"Delhi Belly"& more from CBI ROUNDUP

[Joseph McCollum]

>---------------------------------------------
>CASEY AT THE BAT (continued)
>
>    FWIW, this is from the C.B.I. ROUNDUP, 18 February 1943, pg. 8,
>cols. 2-4:
>
>_DEATH CLAIMS ORIGINAL "CASEY AT THE BAT"_
>     WASHINGTON--Daniel M. Casey, 80, original of the famous poem
>"Casey at the Bat," by Philadelphia Sportswriter Ernest Thayer, died
here.
>     Casey, a pitcher, entered professional baseball with the
>Wilmington Eastern League in 1884.  He reached Philadelphia in 1887,
winning 38,
>losing 12 and tieing (sic) two.  His immortalized strike-out occurred
when he
>was batting for the Phillies against the Giants in the same year.
>     Thayer cast Casey in the hero role because he broke up the game
>with Boston the previous week with a homer.  But Casey wasn't really a
>slugger at all--his lifetime batting average was under .200.

In a book called "American Ballads," (written 1952) Charles O'Brien
Kennedy,
remembering his youth, conjectures that Casey was Mike "King" Kelley of
the Boston
(NL?) team.  Kelley was the highest-paid player of his day.  I'll try to
get the exact
quotation.  Thayer was not a Philadelphia sportswriter.  He had written
for the San Francisco examiner, but had returned to his native
Massachusetts at the time he wrote Casey in May 1888.  The poem was
published in the SF Examiner in June 1888.

A pitcher with a lifetime average of under .200 wouldn't be expected to
make a clutch hit.  It makes sense that Casey would be a "star" player
who didn't live up to expectations.


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