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Both Alfred H. Spink’s The National Game (1910) and A.G. Spalding’s America’s National Game (1911), generally regarded as the first attempts at writing a standard history of baseball, cite “Casey at the Bat” as the best baseball poem ever written. Spalding goes so far as to proclaim that “Love has its sonnets galore; War its epics in heroic verse; Tragedy its sombre story in measured line; and Base Ball has ‘Casey at the Bat’.” Ernest L. Thayer’s poem, first published in the San Francisco Examiner on June 3, 1888, gained its initial popularity through the stage performances of comic actor ...(100 of 21802 words)