The History of "Casey at the Bat"
"Casey at the Bat" by Ernest Lawrence Thayer (1863-1940) was first published in the San Francisco Examiner on June 3, 1888. The byline was Phin, derived from a college nickname of Thayer's.
The poem got little attention until a pair of baseball teams, the New York Giants and the Chicago White Stockings, were invited (in 1888 or early 1889) to be guests at a performance of the comic opera Prince Methusalem, playing at Wallack's Theater on Broadway. De Wolf Hopper, a performer in the show, looking for something special with which he could honor the guests, was shown "Casey at the Bat" by his friend Archibald Gunter. Hopper got such a strong response from reciting the poem that he was soon including it in every performance.
The poem has been the subject of two silent films and several animated films. Sidney Homer put it to music in 1920. In 1953, a short opera, The Mighty Casey, was composed by William Schumann, with libretto by Jeremy Gury. Poems derived from "Casey at the Bat" are numerous. Martin Gardner has published an Annotated Casey at the Bat (New York: Dover, 1967, rev. 1984, 1995), over 200 pages of commentary, parodies, pastiches, and notes on the poem, from which this history has been gleaned.
