Mythical ‘Casey’ was baseball’s first fallen star

Ernest Lawrence Thayer sat at his desk in the San Francisco Examiner newsroom and wondered what to write. It was an important decision because young publisher William Randolph Hearst was paying his former Harvard classmate $5 a day to compose clever things.

Thayer’s thoughts slipped back to his high school days in Worcester, Mass., a few years earlier. A certified WASP, he had started a pamphlet in which he ridiculed a burly Irish student named Daniel Casey. There had been a heated confrontation that left Thayer shaken. At its end, Casey stomped off just short of fisticuffs.

Now Thayer pulled out a sheet of paper, licked the nib of his pen and began putting down his wordy title: “Casey at the Bat, A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888.” Then came the opening verse:

The outlook wasn‘t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day;

The score stood four to two with but one more inning to play.

And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,

A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game. …

The 13-stanza, 52-line poem was published on Page4 of the Examiner on June3, 1888. One hundred seventeen years later, it remains a classic of American poetry and the most famous baseball verse.

Only two challengers come close: the song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” by Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer in 1908 and Franklin P. Adams’ “Tinker to Evers to Chance” rhyme published in the New York Evening Mail the same year. But each of these pales in both length and content to “Casey.”

As with most legends, facts collide with fancy where “Casey” is concerned. Various versions have been published over the decades, but the original seems the most accurate. For years, baseball fans tried to identify the “real” Casey, with 1880s star Mike Kelly considered the likeliest candidate. But in 1935, five years before his death at 72, Thayer insisted there was no such person.

“The poem has absolutely no basis in fact,” he wrote at the time. “The verses owe their existence to my enthusiasm for college baseball. In my brief connection with the Examiner, I put out large quantities of nonsense …”

But it hardly matters, several lifetimes later, whether Casey was a real person or a figment. In one sense, he will endure as long as baseball is played as its quintessential figure of failure. Talk about long slumps! This poor guy never gets a hit.

Thayer must share the credit for the poem’s longevity, however, with a young stage actor named DeWolf Hopper, who obtained permission from Thayer to recite it without paying the author royalties and did so 40,000 times by his own estimate before his death in 1945.

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