Thayer’s poem about mighty Casey’s strike-out during the Mudville Nine’s legendary baseball game was first pseudonymously published in The San Francisco Examiner on June 8, 1888. Since then it has appeared in countless anthologies and a few picture book editions for children. No artists have attempted to do what Bing has accomplished so handily, which is a brilliant recreation of the “ballad” in what first appears to be a scrapbook from someone’s attic. Using scratchboard artwork, Bing fashioned illustrations of the poem, putting Casey into a uniform of the period and surrounding him with the people and trappings of 1888. Those illustrations are likewise surrounded with what one might find in a box of old keepsakes, such as faux tickets to the game and other mementoes of a sporting event in 1888. Using today’s graphic technology, Bing replicated an “antique” catalog card on one of the end pages; a front cover image of a baseball it seems that one could pick up and pitch; and fabricated old newspaper ads and stories. Older readers will find surprises in every inch of fine print and photograph of objects from Casey’s time. (Age 4 and older)

"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.