Casey at the Bat

Ernest L. Thayer’s poem, “Casey at the Bat” (1888), is not the earliest piece of baseball fiction, but it is likely the best known of the 19th Century, if not of all time. When it was first published in the San Francisco Examiner, it received little attention, but today it is one of the most recognizable poems in American literature. It is a rather short (13 stanzas), concise poem in which each line presents a vivid image of the moment. The poem’s brevity, however, has resulted in a number of unanswered questions: Who was Mudville playing? Was Casey modeled after an actual person? What was Casey’s story, and what happened to him after the game? Since its original publication, many authors and poets have expounded on the original, whether to address unanswered questions, or satisfy some deep-seeded need to see Casey redeemed.

In 1906, sportswriter Grantland Rice penned a sequel, “Casey’s Revenge”, where Casey – now nicknamed “Strike-out” - is given a second chance. In Rice’s story, the team goes into a slump in the days following their famed loss. But in a rematch against the same pitcher a few weeks later, and their team trailing 4-1 in the last inning, Casey gets his redemption: he hits the ball with three men on, to win the game. Rice was such a fan of the poem that he actually wrote a couple of other related poems about Casey, including “Mudville’s Fate” (1910) in which the town folds up after the failure of their team to win.

Two years after "Casey's Revenge", Clarence McDonald of the San Francisco Examiner wrote “Casey – Twenty Years Later”, a poem that features Casey sitting in the stands watching a game when the catcher is hurt and can’t play any longer; Casey volunteers to bat for him with predictable results.

Casey’s restoration from goat to hero is a common theme. Burgess Fitzpatrick’s novella, Casey’s Redemption (Greenwich Book Publishers: 1958) features a grandson making up for Casey’s strikeout by making a winning play. In Dan Gutman’s Casey Back at Bat (HarperCollins: 2009) the great hitter gets a second chance and hits the pitch so hard that it not only travels out of the park, but around the world. An odd tale of Casey’s redemption is “Mighty Casey’s Ghost”, in which Casey returns from the dead to relive the moment of his failure.

On the poem’s 100th anniversary, sportswriter Frank DeFord posed an alternative telling of Casey at the Bat (Sports Illustrated, July 18, 1988) which created a back-story for Casey with that of the song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” He later expanded his article to book form called Casey on the Loose: What Really Might Have Happened (Viking: 1989). In DeFord’s retelling, Casey has a number of adventures in Boston that lead him to that fateful at-bat. In DeFord’s version, Casey strike’s out on a passed ball and the winning runs actually score to give Mudville the win.

From an alternative perspective, there are the works that try and address who may have struck Casey out. Robert Coover, who wrote The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., Jerry Waugh, Prop. (Random House: 1968) penned the short story “McDuff on the Mound” (The Iowa Review: Fall 1971), similarly is Thomas Fronchowiak’s poem, “Thatcher on the Hill” (Baseball Almanac: 2008) And an anonymous author calling himself (or herself) Sparkus, wrote “The Man Who Fanned Casey” sometime around the time DeWolf Hopper made his recording of the Thayer poem. In this work, the pitcher’s name was Hagen and hails from Frogtown. Interestingly, his catcher is named Thatcher.

There's something about this poem that makes it timeless. Countless retellings have been produced, in prose, book, on film and on television, that both retell the original, expound upon it, or re-create it in another setting (sometime, take a look at the Twighlight Zone re-do). Perhaps it's because it's a tale of failure that intrigues us, rather than one of expected success.

Listen to DeWolf Hopper reciting "Casey at the Bat"