Headfirst Slide Into Cooperstown On A Bad Bet

This song about infidelity and deception originally was going to name-drop former Major League Baseball player Pete Rose in the title. (Rose was blackballed from baseball after accusations that he gambled on games while both playing for and managing the Cincinnati Reds.) Fall Out Boy changed the song's name because of concerns about the lawsuit brought against OutKast over their 1999 single "Rosa Parks" by the civil rights activist, who was name-dropped in the title. Bassist and primary lyricist Pete Wentz commented to Rolling Stone: "I wanted to see Pete Rose in Cooperstown. I was all about it."

At one time this was titled "Does Your Husband Know?"

Wentz married singer/actress Ashlee Simpson on May 17, 2008. The change in his circumstances influenced his writing, which is reflected on a number of songs on Folie à Deux, including this track. Frontman Patrick Stump explained to MTV News: "Swagger is a great way to describe it, because on the song, he's lyrically adopting a character that has swagger, so I wanted the music to have that swagger. The verse is so confident and funky and forward because the lyric is so full of itself. And then everything stops, and there's a piano breakdown, and it's very melancholy and sad and theatrical, and the lyric shifts to the doubt that's behind all that arrogance. And ultimately, I wanted the music - in conjunction with the lyric - to express that arrogance is usually a mask for terrible insecurity. What I took out of [the lyrics] was that there was something so compelling about the character in the song. Like in Silence of the Lambs, when Hannibal Lecter is talking about how he doesn't kill, he covets. The song is about that - the prowl of chasing a woman. I think it meant, like, this guy is cheating on his girlfriend, but he knows she's not cheating on him. There's this total 'looking into the mirror and trying to convince yourself of absolute lies' kind of thing. People ask all the time, 'Oh, Pete got married, how does that affect the record?' and I think, if anything, he just wanted to point out how lightly people are taking their marriages. No one seems to be worried about what's going on, they just want to have things."