As of today's NBC News report, twenty of baseball's thirty teams no longer put a live organist in the booth for every game, and that's an embarrassment. Every one of those front offices will tell you it was about changing tastes or tightening budgets. Really it was about who got the booth space.
Start with the team that gave the game away. The Texas Rangers won the 2023 World Series and then got rid of their organist. Dustin Tatro announced in March 2024 that he'd been replaced by an electric guitar. A franchise climbs the highest mountain in the sport, pulls in a title's worth of revenue and attention, and the reward for the person soundtracking the building is a pink slip and a guitar amp. You can't win the whole thing and plead poverty in the same breath.
The Rangers aren't alone, and the reasons get more telling the closer you look. The Milwaukee Brewers quietly dropped their organist after expanding the scoreboards and needing the control-room space the organ had occupied. What you hear at the park now is pre-recorded. The instrument lost a turf war to a bigger screen: a person who reacted to the game in real time, evicted so there could be more surface area for sponsored graphics and hype prompts.
A live organist answers a 3-2 count, a mound visit, a blown call at first. A canned playlist can't do that, and neither can a DJ cueing up the same four bars of a pop song between pitches. When Dieter Ruehle plays a quick live burst of Beethoven's Fifth after every Dodgers strikeout, that's a person listening to the game and talking back to it. When the board barks "clap your hands" at you for the ninth time, that's just a machine running a loop. That's the difference between a ballpark that feels alive and one that feels like you're being herded through a store.
The organ hasn't vanished everywhere, and plenty of parks found a way to keep it going. The Padres keep Bobby Cressey part-time, taking requests in person and over social media, mixing standards with video-game themes. The Cardinals share Jeremy Boyer with the NHL's Blues. The Cubs split the job between John Benedeck and Josh Langhoff. The Dodgers kept Ruehle full-time, picking up where Nancy Bea Hefley left off after her long run. The tradition is bruised, but it's alive. That list undercuts every excuse the other twenty teams give. If the Dodgers and Cardinals and Cubs and Padres can find room and money for a human in the booth, then "too expensive" and "too impractical" are stories teams tell to avoid saying the true thing.
The true thing is simple. These are billion-dollar operations. A part-time organist is a rounding error next to one scoreboard upgrade. They cut the organ because no one with final say cared enough to fight the AV department for the real estate. Chicago gave the sport its first ballpark organ at Wrigley back in 1941, and even the Cubs chipped away at the role when they let players pick their own walk-up music in 2015. If the birthplace can let it slide, anybody can talk themselves into it.
Stop blaming "changing tastes." Fans didn't vote this instrument off the island. Stadium-operations executives did, one repurposed booth at a time, chasing content and sponsor inventory over atmosphere. The parks that kept a person at the keys prove the whole thing was a choice. The twenty that didn't should own it instead of blaming you.
