Author Can Discuss Historical Ties Between Sports and the Theater (such as "Casey at the Bat" anniversary August 14, or baseball/boxing ties of Drew Barrymore's great-grandfather)

On August 14, 1888, eight years before the first modern Olympics, the dramatic baseball poem "Casey at the Bat" was first recited on stage. At the time, ties between baseball and the theater were especially close. A new book, besides laying out the extensive baseball friendships among famous actors up to 1900 (including Drew Barrymore's great-grandfather), is the definitive biography of the Hall of Fame baseball player who was the most likely inspiration for Casey.

Arlington, VA July 14, 2004 -- To mark the anniversary of the first stage performance of the baseball-theatrical poem "Casey at the Bat," or to tap into interest in actress Drew Barrymore, an historian is available to discuss the close ties that used to exist between baseball and the theater.

Drew Barrymore's great-grandfather, Maurice Barrymore, was one of the five most prominent actor-baseball fans at the time the poem was published. For example, he was colorfully described in newspapers for having "bohemian" mannerisms at games. Great-granddaughter Drew recently signed to star in a Fox 2000 studio baseball movie, "Fever Pitch," about an obsessive Boston Red Sox fan.

Maurice who was born Herbert Blythe in India (his father was a surveyor for the British East India Company), was educated in England and in his youth was quite a boxer (he won England's amateur Marquis of Queensbury Cup in 1872). After emigrating, he became a big baseball fan of the New York Giants (the ancestor of today's San Francisco Giants). The Giants won the pennant in the season "Casey at the Bat" was published, 1888.

Another notable actor-fan was De Wolf Hopper (one of whose six wives was Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper). On August 14, 1888, Hopper gave the first public performance of the poem, at Wallack's Theatre in New York City. He would recite it thousands of times until his death in the 1930s.

Howard W. Rosenberg, the definitive writer on baseball's ties to the theater to 1900, has chronicled early baseball ties of famous actors over dozens of pages in his 2004 book Cap Anson 2: The Theatrical and Kingly Mike Kelly: U.S. Team Sport's First Media Sensation and Baseball's Original Casey at the Bat. Hall of Famers Mike "King" Kelly, who may have served as the model for the baseball situations facing the title character in the poem, and Cap Anson of Chicago, the lone baseball player to reach 3,000 hits before 1900, accomplished notable firsts on the stage.

Kelly's firsts as a player-actor were being highly paid for accepting a bit part (in Charles Hoyt's "A Rag Baby"), and frequently reciting "Casey at the Bat." Anson's notable first among players was for receiving star billing on the stage, in Hoyt's 1895 "A Runaway Colt," which had a baseball theme. Hoyt, a former Boston baseball writer, loaded the play with baseball double entendres (as well as political ones, such as in reference to the then-police commissioner of New York City, Teddy Roosevelt).

Kelly made his stage debut months before the first publication of "Casey at the Bat." And months before his stage debut, he played baseball in San Francisco in the presence of "Casey at the Bat"'s soon-to-be author, San Francisco Examiner baseball writer Ernest Thayer; Thayer had his poem published the following spring in the Examiner and Hopper gave the first performance of it that summer on Thayer's 25th birthday.

Kelly was so popular at the time that weeks after the first publication of the poem, a parody was printed that replaced Casey's name with Kelly's, and substituted his major league city, Boston, for Mudville (the true nickname of Stockton, Calif., and Holliston, Mass.). An article in the A section of the New York Times this past March, by Kate Zezima, singled out Kelly as a possible inspiration for Casey, and explained the dual claims of the above cities as inspiration for Mudville.

Kelly died in 1894 at age 36 two years before the first modern Olympics. For his daring base-running, a song was written in 1889, "Slide, Kelly, Slide," that in Babe Ruth's heyday, 1927, became the title of an MGM silent movie. Kelly acquired his fame overnight in 1887 when Chicago sold him to Boston, both of the National League, for a then-record price of $10,000, about $200,000 today.

For several years starting with 1887, Kelly's fame in Boston rivaled that of a native of the city, heavyweight boxing champ John L. Sullivan. Sullivan was the first U.S. professional athlete to have star billing on the stage. Maurice Barrymore sometimes sparred in the ring with Sullivan and, in San Francisco, launched the stage career of heavyweight boxer James Corbett. After Sullivan, Corbett became the second U.S. professional athlete to have star billing on the stage. Cap Anson was the third.

Other entertainment figures who Rosenberg can discuss for their baseball ties (or indirect associations with the sport) include: conductor John Philip Sousa and Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth (brother of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth), although whether Edwin had any liking for baseball is not readily clear. Rosenberg's book, incidentally, contains a picture of 19th-century actor Joseph Jefferson, for whom the late actor Tony Randall named his son Jefferson Salvini Randall. And the actor-son of the actor Salvini for whom Randall's son received his middle name is pictured as well (the younger Salvini, but not his father, had some notable baseball ties).

Rosenberg can also discuss topics including:

- What were the common bonds of baseball and the theater in the Victorian Era?
- Does "Casey at the Bat" have a basis in fact?
- How did comical actors including Hopper take such a liking to baseball?
- On stage, what kinds of allusions did they make to the sport? (For example, Hopper's 1880s sidekick, Digby Bell, who once played for the New York Knickerbockers amateur baseball team, worked its little expressions and incidents into his performances in catchy ways. In Gilbert and Sullivan's the "Mikado," when Katisha makes for him intent on violence, he runs to the side of the stage, puts his foot up on the wall and says: "You can't touch me. I've got my foot on the base." At another part of the play, when he sets forth the joys of being a prisoner condemned to death to the Mikado's son, one of them is playing "Baseball every day.")
- How did Kelly personify the late President Ronald Reagan (beyond the coincidence of Kelly being the first actor-baseball star and Reagan the first actor-president)?

The author can also account for the unfamiliarity today of once-famous Victorian Era baseball-actors and actor-fans. Despite their trailblazing, overlapping interests in baseball and the theater, they are summarily ignored today according to tastes that favor immediately recognizable names or the telling of personal stories, often with an "overcoming adversity" story line (a staple, by the way, of modern-day Olympics coverage).

Two of the few recent articles relating to the author's subjects include one on playwright Hoyt, by the managing editor of the Atlantic (Monthly), Cullen Murphy, in 2001 (the link is: www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/11/murphy.htm). Another, a feature on Anson's 1895 performance in Hoyt's play, was by David Hinckley of the New York Daily News in 2003 (the link is: www.nydailynews.com/city_life/big_town/v-bigtown_archive/story/119568p-107738c.html).

Rosenberg's first book provided the definitive baseline on off-the-field discipline in baseball (Cap Anson 1: When Captaining a Team Meant Something: Leadership in Baseball's Early Years, 2003). He has been cited or featured in such national outlets as National Public Radio, the Associated Press and USA Today and on radio stations in Chicago and Boston. He is available for interviews and, on short notice, can forward PDFs of the two or three most relevant chapters of his 2004 book. Those chapter numbers and titles are:

1. Kelly and Casey
5. Anson and Kelly: Acting
6. De Wolf Hopper, Digby Bell and Other Actor-Fans

Cap Anson 2 also has an Olympics angle: In vivid detail, it describes Ansons extensive trapshooting career, in an age when live birds were the targets. In the first trapshooting in the modern-day Olympics, in 1900, live birds were shot at. Because of the messy carnage, Olympic trapshooting from 1904 to today has been at nonliving objects.

CONTACT INFORMATION:
Howard W. Rosenberg
1111 Arlington Boulevard
Number 235 West
Arlington, Virginia 22209
703-841-9523
http://www.capanson.com/cap_anson_books.html

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