A newly illustrated edition of Ernest Thayer’s much-loved Casey at the Bat turns the time-honored sports classic into a relevant, resonant story for today. The unfolding baseball drama plays out on a diamond that is squeezed between high-rises and busy urban streets, in the midst of asphalt and concrete. Casey and the rest of the Mudville nine are a mixed-race group of inner-city teens. They are also the underdogs everyone is rooting for as they take on a uniformed, semi-professional team that was passing through the neighborhood and proposed a challenge. The teen players, in their baggy jeans and t-shirts, are identified by name in graffiti-like script that is reminiscent of taggers and reflects the real graffiti on some of the buildings and walls around the field. They are cheered on by enthusiastic fans watching from the small balconies of the nearby buildings, as well as by hip, tattooed observers on the sidelines. Morse’s style is immediate and dynamic, with thick black lines and juxtaposed angles and curves conveying intense energy and emotion. Despite the artist’s muted palette, the images are incredibly active and vibrant as they offer new dimensions of story and transform Thayer’s nineteenth-century verse into a fresh contemporay tale. (Ages 9–16)

"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.