Lampoon President and Baseball's Greatest Poet

Baseball's spring training kicked off this week, and, as is tradition, dozens of authors and poets have already begun to put pen to paper to describe the spring ritual.

If he had been born 100 years later, Ernest Lawrence Thayer, Class of 1885, might have been among them. It was Thayer, a Lampoon president who authored the most famous piece of writing about baseball in history--the ballad "Casey at the Bat"--as the "funny man" for the San Francisco Examiner in 1888.

As an undergraduate at Harvard, Thayer achieved literary distinction in almost every way possible. In addition to being president of the Lampoon, Thayer was chosen to be the Class Day Ivy orator. And as a junior, he wrote the Hasty Pudding play.

A friend of Thayer's from the Lampoon named William Randolph Hearst--who was expelled from Harvard and never graduated, because of a fondness for practical jokes--took over the Examiner shortly after Thayer graduated.

Hearst asked his former Poonmate to contribute to the paper's Sunday supplement. And under the alias of "Phin," Thayer published a series of ballads and humorous poems of which only "Casey" made history.

"This graduate of Harvard University wrote a masterpiece which millions of ambitious men wish they had written," William Lyon Phelps, a Yale professor, wrote in 1934 in his definitive poetry anthology. "For Casey's is absolute perfection."

However, "Casey at the Bat" does not owe its popularity just to the quality of its writing. De Wolf Hopper, a well-known musical comedian of the early twentieth century, was given the newspaper clipping of "Casey" to recite for one of his acts.

The recitation was such a success that Hopper made "Casey" the trademark of his famous act. Hooper wrote later in his life that he had recited "Casey" more than 10,000 times.

Although the poem was a national institution by 1900, few people knew who the author was. For years a controversy raged in the pages of sports magazines and newspapers about who actually wrote "Casey."

Many besides Thayer called the poem their brainchild. The most persistent claim was that of George Whitefield D'Vys. Although his story changed in a few times, one version had D'Yys writing the verse in Cambridge Common with his mother. As he finished the poem, a runway horse forced them to leave. D'Yys returned to find his poem stolen.

Even though many writers declared the mystery about the author settled, D'Vys swore he wrote "Casey" all the way to his grave. In fact, he once accused Thayer of stealing his poem form the Cambridge Common.

For Thayer, the fame and controversy surrounding "Casey" proved to be such a problem that the Harvard grad often wished he hadn't written "Casey."

In a letter to Burton Egbert Stevenson, Thayer wrote that the poem's "persistent vogue is simply unaccountable, and it would be hard to say, all things considered, if it has given me more pleasure than annoyance."

But, bowing to popular demand, Thayer recited it at his 50th Harvard reunion.

The poem itself was so well-known that many baseball players attempted to put their names in history by declaring themselves Thayer's "Casey." Thayer confessed, though, that he based the the character on a high school classmate by that name.

Cities have also sought recognition as the official "Mudville" where the infamous ball game was played. Stockton, Calif., held reenactments of the poem throughout the fifties and sixties. In one of these restagings, the "Casey" was masked and the audience member who guessed who was under the mask won a prize.

In fact, the evidence that Stockton was the official "Mudville" is very circumstantial.

More likely, Thayer was simply influenced by the Harvard baseball team while he was in Cambridge.

Thayer's best friend, Samuel E. Winslow, Class of 1885, was captain of the best nine Harvard would field for a long time to come. They won all their games except one which was against a team of semi-professionals.

Thayer wrote: "The verses owe their existence to my enthusiasm for college baseball, not as a player, but as a fan."