Royce Clayton is an entertainment maven, has set his eyes on custom walk-up music

Royce Clayton is creating custom walk-up music

By Michael Clair

December 15, 2015

Among people with dreams of playing Major League Baseball, one of the favorite topics of conversation is walk-up music. While it's hard to imagine hitting a 95-mph fastball, it's easy to picture strolling to the plate as "Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me" plays on the loudspeakers.

What -- you don't imagine coming to the plate to The Smiths?

Royce Clayton is looking to modernize all of that by one-upping the entrance music. And he plans on doing it by creating custom songs for players with his company MUSIQ Locker.

They've already worked on bespoke jams for Jimmy Rollins and Chris Carter, and have tunes for David Ortiz, Mike Trout and others on the way. Said Clayton in an interview with Rolling Stone:

"We do research on the player's previous walk-up songs, see what they're using currently and we start assimilating some of those beats and rhythms to see what they like. Once we've figured that part out, we engage them on the creative part, like, 'What's your nickname? Do you want your nickname in it? Do you want your number included?'"

Sadly, unless Clayton is going the Nathan Fielder/Weird Al route as a parody artist, he is probably not working on an update of The Notorious B.I.G.'s "Big Poppa" to "Big Papi." But this also means that we may one day have a song that features the lyrics like, "Don't touch my head, I'm Adrian Beltre /Seriously, don't touch my head. I already asked nicely."

But for Clayton, who has already had a 17-year Major League career and starred as Miguel Tejada in "Moneyball," he's only a few short steps away from the baseball equivalent of an EGOT. Now all we need is for Clayton to produce a one-man show called, "Have Glove, Will Travel (A Whole Lot)" about his career playing for 11 different teams.