The story of how Ernest Thayer’s verses first ended up in the Sun, in 1888, is a curious one.
In August 1888, The New York Sun published a poem, attributed to “Anonymous,” called “Casey at the Bat.” And the story of how it ended up in the Sun is a curious one.
The light verses were actually by Ernest Thayer (1863–1940), a Harvard classmate of William Randolph Hearst, who followed his friend to California when Hearst took over the San Francisco Examiner in 1887. Writing under the penname “Phin,” Thayer put the comic poem in the June 3, 1888, issue of the Examiner: an account of an arrogant ballplayer who plays for the Mudville nine. Despite the claims of various players at the time to be the original for Casey — and various towns, down to the present, to be the original for Mudville — Thayer always insisted the story and its details were entirely fictional.
The age of bitter newspaper rivalry was coming into full swing. (It would escalate dramatically when Hearst bought the New York Journal in 1895, and began to compete directly with other New York publications.) But, according to the best-documented account, a man named Archibald Gunter, visiting California, clipped the poem from the Examiner and gave to a friend, the comedian De Wolf Hopper, on his return to New York. And Hopper added it to an August 1888 performance of “Prinz Methusalem,” a loose English vaudeville adaptation of the 1877 comic operetta by the Viennese waltz-composer Johann Strauss II. Members of the hometown New York Giants and the visiting Chicago White Stockings baseball teams had announced they would be attending the show, and Hopper wanted to tease them with something about baseball. A Sun writer in the audience transcribed the poem (slightly inaccurately), and the paper immediately ran it, giving the poem its first national publication.
Only over the next few years would the authorship and original of Thayer’s poem become widely known. And something even more than widely known. Thayer is remembered for little else, and the poem has gone on to become the best-known, most-performed, and most-reprinted of baseball poems. It’s in a trotting heptameter, a seven-foot meter that has some serious uses (think of Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” our Poem of the Day last September) but would eventually come to seem primarily a comic meter in English (think of Robert Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee”). Something about the rush of Thayer’s couplets, arranged in quatrains, caught the public’s ear at the time — and still does.
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