Ruth Roberts at a Mets game

Ruth Roberts, a popular song composer whose work was sung by millions of New York Mets fans and the Beatles, died June 30. She was 84.
Roberts co-wrote “Meet the Mets,” the catchy and enduring fight song for New York’s new National League team in 1961, even before they had played their first game. The song has been revised and revamped several times, but none of the changes “ever eclipsed the original version. It’s so stylized, it couldn’t have been written in any other period but the early 1960s,” said Bob Thompson, a professor of music at SUNY Purchase and the head of the Baseball Music Project. “It’s one of the most charming, endearing parts of the Mets’ history. It was about the honesty and the purity of the game. It turned the spotlight away from the players and onto the fans. It’s so corny — and that’s what makes it beautiful.”
According to The Wall Street Journal, in 1961 the Mets and ad agency J. Walter Thompson were seeking to build a new brand out of the ashes of the departed Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants. They created a contest for the new team’s logo and also put out a call for a theme song. Roberts’s entry was one of 19 songs considered. The song,  performed by the Glenn Osser Orchestra, was released to the public in 1963. It is still played at Citi Field, the Mets’ current home, and versions are played during TV and radio broadcasts.
“I think it is the most nationally well-known theme song maybe in all of sports,” said Mets broadcaster Howie Rose. The song was played at Citi Field before the July 1 Mets-Yankees game as a tribute to Roberts, who studied at Northwestern University and the Juilliard School of Music in New York. A 2010 New York Times article, “Mets May Have Musical Edge on Yankees,” compared “Meet the Mets” to the Yankees’ theme song, and the article’s headline gave away its conclusion.
Roberts wasn’t a one-hit wonder. The native of Port Chester, N.Y., sold her first song in 1947 at the fabled Brill Building in Manhattan. “The Moon is Always Bigger on a Saturday Night” was recorded by Big Band leader Orrin Tucker. Other artists of that era who recorded Roberts’ songs included Arthur Godfrey and the McGuire Sisters. Her songwriting reached into the world of rock ‘n roll when Buddy Holly included her song “Mailman Bring Me No More Blues” as the B side of his record “Words of Love.” The Beatles, big Holly fans, recorded the same song, as did John Lennon in a solo performance. The Beatles’ version was never released until their Anthology 3 collection in 1996, and the Lennon version has surfaced only as a bootleg.
Roberts also wrote other sports-themed songs, including “I Love Mickey,” about Mickey Mantle, and “It’s a Beautiful Day for a Ballgame,” which was played for many years at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Both songs offer ironic twists for someone so closely associated with the team that tried to fill the Dodgers’ place or replace the Yankees in New Yorkers’ hearts.