Ernest Thayer: Reluctant Author of America’s Favorite Baseball Poem

The comic ballad ‘Casey at the Bat’ entertained the country while actor DeWolf Hopper took it around the country.

Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat.” Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock

In the summer of 1888, little-known columnist Ernest Lawrence Thayer (1863–1940) published a humorous ballad in the San Francisco Examiner under a pen name. It told the story of a baseball hero’s stunning failure.

At first, it seemed destined to disappear with the day’s paper. But “Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic, Sung in the Year 1888” (“Casey at the Bat”) would outlive both its creator’s expectations and his career, becoming the most famous poem about baseball ever written.