21 pages • 42 minutes read
Ernest Lawrence ThayerCasey at the Bat
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1888A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Danger of Pride
The poem’s message is not about Casey striking out. Striking out is a critical and inevitable element of a game in which a spheroid is hurled at speeds approaching 90 miles per hour by someone 60 feet away. Babe Ruth, the iconic long ball power hitter of Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s era, struck out more than 1,300 times in a 22-year career. Rather, the message is about Casey only swinging once. With reckless arrogance, Casey denies the reality of the game—it is a pitcher’s game, not a hitter’s game—and serenely decides to wait for a pitch he likes: “Casey stood a-watching [the pitch] in haughty grandeur” (30). Like a king or self-proclaimed god, Casey decides he controls the game. He motions to the pitcher that he is ready. He calms the fans when they overreact to the called strikes. Disconnected from the real-time drama playing out all around him, unconcerned about the team concept, and ignoring the emotional investment of the paying fans—save to tip his hat in a gesture of arrogance—Casey isolates himself within the vacuum of his pride and watches two good pitches sail past him. Ironically enough, the name Casey comes from the Scottish and means “watchful.”
The poem then is a cautionary tale that reveals the damage a flawed character causes given that flaw. In this case, Casey’s pride kills the Mudville rally and ends the game. Casey is neither Hamlet nor Oedipus. The poem delights in inflating the Mudville game to tragic proportions as a way to deflate Casey’s ego. This is just a baseball game. The evidence about the Mudville players’ skills and the fickleness of their fans suggests Mudville fans are used to losing. Nevertheless, Casey’s toxic pride very much came before this fall.
The Psychology of Being a Sports Fan(atic)
The Mudville fans exist as a collective character whose wild, emotional response to the game—from desperate hope to murderous rage to apocalyptic despair—reveals aspects of the psychology of sports fans. The relationship between fans and athletes reveals a dynamic that involves emotional identification and projection. For some fans, their attraction to the sport (and athletes) stems from the fact that they are not as gifted athletically as players. Hence, fans maintain a voyeuristic role in a game. Fans are vocal, certainly, but they do not actually participate in the same way as players.
Fans do, however, have a place in the game. As sports culture enthusiasts noted during the Covid-19 pandemic when many teams played in front of empty seats, fans impact the players’ emotions and in turn impact the game. The Mudville fans, the “patrons of the game” (Line 4), initially abandon hope and begin to leave the game early, a sign of resignation and surrender. Only a remnant maintains the long-shot hope that somehow their most gifted hitter can have a shot at saving the game. They are amazed—the term “wonderment” (Line 13) even has religious significance implying a miracle—when two of the least regarded Mudville hitters both get on base.
The fans move quickly into “lusty” (Line 17) confidence, the word suggesting for prim Gilded Age America that the fans were reverting to animals. They are depersonalized into parts—eyes and tongues. And after just the first strike, they turn moblike, their unison boos resounding like “storm-waves” on the ocean shore (Line 34), one fanatic giving voice to their feral emotions: “Kill him! Kill the umpire” (Line 36). When Casey’s swing and miss seals the game, the crowd departs the ballpark in joyless despair within minutes.
Thayer is no psychologist. He offers no rationale for this maelstrom of fanaticism. That range of emotions, exaggerated certainly for comic effect, suggests the emotional register of fans that more than a century after Thayer wrote the poem still define the stadium experience.
The Unpredictability of Life
Thayer was by training and by temperament a philosopher. Harvard-educated, Thayer aspired to teach philosophy, particularly his interest in contemporary existentialism and what he saw as the threat of nihilism, that is, the perception of the universe as pointless and therefore grim.
The ballgame that plays out in the frantic closing moments of the last inning reveals how little control anyone has over the unfolding of events, how the universe refuses to abide by expectations or by logic. Down 4-2, with only one out left in the game, Mudville is going to lose. That is the given that drives the emotions of the fans in the first three stanzas. To add to the predictability of the outcome, the team’s slender hopes rest on two players with inconsistent talent. There is no way that either Flynn or Blake will hit.
But they do, thus creating the first moment of surprise. Then Casey steps up to the plate. Casey with his imperious confidence, his sheer physical presence, and his sneering dismissal of the pitcher, will get the hit the team needs. The game has gone from a certain defeat to a certain win.
In true existential fashion, however, the opposite happens. Casey does what he is not supposed to do. Mighty Casey strikes out. The game collapses against this unpredictable turn of events. Nothing follows expectations. The worst hitters tear the leather off the ball, the hapless and pitiful pitcher dominates, and the great slugger goes down in a powerful and entirely comic whiff. In short, for Thayer, ever the philosopher with an eye on broader themes than winning or losing a baseball game, writing his final column, his farewell to his readers reminds them of one incontrovertible reality: In baseball, as in life, expect only the unexpected.
