
In a radio interview with Dan Patrick on October 8, 2015, John mentioned that he always pictured Jackie Robinson as the "brown eyed handsome man" who was "rounding third, headed for home". The final verse quotes longtime Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants broadcaster Lon Simmons, whose home run call was "Tell it goodbye!"

John quoted a line from Chuck Berry's " Brown Eyed Handsome Man" in the first verse: "rounding third, he was heading for home." The second verse refers to Casey (of the Mudville Nine) from the poem " Casey at the Bat". 1 guy seemed to be a center fielder, and he seemed to play in Yankee Stadium." The song was also inspired by his frustration watching a struggling team on TV, where he would imagine himself to be a rookie sitting on a bench, "I would always yell at the TV, 'Put me in coach, put me in!' " īaseball legends mentioned in the song include DiMaggio, Willie Mays, and Ty Cobb, all of them center fielders. "Through my own lore, the way I was kind of filtering this faraway dream, it seemed that the coolest place. "When I was a little kid, there were no teams on the West Coast, so the idea of a Major League team was really mythical to me," he said. When John was growing up on the West Coast, there was no Major League Baseball team to root for, and the closest thing his area had to a team was the New York Yankees which had San Francisco native Joe DiMaggio on their team.

It was never considered rock-and-roll." Īccording to John, he drew his inspiration from center field at Yankee Stadium. "Over the years it seemed like sports songs just didn't qualify into the rock-and-roll lexicon," Fogerty said. "I went into the studio, playing the guitar with a drumbeat and it just came out." The song combines two of John's passions, baseball and rock & roll, and he was nervous about its reception. "I was practicing a song, and I came up with that guitar riff that starts the song," he said. For his comeback album, he chose “Centerfield” as the name of the album before he even wrote the song itself. John took approximately a decade off from recording after leaving Creedence Clearwater Revival and releasing two solo albums. In 2010, Fogerty became the only musician to be celebrated at the Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony when "Centerfield" was honored by the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Along with " Take Me Out to the Ball Game", it is one of the best-known baseball songs. Originally the b-side of the album's second single, "Rock and Roll Girls" (#20 US, Spring 1985), the song is now commonly played at baseball games across the United States. " Centerfield" is the title track from John Fogerty's album Centerfield, Fogerty's first solo album after a nine-year hiatus.


For the Grey's Anatomy episode, see Put Me In, Coach.
