“Winning It All” by The Outfield, Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Signed to Columbia/CBS Records  in 1984 under the "tacky" and "tongue-in-cheek" moniker The Baseball Boys, the London-based band quickly changed their name to The Outfield. The band's chief lyricist and guitarist John Spinks got the idea for a baseball-themed band when watched the movie The Warriors. The band's American manager convinced the band to change their name. Spinks was a fan of both American sports, particularly baseball and football because those sports were "far more business, far more spectacle, than British sports." The "American-sounding band" found their earliest success in America, not the U.K., starting with 1985's hit "Your Love."

NO SECOND CHANCE, NO GIVING UP. The Outfield has a string of hits after "Your Love" between 1985 and 1990, but their popularity faded with the rest of the New Wavers. Most of their album titles are named after baseball references, starting with their debut Play Deep. However, there were a few notable exceptions. Today's song Rockeye, named after the CBU-100 Cluster Bomb. Today's song "Winning It All" was featured in NBC's NBA Finals from 1992-1996 and it was also heard in the end credits of Disney's 1992 film The Mighty Ducks. Beyond those inclusions, no song was a hit from the album in America or the U.K. "Winning It All" opens the album. In 1992, the band had dwindled into a duo, with only bassist and lead vocalist Tony Lewis and John Spinks playing the guitars and keyboards on the record. There's something beautifully cheesy as the late '80s/early '90s keyboard plays at the beginning of the song. It feels like a song in a sports film. The vocabulary in the song is simple: it's about winners and losers. It sounds like a team rally when the game has been postponed for a rain shower, and the home team (The Outfield's team) is down a few points, and as they meet in the locker room, in uniforms soaked in sweat and rainwater, the captain of the baseball team (the lead singer) gives a speech, persuading the players to do their best after the rain lets up.

NO ONE REMEMBERS A LOSER. I'm not a big sports fan. I found playing sports when I was a kid to be humiliating. Being raised Seventh-day Adventist living among many non-Adventists meant playing sports conflicted with the Sabbath, so I never really tried. Very rarely do my musical tastes overlap with sports. The stereotype is that there are sports guys and music guys in high school, and they only mix when the hunky captain of the football team plays guitar. There are a few musicians like NEEDTOBREATHE and Tyler Ward who have football backgrounds. But we have to discuss baseball with today's band. I remember discovering The Outfield because my dad said that Anberlin reminded him of that band. I began listening to the '80s post punk and New Wavers to see how they influenced the music of my day. Two years ago, apart from thinking about how Trump's rhetoric sounded like a sports team and this song reminded me of Trump from time to time, I also was taken by how much Acceptance's "Cold Air" sounds similar to The Outfield's '80s/'90s vocal production and harmonies. So, while jock-rock isn't always to my liking, I can appreciate how The Outfield influenced my favorite bands. And that's worth a cheesy sports cliché once in a while, right?




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