Baseball with a Beat: The Most Popular Walk-Up Songs for the Columbus Clippers
From Bad Bunny to Kid Rock to Kings of Leon, we break down the music that serenades Clippers players as they step up to bat at Huntington Park.
Dave Ghose
Hip-hop is king at Huntington Park. When a Columbus Clipper steps up to bat, there’s a good chance you’ll hear a rap song over the PA system. Of the 35 walk-up songs requested by Clippers players during the 2021 and 2022 seasons, 21—or 60 percent—were rap, including Spanish language variations, such as reggaeton and Latin trap. (Puerto Rican rapper and singer Bad Bunny is a favorite.)
After that, it’s slim pickings for other genres. A distant runner-up was country, with five songs, featuring the likes of Brooks & Dunn, Eric Church and Kid Rock (during his later country period). At the bottom of the standings were pop, rock and R&B—barely ahead of outfielder Oscar Gonzalez’s 2022 novelty selection, the SpongeBob SquarePants theme, which became a sensation when he moved on to the Cleveland Guardians.
Which makes me—a lifelong fan of frantic guitar riffs and unintelligible, bluesy vocals—raise a lighter in honor of nonconformists like catcher Luke Maile, who walked up to the plate in 2022 to the rough and tumble sounds of Kings of Leon’s “Taper Jean Girl.” For those Clippers still rocking, I salute you.
Clippers Walk-Up Songs, By the Numbers (2021-22)
Rap: 21
Country: 5
Rock: 3
Pop: 3
R&B: 2
TV theme: 1
Source: Columbus Clippers
This story is from the April 2023 issue of Columbus Monthly.