Ernest Thayer

Ernest Lawrence Thayer was an American writer and poet who wrote Casey at the Bat, the single most famous baseball poem ever written according to the Baseball Almanac, and the nations bestknown piece of comic versea ballad that began a native legend as colorful and permanent as that of Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan.

Thayer was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts and raised in Worcester. He graduated magna cum laude in philosophy from Harvard in 1885, where he was editor of the Harvard Lampoon and member of the Hasty Pudding theatrical club. William Randolph Hearst, a friend from both the Pudding and Lampoon, hired Thayer as humor columnist for the San Francisco Examiner 188688.

Source: Wikipedia