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.
Symbols & Motifs
Casey's Sneer
The poem is the story of a sneer; more specifically, it’s the story of how facial expressions reveal emotional and psychological growth. When Casey advances to the plate, he smiles generously to the crowd who sees in his bulk, in his skill, in his reputation a reason to hope and win the game. Casey loves the adulation. But when he turns to face the “writhing pitcher” (Line 27), that smiles twists into a sneer. And when, two pitches later, Casey faces an entirely new set of circumstances, one that threatens to render ironic the fans’ adulation, that “sneer is gone from Casey’s lip” (Line 45).
The sneer symbolizes the moral lesson that Casey learns too late. A sneer is a curl of the lip that reveals disdain, even contempt. Unlike a smile, which is a generous and inviting facial expression, the sneer, more of a kink in one side of the lips, is intended to create a feeling of imminent threat and infers that the person sneering assumes a position of dominance and empowerment. That the sneer is gone by the last pitch indicates through body language that Casey has already learned a lesson. He realizes he is not in control of the game and must now face what every lesser human being routinely faces every day: the unexpected. In fact, the sneer is replaced by Casey’s little tantrum, pounding the bat with violence on home plate, suggesting that Casey descends from his position of god-like superiority and confidence to the panicky rage of a desperate, cornered animal.
The Umpire
Even within the hyperbole of hyper-emotional fans, the chant to kill the umpire, verging as it is does on violence, invests the umpire with symbolic importance: Killing the umpire would not in fact have made the two called strikes anything else but strikes. Even as the fans—and Casey himself—descend into primal anger and suggest a disturbing potential for violence barely contained, the umpire symbolizes the moral authority that controls and directs the game of life. Whether investing faith in the guidelines of institutional religion or trusting in the government of laws, society relies on a variety of “umpires” to maintain order and to discipline the raw and careless emotions that people under pressure indulge. Umpires are society’s stays against chaos. After all, the umpire here merely calls the pitches what they are: fair and clean strikes. It is not as if Casey swung at them—rather, he casually and arrogantly decided he would ignore them as simply not his style of pitching. Without the umpire to regulate those up to bat, the game descends into the control of a single player vested in the outcome of the game. The umpire then provides the reassuring objective authority that frames Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s moral universe itself.
The Two Pitches
Baseball purists struggle to understand why Casey ignores two perfectly good and hittable pitches when so much depends on getting a hit, any hit, in a game that is down to its last out and in which two teammates improbably enough are on base. Intensity and commitment would drive any ball player to bear down right from the start. But Casey lets two pitches go by. And why, now two strikes up, would the pitcher have thrown a hittable pitch—why give a power hitter something to hit? Even a hapless pitcher would throw a junk ball. Casey would have known that, would have known not to swing. Yet he does.
Casey’s casual attitude may simply be a result of his preening overconfidence, and the pitch is his ultimate lesson in humility. But there may be something darker. Thayer, an investigative reporter, in addition to his work as a Sunday columnist, got wind of fixed games in the nearby Stockton minor league baseball club, for years a losing franchise. But he feared running with the article because of reprisals from the organized crime network responsible for running numbers and gambling in the San Francisco Bay area. This might explain why Thayer wrote “Casey” as his last column, on his way out of town, heading back to the relative safety of Massachusetts, and why he chose to veil the story in such a hyper-comic way, masking the unsettling possibility that the larger-than-life Casey was in collusion to throw the game.
Not so much a parable on the danger of pride, “Casey at the Bat” thus becomes an exposé of the threat of fixed games in a sport that was becoming a national obsession and a betting bonanza. There is even mention in Stanza 2 of the money some of the fans had riding on the game. A scant 20 years before the World Series itself would be rocked by the infamous Black Sox scandal, Thayer warns that, given the game’s human factor, fixing games would be easy. Casey does not strike out—he covers the spread. That would make the poem more about what the easily duped fans never suspect, that the game is really an elaborate theater piece, the script already written, the fix in place.
