Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
This California town’s literary claim to fame comes with controversy
It’s been 136 years since “Casey at the Bat,” one of the most famous poems in American literature, was first published. And in all of that time, the concluding line of Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s ballad has endured in newspaper headlines, songs, baseball team names and more: ¶ “But there is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has struck out.” ¶ While there was no joy in Mudville after Casey’s swing and a miss, for the city of Stockton, Calif., the poem has been a point of local pride for years — and the center of a decadeslong beef too.
While residents had been living in the area for decades before the Mexican-american War of the 1840s, the American town of Stockton was officially founded back in 1849 during the Gold Rush boom. But the prime location near the San Joaquin River and other waterways from the area made it a natural spot for a port, helping serve the greater San Joaquin Valley and shipping out to San Francisco Bay and beyond.
But sitting on a riverbank can cause all sorts of problems if the water runs high from flooding. And for years, as Haggin Museum CEO Tod Ruhstaller said in an Milb.com story in 2016, Stockton had a “unique” mud problem, earning a nickname we now all know: Mudville.
“The mud in this area, it’s an adobe mud so it’s particularly sticky,” Ruhstaller told reporter Benjamin Hill. “And there were years when the streets were underwater (due to flooding from the San Joaquin River), and you had to get around with a boat. When it started to dry out you couldn’t go to a lot of places in downtown Stockton because these streets were quagmires. I’ve read where dogs would get caught in the street, and have to be rescued.”
Even back then, Mudville was a known descriptor of the town as a whole, but particularly the area around the river. There are still a number of businesses in Stockton that use Mudville as a name, and the Single-a Stockton Ports now play in Banner Island Ballpark, built on a former island in the San Joaquin River delta in the Mudville area.
It would’ve been known as such in the 1880s, when a man named Thayer moved out West. Born in Lawrence, Mass., and growing up in Worcester, Mass., Thayer had helped run the Harvard Lampoon, a humor magazine, alongside William Randolph Hearst. When Hearst’s father George bought the San Francisco Examiner to help boost his political career, he gave the task of running the newspaper to his son, who subsequently got his friend Thayer to join him.
Thayer mainly wrote satirical columns for a few years using the pseudonym “Phin” for the Examiner, but also covered the burgeoning sport of baseball. He had become a fan of the game while at Harvard and covered it out West, and some in Stockton claim that coverage included Thayer attending games in Stockton’s Mudville.
Despite returning to Massachusetts in early 1888, Thayer sent in more columns to the Examiner from afar, leading to the June 3, 1888, publication of “Casey at the Bat” in that day’s paper. The poem tells the tale of a big baseball game, with the home team trailing by two with two outs in the final inning and facing long odds to get their star player, Casey, to the plate. But the two hitters ahead of Casey reach base and give him a chance to win the game ... only for Casey to take two pitches for strikes and swing through the third, improbably striking out to end the game.
The poem started its rise into the American consciousness when it was reprinted in a New York paper later that year. But the real accelerant came from comedian William Dewolf Hopper, who performed the poem to rousing applause one night and decided to make it a nightly part of his comedic act, reciting it repetitively across the country. Within a year, newspapers around the country were reprinting the poem, sometimes tweaking the name of the great hitter and the home team’s town name to fit their audiences. Hopper himself estimated he performed the poem more than 10,000 times.
Right away, many wondered which ballplayer the poem was based on. But Stockton quickly bought into the idea that it was the location referenced. The Single-a team in town took the Mudville Nine name in two different stints, 1982-1984 and 2000-2001, and still makes the claim all over the team’s website.
“Baseball lore also credits a baseball team based in Stockton, CA with being the inspiration for Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s famous ‘Casey at the Bat’ poem,” the Ports’ website reads today. “As legend goes, Thayer wrote the fictional poem in 1888 after seeing the Stockton club perform. At that time, Stockton played at the same site that currently houses Banner Island Ballpark near a riverfront area called Mudville.”
But as strongly as Stockton residents feel about their home being the basis for Mudville, so does the Massachusetts town of Holliston. Located about 30 miles east of Thayer’s hometown of Worcester, Holliston was a known baseball hotbed at the time of the poem’s publication and still has a Mudville neighborhood to this day.
Holliston’s embrace of its own claims goes even further. The town erected two figures of Casey in the Mudville area, with one wooden carving in a garden on a residential street and the other in a bar — fittingly named Casey’s Pub. Holliston residents have even fired shots at Stockton in the press, too.
“Stockton wasn’t incorporated out there until 1850,” Holliston resident Bob Blair said to WGBH in 2014. “Here we were being called Mudville in 1856, I’m sure earlier. They’re Johnny-come-latelys.”
But the answer as to which town is the true Mudville, so far as we have one from Thayer, is quite unsatisfactory. The mystery around the ballplayer led the Syracuse Post-standard to write to Thayer in the 1930s, which he answered with a rather blunt assessment: “The poem has no basis in fact.”
That hasn’t put an end to the dispute, though. The New York Times wrote a big feature on the two Mudville claims in 2004, bringing the towns’ dueling claims into the national spotlight. That led the towns to get together in Stockton and settle things on the field in 2010, with an old-timey baseball game played under the rules of the sport from the 1880s.
The squad representing Stockton won 10-4, though Blair claimed that the Holliston team losing was actually a better sign for them being the true team of Mudville — after all, Mudville lost on mighty Casey’s strikeout.
And with that, the rivalry between the towns with dueling Mudville claims lives on, even after the game on the field. Stockton had a “Mighty Casey” figurine giveaway night at a 2017 game. Holliston held an old-time baseball game in honor of Casey in 2023.
And each still holds on to its claim of being Mudville — the Mudville, with the influence of the poem lasting far longer than any single at-bat, and serving as its own special type of joy.
“As legend goes, Thayer wrote the fictional poem in 1888 after seeing the Stockton club perform. At that time, Stockton played at the same site that currently houses Banner Island Ballpark near a riverfront area called Mudville.”