Mudville Man

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.

"Who is Casey?" wasp-waisted little wives whispered into their husbands' sideburns as young De Wolf Hopper recited the last stanza of a poem called Casey at the Bat in Wallack's Theatre on Broadway one summer night in 1888. It was a gala baseball night in honor of the visiting Chicago White Stockings and the management had clipped the tragi-comic verses out of the San Francisco Examiner for young Hopper to deliver as an added fillip between the acts of the operetta, Prince Methusalem.

Not only wives but even the most seasoned baseballers in the audience wondered who Casey was. Harvardman (1885) Ernest L. Thayer, who had written the poem for the paper his friend Willie Hearst had recently acquired, declared that no real-life Casey existed. But baseball fans down the decades have had to invent not one but many. Up Boston way, they were sure Casey was King Kelly, the Babe Ruth of the '80s, whom the Boston National League club had bought for the unheard of price of $10,000 from the White Stockings in 1887. Almost every community had its Casey and announced it in the public prints.

De Wolf Hopper died three years ago and it was about that time that a wizened little septuagenarian from Silver Springs, Md. walked into a Washington newspaper office and presented himself as the original Casey. Dan Casey had been saying it for 50 years in his native Binghamton, N. Y., where he had worked as a trolley-car conductor since retiring from baseball, but no one had paid much attention. In Washington, however, it was different.

Sportswriters listened to his claim: "I was a left-handed pitcher for the Phillies. I guess you'd call me the Hubbell of my time. We were playing the Giants in the old Philadelphia ball park on August 21, 1887. Tim Keefe was pitching against me and he had a lot of stuff but I was no slow poke myself. It was the last of the ninth and New York was leading 4-to-3. Two men were out and there were runners on second and third. A week before I'd busted up a game with a lucky homer and folks thought I could repeat. . . ."

Baseball bigwigs, eager to round up all forgotten heroes for next year's centennial, decided that Dan Casey had valid claim to baseball immortality. This spring Oldster Casey, now 76, was rewarded with a lifetime pass to all ball parks, was introduced to the U. S. public on a radio program. Last week, the Baltimore Orioles, whose feats have been almost as integral a part of baseball folklore as Casey's, invited the latest Maryland celebrity to stage a revival of Casey-at-the-bat as a prologue to a night game with the Jersey City Giants. It rained on "Casey Night." Dan Casey, neatly garbed in a business suit and Oriole cap, stepped gingerly to the plate, wrapped his gnarled fingers round a bat for the first time in 40 years. From 2,000 throats or more there rose a lusty yell as Oriole Coach Rogers Hornsby, recent manager of the St. Louis Browns, wound up for the special strikeout.

Sticking to the script, Dan Casey found the first two strikes not his style. Then he took liberties with the original version. Mighty Casey, his blue eyes blazing, smacked the ball into the infield.

"You got to get used to these lights if you're going to hit," said Casey, explaining his two strikes. "But I'll admit Hornsby didn't have as much on the ball as Tim Keefe did that time. . . ."

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