In his 1984 hit, “Glory Days,” Bruce Springsteen sings, “I had a friend, was a big baseball player, back in high school.” Not only did Springsteen have friends who were baseball players, he himself has had a lifelong relationship with baseball—and softball. In honor of Major League Baseball’s Opening Day, we’re taking a look here at the Curatorial Corner.
Long before Bruce Springsteen became synonymous with American music, baseball was a meaningful part of his childhood in Freehold, New Jersey. Growing up in a working-class community, Springsteen played in local youth leagues, learning the value of practice and teamwork. Like so many young Americans of his generation, he came of age at a time when baseball was deeply embedded in everyday life—played in sandlots, followed on the radio, and celebrated as a shared cultural language.
As Bruce himself will admit, he wasn’t necessarily a baseball standout. Ultimately, he hung up his glove for the love of music and girls. Still, baseball provided structure during his formative years and exposed him to the dynamics of camaraderie and competition that would later echo in his life as a bandleader.
The game also offered a cultural touchstone: mid-century American baseball, with its neighborhood fields and local heroes, helped shape the sense of place and nostalgia that would become central themes in his songwriting. Even as music gradually took precedence, those early experiences on the diamond left a lasting imprint, informing both his storytelling and his enduring fascination with the intersection of memory, youth, and identity. It is no coincidence that references to baseball (and to the passage of time it so often symbolizes) surface in his work, most memorably in 1984’s “Glory Days,” where the sport becomes a lens for reflecting on aging and remembrance. More on that in a moment.
First, let’s fast forward from the Little League fields of Freehold in the 1960s to the mid-1970s: Bruce has released three albums: 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, and 1975’s Born to Run. With his career gaining national attention and his live performances becoming the stuff of legend, Springsteen and his band were spending long stretches of time on the road, developing both their sound and their identity as a group.
One way to do that? Softball games as the “E Street Kings.” These games, played in cities across the country, became a regular part of tour life for a period—sometimes drawing small crowds of curious fans and local opponents eager to take on the rising rock band. As Springsteen told a reporter at Rolling Stone in 1976, “The road crew challenged us to a game…We beat them 27-6. Everything sort of fell into place. So, the next day we went out and dropped about $700 on equipment. Softball is our whole life right now. That concert we played last night? That was just a pregame ceremony, like the ‘Star-Spangled Banner.’”
Band-worn E Street Kings gear from the Springsteen Center Collection. Photographed by Mark Krajnak.
The $700 in 1976 would be about $4,000 today, by the way.
Let’s jump ahead again, now to the 1980s. During the Born in the USA tour, Bruce introduced his then-new song “Glory Days” from the stage many a time with some variation of:
“When I was 15…I used to…well, before I was 15…the only thing I wanted to do besides play the guitar was I wanted to be a baseball player…so…I was in like Little League and Colonial League and…then when I hit 15 years old, I was in this league called Babe Ruth League… but right about that time, when you’re 15, I kind of got interested in the guitar and the girls…and, so I started to lose interest in kind of playing baseball but it wasn’t too bad because the games, the games were usually like during the weekdays around 6 o’clock and so on the weekends I used to play… with my band but…we had this rained-out game one time and they scheduled it for like Saturday morning at 8 o’clock. So, I played Friday night real late, came home, and I got to confess that I was losing my commitment to the sport pretty quickly…”
“Anyway…so the guys came by to pick me up and I said ‘Mom, tell ‘em I’m sick and I can’t go!’…So like I was laying there in bed… I was laying there and I heard ‘em knocking on the door and you know I’m kind of embarrassed and got my head covered up, you know, but I hear them, she talks to them and they go away…and then about 20 minutes later, they come back and they say ‘Mrs. Springsteen, we’ve only got eight guys and if Bruce doesn’t come, we’re gonna forfeit the game!’ Oh, man….so like I hear ‘em coming up the stairs and like now I got to really make like I’m sick! (Pretend coughing) ‘Oh, I feel so bad,’ and they’re begging me and stuff so finally I get out of bed, put on my uniform and I go down to the field…and they put me out in right field…that was ok with me!”
“So, I’m standing out there, I’m praying that nothing’s gonna come my way…I don’t want to be catching no baseball! As soon as I’m standing there, I’m…I’m sweating, I’m living and dying with every pitch and then here it comes! And it kind of disappears into the clouds first and I’m standing there…and it bounces off my glove and hits me in the head and I fall down…and I’m semi-conscious…I’m embarrassed too, and all I hear is ‘Throw it in, throw it in!’ No matter what happens to you on the baseball field, somebody’s always telling you to throw it in…anyway…I only brought this up…because I met this guy in a bar in Asbury Park…he was pitching that day…”
And the rest is now music history.
As to WHO the “big baseball player” in “Glory Days” is?
Listeners and commentators have long noted that the opening lines of “Glory Days” were inspired by Springsteen’s Freehold friend and former Little League teammate Joe DePugh. The two famously reconnected by chance at a bar in the 1970s, reminiscing about their youth, a moment that closely mirrors the song’s narrative and has been widely cited as its real-life origin. When DePugh died in 2025, Springsteen publicly acknowledged that connection in a brief but poignant tribute, writing, “Just a moment to mark the passing of Freehold native and ballplayer Joe DePugh…He was a good friend when I needed one… Glory Days my friend,” explicitly linking his old teammate to the song that helped immortalize him.
On the field, 1983, playing the Pony Express softball team. Courtesy John Corio / The Stone Pony.
The E Street Kings may have long since packed up their gloves, but Bruce Springsteen has never fully left the ballpark behind. Over the years, he’s been a familiar presence at games, especially in the New York/New Jersey orbit—most often spotted at Yankee Stadium. Whether slipping into a regular-season game or attending high-profile postseason matchups, Springsteen’s connection to baseball endures as a quieter echo of his youth: less about playing now, and more about observing, remembering, and participating in the shared rituals of the game. Like so much in his work, the ballpark remains a place where past and present meet.
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Melissa Ziobro
Director of Curatorial Affairs
Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music
Monmouth University
March 28, 2026