Turn That Song Off: Baseball's Soundtrack Has a Homophobia Problem and We Keep Humming Along
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Baseball has a soundtrack, and if you've spent any real time at a ballpark, you know parts of it by heart. The organ. The walk-up songs. The rhythmic clapping in the cheap seats.
And if you're queer — or you're paying attention — you also know the other parts. The chant that rhymes a player's name with a slur. The walk-up music chosen for its "funny" title that's actually a punchline at someone's expense. The heckle directed at the opposing bullpen that gets a laugh from the section and a wince from anyone it lands on.
We keep treating these as background noise. They're not. They're choices, and we can make different ones.
'It's Just Baseball Culture' Is a Cop-Out
Every time someone raises this, the response is the same: it's tradition, it's banter, nobody means anything by it. But that defense collapses under the lightest interrogation. Baseball culture has already changed a hundred times when it wanted to. We retired chants that mocked players' weight. We scrubbed the blaringly racist bits of the game's musical history from ballpark playlists. We added netting, shortened games, invented the wave.
The sport's soundscape is not a natural phenomenon. It's curated — by organists, by DJ booths, by front-office entertainment staff, and yes, by the rest of us in the stands. Curated things can be re-curated.
The Playlist Is a Front-Office Decision
Start with the easy part: the music teams actually control. Walk-up songs pass through clubbie hands and entertainment staff before they ever hit the PA. A front office that cares can put a simple review in place — not censorship, just a grown-up question of "would this embarrass us if we thought about it for ten seconds?" Some clubs already do this. Others clearly do not, and the gaps are audible.
Organists and in-house DJs have power too. The between-inning montage, the crowd-prompt chants on the videoboard — those get written by someone. Write better ones. There is a version of baseball's soundtrack that's loud, weird, fun, and doesn't lean on a single gay joke, and honestly, it's a more entertaining version.
The Harder Part: Us
The stuff teams can't directly control — the heckles, the section chants — still isn't beyond reach. Ballparks have text-a-hotline numbers posted everywhere for fan conduct. Use them. Ushers respond faster than you'd think when the report is specific.
And in the sections themselves, the most effective tool ever invented is the boring one: "Hey, not funny." No speech, no scene. Just a neighbor making it clear the bit didn't land. Fan culture changes when the audience stops being an automatic laugh track.
What Better Sounds Like
Picture it: a ballpark where the soundtrack is relentless and joyful — organ riffs, trash-talk that stays on batting averages, walk-up songs chosen because they slap, not because someone thought the title was a zinger. A place where a queer kid in the left field bleachers hears forty thousand people being loud and ridiculous and never once wonders if any of it is aimed at them.
That's not a fantasy. It's a playlist decision, a training session, and a few thousand fans willing to say "not funny" at the right moments.
Baseball already rewrote its soundtrack once, when it decided which traditions it could live without. It can do it again. The only question is whether the people holding the mic — and the people in seats 12 through 24 — want to.
Turn the good stuff up. Leave the rest off.
