Neil Diamond is scheduled to perform at Fenway Park, home of the great Boston Red Sox, next Saturday. His song Sweet Caroline plays in the middle of the eight inning at every Red Sox home game and "has become the team's unofficial anthem and more: a rousing eighth-inning singalong-turned-musical totem whose propitious properties remain a mystery - even to the songwriter who the folks at Fenway have been trying to lure to the park for years."
"I'm not sure I understand it, but it's fun to sing along with and for me it's always been a good-luck song," Diamond says of his 1969 hit, whose popularity has hardly ebbed in four decades. "It's been around for so long, and I think that anybody who adopts it has some of that good luck. The fact that the Red Sox have adopted it proves the point."
Uh, really?
"I put home runs and good pitching in front of the song," he concedes. "But the song does capture the spirit of the team."
It's an odd association considering the song has nothing to do with baseball or the Red Sox. And no one seems to know the connection between their favorite team and this song by Neil Diamond. Turns out the person responsible for starting this entire tradition is Amy Tobey whose job from 1998 to 2004 was to create the playlist of songs to play during each game (SWEET GIG!). She noticed that Sweet Caroline was playing at other sporting events and decided to include it at Fenway. At some point playing the song became a superstition thing to her: Something that Red Sox fans are no strangers to. We can be a little edgy.
In 2002, when new management took over at the park, they requested that Tobey play the song during the eighth inning of every game. ''They liked it and they just loved the crowd reaction with it and stuff," she says. Though Tobey says she was nervous the change would be bad luck for the team, its appeal to fans ultimately ruled. And under the song's spell, the Red Sox last season won their first World Series in 86 years.