If all goes well on Sunday, Aug. 30, Ali Berke will roust herself from her New York home at 3:30 a.m., get dressed, pack a light bag, and head to the airport to catch a 6 a.m. flight to Detroit.
Once she lands at Metro Airport, she’ll catch a ride to Comerica Park, do a soundcheck sometime around 10 a.m., wait for the stands to fill, and perform the National Anthem just before the Tigers and the Los Angeles Dodgers wrap up their series.
Tarik Skubal will have already pitched. Short of one last turnaround, the Tigers are likely to be even further from the playoffs.
Still, the sun is scheduled to appear. So are the 80s (the temperature, not the era).
And if you were thinking about moving onto football – or already have – consider heading to the ballpark
to see a young artist trying to make a name for herself as a pop singer while she belts out our most patriotic song in the churches of our national pastime.
When Berke completes the anthem, she’ll have sung it in 24 of Major League Baseball’s 30 venues. Before next season is finished, she’s hoping to have sung in all 30.
She didn't set out to see the country through its baseball parks, though she’d long dreamt of singing across the country; once her father suggested an anthem tour, she figured it might be a way to kick open doors for her songwriting career.
The 25-year-old Manhattan native has written dozens of songs of her own and performs them in clubs and malls and venues close to her New York home. She also works full-time in a medical office.
As for the baseball tour?
She started three years ago in Boston, trying to hit as many parks as will have her every summer. When she sends a club her résumé and a singing sample, she mostly crosses her fingers that she’ll get a date. When she does, she generally travels to and from the park in a single day.
Her father accompanies her – he's a sports agent – and she said she’s been grateful for the experience of seeing the country with him. While Boston kind of kicked off the current tour she’s on, her first time singing an anthem in at a sporting event came several years before the Red Sox game, at the Mets' Citi Field in New York.
She was 16 at the time. Her dad, Jack Berke, reached out to the Mets, thinking it might be a one-off. Then he got to thinking. And Ali got to thinking, and well, here they are.
Or here they are about to be.
“We wondered if anybody had done all 30 ballparks and found out someone else was trying and thought, ‘Let’s do it anyway,” Berke said in a phone interview Tuesday, Aug. 25.
She loves singing the anthem in slightly different ways depending on the ballpark and its vibe and atmosphere, and she loves the feeling she gets when the crowd responds. She’s especially enjoyed the classic parks, like Fenway and Wrigley.
Berke has never been to Detroit and can’t wait to get to Comerica Park to see yet another new place and get closer to her goal. When she finishes Sunday, she’ll only have Atlanta, Seattle, Toronto, Colorado, Texas and the New York Yankees left.
The New Yorker hopes to end the tour at Yankee Stadium, naturally.
And then?
“Get back to more of my original work,” she said.
She’d hoped that touring the country’s baseball parks and singing in them might lead her to more exposure for her own work by now, but she has nothing but gratitude for what she’s seen and what she’s been able to do.
“I’m just going to be patient,” she said.
Which means she will keep getting up in the middle of the night to pack and keep heading to the airport for break-of-dawn flights and keep writing songs when she gets home from her day job. All she knows is that she is chasing her dream, one ballpark at a time.
Contact Shawn Windsor: swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him @shawnwindsor.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Sunday's Tigers game to get slice of history, even before 1st pitch
