The women of 'National Pastime's' WZBQ. (Photo by Jim Coates)

National Pastime at the Keegan Theatre

It's not the sports metaphors in National Pastime's songs that will get to you — it's the schmaltz. In the Keegan Theatre's world-premiere musical about a radio station that invents a baseball team, each reference to keeping one's eye on the ball is surpassed by the gag reflex-triggering pap in its many identical-sounding songs about romance and this crazy game of life. Sample lyrics: "Hope has the sweetest sound and hope lifts you off the ground." "You are the only girl to get inside my lovely world." "Suddenly, somehow, love came in from nowhere." The best songs of the show are actually the old-timey radio jingles sung by commercial babes Carla (Paige Felix) and Darla (Carolyn Myers).

National Pastime would have been fun as a play. It's the story of a radio station that, facing their certain extinction, gins up some advertisers and business by inventing a fake baseball team for the tiny town of Baker City, Iowa (hey, maybe there's a lesson for other media outlets facing layoffs here!). It's the brilliant idea of Karen (Katie McManus) — a sharp-talking lady-lawyer, and the daughter of the station manager, J.P. (Timothy Lynch) — and she brings in some tough Chicago ballplayers to teach clueless announcers Marty (John Loughney) and Lawrence (Tim O'Kane) the rules of the game. You have to suspend your disbelief that there were 1) female lawyers bossing the boys around in the 1930s, and 2) grown men who do not know a single thing about the most popular sport in America. Also, the fact that Karen announces "I will guide them honestly," after she's just, y'know, laid out a plan to deceive an entire city and bilk them out of their advertising money. Lawyers! The book scenes, especially those in which Loughney and O'Kane have to scramble to produce all of the necessary sound effects for their broadcast, are entertaining, but they're bogged down by two tepid romances between the station employees, and the saccharine songwriting. Unfortunately, the creators of National Pastime have whiffed.