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 CHAPTER XXXII.

IKE every other cause worthy the best efforts of writers of note, Base Ball has a literature peculiarly its own. Love has its sonnets galore; War its epics in heroic verse; Tragedy its sombre story in measured lines, and Base Ball has "Casey at the Bat."

To this day men of splendid mental equipment are burning midnight oil in labored efforts to solve the authorship of the immortal productions usually accredited to the "Bard of Avon." It is not, therefore, passing strange that more than one individual has taken to himself the honor of having written the popular Base Ball classic. At various times in the early history of this poem its authorship was assumed by Joseph Quinlan Murphy, Will Valentine and Ernest L. Thayer. That Mr. Thayer was its author has long been established beyond the peradventure of a doubt, the false claimants fading away as soon as the real author was brought to the front.

The poem, "Casey at the Bat," was first published in the San Francisco Examiner, June 3, 1888, and won instant favor among the Base Ball fraternity. But it needed the impetus given it by DeWolf Hopper to bring to it the widespread popularity that it has since attained, and which not only calls for its repetition whenever 449