"Casey's" Companions and Counterfeits, Part II: The Classical Roots of Baseball Poetry

In previous posts "In Search of 'Casey's" Companions: A Tale of Two Clowns,"  and "In Search of the Counterfeit Casey," Caseyatthe.blog has explored the infancy of baseball balladry. Ernest Thayer,...

¡Viva el 5 de mayo! Y viva la tradición de la Liga Mexicana de Béisbol!

¡Celebramos el 5 de mayo, junto con la historia rica de la Liga Mexicana de Béisbol!  Caseyatthe.blog ha declarado nuestra intención de ver la balada de "Casey" traducida a todos los idiomas de la...

"Casey at the Bat" and its Long Post-Game Show

Caseyatthe.blog exists for the purpose of curating and promoting the best of "Casey" research, parody, and scholarship--the legacy of Ernest Thayer's 1888 saga enigmatically subtitled "A Ballad of...

Emily Dickinson in the Elysian Fields

Poet and translator A. M. Juster has referred to “Casey at the Bat,” as "perhaps the most enduring poem of American popular culture." (Its only rival for that distinction, says Juster, is Clement M...

Song of Our Game: The Ballad of Casey as Imagined by Walt Whitman

“Bold, ambitious, brave, congrats!”  -- John Thorn, Official Historian of Major League Baseball In the spring of 1888--as people from Maryland to Maine dug out of the Great Blizzard which had paral...

In Search of the Counterfeit "Casey"

In Albert Spalding's compendium of American baseball from its origins to the early 20th century[1], baseball' s former star, future Hall-of-Famer (1939), tireless entrepreneur, and foremost impresa...

In Search of "Casey's" Companions: "A Tale of Two Clowns"

The dedicated sleuthing of MLB's official historian, John Thorn, has brought to light a "companion piece" to "Casey at the Bat," dating to October 1889--the month in which the New York Giants won t...

Casey and the Golden West

The notion of Ernest Thayer's "Casey at the Bat" as a literary emblem of America's Golden West occurred to me as I read MLB's official historian John Thorn's recent post, "The Game of the Golden W...

Is sports all about winning? Or all about losing?

Ernest Thayer's classmate George Santayana wrote in an 1894 essay ("Philosophy on the Bleachers") of the inherent drama (and potential tragedy) evoked by all athletic contests. Santayana noted (a...