Casey at the Bat

Casey at the Bat, humorous poem about a baseball game, written by Ernest Lawrence Thayer and first published in the San Francisco newspaper The Daily Examiner in 1888. The young actor, comedian, and singer DeWolf Hopper popularized it by reciting the poem on stage. It was the only work by Thayer that found a wide readership, but it has become a quintessential piece of American literature. In 1967 American Heritage magazine described it as “the nation’s best-known piece of comic verse—a ballad that began a native legend as colorful and permanent as that of Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan.”

Ernest Lawrence Thayer

Thayer was born in 1863 and grew up in Massachusetts. He attended Harvard University, where he studied with the philosopher William James and became president and editor of the university’s humor magazine, The Harvard Lampoon. His classmates called him by the nickname “Phinney.” After graduating in 1885 Thayer spent about a a year and a half in San Francisco, working at the Examiner under the management of William Randolph Hearst (whose father, George Hearst, had bought the paper in 1880 before turning it over to his son seven years later). Thayer and William Hearst had been friends at Harvard, where Hearst had been the Lampoon’s business manager. Among other contributions to the Examiner, Thayer wrote ballads that appeared in the Sunday edition about every other week under the byline “Phin.”

In February 1888 Thayer returned to Massachusetts and started working in his family’s wool manufacturing business in Worcester. However, he continued sending his writing to the Examiner, and on June 3 he published “Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic, Sung in the Year 1888.” As with his other ballads, it was attributed to Phin.

“No joy in Mudville”

Beginning with the line “The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day,” the ballad narrates the last inning of a baseball game and is set in the fictional town of Mudville. Mudville’s team is losing 4–2 against an unnamed foe. Two players have failed to make it to first base—“Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same”—leaving the team with two outs. Much to the despair of the fans in the audience, the next two batters are also unremarkable—“the former was a lulu and the latter was a cake.” Miraculously, those hitters manage to get onto second and third bases, putting them both in scoring positions:

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 men saw what had occurred,
There was Jimmy safe at second and Flynn a-hugging third.

Now “mighty Casey,” the team’s best hitter, steps up to the plate as the 5,000 fans cheer wildly. Casey, partly out of arrogance, does not swing at the first two pitches, and the umpire declares them both strikes. Enraged, the fans call for the umpire’s death and declare him a fraud. An overconfident Casey waits for the third and final pitch:

The sneer is gone from Casey’s lip, his teeth are clinched 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.

The game ends on this tragic note of defeat, and the fans go home disappointed: “But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.”

DeWolf Hopper

In July 1888, Jim Kennedy, editor of the New York Sporting Times reprinted an abbreviated version of the poem, changing Casey’s name to Kelly for Mike (“King”) Kelly, a popular player with the Boston Beaneaters, (originally the Boston Red Stockings, now the Atlanta Braves) and Mudville to Boston. That August DeWolf Hopper, who was an obsessive baseball fan, recited Thayer’s original version before an audience at Wallack’s Theatre in New York City. Two baseball teams that Kelly had played for—the Chicago White Stockings (now the Chicago Cubs) and the New York Giants—were in attendance. The performance was a massive success. Hopper continued to recite the ballad on stages and over the radio, likely performing it more than 10,000 times over the next four decades. (In his 1927 memoir Hopper wrote, “The actual number of times is a problem for one of those laid-end-to-end statisticians.”)

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The mystery of Casey and Mudville

The poem soon became ubiquitous in American culture, but hardly anyone knew the author’s identity. Many people claimed to have written it, and others claimed to have inspired Casey’s character. Various towns have put themselves forth as the real-life Mudville. Meanwhile, Thayer, who had received only $5 for its initial publication, had devoted himself to wool manufacturing and did not make a serious effort to claim credit.

Thayer and Hopper were at last introduced at the Worcester Club in Thayer’s hometown in the 1890s. On that occasion, some members at the Worcester Club pressured Thayer to recite “Casey.” Hopper described Thayer as “the most charming of men” in his memoir but said that he had no talent for performance. “In a sweet, dulcet Harvard whisper [Thayer] implored Casey to murder the umpire, and gave this cry of mass animal rage all the emphasis of a caterpillar wearing rubbers crawling on a velvet carpet,” the actor wrote. “He was rotten!”

Also during this meeting, Thayer revealed that the inspiration for his poem was a childhood friend named Samuel Winslow, who had been the captain of Harvard’s baseball team in 1885. Thayer largely dismissed the adulation for his poem, once likening his work as “nonsense” and remarking, “It would be hard to say, all things considered, if it has given me more pleasure than annoyance.” He retired early and moved back to California in 1912. He died in Santa Barbara in 1940.

“Casey” in American culture

Hopper conceded that there were greater poems in American literature, but he wondered whether any would endure longer than “Casey.” Indeed, the poem has been performed and recorded countless times, and the expression “No joy in Mudville” entered the American lexicon. Walt Disney Productions released an adaptation as part of the animated film Make Mine Music in 1946. The composer William Schuman adapted it into the opera The Mighty Casey in 1953.

Numerous famous actors, including Vincent Price and James Earl Jones, have recorded dramatic readings of the poem, as did New York Yankees’ sportscaster Mel Allen. T.S. Eliot and Ray Bradbury are among the writers who produced parodies of “Casey at the Bat.” Perhaps the most imaginative use of the poem was that of magicians Penn and Teller. In the 1980s the duo included in their act an amusing segment in which Penn would recite “Casey at the Bat” while Teller, confined to a straitjacket and suspended upside-down over a bed of nails, attempted to escape his predicament before Penn reached the poem’s end.