ESPN: Wilkie: Baseball Project steps up to the plate

and will back Big City Dick: Richard Peterson’s Second Movie?

As a follow-up to The Baseball Project’s buzz-worthy 2008 album of original music about baseball and a U.S. tour last year, the band has come up with a clever way to chronicle the 2010 season.

The talented rock musicians and hard-core baseball fans will be writing and recording one song per month and offering each of their “Broadside Ballads” for free in ESPN.com’s The Life (see inset boxes to download and listen).

“We figured out a way to give ourselves even more work and make less money,” singer and guitarist Scott McCaughey said with a laugh last week during a phone interview from his home in Portland, Ore.

While they finish up their second album later this year, McCaughey (The Minus 5, R.E.M., Young Fresh Fellows) and his Baseball Project teammates Steve Wynn (The Dream Syndicate, Gutterball, Miracle 3), Linda Pitmon (Miracle 3, Golden Smog) and Peter Buck (R.E.M.) will be making musical commentaries on the upcoming baseball season. Singer-guitarist Wynn describes the group as part musicians and part sports journalists.

“I think it will be a lot of fun just to kind of see what’s going on and get fired up about something. And instead of just writing bemused e-mails to each other, we’ll put chords behind it and call it a song,” Wynn said last week by phone from New York.