musical baseball blogging, so to speak, writing, recording and releasing in quick succession a series of songs during the coming big league baseball season, dubbed Broadside Ballads.

“The band will be providing tuneful commentary on baseball events big and small, recording them in magical bi-coastal fashion (Linda and Steve in New York City, Scott and Peter in Portland and Seattle, respectively) and putting them up online while the ink is still wet,” they report on Steve Wynn’s web site.

The first track already is available: “All Future and No Past.” Written by Scott McCaughey, it deals with the fact that before the first pitch is tossed, every team is full of promise. “I’d been reading all the pre-season reports and realizing that this is the time of year when every team has high hopes, no matter how unrealistic. Then I stumbled upon a saying from the great Indians player/manager Lou Boudreau: ‘On opening day, the world is all future and no past’. And for me that really sums up the beautiful feeling that comes with spring training each year.”

Wynn reports that the song was “written, recorded and mixed in Portland and New York City, all in the space of about a week, setting a template for regular dispatches throughout the season.”

The songs will be available on ESPN’s “The Life” section. The second song, already in the can, will be released in April around opening day.

“I think it will be a lot of fun just to kind of see what’s going on and get fired up about something,” Wynn writes on his blog. “And instead of just writing bemused e-mails to each other, we’ll put chords behind it and call it a song.”