WASHINGTON POST puts THE NIGHT CASEY WAS BORN on The All-Star Team

The Night Casey Was Born gets MVP consideration in the Washington Post's baseball book round-up this past weekend.

John Evangelist Walsh tells the story of the poem's creation as if its mythical Casey's whiff were a metaphor for all human failure. The author, who has also written biographies of Robert Frost, John Keats and Edgar Allan Poe, offers all the historical details of 1890s baseball anyone could want. He explains, for example, that the 52-line poem would likely have been forgotten had it not been performed thousands of times on hundreds of stages by a comic opera star named DeWolf Hopper. In a book that is both Americana and nostalgia, Walsh swings for the fences -- and unlike Casey does indeed connect.