Inspiration
In 1887, National League star Kelly became famous—arguably the first baseball player to become so overnight—when Boston paid Chicago a record $10,000 for him. He had a personality that fans liked to cheer or jeer. He also is associated with "Casey at the Bat", and a once well-known song and expression for avoiding danger, such as being tagged out: "Slide, Kelly, Slide!" In 1927, an MGM silent movie with a baseball theme was called Slide, Kelly, Slide.
As of 1887, Kelly was especially known as the "$10,000 Beauty." In 1881, actress Louise Montague had been so dubbed after winning a $10,000 contest for handsomest woman in the world.
After the 1887 season, Kelly went on a playing tour to San Francisco. Thayer, who would write "Casey" in 1888, covered the San Francisco leg for the San Francisco Examiner. Although Thayer said he literally chose the name "Casey" after a non-player of Irish ancestry he once knew, open to debate is who, if anyone, he modeled Casey's baseball situations after. The best big league candidate is Kelly, the most colorful, top player of the day of Irish ancestry. Thayer, in a letter he wrote in 1905, singles out Kelly as showing "impudence" in claiming to have written the poem. If he still felt offended, Thayer may have steered later comments away from connecting Kelly to it. The author of the 2004 definitive bio of Kelly – which included a close tracking of his vaudeville career—did not find Kelly claiming to have been the author.
Before the playing tour, Kelly's plans to go on it had drawn colorful comment in San Francisco. In August, the San Francisco Call said, "My, what a time the small boy will have following him around the streets, styling their nines the 'Only Kells,' and asking him how he liked . But it is a great thing to be distinguished, you know.'"
Also, while Kelly was in San Francisco on the tour, the $10,000 check arrived with which Boston had bought him. It will "at once be placed on exhibition in a prominent show window," the San Francisco Chronicle said. "The check bears the names of A. H. Soden of Boston as payer and A. G. Spalding of Chicago as payee."
Read more about this topic: Casey At The Bat
Famous quotes containing the word inspiration:
“Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The ironies in the commonplace are my inspiration and delight.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)