Songfacts®:

• The British Library catalogue contains three entries for baseball rags churned out between 1913 and 1919; the third has the dubious honor of being the first Noël Coward song ever published. Fortunately for future generations, music and other publishers were not deterred by this awful song, otherwise the Twentieth Century may have been deprived of one its greatest playwrights and all-round entertainers.
  
  The music for "The Baseball Rag" was composed by Doris Joel, who rather curiously used the name Doris Doris in her professional life. At this time, Coward - here in the role of lyricist - had been writing furiously with his early collaborator, and this was the first, and apparently only fruit of their labors to see the light of day. They went to some lengths to get it published; in London, Ascherberg, Hopwood & Crew offered it for sale at two shillings; eight years later, the massive Horatio Nicholls hit "Among My Souvenirs" retailed for a shilling and thrupence less. "The Baseball Rag" was also published in New York the same year, 1919, by Leo Feist.
• Rags had been around since the 1890s, and ragtime had really taken off in 1911 with "Alexander's Ragtime Band," and the Roaring Twenties were on their way, so it is hardly surprising that Joel, Coward and other English musicians penned the occasional ditty in that genre. Coward sailed for America for the first time in May 1921; if he had waited until he had actually visited the Promised Land, he would surely have written something more fitting than:
  
  It's a cinch
  It's a go
  It's a jazz
  Tally-ho
  For that Baseball Rag
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  Suggestion credit:
  Alexander Baron - London, England, for above 2