Casey at the Bat

The first section of the poem, Lines 1-12, explores the relationship between the Mudville fans and the game they are watching. Because the team is down to their last at-bat, the fans have begun to lose hope. The fans, so quick to lose hope in a game not that lopsided, entirely lack the kind of die-hard emotional support a home field advantage is supposed to ensure. This indicates that the Mudville team is not known for comebacks, not known for the heart-stopping rallies that define strong teams. And when the first two batters both go down, that “pall-like silence” (Line 4) indicates a funereal atmosphere, despite the home field and despite the presence in the lineup of a batter the magnitude and promise of mighty Casey. The fans should be rallying now—this is where the Mudville team most needs its fans. The fans, however, know all too well that Flynn and Blake aren’t reliable. With the fans’ hopes easily rendered ironic, this section closes with a sense of doom, the fans settling into a “grim melancholy” (Line 11). Many already start to leave. Within the psychology of sports fans, few figures are as widely criticized as home team fans who leave a losing game early. That level of despair is driven not by emotions—which define authentic fans—but rather by logic, predictability, and expectations, which many who consider themselves real sports fans know have little to do with the excitement and drama of sports. Fans who leave early know nothing about the game. Thus, the poem reveals what a fan is by revealing what a fan is not.

The poem’s middle section (Lines 13-36) provides a philosophy professor’s master class in the unpredictability of life. In this, Ernest Lawrence Thayer draws on his education and his fascination with the emerging school of existentialism to explore the intrusion of surprise. As the last out of the last inning is set up by circumstances (two outs and two unreliable and inconsistent batters coming to the plate), the poem itself sets up a lesson on predictability. The game is over. Then, the Mudville baseball game broadens into a larger lesson on life itself. Anticipation becomes ironic; expectation collapses into foolishness. Live, the poem argues, expecting the unexpected. Even as the fans stream out of the stadium, first Flynn and then Blake get on base. That is not supposed to happen. Both have reputations for inefficiency and non-productivity, part of the larger Mudville team profile that relies entirely on the strength and presence of a single player. The emergence of Casey himself, strutting, Goliath-like, to the plate, preening like a champion, sets up the next set of expectations. There is ease in his manner, a smile on his face, indicating he is now in control. It is his show. The pitcher is dismissed to inconsequentiality. He is the only player in the poem not even given a name. He is “writhing” (Line 27) nervously, grinding the ball into his hip, tells that reveal his expectation that this is not going to go well. What happens then shatters expectations and underscores Thayer’s bemusement as a philosopher in unpredictability. With the team’s two worst hitters on base, their most reliable batter, a behemoth with a sneer, watches two hittable pitches sail past for a 0-2 count.

The closing section of the poem (Lines 40-52) becomes a morality play, a kind of sports-themed parable, on the dangers of pride. Casey stills the angry home town crowd, verging on a mob determined to kill the umpire, with a “smile of Christian charity” (Line 37) and a simple wave of his hand. His face goes “stern and cold” (Line 43). The score is no longer his concern. His teammates waiting to come home are not his concern. The fans, outraged and “maddened” (Line 42), are not his concern. This is personal. It is time for Casey to be Casey. As it turns out, Casey being Casey is Casey learning a difficult lesson in pride. Yes, his swing is mighty; nevertheless, he misses the pitch. The closing stanza completes the lesson in Casey’s deflated pride in that we are given none of the expected post-game images of the all-too-human batter now responsible for losing the game stunned into epiphany. The camera, as it were, pans so far back to “somewhere in this favored land” (Line 49) that Casey himself is lost to insignificance.