Oh Cey, Can You Sing?
Flashing back on the 1976 novelty single by L.A. Dodgers third baseman Ron Cey
While I generally strive to feature only high-quality music here at Jagged Time Lapse, sometimes you just need to throw something truly awful into the mix.
“Third Base Bag,” the 1976 novelty single by Los Angeles Dodgers third baseman Ron “The Penguin” Cey, has long vied for the honor of “Worst Record in My Collection”; my sentimental fondness for the record allows it to continue to rub shoulders in my “C”box with far superior 45s by the likes of Alvin Cash and The Chi-Lites, despite its many flaws.
Y’see, Cey was my first favorite ballplayer — back in the days when baseball meant more to me than anything else — and I heard “Third Base Bag” for the first time while listening to The Dr. Demento Show, my first favorite music-oriented radio show. Such a confluence of first loves will inevitably leave a lasting impression; and over a decade back, when my then-editor and still-friend Rob Neyer (aka robneyer) assigned me to interview Cey about the record for “Bloop Hits,” a series of columns I was writing for Fox Sports about the intersection of baseball and music, my inner 10 year-old immediately jumped for joy...
Now that we’re approaching the 50th anniversary of the first time I ever saw “The Penguin” play in person — August 6, 1976, when Cincinnati’s “Big Red Machine” beat the Dodgers 7-4 at Chavez Ravine despite a Cey solo home run — I figured that this would be a good time to unearth that “Bloop Hits” piece and re-run it here.
Also, since we’re still celebrating the 50th anniversary of the tumultuous and incredibly entertaining 1976 season, this would be a good time to remind those of you who dig this sort of thing that my book Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of ‘76, is still in print and available for purchase at Amazon, Bookshop.org and everywhere else that funky readables are sold…
It’s also a good time for me to thank everyone who continues to support this Substack with a paid subscription — you kind folks really do help keep the lights on over here and put the gas in my tank, both literally and figuratively, and I’m immensely grateful for that. I’ve got some special paid-only posts coming your way in the next week or two (either something tasty from my vast interviews archive, or the latest memoir chapter that I’ve been working on, or both), not to mention the next episode of CROSSED CHANNELS, the monthly music podcast I do with my friend and colleague Tony Fletcher… And if you’re not already a paid subscriber, a mere five bucks a month — or $4.17, if you opt for a money-saving yearly subscription — will afford you access to all JTL posts old and new!
And now… on to our featured presentation!
Ron Cey was my first favorite baseball player. He had a powerful bat, a deft glove, an unusually squat build and a colorful nickname — “The Penguin” — inspired by the way he waddled around the bases. And best of all, he had a single that got semi-regular airplay on the Dr. Demento Show.
As two-sided SoCal pop classics go, “Third Base Bag” b/w “One Game at a Time” will never be mentioned in the same breath as, say, The Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” b/w “God Only Knows”. But Ron Cey’s 1976 single is still spoken of in hushed tones among a certain tribe of men and women who grew up wearing #10 on their little league uniforms in tribute to the Dodgers’ All Star third baseman. Several of my friendships have been sealed by the realization that we both loved The Penguin when we were kids — a shared epiphany that is always immediately followed by the other person asking me, in an almost conspiratorial whisper, “Hey, you’ve heard his record, right?”
The record in question was the brainchild of Jim Campanis, Sr., a former backup catcher with the Dodgers and Royals (and the son of Dodgers general manager Al Campanis), who by 1976 was working in the Dodgers’ community affairs office. “The idea for Ronnie’s record came from when I was playing for the Royals,” Campanis, Sr. tells me. “We had a pitcher named Al Fitzmorris, who was a singer, and I put him together with a friend of mine in Kansas City who had a recording studio. Year later, when I was working for the Dodgers, Ronnie was a big star, and being the entrepreneur that I thought I was…”
Campanis met songwriter Clyde Curtis Ligons while playing racquetball, and told him he was on the lookout for some original songs for Cey to sing. “Two weeks later he had the songs,” Campanis, Sr. remembers. “I heard ‘em both, and I loved ‘em both!”
“Jimmy came to me and said, ‘Let’s do a baseball jingle!’” Cey recalls. “And, you know, I thought it would be something neat to do. So we threw it together and recorded it in one day, and the rest is history!”
The session was set for April 13, at a home studio belonging to a friend of Campanis, Sr., with several L.A.-area session musicians and vocalists in attendance. “The studio was somewhere in Orange County, in somebody’s house,” Cey remembers. “I had a game to play in San Diego that night, so I drove to the studio, laid down the tracks, and I continued from there on down to San Diego.” (Possibly drained by the intense studio regimen, Cey would go 0-for-4 against the Padres that night.)
“I was only nine or ten at the time, but I remember it like it was yesterday,” says Jim Campanis, Jr. “It was just like you see in the movies: Ron was in the vocal booth with his headphones on, and the backing vocalists were singing along with him.”
The country-tinged “Third Base Bag” is probably the best of the two sides; Cey’s laconic vocals work well such aw-shucks lines as, “Every now and then I make a good tag.” The disco-fied “One Game at a Time” is more of a stretch — the decision to have Cey double-track his vocals was ill-advised, to say the least — but its laid-back 1970s sheen definitely captures the L.A. of the era, and the brief call-and-response cameo from Campanis, Sr. at around the 1:30 mark is kind of charming in its goofiness.
“I like to joke with my dad that he was the first rapper, because of his part on the record,” laughs Campanis, Jr. “The disco thing was really happening in L.A. at the time, and the country thing was coming on. It’s kind of like you can hear both Saturday Night Fever and Urban Cowboy in there, even though neither of those movies had come out yet!”
The two songs came out in the summer of ’76 on Long Ball Records, a label started by Campanis, Sr. for the purposes of the release. Though he had visions of the record climbing the charts, he lacked the distribution or financial backing to make it happen. “Third Base Bag” received regular spins at Dodger Stadium, where copies of the single were available for sale at the souvenir shop, and it got enough local airplay that Ligons (according to Campanis, Sr.) made a few hundred bucks in songwriting royalties; but ultimately, the only chart it made was Dr. Demento’s year-end Nifty 50 for 1977, where it lodged at #49 between National Lampoon’s “Deteriorata” and Sulu’s “I Love Your Toes.”
“Well, it wasn’t really designed to be a hit,” Cey insists. “I think it may have sold thirty copies worldwide. It was really just kind of a keepsake that was done in fun. Anyone who took it more seriously than that missed the point!”
Cey says he never sang the song again after that recording session. “That was my one and only shot, and I enjoyed it,” he laughs. “I suppose the reason why I was okay with doing it in the first place was that I was finally able to put my seventh grad glee class experience to use!”
Still, Cey gets a kick out of the record’s continued life, nearly thirty-nine years after its original release. “I’ve seen it on YouTube, I’ve heard other people play it, and I have a CD of it that Jimmy made up, which I pass out to some of my friends and some of the people in the office for a good laugh,” he says. “We were at fantasy camp in Vero Beach last November, and Rick Monday pulled it up on YouTube and started playing it in the clubhouse. Everyone wanted to know who it was, and we all had a good laugh about it.”
Besides, he says, “It’s just one of those things I have that someone else doesn’t. I used to kid Ryne Sandberg when we were on the Cubs — he ran well, and I didn’t run so well in comparison, but I had an inside-the-park home run, and he didn’t. And he didn’t have his own record, either!”
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Great write up! I love the deep dive into baseball and music crossovers. Cey's pop culture footprint extended beyond his 7" single. He was a guest star on Columbo, Simon & Simon, Murder She Wrote, Hardcastle & McCormick, and... Q: The Winged Serpent (as a machine gun blasting cop)! Here's my writeup with link to clips: https://tinkertaylorsolerspiezio.substack.com/p/baseball-songs-on-vinyl-ron-cey?r=fjz4v&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
this is amazing. I assume you’ve done a story about The Big Blue Wrecking Crew