Song Lyric of the Day (Dave Frishberg, Immortalizing an Unusual Baseball Name)

“Whitey Kurowski, Max Lanier
Eddie Waitkus, Johnny Vander Meer
Bob Estalella
Van Lingle Mungo.”— “Van Lingle Mungo,” words and music by Dave Frishberg (1969), from The Dave Frishberg Songbook

The man who gave his name to the only song I know that’s composed entirely of the names of baseball players was born on this date 100 years ago.

Van Lingle Mungo (in the image accompanying this post) was a righthanded flamethrower who, in 14 seasons, compiled a 120-115 record and 3.47 ERA. Much of that time was spent toiling for the Brooklyn Dodgers, whose second-division play often made him lose control of his temper and of games. An injury led the Dodgers to release him in the 1941 season (naturally, the year they made it to the World Series), whereupon he reinvented himself as a junkball specialist.

That record and temperament made Mungo the subject of one of the typically priceless one-liners from Casey Stengel, his manager with the Dodgers: “Mungo and I got along just fine," said Stengel. "I won't stand for no nonsense, and then I duck."

That same fiery temperament might have made me, for one, reluctant to turn him into the subject of a song, but jazz pianist and composer Dave Frishberg probably did not know this when he did so: It was simply an unusual name that summoned an entire lost world of his youth.

But when Mungo heard that he was the subject of a song, the former player--now in his late fifties--wanted to know why he wasn’t getting royalties. (In those pre-free-agent days, players and ex-players had to hustle for every dollar they could get.) Frishberg patiently explained that hardly anybody associated with the song was likely to see any money from the tune, especially the songwriter himself, and that Mungo’s best recourse was to write a song about him. At that, Mungo grinned and said that maybe he would. (He didn’t.)

In a way, I liken what is now one of Frishberg’s signature tunes to Stephen Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here.” Each, containing references to an era unfamiliar to someone growing up today, becomes, in effect, a mini-history (in the case of the latter, “I got through Abie’s Irish Rose, five Dionne babies, Major Bowes”).

As a baseball fan, I find “Van Lingle Mungo” a deeply humbling experience. You see, I could only identify 12 of the 38 names in the song. That kind of average might be okay on the baseball diamond, but hardly elsewhere.