Joy & Pain in Mudville

So what if Casey never went to bat? The sweet poetry is in the story.

The JetHawks will open a three-game series against the Mudville Nine tonight in Stockton, a city that has long claimed the legend of Casey as its own.

The JetHawks will watch the Nine take the field wearing jerseys with the word Mudville stitched across the front.

They'll see the Mudville mascot - Mighty Casey - with an over-sized, plastic head, chiseled jaw and signature handlebar mus-tache, proudly parading around the stadium while fans hail him as a hometown hero.

The JetHawks might even hear someone from the Mudville organi-zation recite Ernest Lawrence Thayer's classic poem, "Casey at the Bat," as they did during their last trip to Stockton on the Fourth of July.

It's a sham.

Well, sort of.

"Casey at the Bat" was first published in a Sunday edition of the San Francisco Examiner on June 3, 1888. Thayer signed the piece "Phin," and didn't claim au-thorship for a number of years.

Eighty-five miles east of San Francisco in Stockton, there was a first-year California League team that was then known as the Stock-ton Baseball Club. Thayer, an avid baseball fan who frequented games while he was a student at Harvard University, was known to take in weekend games at the team's first Stockton home at Ban-ner Island.

"It was always thought that the author based the poem on some-thing he had seen in Stockton," California League historian Bill Weiss said.

"The Stockton club had a pitch-er named Jack Flynn. Some writ-ers and the management in Stock-ton have said he inspired the Flynn character," Weiss added as he scanned a copy of Stockton's original roster. "Another player, Bob Blakiston, is believed to be the inspiration for Jimmy Blake's character."

Members of the 1888 Stockton Baseball Club may have inspired some of the characters in Thayer's poem, but Casey certainly wasn't one of them.

"There was no Casey on that team," said Tim Wiles, director of research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Coopers-town, N.Y., a man who is consid-ered by many to be the nation's leading expert on the subject. "We know Thayer watched that Stock-ton team, and it seems pretty evi-dent that that's where he got the names for some of his players, but there was no Casey in Stockton."

Before his death in 1940, Thay-er made this clear in a letter he wrote to the Syracuse Post-Stan-dard.

"The poem has no basis in fact," Thayer wrote. "The only Casey ac-tually involved, I am sure about him, was not a ballplayer. He was a big, dour, Irish lad of my high school days.

"While in high school, I com-posed and printed myself a very tiny sheet, less than two inches by three. In one issue, I ventured to gag, as we used to say, this Casey boy. He didn't like it and he told me so, and, while he discoursed, his big, clenched, red hands were white at the knuckles.

"This Casey's name never again appeared in the Monohippic Ga-zette. But I suspect the incident, many years after, suggested the ti-tle for the poem. It was a taunt thrown to the winds. God grant he never catches me."

Casey may have swung a big stick in Worchester, Mass., where Thayer was raised, but it wasn't used for whacking baseballs as the poem suggests.
Lies lead to the truth

As tragic as Casey's tale turns out to be, there was no shortage of players claiming to be the inspira-tion for the poem's leading man. There are two players who have been mentioned most often in this regard.

Many East Coast fans believed the real-life Casey was Mike Kel-ly, a career .317 hitter who played for the Boston Beaneaters when the poem was first published.

Another player, Dan Casey - a pitcher, for crying out loud - shamelessly attempted to sell him-self as the Casey from the poem. And while he would have been a likely strikeout candidate, it turns out he was just the Casey from the Philadelphia Quakers, not a mighty hitter at all with 11 hits and 28 strikeouts in 118 at-bats during the 1888 season.

"Dan Casey," Wiles said, "par-ticularly claimed to be the inspira-tion for `Casey at the Bat.' But while he was out there claiming to be the inspiration for Casey, Thay-er was out saying he wasn't. Gen-erally, people are inclined to take the author's word for it."

For many years this was a prob-lem, though, because Thayer wasn't claiming the poem as his own - even while many others were happy to do so in his absence.

All this deception and plagia-rism left Thayer much dismayed. He wasn't particularly proud of his baseball ballad, and likely would have gone to the grave without ever claiming authorship if not for the numerous phonies who tried to pass off his work and his character as their own.

"There must have been times in his life when he wished he had never written `Casey' as a harm-less filler for the San Francisco Examiner," the late baseball histo-rian Lee Allen once wrote of Thay-er. "He had no idea he was to be-come the center of a storm of con-troversy that would rage for more than half a century.

"A shy, cultured gentleman of unusual sensitivity and intelli-gence, he was destined to spend his life warding off the spurious claims of frauds who maintained either they had written the poem themselves or inspired the charac-ter of Casey."

By the turn of the century, the poem, its authorship still un-known, had become a cash cow for a man named William De Wolf Hopper.

A friend of Hopper's, Archibald Clavering Gunter, gave Hopper a copy of the poem less than a year after its publication. Hopper is said to have recited the poem more than 10,000 times, and, in 1906, he released a recorded version that climbed as high as No. 3 on the Billboard Charts. In 1916, Hopper even starred in a silent film ver-sion of "Casey at the Bat."
Stockton claims the name

When Kevin O'Malley and his cousin, Tom Seidler, purchased the Stockton Ports on Nov. 3, 1998, they immediately changed the team's name to the Mudville Nine.

"Obviously, `Casey at the Bat' is fictional, but there are similar names from both the poem and the Stock-ton Baseball Club of 1888," said O'Malley, Mudville's general manag-er and a grandson of Walter O'Mal-ley, who moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1958. "Although there is some mystique behind it, I think most would agree that the most like-ly home is Stockton.

"There are locations across the U.S. that claim to be Mudville, but we have a pretty strong tie here and we're going to use it," Kevin O'Mal-ley said.

And so have Stockton city offi-cials, who secured All-America City status in 1999 after making a pre-sentation in Philadelphia that was largely based on baseball.

"They used our mascot and talked about the city of Stockton, the home of this great American poem," O'Malley said.

So what if they can't prove it?

"Nobody can say for sure that this is where `Casey at the Bat' hap-pened, because it actually didn't happen," Wiles said. "But if any-body has a legitimate claim to it, Stockton has as legitimate a claim as anyone else."

A bit confusing, yes, but Stock-ton, part of which was known as Mudville when the poem was pub-lished, probably can make the strongest case.

Still, not everyone agrees. Just ask the people of Mudville - the other Mudville.

"This has always been Mudville," said Joane Hulbert, a resident of Holliston, Mass., part of which has been known as Mudville since at least 1856. "You can drive into Holliston and ask for directions to Mudville, and everyone will be able to tell you how to get here. You can stop at a sandwich shop downtown and order `The Mudville.'

"Ernest Thayer came from a fam-ily of wool manufacturers, and in Holliston in the 1880s, we had the Darling Woolen Mill, which was owned by a relative of Thayer's. Not only that, but when you read the poem, you see names like Casey, Blake, Flynn and Cooney, and all of those names were common in this area."

According to Wiles, the people of Holliston are very serious when they say they represent the real Mudville.

"All through town, they've got Mudville taverns and T-shirts," Wiles said. "And this is not some new fly-by-night thing. They've al-ways felt that they were the home of `Casey at the Bat.' The problem is, at that time, there were five cities in the U.S. that were known as Mud-ville. Thayer had never been to any of them, but there were neighbor-hoods in Boston, Philadelphia and Stockton that were called Mudville, all of which we know Thayer spent time in during the year before writing the poem. Mudville was a very com-mon term because roads weren't paved, and when it rained people would think of calling places things like Mudville."

Whatever, says O'Malley.

"Others might claim to be Mud-ville," he said. "But that's part of the fun, and it is still good publicity."
If you build it, will they stay?

After buying the team, O'Mal-ley and Seidler decided they need-ed a replacement for Billy Hebert Field, an outdated stadium that opened in 1927.

The new owners began lobbying for a new $13.5 million stadium - Mudville Park - to be built on the vacant Banner Island lot that once served as the Stockton Baseball Club's original home. In October 1999, the city council voted 7-0 in favor of building the new stadium. Then Stockton officials balked, and the proposed 2000 grand open-ing was postponed until 2001.

More red tape, more delays, and soon Opening Day had been pushed back to 2003.

"We're down a million dollars from operating the team in Billy Hebert Field and from putting startup money into the new stadi-um," Seidler told the San Francis-co Business Times in April. "The city of Stockton just wouldn't coop-erate in getting the project mov-ing.

"Eventually, we decided that it was a shame, but we'd probably have to look at another city that was willing to build us a park."

It seemed that recent develop-ments had revived the stadium proposal and a related downtown revitalization project, giving O'Malley and Seidler reason to be-lieve that their dream of an old-fashioned, wooden stadium in Stockton may come true after all.

Developer T.W. Starkweather and a team of financial partners have reportedly offered to buy, build and renovate several down-town Stockton structures on the south shore of the Stockton Chan-nel because they believe the boom-ing Bay Area will someday extend to Stockton.

Stockton also has a new city manager to complement Mayor Gary Podesto, whose enthusiasm for a new stadium and a revital-ized downtown were key selling points when O'Malley and Seidler bought the team in 1998.

"The new city manager has tak-en over, and that's been a positive boost for the project," O'Malley said. "We've had some bumps in the road, but hopefully there will be a ballpark on Banner Island someday in the future."

But the Inland Valley Times re-ported Thursday that Minor League Baseball has offered Mud-ville and Bakersfield a $3.9 mil-lion buyout package to move the franchises to the Carolina League for the 2003 season. The Times cited unnamed sources as saying the teams have filed counteroffers with Minor League Baseball, and that they would be willing to ac-cept the buyouts if they can relin-quish control of the teams for the 2002 season.

Talk about no joy in Mudville. How about no team in Mudville?
Casey lives in Coopers-town

The real Casey was never a ballplayer, but for 113 years he has still managed to strike out each time Thayer's immortal words are recited.

And so Casey lives, as a ball-player, in our hearts and in our minds.

He lives in grade schools and in libraries, in minor league ball-parks and bush-league towns.

Casey also lives on at the Na-tional Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, where a 14-foot stat-ue stands in his honor. Once a year, a somewhat smaller replica of this mighty figure springs to life for all who attend the Hall of Fame induction ceremonies.

Tim Wiles is not just the direc-tor of research at the Hall of Fame library. For one day each year, he becomes Casey.

"For the last three years, start-ing in 1999, I've delivered the poem to start the induction cere-monies," Wiles said.

And what a delivery it is.

With the likes of Yogi Berra, Nolan Ryan and Steve Carlton looking on, Wiles has recited the poem proudly as he acts out the scenes with bat in hand. Wiles wears a white baseball uniform with red trim and a red turtleneck beneath a jersey that reads Mud-ville across the front in red letters. He buttons his jersey up to the col-lar, and turns the collar up as players from the 19th Century were known to do. He wears red baseball sox with the pants pushed up to his knees.

Atop his head sits an old-fash-ioned baseball cap featuring a red `M,' and glued on his face is the black, handlebar mustache that has become Casey's trademark.

"The mustache makes it," Wiles said. "You can be in the whole cos-tume, and without the mustache, nobody knows who you are. Once you put on that mustache, though, everyone's like `Casey, Casey.'

"I've even tried to grow the mustache, but it's very hard for me to get the handlebar parts. I have spoken to Rollie Fingers, who is fa-mous for his handlebar mustache, and it takes him about six months to grow hair on the sides to create the handlebar. I've tried for 10, 12 months at a time, and it just doesn't grow in that area."

No matter. It's the things that do grow - legends, for instance - that make Casey's legacy special.

"Baseball history is kind of set in stone," Wiles said. "We know who the all-time home run king is. We know who has played the most consecutive games and all this kind of stuff.

"But baseball's greatness isn't just in its history, it's also in its folklore; things like `Casey At The Bat,' `Take Me Out to the Ball Game,' all the baseball movies and novels. It's just kind of neat to pro-mote and celebrate these parts of baseball that are less than factual, but certainly beloved in baseball history."

Like the joy and pain that will forever reside in Mudville, wher-ever it may be.

Uploaded August 20, 2001