Casey at the Bat


"Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888" is a baseball poem written in 1888 by Ernest Thayer. First published in The San Francisco Examiner on June 3, 1888, it was later popularized by DeWolf Hopper in many vaudeville performances. It has become one of the best-known poems in American literature. The poem was originally published anonymously.

Synopsis

A baseball team from the fictional town of "Mudville" is losing by two runs in its last inning. Both the team and its fans, a crowd of 5,000, believe they can win if Casey, Mudville's star player, gets to bat. However, Casey is scheduled to be the fifth batter of the inning, and the first two batters fail to get on base. The next two batters are perceived to be weak hitters with little chance of reaching base to allow Casey a chance to bat.
Surprisingly, Flynn hits a single, and Blake follows with a double that allows Flynn to reach third base. Both runners are now in scoring position and Casey represents the potential winning run. Casey is so sure of his abilities that he does not swing at the first two pitches, both called strikes. On the last pitch, the overconfident Casey strikes out swinging, ending the game and sending the crowd home unhappy.

Text

The text is filled with references to baseball as it was in 1888, which in many ways is not far removed from today's version. As a work, the poem encapsulates much of the appeal of baseball, including the involvement of the crowd. It also has a fair amount of baseball jargon that can pose challenges for the uninitiated.
This is the complete poem as it originally appeared in The Daily Examiner. After publication, various versions with minor changes were produced.

Inspiration

Thayer said he chose the name "Casey" after a non-player of Irish ancestry he once knew, and it is open to debate who, if anyone, he modeled the character after. It has been reported that Thayer's best friend Samuel Winslow, who played baseball at Harvard, was the inspiration for Casey.
Another candidate is National League player Mike "King" Kelly, who became famous when Boston paid Chicago a record $10,000 for him. He had a personality that fans liked to cheer or jeer. After the 1887 season, Kelly went on a playing tour to San Francisco. Thayer, who wrote "Casey" in 1888, covered the San Francisco leg for the San Francisco Examiner.
Thayer, in a letter he wrote in 1905, mentions Kelly as showing "impudence" in claiming to have written the poem. The author of the 2004 definitive bio of Kelly—which included a close tracking of his vaudeville career—did not find Kelly claiming to have been the author.

Plagiarism

A month after the poem was published, it was reprinted as "Kelly at the Bat" in the New York Sporting Times.
Aside from omitting the first five verses, the only changes from the original are substitutions of Kelly for Casey, and Boston for Mudville. King Kelly, then of the Boston Beaneaters, was one of baseball's two biggest stars at the time.
In 1897, the magazine Current Literature noted the two versions and said, "The locality, as originally given, is Mudville, not Boston; the latter was substituted to give the poem local color."

Pre-publication version

Sportswriter Leonard Koppett claimed in a 1979 article that the published poem omits 18 lines penned by Thayer which change the entire theme of the poem. Koppett said the full version of the poem takes the pitch count on Casey to full as his uncle Arnold stirs up wagering action in the stands before a wink passes between them and Casey throws the game.

Live performances

gave the poem's first stage recitation on August 14, 1888, at New York's Wallack Theatre as part of the comic opera Prinz Methusalem in the presence of the Chicago and New York baseball teams, the White Stockings and the Giants, respectively; August 14, 1888 was also Thayer's 25th birthday. Hopper became known as an orator of the poem, and [|recited] it more than 10,000 times before his death.
On stage in the early 1890s, baseball star Kelly recited the original "Casey" a few dozen times and not the parody. For example, in a review in 1893 of a variety show he was in, the Indianapolis News said, "Many who attended the performance had heard of Kelly's singing and his reciting, and many had heard De Wolf Hopper recite 'Casey at the Bat' in his inimitable way. Kelly recited this in a sing-song, school-boy fashion." Upon Kelly's death, a writer would say he gained "considerable notoriety by his ludicrous rendition of 'Casey at the Bat,' with which he concluded his `turn’ at each performance."
During the 1980s, the magic/comedy team Penn & Teller performed a version of "Casey at the Bat" with Teller struggling to escape a straitjacket while suspended upside-down over a platform of sharp steel spikes. The set-up was that Penn Jillette would leap off his chair upon finishing the poem, releasing the rope which supported Teller, and send his partner to a gruesome death if he wasn't free by that time. The drama of the performance was taken up a notch after the third or fourth stanza, when Penn Jillette began to read out the rest of the poem much faster than the opening stanzas, greatly reducing the time that Teller had left to work free from his bonds.
On July 4, 2008, Jack Williams recited the poem accompanied by the Boston Pops during the annual Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular at Boston's Fourth of July Celebration.
On July 14, 2013, the jam rock band Furthur performed the poem as part of a second-set medley in center field of Doubleday Field in Cooperstown, New York.

Recordings

The first recorded version of "Casey at the Bat" was made by Russell Hunting, speaking in a broad Irish accent, in 1893; an can be accessed from the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara Library.
DeWolf Hopper's more famous recorded recitation was released in October 1906.
In 1946, Walt Disney released a recording of the narration of the poem by Jerry Colonna, which accompanied the studio's animated cartoon adaptation of the poem.
In 1973, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra commissioned its former Composer-in-Residence, Frank Proto, to create a work to feature Baseball Hall-of-Famer Johnny Bench with the orchestra. The result "Casey At The Bat – an American Folk Tale for Narrator and Orchestra" was an immediate hit and recorded by Bench and the orchestra. It has since been performed more than 800 times by nearly every major and Metropolitan orchestra in the U.S. and Canada.
In 1980, baseball pitcher Tug McGraw recorded Casey at The Bat—an American Folk Tale for Narrator and Orchestra by Frank Proto with Peter Nero and the Philly Pops.
In 1996, actor James Earl Jones recorded the poem with Arranger/Composer Steven Reineke and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra.
In 1998, actor Sir Derek Jacobi recorded the poem with Composer/Arranger Randol Alan Bass and the National Symphony of London, with the composer conducting. This work, titled "Casey at the Bat" has been recorded by the Boston Pops Orchestra, Keith Lockhart conducting.
In 2013, Dave Jageler and Charlie Slowes, both radio announcers for the Washington Nationals, each made recordings of the poem for the Library of Congress to mark the 125th anniversary of its first publication.

Mudville

A rivalry of sorts has developed between two cities claiming to be the Mudville described in the poem.
Residents of Holliston, Massachusetts, where there is a neighborhood called Mudville, claim it as the Mudville described in the poem. Thayer grew up in nearby Worcester, Massachusetts, where he wrote the poem in 1888; his family owned a wool mill less than a mile from Mudville's baseball field.
However, residents of Stockton, California—which was known for a time as Mudville prior to incorporation in 1850—also lay claim to being the inspiration for the poem. In 1887, Thayer covered baseball for The Daily Examiner—owned by his Harvard classmate William Randolph Hearst—and is said to have covered the local California League team, the Stockton Ports. For the 1902 season, after the poem became popular, Stockton's team was renamed the Mudville Nine. The team reverted to the Mudville Nine moniker for the 2000 and 2001 seasons. The Visalia Rawhide, another California League team, currently keep Mudville alive by playing in Mudville jerseys on June 3 each year.
Despite the towns' rival claims, Thayer himself told the Syracuse Post-Standard that "the poem has no basis in fact."

Adaptations

The poem has been adapted to diverse types of media:

Books

For a relatively short poem apparently dashed off quickly, "Casey at the Bat" had a profound effect on American popular culture. It has been recited, re-enacted, adapted, dissected, parodied, and subjected to just about every other treatment one could imagine.

Sequels

"Casey's Revenge", by Grantland Rice, gives Casey another chance against the pitcher who had struck him out in the original story. It was written in 1906, and its first known publication was in the quarterly magazine The Speaker in June 1907, under the pseudonym of James Wilson. In this version, Rice cites the nickname "Strike-Out Casey", hence the influence on Casey Stengel's name. Casey's team is down three runs by the last of the ninth, and once again Casey is down to two strikes—with the bases full this time. However, he connects, hits the ball so far that it is never found.
Of the many parodies made of the poem, some of the notable ones include:
There are three known translations of the poem into a foreign language, one in French, written in 2007 by French Canadian linguist Paul Laurendeau, with the title Casey au bâton, and two in Hebrew. One by the sports journalist Menachem Less titled "התור של קייסי לחבוט" , and the other more recent and more true to the original cadence and style by Jason H. Elbaum called קֵיסִי בַּמַּחְבֵּט .

Names

describes in his autobiography how his original nickname "K.C." evolved into "Casey". It was influenced not just by the name of the poem, which was widely popular in the 1910s, but also because he tended to strike out frequently in his early career so fans and writers started calling him "strikeout Casey".

Contemporary culture

Games

The poem is referenced in the Super Nintendo Entertainment System game EarthBound, where a weapon is named the Casey Bat, which is the strongest weapon in the game, but will only hit 25% of the time.
Enter the Gungeon features a weapon called "Casey," taking the form of a baseball bat. The quote "Batting.50" is displayed when the weapon is picked up.

Television

A recurring character in the Pokémon anime, a girl who is a very enthusiastic fan of baseball, is named "Casey" in the English version in reference to the poem.
A baseball-themed episode of The Twilight Zone was named The Mighty Casey in reference to the poem's lead character, though the plot is unrelated.
In the show Friends, Ross clarifies how to spell "Casey" as in "at the bat" in the Season 2, episode 14 titled "The One with the Prom Video."
In the show Containment, Season 1, episode 6 takes its name, “He Stilled the Rising Tumult”, from the poem.

Theme parks

On July 11, 1996, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp depicting "Mighty Casey." The stamp was part of a set commemorating American folk heroes. Other stamps in the set depicted Paul Bunyan, John Henry, and Pecos Bill.