This mock heroic poem by Ernest Laurence
Thayer (1863-1940) was first published in the San Francisco Examiner on
June 3, 1888, and Casey at the Bat has been baseball's most famous poem
ever since. Its initial popularity was due as much to Shakespearian actor
De Wolf Hopper, who included the thirteen-stanza poem in his repertoire,
as it was to poet Thayer, a former editor of the Harvard Lampoon. Everyone
knows that there was no joy in Mudville when the mighty Casey struck out,
but few are aware that Thayer patterned his fabled slugger on a real
player, Daniel Maurice Casey, who was still posing for newspaper
photographers fifty years after the poem's initial publication.
Oh! Somewhere in this favored land the
sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and
somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and
somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville - mighty
Casey has struck out.
Dan Casey, a native of Binghamton, New York, holds no records worthy of
recording - not even as a strike out king. He was a pitcher and an
outfielder for Detroit and Philadelphia, but his career was overshadowed
by the exploits of his older brother, Dennis, an outfielder for Baltimore
and New York. Casey died in 1943, when he was seventy-eight, in
Washington, D.C. As for Thayer, he was paid only five dollars for his
poem, which De Wolf Hopper recited over 5,000 times. There have been more
than a score of variations on his poem published since he wrote it.