Casey at the Bat
Joseph Quinlan Murphy ever being connected with this paper. Joseph A. Murphy, nationally known racehorse judge, was sporting editor of the Globe-Democrat in the early 'eighties, but he has never been credited with the authorship of the poem, 'Casey at the Bat.' " So who Joseph Quinlan Murphy was, as well as Mr. Knowles's reasons for attributing the poem to him, remain a matter of conjecture. The publishers of A Treasury of Humorous Poetry, after some investigating of their own, evidently concluded that Mr. Knowles had made a mistake, for in recent editions of the book the poem is credited to Ernest L. Thayer.
Another man to whom the poem has been attributed was an Irishman named William Valentine, who died in the late 'nineties while on the staff of the New York World. The basis for his claim rests largely upon the evidence of Mr. Frank J. Wilstach, the compiler of the Dictionary of Similes. Here is the story as Mr. Wilstach has told it in two recent letters:
Will Valentine, a young Irishman, came up from the Kansas City Star to the Sioux City (Iowa) Tribune in 1885 to be city editor. He was constantly writing verse. On the back page of the Tribune I was at that time conducting a column which, shamefacedly I may say, was supposed to be
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