Playing to lose
In his record of Fenway Playground, Glenn Stout defines exactly just how, in the ballpark's very early years, "the most effective chairs were actually swiftly taken control of through a rabid contingent of casino players that bank on downright every little thing possible, varying coming from the ultimate victor … towards round and also strike phone telephone calls" and also "also such arcane concerns as whether the wind will transform path." Supporters waving buck costs and also barking out wagers resembled "brokers on the flooring of the inventory trade." This sort of wagering was actually thus usual in the stands that Ernest Lawrence Thayer's famous 1888 poem, "Casey at the Bat," recorded such a minute in some of its own stanzas: "A straggling handful of acquired approximately enter deep-seated despair. The remainder clung towards that really wish which springtimes eternal in the individual breast; They thought and feelings, ...