26. Casey at the Bat

"The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day..." So began "Casey at the Bat, A Ballad of the Republic, Sung in the Year 1888," a poem that appeared in the fourth column of page 4 of the Sunday, June 3, 1888 San Francisco Examiner. The poem that would become the most famous American verse ever written was bylined "Phin" and sandwiched inconspicuously between editorials on the left and Ambrose Bierce's weekly column on the right.

Ernest Lawrence Thayer, or "Phinney," as such classmates as William Randolph Hearst and George Santayana called him, had been the editor of the Harvard Lampoon. After Hearst was kicked out of Harvard for sending personalized chamber pots to several professors, his father gave him the Examiner to run, and the errant heir soon asked Thayer if he would write a humor column for the paper.

It took Thayer half a day to write "Casey." The piece might have been forgotten altogether had not a novelist named Archibald Clavering Gunter clipped it and given it to his actor friend William DeWolf Hopper, who was performing a comic opera entitled Prince Methusalem at New York's Wallack Theatre on August 14, 1888. The Giants and White Stockings had been invited to the show, and Hopper thought the new piece particularly appropriate. Before beginning, though, he congratulated Tim Keefe, who was in attendance, on his feat of 19 straight victories.

Hopper, whose fifth wife was gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (their son Paul Hopper played Paul Drake in the Perry Mason television series), later described his first reading of the poem in his autobiography, Once a Clown, Always a Clown: "When I dropped my voice to B flat, below low C, at 'the multitude was awed,' I remember seeing Buck Ewing's gallant mustachios give a single nervous twitch. And as the house, after a moment of startled silence, grasped the anticlimactic denouement, it shouted its glee."

Had Casey hit the ball out of the park, we might never have heard of Thayer or Hopper or been subjected to the countless parodies of "Casey at the Bat." Hopper hit upon its appeal when he wrote, "There is no more completely satisfactory drama in literature than the fall of Humpty Dumpty." He would go on to recite the poem more than 10,000 times, each time in five minutes, 40 seconds...

Baseball Anecdotes, Daniel Okrent & Steve Wulf

Copyright 1989 by Daniel Okrent

Published  by Oxford University Press (New York), 1989

Image: In 1927, Paramount Pictures made Casey at the Bat, a silent film starring Wallace Beery