Casey at the Bat

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Posted By: Howard W. Rosenberg

The book looks like a great read, because that's the author's style. The only problem is that it's not to be taken as truth. Reviewing the book in the Tampa Tribune on February 25, veteran newspaper writer Roger K. Miller declared:

"The Night Casey Was Born" is really like a long essay and has the essayist's personal touch and tone. There is, however, considerable padding, in book design and in accounts of stage productions and 120-year-old baseball games.

In two places where sources are lacking, the author, using "informed insight," imagines conversations that might have taken place. These are, to be blunt, not helpful.

As Walsh notes, "Casey at the Bat" marries rhythm and rhyme to the arch and stilted newspaper phrasing of the time - baseball bromides such as "tore the cover off the ball" and "leather-covered sphere."

Therein lies much of its charm, and within that limited but worthy range of explicating how that charm was exploited to the poem's renown lies the appeal of this book.

[End of heart of review]

The best book about the poem's origins is a book that does not even appear in the above book's credits and likely was not consulted by the author: Jim Moore and Natalie Vermilyea's 1994 Ernest Thayer's "Casey at the Bat": Background and Characters of Baseball's Most Famous Poem.

There is one great historical debate related to the poem that, as far as I know, has not been adequately presented in any book related to the poem: The coventional wisdom is that the characters in the poem are named for players who Thayer (as a San Francisco Examiner sportswriter within a year prior to writing the poem) saw playing ball in Stockton, Calif. (there is an uncanny overlap between the players in the poem and the players on Stockton's team around that time), but there is an alternative view that Holliston, Mass. was the original Mudville.

I happen to have argued in my Kelly bio that:

"Although Thayer said he literally chose the name 'Casey' after a non-player of Irish ancestry he once knew, open to debate is who, if anyone, he modeled Casey's baseball situations after. The best big league candidate is Kelly, the most colorful, top player of the day of Irish ancestry. Thayer, in [a] 1905 letter, singles out Kelly as showing 'impudence' in claiming to have written the poem. If he still felt offended, Thayer may have steered later comments away from connecting Kelly to it. I did not find Kelly claiming to have been the author."

The Walsh book doesn't make any effort to present any argument for why Kelly should be considered the model for the poem's title character, and yet the 1994 book went to great lengths in exploring possible alternatives.