Digby Bell’s lost companion piece to “Casey at the Bat”
“Casey at the Bat” is an American classic, and deservedly so. When it made its public debut on August 14, 1888, its author was unknown and it had been read only by those who happened to purchase the San Francisco Examiner on June 3 of that year, its only appearance in print. The man who made “Casey” a sensation on Broadway and then across the nation was not the poet, later to be revealed as Ernest Lawrence Thayer, but instead a comic actor named DeWolf Hopper.
Another comic actor — Hopper’s best friend, baseball tutor, and collaborator in many light-opera productions — was Digby Bell. Only one year later — at another baseball-themed evening — Bell, equally fond of baseball monologues, first offered up a ditty penned for him by fellow actor George Marion. Over the ensuing decades it became known as “The Tough Boy on the Right Field Fence,” but several variations of that title appeared in print: the boy was sometimes called a kid; the fence was sometimes located in left field. On October 20, 1889, when the theater set’s “High and Mighty Order of Baseball Cranks of Gotham” honored the National League champion New York Giants, singers and comics and banjoists took their turns entertaining the audience, especially the Giants’ players and officials. The New York Evening World reported:
Though every artist received a double encore, the hit of the evening was made by Mr. Digby Bell. That wonder first sang a little ditty about a potato and an acorn in an inimitable way, and then responded to an encore by reciting a new and original poem entitled “The Tough Boy on the Polo Fence,” the lines of which probably contained more baseball parlance and popular slang to the square inch than any ever written before.
DeWolf Hopper, of course, met with a rousing reception, and after singing verse after verse about a man who mismanaged a calcium light, he was finally obliged to recite the poem he has made famous, “Casey at the Bat.”
Today “Casey” is known by all baseball fans, many of whom learned as children to recite whole verses from memory. It is a fixture in the firmament of American popular verse. Yet the lines of “Tough Boy” were never anthologized so today its charm seems beyond recapture.
Why had it fallen into oblivion, I asked, and what was Bell’s monologue all about, anyway? How could a poem once thought the equal if not the superior to “Casey” have so utterly disappeared?
***
Thayer was revealed as Casey’s creator a few years after Hopper’s recital. A literary gent, he had studied philosophy at Harvard, graduated magna cum laude, and served as editor of the Lampoon. Its business manager for a time was William Randolph Hearst who, after expulsion from Harvard, was given the editorship of the newspaper his father had just purchased, The San Francisco Examiner. Hearst invited Thayer to contribute a humor column, which he did, under the name “Phin,” for the better part of two years. On June 3, 1888, The Examiner published Phin’s final effort, the rollicking ballad soon to be known across the land as “Casey at the Bat.”
Yet “Casey” might have vanished without a trace, like Phin’s other five-dollar ditties, except that novelist Archibald Clavering Gunter clipped it from the paper and kept it with him on his next trip east. On August 14, 1888, at Wallack’s Theatre in New York, he was backstage before a performance of Prince Methusalem, a Johann Strauss operetta given as a “complimentary testimonial” to the New York Giants and visiting Chicago White Stockings. One of the stars of the evening was DeWolf Hopper, a regular attendee at the Polo Grounds who wanted to supply some diversion with a baseball theme to spice things up. Gunter gave Hopper the poem that afternoon, Hopper proved a quick study, and between acts of the comic opera he recited “Casey at the Bat.”
The audience loved it. In his autobiography, Once a Clown, Always a Clown, Hopper got the date of Casey’s debut wrong, placing it in May (before Thayer had even written it), but captured its effect on the audience:
On his debut Casey lifted this audience, composed largely of baseball players and fans, out of their seats. When I dropped my voice to B flat, below low C, at ‘the multitude was awed’ [the poem in fact reads: “the audience was awed”], I remember seeing Buck Ewing’s gallant mustachios give a single nervous twitch. And as the house, after a moment of startled silence, grasped the anticlimactic denouement, it shouted its glee. . . . They had expected, as any one does upon hearing Casey for the first time, that the mighty batsman would slam the ball out of the lot, and a lesser bard would have had him do so, and thereby written merely a good sporting-page filler.
Hopper would continue to recite “Casey,” by his estimate, some 10,000 times over the next four decades. That the poem appeared in countless anthologies, too, was testament not to Hopper’s stentorian styling (preserved for the ages; http://bit.ly/2N0AeuR), but to Thayer’s genius and gift for parody.
The resemblance of “Casey at the Bat” to Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “Horatius at the Bridge” was noted early on (“F.J. Wilstach Casts Light on the Question of Authorship,” Washington Post, December 18, 1904). Fifty years later, Arthur Leonard Bloomfield wrote, “Thayer probably hated memorizing Horatius in prep-school, and how he must have enjoyed taking it out on Casey!”
Others have argued that Casey’s resemblance to Horatius is scant. For me, the takeaway is that Thayer’s poem is literary — that is, written to be read, whether or not it was ultimately to be performed.
Hopper may have ad libbed a line or two to suit an audience, but he never strayed far from the text. Bell, on the other hand, varied the text from one appearance to the next, with the result that no single version endured. In 1894, he went so far as to tell a reporter that he did not wish it ever to be published; by keeping it “hidden,” he claimed, “The Tough Boy” would be “always fresh and attractive to the public, whenever he would recite it, unlike ‘Casey,’” which “soon ran out” after it began to appear in the newspapers.
Bell miscalculated — or he may have correctly assessed that “The Tough Boy” was more a performance piece than a ballad of the republic, as “Casey” was subtitled and has proven to be. A sense of Bell’s delivery may be had from a 1909 recording of the poem, but by then most of the original lyric of 1889 had been truncated or replaced (http://bit.ly/39I3Gzy). The Edison Phonograph Monthly praised its “realistic baseball talk indulged in by the youngster from a ‘deserved’ seat on the right field fence. He tells the home team how to play the game and what he thinks of them when their playing isn’t up to his standard.”
Bell’s affected brogue makes transcription of the recording difficult, but below I offer a preliminary compilation from various newspaper reports of “The Tough Boy on the Right Field Fence.”
The Tough Boy on the Right Field Fence
Dere was twenty t’ousand folks inside,
De crowd was just immense,
Bill Mooney, Shorty Burns an’ me
Were outside of de fence.
Shorty he clim up on a tree,
Jest over where I kneeled
A-peekin’ t’rough the fence wid Bill,
A-takin’ in de field.
De game was even — two and two,
New York was at de plate —
T’ree men on bases, two men out,
T’ree balls, two strikes — dat’s straight.
De Cincinnaty pitcher took
De ball; I held my breat’,
He spat twice on his han’s and twirled,
De crowd sat still as deat’.
De batter banged, de ball flew up
Ex if fired from a gun;
De crowd riz up an’ give a yell —
It looked like a home run.
Up in de sky to center field
De ball sailed — Hully, Gee!
I dasen’t wink. I glued my eye
Clos to de fence to see.
An’ Shorty stood up on er branch
An’ let go both his han’s;
Branch broke, or somethin’, Shorty drapped
An’ top o’ me he lan’s.
Dat’s all I know — de next I knowed
I’m lying here in bed —
Say, tell me, doc, is my back broke?
An’, say, is Shorty dead?
I ain’t afeered to know de wust —
Will I always be lame?
But — break it to me gently, doc,
Ef New York lost dat game.
Additionally:
Dere goes a sky scraper [a high fly ball — jt];
Well, dat’s a dead bird, you kin bet.
Well, if th’ mush didn’t muff it!
Why don’t he telephone for a net?
Good boy; run! run;
A-a-h, go back an’ warm yer face!
If I was th’ captain of your team
I’d give you the razoo chase;
You’d want er sheriff an’ a search warrant
To go out an’ find first base.
Git ’em over de plate.
Strike? Dat empire’s a dead skin.
It ain’t no use talkin’,
W’en he’s de Solomon our boys can’t never win.
That’s a bute! Git up an’ run;
Run, you son of a gun! run!
Foul? Chee, but dat empire is makin’ us dance.
I’d like to have a boot flirtation wid de seat of his pants.
Play ball! Play ball! W’y he couldn’t hit a growler,
An’ if he did he’d flounder in the foam.
Ah. wot did I tell yer? Dat settles it.
Our name is mud, and here’s de wizard dat’s going home.
Rats. Rats! Say, who told youse sons of guns dat yuse could play ball?
Why if I was a Wanderbilt I’d have baseball for every meal.
I’d sit at the table and I’d play ’em early and late,
And when they were out doing their pretties
I’d be putting codfish balls over the plate.
A Tale of Two Clowns was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.