Last weekend at Yankee Stadium, during a Juan Soto at-bat, a small bird briefly paused the game when it found its way onto the outfield grass and would not fly away.
As a groundskeeper went to get the wounded bird out of harm’s way, the in-house audio director told stadium organist Ed Alstrom to play something bird-related. With just a moment to consider, he went with a classic “Yellow Bird,” to give the stadium a soundtrack adding to the levity of the moment for the crowd.
Alstrom is in his 21st season as the Yankee Stadium organist on Saturday and Sunday, has consistent cues to hit every game, but the unscripted nature of baseball keeps his improvisational skills sharp. “I wasn’t ready for that one,” Alstrom said.
There was another recent example of a ballpark organist giving a live reaction to a peculiar situation, a clip made the rounds on social media of a car catching flames in the Dodgers parking lot. The Dodger Stadium organist Dieter Ruehle was on the scene to react to it.
The organ player is cold blooded… pic.twitter.com/4vJ3U4LpW0
— Eric Staniford (@EricStaniford) May 22, 2024
The tradition of the organ at baseball games originated in 1941, when Cubs owner Phillip K. Wrigley installed pipes behind the grandstand of Wrigley Field, and the warm and rich sound it provided just matched the feel of being at a ballgame. Gladys Goodwill brought in the era of organ playing at New York sporting events, originally at New York Rangers and Knicks games at Madison Square Garden, but later at Ebbets Field for the Brooklyn Dodgers starting in the 1940s. The Mets would introduce an organist when they opened Shea Stadium in 1964, and the following year, the Yankees installed one that would be ultimately occupied by Eddie Layton, who was an established figure in the pop-organ genre, when he took over as the in-stadium organist when CBS bought the Yankees in 1967.
According to Alstrom, about half of MLB ballparks have a live organist in some capacity. A SF Gate profile in 2023 reported that there were nine teams that employed a live organist for every game: Twins, Red Sox, Reds, Cubs, Cardinals, Braves, Dodgers, Diamondbacks, and the Yankees, who have two, Alstrom (Saturday and Sunday games) and Paul Cartier (weekdays).
“I don’t really know the reason why… it could be that they don’t want to spend money on it,” Alstrom said about the fact that some stadiums began to move away from live organists. Alstrom continued, that some stadiums may have directors that think organ music is “old and hokey.”
At Yankee Stadium, you can hear the classic tunes organists have routinely played at ballgames for decades. However, during Alstrom’s time with the Yankees, the organist’s role has expanded to incorporate more modern songs. “I would say my goal is mostly to keep it fresh and never let it get stale,” Alstrom said. “I like to challenge myself. If I hear a new song, like a Taylor Swift song, I’ll think: can I pull this off on the organ? Then I’ll try to find a way to do it.” He explained that not every hit song will work on the organ, but he enjoys the challenge of seeing if he can translate it. “I just want to maintain what I have been doing best all along and then add to it.”
He has help, though. Before the beginning of the season, he holds a mini-focus group with his two young adult daughters to make him a playlist of popular songs. He will play around with the 10-to-15 of their suggestions that could work on the organ. For this season, “Lovin On Me” by Jack Harlow, “they said that’s a must,” Alstrom said. “So I’ll play that. I often play it during an [Aaron] Judge at-bat.” While some players use pre-recorded music, Alstrom has heard that Judge prefers the live organ as his walk-up music, so he tries to incorporate some contemporary hip-hop songs to give a 2024 feel to the organ sound for the captain.
He has other ways to put his touch on different players in the lineup. “I claimed Italians as my own, [Anthony] Rizzo, [Anthony] Volpe, and [Jon] Berti, they’re mine,” Alstrom says with a laugh, “so I have all this Italian music I play when they hit foul balls.”
Even though there are times, like with the ailing bird on the field, when he will improvise, he does have a clear plan for what he will do before the game. “I find it a lot easier to have things in mind if you are going to play,” Alstrom said. “If they come to [me] and I take two or three seconds to think about it, then the moment is gone, especially with the pitch clock. So that has shortened those gaps.”
When Alstrom, a big New York sports fan, sat in front of an organ for the first time, he wasn’t eyeing a job at a ballpark, mainly because he was five years old and just wanted to emulate his father’s passion for music. He was given an option to either pick up the two instruments in his family’s house: the organ or accordion, a classic childhood dilemma. His father was a heating, plumbing, and air-conditioning tradesman, but he was able to play music by ear, and played those two instruments.
He ultimately chose the organ, “I was very serious [about the organ] because I was good at it. I was born to do it.” Alstrom said about starting out. He was not an athlete, or had a natural talent for fixing things like his dad. “The only thing I would really do well was play music, so I figured that is what I better do.”
His love of baseball developed shortly after his love for music. He remembers going to Shea Stadium (his dad was a New York baseball fan for all the teams) and having that universal moment young baseball fans experience when seeing their first game. He recalls walking out of the tunnel, seeing the field, and hearing the stadium organist. “Dad, they have an organist here!” he excitedly pointed out.
Alstrom would hear and admire both longtime organists: Layton at Yankee games and Shea Stadium’s Jane Jarvis. Despite being a talented organist who loved baseball, it was not a foregone conclusion that he could become a stadium organist. “I could only dream about it. I didn’t know how I was ever going to get there,” Alstrom said. “I have been watching games since I was a kid, thinking, ‘Yeah, I would love to play organ at a stadium,’ but Layton was there for such a long time, you never thought the job was going to become available.”
Towards the end of the 2003 season, it was announced that after 37 years with the team, Layton would be retiring as the Yankee Stadium organist. Alstrom was interested in the role but had no idea how to go about it. It was not a job posted in the classified ads, and he did not know anyone who worked for the Yankees. So what was he supposed to do? Knowing how perfect the fit would be, his wife, Maxine, went to work. She began calling random members of the Yankee organization and eventually got on the phone with the head of marketing, who forwarded her to the head of scoreboard operations, the person hiring for the position. After chatting him up, she had him fax (it was 2004) his resume to the Yankees.
A couple of weeks before the start of the season, he got to audition at Yankee Stadium. His experience was literally a flash, as Layton had him quickly run through the essentials. “He’s standing in the doorway just naming songs, and I would literally play a measure of the song, and he would go, ‘yeah, alright, next,’” Alstrom recalls. He played a couple of bars of “New York, New York,” then Layton had him move on—the national anthem, “next,” the Canadian national anthem.
“I played six or seven snippets of songs for about a minute and a half. Then he was like, ‘alright, I’ve heard everything I needed to hear.’ I remember saying, ‘really, you don’t want to hear anything else?’ and he said, ‘no, I’m good.’”
He walked away from the audition unsure of what to make of it. He remembers thinking, “If I did nothing but the audition, it would have been super cool.” Shortly after, Alstrom received a call offering him the organist role for Saturdays and Sundays.
The organist needs to know the game, as they often have to react to moments and read the stadium crowd. “They wanted an organ player who knew baseball. I was told there were organ players who auditioned, but they weren’t baseball fans.”
It didn’t take him long to get comfortable with the job. He said it took him about five or six games to figure out the rhythms of what to do: play in and out of innings, the staples like “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and “Happy Birthday.” There were about a dozen things to play in a given game when he started out.
Then he started to do independent league ballgames for the Rockland Boulders in 2014. That is where he began to increase his repertoire of songs. Unlike at Yankee Stadium where he splits his time with the pre-recorded sound, the Boulders, he found out his first game, relied more heavily on the organ. “I ran out of stuff to play by the third inning,” Alstrom remembers. Not wanting to repeat the same dozen or so jingles he typically would play at Yankee Stadium, he began riffing on classic rock tunes like “Smoke on the Water”, and “You Shook Me All Night Long”. “Before I knew it, I had like 40 things to play,” he remembers.
From all his time working with the Yankees, his early days in the role interacting with Bob Sheppard at the old Yankee Stadium are among his most fond. “Beyond the general thrill of being the organist at Yankee Stadium,” Alstrom said. “The thrill of meeting Bob Sheppard, and becoming friends with him, is something that I will cherish for my whole life.”
Sheppard was in his mid-to-late-90s when Alstrom knew him, but he was still mentally sharp. Alstrom would often find him reading huge books on a variety of subjects, during the game, and he would somehow never miss a cue to do an iconic call that would give fans chills.
We had some hysterical moments together. He was funny, witty, and pretty acerbic at times when he could get away with it. During his first season with the team in 2004, Sheppard came over and shared a whimsical poem he had written about Kevin Brown, who had just broken his non-throwing hand by punching a clubhouse wall right before the end of the regular season.
Oh Kevin Brown let his team down
When he fractured his hand on the wall
Better instead he had fractured his head
Then it wouldn’t have mattered at all
Sheppard in his spare time wrote Yankee-themed poems like that. “‘You need to get a book made. Yankee fans would love to see these in print,’”Alstrom remembers telling Sheppard, “And he says, ‘oh, no, Mr. Steinbrenner would fire me.’”
“You don’t get moments like that unless you get to be in this weird, amazing position that I found myself in,” Alstrom said.
Ed Alstrom does public speaking events at libraries in the tri-state area. Here are his upcoming dates, where you can hear more great stories about his experience upholding one of the great ballpark traditions:
Scarsdale, NY: Friday, 6/7 at 3 pm
Warwick, NY: Monday, 6/10 at 6:30 pm
Mt. Kisco, NY (Zoom only); Thursday, 6/20, 6:30 pm
Bronxville, NY: Monday, 7/22, 3 pm
Yonkers, NY: Wednesday, 7/24, 2 pm
Bernardsville, NJ: Wednesday, 7/31, 6:30 pm
Ridgewood, NJ: Thursday, 8/8, 11 am
Little Falls, NJ: Tuesday, 8/20. 6:30 pm
Scotch Plains, NJ: Monday, 8/26, 7 pm
This article is part of a series on the environment around Yankee Stadium. If you liked it, check out this feature on Bronx saxophonist Luther Petty, this item on Muhamed from the Bebo Halal Food truck outside the ballpark, and this article on the Bronx vendors who sell gameday staples, hot dogs, and more.
