Thursday Thoughts on Leadership
July 31, 2025
Organ-ic leadership
Many think of Chicago as being bitterly cold in the winter, and for good reason. It is. Yet, the city has also experienced many sweltering summers, with high temperatures intensified by high humidity.
With the mercury reaching the upper 80s and low 90s, that was the case nearly a half-century ago, during the last weekend of July 1977. And with the White Sox in a pennant race with Kansas City for the AL West, the three-game home series with the rival Royals brought another kind of heat to the Southside that weekend, too.
A few years prior, the White Sox General Manager, Stu Holcomb, heard a young organist play Henry Mancini’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” at a business luncheon. Without a formal audition, Holcomb offered Nancy Faust, who graduated from North Park University a few months earlier, the opportunity to be the White Sox organist.
In her earliest years with the team, Nancy Faust had an often lonely perch among the center field bleachers at the old Comiskey Park. From that spot, beneath the exploding scoreboard that shot off live fireworks when a White Sox batter hit a home run, Faust said she learned the game of baseball. She also learned how to respond to the mood of the crowd.
Over a career spanning four decades, Nancy Faust became a leader who has left an indelible mark on the game. Or more precisely, she changed the way fans experience a major league baseball game.
When I attended White Sox games as a resident of the near Southside, I heard something in the park that I had never noticed while watching games on television. A short clip of recorded music is played as a batter for the home team steps up to the plate. It’s a tradition that permeates even regional summer leagues, where college players hope to catch the eye of a scout for a bigger school that might offer them greater exposure, thereby increasing their chances of a professional career.
Baseball players often choose songs that capture and communicate, in just a few bars, their personality, their national heritage, or their faith. Occasionally, they’ll pick songs that are intended to be humorous or taunt the opposing team.
That “walk-up music” has been around for a long time now. But it had its origins at the tips of Nancy Faust’s fingers. And when she began that now commonplace tradition, she was improvising, playing songs she knew to communicate something about the White Sox player’s reputation or personality. Faust’s paying “He’s So Shy” when Harold Baines walked up to the plate, for instance, captured his quiet demeanor. That quiet demeanor was still very much who he was when I met him at a White Sox game in 2017.
Yet, Faust’s most recognizable contribution to the game came during that last weekend of July 1977, when the weather and the competition with the Royals were both so hot.
In a 2007 interview with George Castle, historian at the Chicago Baseball Museum, Faust explains that the Sox batters were having their way with the Royals pitcher that Friday night in the first game of the weekend series. I’ve linked that interview below, in case you want to listen to it.
The home crowd was already ecstatic when the Royals manager, Whitey Herzog, came out to the mound to take the ball from starting pitcher Andy Hassler, after giving up four runs off seven hits in the first three innings. As Hassler walked back to the dugout, Nancy Faust instinctively dipped into her extensive repertoire of popular music and began playing Steam’s 1969 hit, “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye.” The White Sox fans in the stands of Comiskey that night formed a 45,000-voice choir that sang along as they taunted the pitcher who had been yanked so quickly.
The song became so popular at White Sox games during the late 1977 season that Steam, the band that recorded it, re-released it that year. When the single went gold for a second time, Mercury Records sent Faust a gold record as an expression of gratitude for her role in the song’s success the second time around.
Nancy Faust’s imprint on popular American culture offers some insights for all leaders.
Leaders don’t need to be famous to lead. While I became aware of the walk-up music tradition nine years ago by going to Sox games, I only learned this year that it was the team’s organist who started it. And while die-hard, lifelong White Sox fans knew her name, Nancy Faust had retired some six years before I ever attended a game. And I’d guess there are plenty of fans of other major league teams who taunt a visiting pitcher as he leaves the game without knowing that it was Faust who started it all.
Intuitive leaders don’t need a detailed script. I’ve known, appreciated, and stood in awe of leaders who will invest hours upon hours in working through every detail of a multi-stage plan for a new initiative, product introduction, or event. I’ve also known intuitive leaders who have only a broad, flexible set of general ideas as they begin to plant a church, start a new business, or change the menu of their restaurant. I’ve seen both succeed. I’ve seen both fail. Perhaps it was a result of her youth, ignorance of the game, and her experience playing in other venues that allowed Faust to respond to the crowd and fuel the frenzy when the White Sox were white hot. What we do know for sure is that she didn’t have a detailed script she used.
What about you? How can you leverage the unique gifts, abilities, and insights that you possess to lead in the role you have, regardless of the number of people who know who you are? Who can help you assess what those gifts, abilities, and insights are and how to use them to lead with maximum effectiveness?
Do you have a clear understanding of what sort of leader you are? Are you intuitive? Or do you need to plan more carefully? Who can help you understand how to utilize the best of who you are as a leader?
Enjoy your weekend and cheer on the White Sox!
The views and opinions expressed in my Thursday Thoughts on Leadership are my own. They do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or policies of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina or any affiliated churches.