By Danielle Capalbo
I was 18 years old when I first heard the song “Sweet Caroline,” at 6 a.m. in the parking lot of my Connecticut high school. (Don’t let this sentence disturb you. Someone in my life clearly dropped the Neil Diamond ball, but I’m over it.)
Anyway, it was early summer. The sun was rising over the football field and in that moment, Boston felt as far from my small suburban town as any foreign country. I had only graduated the day before, and to close the year, our class pulled a collective all-nighter. At six in the morning, we were streaming out of the building as Diamond’s voice swam across the lot, a wake-up call for all of us.
The freedom of summer lasted for a few months before I started school again, this time in Boston – the land of lobsters and “Good Will Hunting,” as far as I knew. When a friend whisked me off to Fenway Park a few weeks later, I learned the Red Sox live here, too, alongside packs of charming, hysterical fans who all know the words to the mystical song that rung me out of high school like a bell: “Sweet Caroline.”
Since the late ’90s, “Sweet Caroline” has poured out of Fenway’s speakers like an anthem at every game. It comes in the eighth inning, and like second-nature, fans sing along as part of a curious ritual shrouded in mystery.
There are plenty of rumors about the origins of “Sweet Caroline” in Fenway Park. Some say it was first played in honor of John F. Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline. Others substitute Caroline Fitzpatrick as the song’s namesake, the newborn daughter of a man who had worked in the park’s control room for 20 years, according to National Public Radio reporter Susan Orlean.
In 2005, Orlean set out to solve the mystery of the song, which has nothing to do with Boston or baseball. Orlean’s research was thorough, but her findings were anticlimactic: The song thrived at Fenway because it just felt right.
There was no real Caroline, no heroine whose honor the song trumpeted; there was no old legend or arcane logic. It was simple: The park’s acting music director liked the song, so she played it one day. Amy Toeby was stunned to hear fans embrace it so wildly, so she played it the next game, too, and again at the game after that. In time, fans developed their own response to its popular refrain and the song became such a natural extension of the Red Sox landscape it was included in the 2005 movie “Fever Pitch,” about a man, of course, in love with the Sox.
When Tobey left her post in 2004, Megan Kaiser took her place, Orlean said. Kaiser kept the tradition alive, but changed it a bit.
Every time Kaiser pumps the song throughout the park, she told Orlean, she lowers the volume at the most popular parts (the “ba-ba-ba!” and “so-good!” in the chorus) so fans can be heard singing louder than Diamond. Anyone who has been to a game can vouch: it’s an unthinking songfest carried out in droves, and it doesn’t seem to matter as it fills the park like a wave that “Sweet Caroline” is a song about a woman, not a game.
But it’s not about the words, anyway – it’s about the feeling. Music has the unique power to connect with people and places, unexpectedly sometimes, and produce the sensation that everything fits; all is as it should be. The transformation of “Sweet Caroline” from silly pop love-note to unofficial baseball anthem (mind you, played as regularly per game as the “Star-Spangled Banner”) is less a testament to the song than the odd and blissful way it fits snugly into the space between the seventh and ninth innings.
Three years after my first game, when I first heard “Sweet Caroline” in the park, I finally became a Red Sox fan. I wasn’t resisting on purpose. I just never thought I could get excited about a sport I knew so little about. But on the couch last Sunday, after a week’s worth of late-night playoff games, I jumped up involuntarily when Dustin Pedroia’s grand slam gave the Sox a safe lead, and clapped to celebrate when Coco Crisp’s stretch of a catch brought the game, and the ALCS series, to a close. Just half an inning earlier, “Sweet Caroline” had washed over the park, though I wasn’t there to hear it.
With the Red Sox newly crowned as the American League champions, the good times never seemed so good. But once the World Series is in full swing, the good times will get even better.
– Danielle Capalbo can be reached at
