Throwback Thursday: The Enduring Appeal of "Casey at the Bat"

Each week, VICE Sports takes a look back at an important event from sports history for Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. You can read previous installments here.

On June 3, 1888, in a newspaper that had reportedly been acquired eight years earlier by a business magnate as part of a poker debt and then passed down to his 23-year-old son, a baseball poem appeared. It was written by a man named Ernest Lawrence Thayer, who had not published any poetry of note beforehand and would not author anything particularly brilliant afterward.

Thayer and the newspaper's young owner, one William Randolph Hearst, had mingled at Harvard before their careers converged at the San Francisco Examiner,where Thayer worked as the humor columnist for two years before publishing this, his final piece for the paper. It was a long-lined rhyming comic ballad about a powerful slugger who comes to the plate with the game on the line only to fail miserably, in epic and classical fashion. It was titled "Casey at the Bat," and nearly 130 years after its publication, it remains the definitive poem about our national pastime.

Thayer's verse was part of a movement by Hearst to utilize populist poetry as a way of gaining readership; it was targeted at a wide audience. A year earlier, the Examiner had published "The Man With the Hoe," a poem about the oppression of labor by Edwin Markham that had been circulated nationwide. "Casey" caught fire in the same way. By August of 1888, it was being performed onstage in New York City, and it would eventually bleed into nearly every aspect of popular culture. But that doesn't answer the central question that still lingers among scholars and poets: Is "Casey at the Bat" just a cultural touchstone, or is it actually worthy as a piece of art?

"I think 'Casey at the Bat' is a damned good poem," California poet laureate Dana Gioia told VICE Sports. "It's not Yeats' 'Sailing to Byzantium,' but it doesn't have to be. It's the finest poem ever written about baseball. It's at the center of the baseball canon. It's very easy for a literary person to condescend to 'Casey at the Bat,' but no poem remains universally popular for more than 100 years unless it has considerable merit."

So what is it about "Casey" that so resonates today? How is it that baseball—which inspires a raft of poetic and literary musing, some good, some terrible—is so brilliantly captured within the narrative arc of Mighty Casey's journey to home plate and back? It's not easy thing to define, but part of it, at least for current New York Times Magazine poetry editor Matthew Zapruder, is that 'Casey' was one of the first poems he ever heard as a kid. It's structured in what Zapruder refers to as an "amended ballad" form, meaning that the lines are longer than they would be in a normal ballad, and the rhyme scheme is AABB.

"The effect," Zapruder says, "is basically mock grandiose, super puffed up, and ridiculous." In a way, then, it is almost "a parody of poetry in general, or of what people think of as poetry: overblown language about big subjects."

And yet what makes it lasting is that amid all that overblown language, there also is beauty. Line to line, Zapruder says, Thayer alternates between high and low language, which adds to the comic effect. The language also tends to mimic the subject itself, this story of an incredibly arrogant slugger victimized by his own self-regard. It builds up as the hitters (Flynn and Blake) who precede Casey in the Mudville lineup get on base; it swells as Casey takes that first pitch for a strike—"From the benches, black with people, there went up a muffled roar/like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore"—and it culminates in the famous final verse, which has been mimicked and co-opted hundreds of times since its publication:

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
the band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
and somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
but there is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has struck out.

Maybe, as Zapruder claims, you can see "Casey" as a poem that speaks to the way we think about poetry itself, a parody of form, structure, and pomposity. Maybe that's enough to recommend it to scholars, who haven't regarded it with much seriousness over the years. But there's also something even more basic going on here, as Gioia points out: "Casey" epitomizes the agony of being a baseball fan.

"Baseball is a magnificently slow and excruciating game that inflicts enormous psychic pain on its admirers," Gioia says. "It's a combination of its charming narrative and its ability to get deep into the psyche of a fan. Casey is Achilles, Lancelot, and Roland—he's this great hero like the ones out of classic literature, whose lives end tragically. There's a resonance to it."

Poetry like this—popular poetry that appeals to the masses—was largely mocked in the years after the publication of "Casey," amid the rise of the modernist movement, according to Gioia. "Poets lost their ability to talk to a nonliterary audience," he says. "It diminished both poetry and the culture."

Which is perhaps part of why "Casey" survives as a crucial baseball artifact. The scholars who proscribe the canon may never regard it as great poetry, but it is, as Zapruder says, "still a lot of fun."

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