There Is No Joy In Mudville

"Casey at the Bat, A Ballad of the Republic" was first published on June 3, 1888 in San Francisco's Daily Examiner by Ernest Lawrence Thayer, writing under the pseudonym "Phin."

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Since its first public performance later that year by comedian/actor DeWolf Hopper at Wallack's Theatre in New York City it has been performed countless times in venues ranging from ballparks, classrooms, Las Vegas stages, "Saturday Night Live" and a 1946 Disney cartoon classic.

Hopper himself estimates that he performed Casey At The Bat over 10,000 times.

Quite a legacy for a piece which was written in a few hours and intended as filler.

Although Thayer held that the poem was pure fiction, there is a town 90 miles east of San Francisco which was once known as Mudville that had a California League team in 1888. The league also did have players with the names Barrows, Flynn and Cooney, which are the names of the batters to precede Casey to the plate in the verse.