"There was ease in Caseys manner as he stepped into his place, There was pride in Caseys bearing and a smile on Caseys face, And when responding to the cheers he lightly of his hat, No stranger in the crowd could doubt, t was Casey at the bat."
Ernest Lawrence Thayer was an American writer and poet who wrote the poem "Casey", which is "the single most famous baseball poem ever written" according to the Baseball Almanac, and "the nation’s best-known piece of comic verse—a ballad that began a native legend as colorful and permanent as that of Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan".
"Oh! somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright, The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light, And somewhere men are laughing and somewhere children shout; But there is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has "struck out."
"We have reached the age, those of us to whom fortune has assigned a post in lifes struggle, when, beaten and smashed and biffed by the lashings of the dragons tail, we begin to appreciate that the old man was not such a damned fool after all. We saw our parents wrestling with that same dragon, and we thought, though we never spoke the thought aloud, Why dont he hit him on the head? Alas, comrades, we know now. We have hit the dragon on the head and we have seen the dragon smile."