Introduction to ‘Casey at the Bat’

Can there be a soul alive on these shores so culturally impaired that he cannot respond with a twinkle of recognition to the immortal lines that begin, “The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day … “?

Probably not, for “Casey at the Bat” may well be the most familiar as well as the most popular of all American poems. It has been recited endlessly on the stage and on radio and television. It has been made into movies and set to music (it even became an opera). And academics have gravely contemplated its interior nuances. It is undeniably a staple of American folklore.

But it was written pseudonymously as newspaper filler by a young scholar who dismissed it as a trifle, never earned more than five dollars for it, and never wrote anything of consequence again. Indeed, not all of the irony in “Casey” is contained within its text.

The poem first appeared under the byline “Phin” in the Sunday edition of the San Francisco Examiner on June 3, 1888. It was unceremoniously sandwiched between an unsigned editorial and an essay by the newspaper’s star columnist, Ambrose Bierce. Local readers found it amusing enough, and there was some speculation that “Mudville” might in reality be Stockton, a particularly cheerless community back then northeast of San Francisco. But the poem was hardly clasped to the bosom of the reading public outside the immediate Bay Area.

It was written, in the first place, only by an accident of fate. The editor-publisher of the Examiner at the time was the not-yet-famous William Randolph Hearst. Before he was expelled from Harvard for pranks that included sending autographed chamber pots to his professors, Hearst had been business manager of the campus humor magazine, the Lampoon, then edited by his friend, Ernest Lawrence Thayer. Unlike Hearst, young Thayer was a brilliant student, a disciple of the philosopher William James, who would graduate Magna Cum Laude in 1885. After Harvard, Thayer sailed for Europe in the vain hope of escaping the prospect of running his father’s profitable woolen mills in Worcester, Mass. He was, after all, a philosopher, not a man of commerce. At least, so he thought Hearst, meanwhile, had inherited the Examiner from his father. Sensing the need for a humor columnist, he cabled Thayer in Paris, imploring him to take the job, at least temporarily. Thayer, still fleeing the family business, accepted. But he stayed in San Francisco barely a year before surrendering at last, in December of 1887, to his responsibilities back in Worcester. For a few months afterward, though, he mailed some remaining ballads and ditties back to the Examiner. The last of these was “Casey at the Bat.”

And that would have been the end of it had not a then popular New York novelist, Archibald Clavering Gunter, been visiting San Francisco at the time of “Casey’s” publication. Amused by the poem, he clipped it from the paper and took it home with him. On August 14, 1888, Gunter was visiting with his friend, the actor Dewolf Hopper, when Hopper told him he desperately needed some baseball material since players from the Giants and Chicago White Stockings were scheduled to be in the theater that night. Gunter met with Colonel McCaull, who owned the theater. McCaull then gave Hopper the “Casey” clipping.

And when on that fateful evening Hopper dropped his voice from B-flat to low-C at the line, “the multitude was awed,” he saw in the audience Giants catcher Buck Ewing’s “gallant mustachios give a single nervous twitch.” Ewing’s mustachios were not alone. In fact, Hopper’s recitation was such a rip-roaring success that he would spend the better part of his remaining 47 years repeating it—by his own estimation, some 10,000 times.

When he first came across the poem, Hopper had no idea who had written it. No one did, except Hearst and Thayer, and for months afterward, many an impostor claimed authorship and Mudvilles popped up everywhere. Finally, an exasperated Thayer stepped forward, commenting sourly that the poem’s “persistent vogue is unaccountable” and that the haggling over authorship “has certainly filled me with disgust.” And no, he said, Casey was not a real person and there was no Mudville, except in his imagination.

Thayer finally retired from the woolen business in 1912 and spent his last years happily reading philosophy in Santa Barbara, California, until he died in 1940. He continued to think of Casey as “nonsense” and told one publisher, “All I ask is never to be reminded of it again.”

Fat chance.

RON FIMRITE is a Senior Writer for Sports Illustrated.

 

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CASEY AT THE BAT
By Ernest Lawrence Thayer

The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day;
the score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play.
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
a sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game.

A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
they thought, if only Casey could get but a whack at that –
they’d put up even money, now, with Casey at the bat.

But Flynn preceded Casey, as did also Jimmy Blake,
and the former was a lulu and the latter was a cake,
so upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat,
for there seemed but little chance of Casey’s getting to the bat.

But Flynn let drive a single, to the wonderment of all,
and Blake, the much despised, tore the cover off the ball;
and when the dust had lifted, and the men saw what had occurred,
there was Jimmy safe at second and Flynn a-hugging third.

Then from five thousand throats and more there rose a lusty yell;
it rumbled through the valley, it rattled in the dell;
it knocked upon the mountain and recoiled upon the flat,
for Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat.

There was ease in Casey’s manner as he stepped into his place;
there was pride in Casey’s bearing and a smile on Casey’s face.
And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,
no stranger in the crowd could doubt ’twas Casey at the bat.

Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hands with dirt;
five thousand tongues applauded when he wiped them on his shirt.
Then while the writhing pitcher ground the ball into his hip,
defiance gleamed in Casey’s eye, a sneer curled Casey’s lip.

And now the leather-covered sphere came hurtling through the air,
and Casey stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there.
Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped—
“That ain’t my style,” said Casey. “Strike one,” the umpire said.

From the benches, black with people, there went up a muffled roar,
like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore.
“Kill him! Kill the umpire!” shouted someone on the stand;
and it’s likely they’d have killed him had not Casey raised his hand.

With a smile of Christian charity great Casey’s visage shone;
he stilled the rising tumult; he bade the game go on;
he signaled to the pitcher, and once more the spheroid flew;
but Casey still ignored it, and the umpire said: “Strike two.”

“Fraud!” cried the maddened thousands, and Echo answered “fraud!”;
but one scornful look from Casey and the audience was awed.
They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles strain,
and they knew that Casey wouldn’t let that ball go by again.

The sneer is gone from Casey’s lip, his teeth are clenched in hate;
he pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate.
And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
and now the air is shattered by the force of Casey’s blow.

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.