Career Takes Her Out to Ballgame a Lot : Organist Gets Standing Ovations as She Scores Team’s Efforts With Broad Repertoire

Nancy Hefley looks like the meek lady behind you in the supermarket checkout line unloading a week’s worth of groceries for the family. Tall and trim, her brown hair cut short and neat, butterfly-shaped glasses riding the bridge of her nose, she hardly looks the part of a musician who gets standing ovations 80 nights a year from crowds that average nearly 40,000 and often top 50,000.

Still, as an audience stood and cheered during a typical performance recently, Hefley turned from her keyboard with a demure smile and said, “They always give me a standing ovation here.” Whereupon she turned back and put the finishing touches on yet another exuberant rendition of that seventh-inning-stretch favorite, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

Yes, it’s Hefley who, unseen by most, purveys those familiar tunes that emanate from the Baldwin organ and reverberate through Dodger Stadium at every home game. She’s the one who plays the national anthem in every conceivable key and tempo, for a host of guest singers. She’s the one who trumpets “Charge!” when the Boys in Blue launch an offensive attack, and the one who triggers the applause when her downtrodden squad needs a shot of moral support.

She’s also the one who, last year, stepped into the shoes of 16-year Dodger organist Helen Dell upon her retirement. She also, to her own relief, stepped into a world championship season.

“I’m glad it worked out the way it did--with them finishing first last year--instead of the other way around,” said Hefley, who (usually accompanied by her husband, Bill) commutes to Chavez Ravine from her home in Yorba Linda three to five times a week when the Dodgers are in town.

What’s the win-loss record got to do with a mild-mannered organ player who looks like the archetypal baseball mom?

“The players can be very superstitious,” she said. “If they win, they won’t change their shirt for a week. Or they’ll eat the same thing they had for dinner every night. I know I have nothing to do with how the season comes out, but I would have felt terrible if they went to fifth place right after I joined.” If it sounds like Hefley takes a proprietary interest in the team that employs her, she does. Although she is on a year-to-year contract with the Dodgers, Hefley hopes to follow her predecessors’ example in career longevity--she is only the fourth Dodger organist since the team moved to Los Angeles in 1958.

Hefley, 53, finished first in a field of more than 30 applicants, narrowed down to three finalists; each performed during pre-season games last year. “They did tell me that they were being very cautious during the audition process because they didn’t want to get someone for one year and then have to turn around and do it again next year, so that’s nice,” she said.

Indeed, there seems to be something of a family manner in the way Hefley approaches her contract negotiations. “I signed my contract for this year about a month ago,” she said with a smile. “I teasingly said, ‘Is this for last year, this year or next year?’ ”

Taking her cue from this most statistic-prone of professional sports, Hefley keeps a clipboard at her side for all manner of musical score-keeping. She logs each song she plays--she’s logged more than 725 different songs so far this season--as well as the team the Dodgers play, who won, the pitcher, the soloist for the national anthem and what key it was played in (“I’ve played it in every key except C-sharp”).

She also notes the likes and dislikes of the many members of the organization and can always draw a tip of the cap from Coach Joe Amalfitano by playing one of his favorite Neil Diamond tunes, or a nod and a smile from former pitching great Don Sutton whenever he’s in the park by reeling off Charlie Rich’s “Rollin’ With the Flow,” which became his theme during his final Dodger season last year.

Not surprisingly, the players interviewed said they concentrate on the game, not the music. “I’ve never listened to the organist,” said relief pitcher John Tudor.

“To me,” said right fielder Mike Marshall, “organ music is pretty much organ music.”

The person who, perhaps more than anyone in the park, takes notice of what is echoing from the Baldwin is Dodger announcer Vin Scully.

“The thing about Nancy, more than any other Dodger organist, and this is not to take away from them, but I guess the word would be sophisticated ,” Scully said. “She uses a lot of show music and a lot of great old classics. (Former Dodger owner) Walter O’Malley felt that the organ captures the feeling of a day in the ballpark, and in order for the organ to be a factor in that feeling, it has to be played well and with personality. I find I’m always commenting on her songs.”

Before coming to the Dodgers, Hefley substituted periodically for Joe Tripoli, organist for the California Angels. And now, when not spinning out a snippet of the “Mexican Hat Dance” to spur a round of applause for the Dodgers, she plays the occasional special function such as team-sponsored charitable fund-raisers. In the off-season or when the team is out of town, she plays background music at horse shows around Southern California, as she has for nearly 25 years.

Though Hefley arguably is heard by more people each year than any other organist (name another that can count a yearly audience of nearly 3 million, the Dodgers’ home attendance) she only turned to the instrument by happenstance.

“I used to play the accordion. One time I got a job at the Orange County Fair and they had an organ and asked if I could play that instead of the accordion. . . . I still have an accordion around the house, but I haven’t picked it up in years.”

A lifelong Dodgers fan who grew up in Southern California, Hefley went to Bellflower High School and majored in piano before graduating from Fullerton College. Hefley said her loyalty to the Dodgers was inherited, adding wistfully that her mother died before she got the job with their beloved team.

“I don’t think I could do this if I didn’t like the game,” Hefley said. “There’s a lot of time you sit around waiting when you aren’t playing.”

Hefley constantly monitors the game from her position in the press box--the organ is merely a Dodger-dog wrapper’s throw from dozens of radio, TV and print-media sports writers--and keeps her red-enameled fingertips poised to play at the drop of a batting helmet.

A knitting enthusiast, she often finds time to work on a sweater when the opposition is at bat.

She is given pretty much carte blanche in choosing what to play, within the bounds of Dodger good taste (excerpts from pop songs, movie themes and Broadway show tunes compose the bulk of her repertoire). But the team has strict rules about when she can play and when she can’t.

“The basic reason I play is to give the team incentive,” Hefley said, “so of course I never play anything while the visitors are at bat because we certainly don’t want to give the other team any incentive.”

But what about a little good-natured razzing? Like at Candlestick Park, where, Joe Amalfitano recalled, the San Francisco organist used to play “Here Comes Santa Claus” whenever Dodger Manager Tommy Lasorda came on the field (back before he trimmed down this season).

None of that at Dodger Stadium, where the play is always fair and square--on the field and on the keyboard.

And that’s just fine with Lasorda. “One thing I can’t stand when we go to other ballparks is when you make a pitching change and the organist starts to play ‘Send in the Clowns,’ ” Lasorda said during field practice recently. “They don’t do that with their own team, do they? I just don’t think that’s right.”

During an August game against the Mets, as Hefley watched Lasorda get thrown out of the game after a nose-to-nose exchange with umpire Gerry Davis, she said that she never uses her music to mock or taunt the opposing team or the umpires.

“I try to stay away from anything controversial, so I don’t add anything to a situation like that,” she said. “The Dodgers are much more conservative about that than most of the other ball teams.”

It’s not that they are particularly worried about raising the wrath of the opposition, according to Dodger spokesman Mike Williams. Rather, he said, it is part of a general philosophy not to have any single aspect of the support system draw fans’ attention away from where it belongs: on the game itself.

Hefley is not averse, however, to punctuating dramatic plays or unusual situations with a little musical editorializing, which often grabs the attention of the players, the announcers and the fans alike.

“Earlier this season we had a game where we were down 11-0 and I played ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.’ One writer used that in his story,” she said with a modest pride. And during one of several marathon extra-inning performances the Dodgers have turned in this season, she turned to Lerner and Loewe for “I Could Have Danced All Night.”

But, she adds, “It’s the songs you least expect anyone to pick up on where they come up and say ‘Gee, that was really fun that you did that.’ I had one fellow who came up after a game and said, ‘I’ll bet you and I are the only ones who know that name of that song’ when I played the theme from ‘The Rothchilds,’ an old Broadway show.”

The hardest games for Hefley in terms of musical inspiration may be low-scoring pitchers’ duels in which there is little action on the field.

“That’s when I have to do a lot of deeper thinking (about what to play). When things are happening, songs just pop into my head. . . . I’m like the ballplayers--I have my good nights and I have my bad ones.”