Casey at the Bat

"And somewhere men are laughing,
And somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville
Mighty Casey has struck out."

Those lines have echoed through the decades, the final stanza of a poem published pseudonymously in the June 3, 1888, issue of the San Francisco Examiner. Its author would rather have seen it forgotten. Instead, Ernest Thayer's poem has taken a well-deserved place as an enduring icon of Americana.

Christopher Bing's magnificent version of this immortal ballad of the flailing 19th-century baseball star is rendered as though it had been newly discovered in a hundred-year-old scrapbook. Bing seamlessly weaves real and trompe l'oeil reproductions of artifacts — period baseball cards, tickets, advertisements, and a host of other memorabilia into the narrative to present a rich and multifaceted panorama of a bygone era.

A book to be pored over by children, treasured by aficionados of the sport — and given as a gift to all ages: a tragi-comic celebration of heroism and of a golden era of sport.

2001 Caldecott Honor Book