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 that he edited the Harvard Lampoon alongside such brilliant undergraduates as George Santayana (1863–1952). And when his classmate (and business manager of the Lampoon), William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951), took over the San Francisco Examiner in 1887 with his family’s gold-mining money, Thayer followed his friend to California, helping out the fledgling newspaper publisher.

The Examiner is where, on June 3, 1888, Thayer (writing under the penname “Phin,” a college nickname) published a comic poem about an arrogant ballplayer on the Mudville nine. Despite the claims of various players at the time to be the original for Casey — and vario…