On this date in 1888

[Brother Buzz]

2. A sad day in my baseball life when I discovered.....

Mudville (Stockton, Ca) was not the Mudville Thayer wrote about

Stockton, California, a lays claim to being the inspiration for the fictional town of Mudville in Ernest Thayer's classic 1888 poem, "Casey at the Bat." Stockton went by the nickname Mudville in the 1800s, and Ernest Thayer was known to have attended games there, covering baseball for the San Francisco Examiner in 1887.

The only problem is, Thayer grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, very close to a town called Holliston, which has a well-known neighborhood called Mudville. In fact, the pro-Holliston faction points out, Thayer's family owned a mill about a mile from Mudville. Thayer himself was noncommittal on the subject, saying only that the poem was fiction.