There are few things that inspire love and devotion like baseball and music.“There are several subjects in the universe that inspire the ultra geekiness of its followers. Baseball and music are near the top of that list. They are the two subjects that people can sit and debate about the most arcane things all night long,” Steve Wynn said. “You can go from who was the best left-handed second baseman to who was the best guitarist in The Yardbirds. It all tickles the same muscle.”Wynn gets to combine both passions with The Baseball Project. Formed in 2007, The Baseball Project is the brainchild of Wynn and Scott McCaughey. If those names sound familiar, they should. Both musicians have had storied careers. Wynn led the Dream Syndicate from 1981-89. McCaughey has fronted The Young Fresh Fellows, The Minus 5 and has been the unofficial member of R.E.M. from 1994 to the band’s end in 2011. Mike Mills and Peter Buck of R.E.M. along with Linda Pitmon round out the not-too-shabby lineup of the Baseball Project.“We always tell people with this band, even if you don’t like baseball you are going to like the songs. They are catchy pop songs. If you like baseball, you are going to get all the references and enjoy it even more. If you love the game, you are going to learn something you didn’t know about,” Wynn said. “I would say 99.9% of baseball fans did not know about Larry Yount. We didn’t. We just happened to hear about it on a visit to the hall of fame. It is nice to know that fans are going to hear that the same way they might read a blog and discover it. They can hear it through The Baseball Project and say, ‘I did not know that. I got to read up more on that guy.'”McCaughey agrees, “Even if you are in Europe and you don’t understand at all what the hell we are talking about, you can still enjoy the music.”And just how dedicated to both music and baseball are The Baseball Project?“(PNC Park) is gorgeous and I say that based on three innings of baseball. We were doing a festival across the street from the stadium,” Wynn said. “This just shows how much we love the game and how dedicated we are. We knew that we were in walking distance from the stadium. We did our sound check and then ran over there. We caught the first pitch and had to leave at the bottom of the third to get back to our gig, but we did it. We loved the hell out of our three innings. We made it work and got to see Manny Sanguillén, so the day was complete.”For McCaughey and Wynn, the music bug bit first, followed not far behind by baseball.“They are pretty close, but baseball might have been a bit earlier. My first real memories about really caring about each of them are probably from around the same time being like eight or nine years old,” McCaughey said. “I got into music a little before The Beatles came along. Then after The Beatles, (I) went completely hog wild. That was at the same time that my family moved up near San Francisco and I started becoming a huge Giants fans and going to ballgames.”Wynn has seen his passions come full-circle.I’ve been a music fanatic through and through from the time I was four years old. Baseball was not that long after, when I was in my early teens,” he said. “The funny thing is before I was doing music for a living I was a sports writer. It is even stranger for me as it is a full-circle kind of thing. When I was 21, that is what I was doing for a living and what I wanted to do for the rest of my life was write sports, even though I was playing in bands and playing guitar. I laughed when I realized I put those two things together. I’m writing about sports with a guitar in my hand.”The Baseball Project has now released three albums; “Volume 1: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails” (2008), “Volume 2: High and Inside” (2011) and “3rd” (2014). The band’s songs are akin to folktales of players from yesteryear through today.“I When we did ‘Volume 1,’ we had our favorite subjects,” Wynn said. “I knew I wanted to write songs about Curt Flood and Harvey Haddix, Fernando Valenzuela and Sandy Koufax. There were certain things about those people I wanted to say.“It was all of this stuff that we had bottled up inside for years. From that point on, it was just a matter of people from baseball that we had talked to, watching games, reading books or running into people that would suggest songs.”The McCaughey-penned “The Day Dock Went Hunting Heads” details Pittsburgh Pirate Dock Ellis’ legendary 1974 attempt to hit each batter in Cincinnati’s lineup as he was upset because he felt the Pirates were intimated by the Reds.“We had to come up with a different angle because other people had written songs about (Dock pitching the no hitter on LSD). We acknowledge it in the song, but we had to come up with a whole other thing,” McCaughey said. “When I heard that story about him going after the Reds I thought it was perfect because it is almost as crazy as the LSD story.“I had never heard about it until four or five years ago and I did some research into it. I thought it was amazing. Today, of course, it could never happen. It will never happen again. He would have been thrown out of the game by the second pitch he threw. It is a pretty amazing story. I love it.”The band has to be a bit leery in writing about contemporary players.“Now we are writing songs and some of them are about a player that is great. You write some of those songs and a year later it is out of date,