Casey at The Bat - Live Performances

Live Performances

DeWolf Hopper gave the poem's first stage recitation on August 14, 1888, at New York's Wallack Theatre as part of the comic opera Prinz Methusalem in the presence of the Chicago and New York baseball teams, the White Stockings and the Giants; August 14, 1888 was also Thayer's 25th birthday. Hopper became known as an orator of the poem, and recited it more than 10,000 times (by his count—some tabulations are as much as four times higher) before his death.

"It is as perfect an epitome of our national game today as it was when every player drank his coffee from a mustache cup. There are one or more Caseys in every league, bush or big, and there is no day in the playing season that this same supreme tragedy, as stark as Aristophanes for the moment, does not befall on some field."

On stage in the early 1890s, baseball star Kelly recited the original "Casey" a few dozen times and not the parody. For example, in a review of a variety show he was in, in 1893, the Indianapolis News said, "Many who attended the performance had heard of Kelly's singing and his reciting, and many had heard De Wolf Hopper recite 'Casey at the Bat' in his inimitable way. Kelly recited this in a sing-song, school-boy fashion." Upon Kelly's death, a writer would say he gained “considerable notoriety by his ludicrous rendition of 'Casey at the Bat,' with which he concluded his `turn’ at each performance.”

During the 1980s, the magic/comedy team Penn & Teller performed a version of "Casey at the Bat" with Teller (the "silent" partner) struggling to escape a straitjacket while suspended upside-down over a platform of sharp steel spikes. The set-up was that if Penn Jillette reached the end of the poem before Teller's escape, he would leap off of his chair, releasing the rope which supported Teller, and send his partner to a gruesome death. The drama of the performance was taken up a notch after the third or fourth stanza, when Penn Jillette would read out the rest of the poem much faster than the opening stanzas, greatly reducing the time that Teller had left to work free from his bonds.

On July 4, 2008 Jack Williams recited the poem accompanied by the Boston Pops during the annual Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular at Boston's 4 July Celebration.