The Baseball Project mixes the national pastime with great guitar work

“I saw some great Giants teams in the ‘60s, but they were always frustrated in the end,” he says. “But that was a great team to root for when you were a kid — Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, Gaylord Perry.”

Those Giants teams couldn’t quite get the job done, but the new guys who moved into the ballpark on the other side of the Bay quickly began hanging championship banners.

“That was good timing,” McCaughey says of the A’s move to the Bay Area. “I went to a couple of World Series games in ’72 and ’73. They won (the World Series) three years in a row which is amazing.”

Wynn grew up in L.A., but favored the Reds and A’s over the Dodgers in his formative years — even before landing at UC Davis as a freshman in 1977.

“I went there with the full intention of being a sports writer,” he says. “Like Scott, I was into rock ‘n’ roll in high school and played guitar and wrote songs. But I did not think I was going to end up playing in a band professionally for the next 50 years. That didn’t seem like an option. Sports writing felt like the way I was going to be going.”

Wynn became sports editor at the college newspaper, but found the Bay Area’s thriving punk rock scene impossible to resist. He started spending much of his time driving back and forth to Berkeley and San Francisco to buy records and go to shows.

“I was seeing all those great shows in the Bay Area,” remembers Wynn, who lives in New York now and follows the Yankees. “My punk rock education was going to the Old Waldorf, Mabuhay Gardens – just whatever shows that were happening around there. After three years in Davis, I think I was still a sophomore, because all I wanted to do was DJ at the radio station, play in my new wave band Suspect — which was a forerunner to the Dream Syndicate — and go to concerts.”

Sports writing’s loss was the music world’s gain. Wynn delivered multiple memorable albums with the Dream Syndicate and other outfits as well as during his own solo career.

It was R.E.M. who brought the Baseball Project together — or rather, it was their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2007 that did the trick. The musicians were celebrating the band’s honor at a party in New York, when McCaughey — an auxiliary member of R.E.M. who recorded and toured with the band for years — got to chatting with Wynn about this idea of recording some songs about baseball. The excitement grew as the conversation went on, and when they parted company, it was to begin writing new material.

“We both immediately dashed off three or four songs and were like, ‘Wow, these are really good. This is going to be cool,’” McCaughey says.

Soon after, they recruited Pitmon and Buck for the project and ventured into the studio.

“We went in making the record, not having any idea that it was going to be a band or anything like that,” McCaughey says. “We didn’t even know what we were going to call it when we recorded the album. Then it turned into something.”

The band was a hit right from the start, quickly landing a coveted slot on the “Late Show with David Letterman” and appearing at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas.

The band’s first album was followed by “Volume 2: High and Inside” in 2011. By the time the group’s third album — “3rd” — was released in 2014, Mills had officially joined the Baseball Project. After a nine-year hiatus, the group returned with more songs about our national pastime on “Grand Salami Time!”

The Baseball Project’s music is a hit with all kinds of fans, from baseball die-hards who can recite Rickey Henderson’s top stats from memory to folks who know all the words to R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” by heart.

“We definitely have baseball nerds who come to see us. We definitely have R.E.M. nerds who come to see us. But that might be 20% on either side,” McCaughey says. “And then you’ve got the 60% in the middle who are just people who just love our music — who are fans of all of our bands.”