Here's your reminder that Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan once wrote a song about Catfish Hunter
History was made today as the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the poetry-spouting Bob Dylan. He is not only the first musician to win the literature award, but he's probably the one of the biggest baseball fans to ever receive the prize. OK, we don't have any pictures of him throwing out a first pitch, but we know he cares. He cares so much that he wrote an entire song dedicated to Catfish Hunter, name-checking Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin along the way:
But that's not the only connection Bobby has to baseball (fine, he's 75, so we probably shouldn't call him Bobby). In 2004 and 2009, along with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp, Dylan toured Minor League parks across the country.
And it doesn't end there. Did you know Bob Dylan is in the Hall of Fame? Well, sort of -- in 2006, the Hall added an episode from his satellite radio show, "Theme Time Radio Hour," to its archives. The episode, unsurprisingly, is called "Baseball," and it features Dylan's spoken-word rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," as well as many other baseball songs that should probably join the ballpark organ rotation. You can listen to it here.
We can only hope that Dylan will throw out a first pitch next year and make Bryce Harper hold his Nobel.
This post has been updated and originally ran on May 24, 2016.