Ranking the Best Sports Theme Music

7. Baseball Tonight

The theme still harkens back to the halcyon days of ESPN, when Baseball Tonight was your vessel to find out who won, who lost, and what the stats were before the paper arrived at your doorstep the next morning. In the era of, like, Ken Griffey Jr. and Frank Thomas and their contemporaries, it was a treat when that organ hit.

6. Monday Night Football

There was that couple-year interlude in between problematic Hank Williams Jr. comments that we weren’t greeted to the game with the knowledge that all our rowdy friends are here for Monday Night, and for some inexplicable reason it felt like something was missing. Time apparently healed enough wounds, and the MNF theme has returned.

5. NFL on Fox

The more beefed up, dramatic version of the sad injury music. A few years ago, then-Deadspin writer John Koblin wrote about the origins of this theme, and that story remains a must-read for sports media nerds — the theme is described in the piece as Batman on Steroids.

4. CBS NCAA Tournament

This theme is great in its own right, but gets an added bump because those first four days of the Tournament are arguably the most wonderful time of the year. Wall to wall games, frenetic gambling action, pizza and wing delivery. You can hear this theme in July and think about Pizza Hut.