Most fans celebrate a major sports championship with Queen’s classic anthem, “We Are the Champions.” But late on Oct. 30, bars in the Beltway turned their speakers up to belt out a modern nursery rhyme.
“Ba-by shark, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo-doo.”
At the beginning of the season, Washington Nationals fans thought it was just an annoying children’s song. By the time the World Series arrived in Washington on Oct. 25, it had long been the Nats’ unofficial fight song, spurring tens of thousands of Washingtonians, mostly adults, to happily chomp their arms in unison at Nationals Park.
The song’s rise from a summer camp song to World Series soundtrack was just as unlikely as the Nationals’ championship triumph.
The song’s origins date back more than 100 years (the Nationals, meanwhile, have only been around since 2005). South Korean education company Pinkfong uploaded a video of the venerable children’s song in November 2015, and it took two years for it to go viral, at first only in Asia. In August 2018, the song finally went viral in the Western world. The main English version, uploaded in June 2016, has been viewed more than 3.8 billion times on YouTube (about one view for every two people on the planet).
The song has nothing to do with baseball. But on June 19, a few weeks after the 19-31 low point of the Nats’ season, Gerardo Parra stepped into the batter’s box with “Baby Shark” as his walk-up song. Usually, his walk-up music didn’t stand out, but his form was slumping, and the song made him think of his 2-year-old daughter, Aaliyah. Parra was zero for his last 22 at-bats, and there were no more than 5,000 people in the stands for the Wednesday day game.
He promptly grounded out to first base.
But in his next at-bat, he doubled and later homered. The Nats won. They were still below .500, but the trajectory was upwards.
As the Nats’ record improved, “Baby Shark” caught fire with the fans and the team. After every hit, Nats players started doing “Baby Shark” dance moves or hand gestures, with different variations for singles, doubles, and triples. Fans started wearing “Baby Shark” shirts, hats, and even full-blown shark costumes.
The rest, as they say, is history. Parra’s at-bats in the World Series weren’t particularly fruitful (two strikeouts and one walk that eventually resulted in the Nats’ only run in a loss), and the Nats lost all their home games in the World Series, so it’d be tough to say the song helped the Nats win the World Series. But fans and the team love it just the same.
Parra’s one-year contract with the Nationals is complete. Whether the 32-year-old re-signs with the Nats or not, the phenomena he started with the Nats will swim on. In the 2019 chapter of the baseball history books, “Baby Shark” will never die.
