Today’s Poem: Casey at the Bat

For Opening Day, the most famous of baseball poems

Cigarette card of George Sisler at bat, 1925 (Wikimedia Commons)

To learn how “Casey at the Bat” became America’s best-known baseball poem — maybe America’s best-known poem of any kind, rivaled only by “A Visit from St. Nicholas” — you have to begin with the fact that a young man named Ernest L. Thayer (1863–1940) went to Harvard.

It’s there in Cambridge…