Papa Het and Kirk Von Hammett played the Star-Spangled Banner before Lars threw out the first pitch at a San Francisco Giants game.
Ah, baseball -- the great American pastime (unless you're asking High On Fire's Matt Pike). For years, baseball teams have honored their hometown heroes by asking local celebrities to perform the Star-Spangled Banner and throw out the first pitch at a gam. And for the seventh year in a row, the San Francisco Giants have honored America's other major pastime -- listening to Metallica -- by hosting their 'Metallica Night,' complete with guitarists James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett performing the National Anthem and drummer Lars Ulrich tossing out the first pitch.
Listen to Kirk and Papa Het rock San Francisco's Oracle Park with the Star-Spangled Banner below:
Awesome. Pure Hendrix.
After James and Kirk finished up, Lars took the mound and tossed out the first pitch. To his credit, he actually got it to the catcher, which is a surprisingly rare feat among celebrity first-pitch throwers.
Take a look at about the two-minute mark on the video below:
Metallica's new album, the follow-up to 2016's huge Hardwired...To Self-Destruct, is on its way according to Kirk, who in a recent interview said that he hopes the album will come out sooner than later.
“When I was 13 or 14 years old, bands put out albums every year," Kirk told Mixdown. "Seriously, Kiss put out an album every eight months – none of this eight years between albums...None of us are very comfortable with the fact it’s been so long, because that’s a long time. We’re hoping to avoid that this time around. We’re in our third year since since Hardwired…To Self-Destruct. Maybe we can get a bit more focus and go into the studio a bit sooner. I have a ton of material. I’ve over-compensated, so I’m ready to go anytime.”
Bassist Rob Trujillo echoed this sentiment in another interview, saying, "We’ve all vowed to get this one going sooner than later. Now, how soon? I don’t know. We’ve been touring non-stop. It’s been over two years now. At some point, sure, we’ll need to take a little bit of a break. It’s sort of the right thing for us to do because we’ve been going so hard.”
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