John Evangelist Walsh - The Night Casey Was Born: The True Story Behind the Great American Ballad Casey at the Bat

A FTER HED SPENT ALMOST HALF A CENTURY PERFORMING and was nearing his seventieth birthday, the great old-time comic opera star DeWolf Hopper indulged himself in a wry confession. called upon the resurrection morn, he sighed, I shall probably, unless some friend is there to pull thesleeve of my ascension robe, clear my throat and begin, The outlook wasnt brilliant for the Mudville nine that day.

From his hearers, all aware that it was only a slight exaggeration, the remark brought knowing nods and appreciative smiles.Hopper wasnt in the least complaining, they knew. During some forty years, beginning one memorable night in 1888, he had,by his own casual estimate, charmed audiences with the grand old baseball ballad, Casey at the Bat, no fewer than ten thousand times, a figure often quoted. (Much too high, of course, calling for a performance five timesa week every week, unfailingly, for four decades. More like it would be less than half that total, still remarkable.) In theatersall over the country, as a feature added to the nights regular bill or as a curtain call, and on many hundreds of other occasions, formal and informal, hed delighted audienceswith his captivating rendition of the poems fifty-two sprightly lines about the dismal failure of Mudvilles mighty slugger.

He didnt docilely recite the poem. He dramatized it vocally, almost performed it. For him the poem was not a mere literarytext, it was an actual script for a one-act comedy with action and dialogue all neatly laid out, and involving several charactersbesides Casey and the umpire. Solely by giving free rein to his wonderfully flexible baritone voice, his large, mobile featuresmirroring the words, he created a stadium filled with excited fans, his broadly varied delivery bringing to vivid life thevery personality of the celebrated slugger.

In the 118 years since Hoppers first on-stage performance of the poem it has garnered an amazing amount of attention. Separatelyand in collections it has been endlessly reprinted, probably more than any other single piece of fugitive verse (its onlycompetition would be C.C. Moores The Night Before Christmas, and perhaps Poes The Raven). It has been imitated, parodied, plagiarized, fictionalized, dramatized in song and story, set to music as a popular song,and often recited on radio. It has been made into three movies (silent), one starring Hopper himself, and one Wallace Beery.It has been recorded by some dozen per formers, again including Hopper (three times, all of which this writer has studiedwith delight). It has been painted, sketched, and sculpted by an army of professional artists, and made into picture booksfor juvenilesone recent version for children won the prestigious Caldecott Award. In 1953 it reached a level that its most devoted admirers couldnt have predicted: It was made into a serious, if small-scale opera, with a chorus of fifty (musicby William Schumann, libretto by Jerome Gury). It has also been the basis for a full-scale ballet.

Hopper was not the poems author, but without him the familiar mock-heroic portrait of the great Caseylike a monarch advancingto the bat, in his lordly way calming the maddened thousands in the stands after hed taken two strikes, then ingloriouslystriking outmight never have become the classic that it is: baseballs favorite poem and Americas best-known, best-lovedcomic ballad.

Not to be slighted is the poems own peculiar literary excellence, a factor not always admitted or remembered. At first blushit may seem to lack that quality of high seriousness supposed to underlie superior poetry, but its there, all right, agoodly portion of it, between and behind the lines, quietly assumed, for otherwise the poem wouldnt work at all. High seriousness! If the true baseball fan feels serious about anything its that moment of nerve-wracking anticipation when, as in thepoem, his team is behind in late innings, the bases are loaded, and the Great Man is coming up! Judged on its own level, intone, pace, nuance, descriptive power, sharpness of imagery, and prosodic skill, Casey is every bit the equal of loftier works, a Kipling ballad, say, or a Browning soliloquy. Ranging it beside Whittiers Barefoot Boy, or parts of his Snowbound, or something of Frosts, his Mending Wall or Birches, is no great exaggeration. Some of Wordsworths things are not out of reach.

Despite Hopper, a lesser composition would never have gained for its hero the stature in Americas consciousnessalong with such as Paul Bunyan, John Henry, and Johnny Appleseedachieved by Casey.

Remarkably, the poems author, Ernest L. Thayera Massachusetts man and only twenty-four years old when he wrote the poemproducednothing else that comes near his masterpiece. His other poems, or