Ernest Lawrence Thayer (; August 14, 1863 – August 21, 1940) was an American writer and poet who wrote the poem "Casey" (or "Casey at the Bat"), which is "the single most famous baseball poem ever written" according to the Baseball Almanac, and "the nation’s best-known piece of comic verse—a ballad that began a native legend as colorful and permanent as that of Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan." ==Biography== Thayer was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and raised in nearby Worcester.
However, late 1880s Boston star Mike "King" Kelly is likely as a model for Casey's baseball situations.
He graduated magna cum laude in philosophy from Harvard University in 1885, where he had been editor of the Harvard Lampoon and a member of the theatrical society Hasty Pudding.
Besides being a native of a town close to Boston, Thayer, as a San Francisco Examiner baseball reporter in the off-season of 1887–88, covered exhibition games featuring Kelly.
During November 1887, some of his reportage about a Kelly at-bat has the same ring as Casey's famous at-bat in the poem.
Kelly had also performed as a vaudeville actor, and recited the poem dozens of times. The first public performance of the poem was on August 14, 1888, by actor De Wolf Hopper, on Thayer's 25th birthday.
Thayer's recitation of the poem at a Harvard class reunion in 1895 helps solve the mystery, which lingered into the 20th century, of who had written it. During the mid-1890s, Thayer contributed several other comic poems for Hearst's newspaper New York Journal and then began overseeing his family's mills in Worcester full-time.
Team Sport's First Media Sensation and Baseball's Original Casey at the Bat, reprints a 1905 Thayer letter to a Baltimore scribe who was asking about the poem's roots.
Thayer relocated to Santa Barbara in 1912, where he married Rosalind Buel Hammett and retired.
Ernest Lawrence Thayer (; August 14, 1863 – August 21, 1940) was an American writer and poet who wrote the poem "Casey" (or "Casey at the Bat"), which is "the single most famous baseball poem ever written" according to the Baseball Almanac, and "the nation’s best-known piece of comic verse—a ballad that began a native legend as colorful and permanent as that of Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan." ==Biography== Thayer was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and raised in nearby Worcester.
A 2004 book by Howard W.
On March 31, 2007, Katie Zezima of The New York Times wrote an article called "In 'Casey' Rhubarb, 2 Cities Cry 'Foul!'" on the competing claims of two towns to such renown: Stockton, California, and Holliston, Massachusetts. On the possible model for Casey, Thayer dismissed the notion that any single living baseball player was an influence.
All text is taken from Wikipedia. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License .
Page generated on 2021-08-05