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.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe (1849)
“Annabel Lee” is by an accomplished and controversial figure in late 19th-century American poetics. Thayer himself admired Poe for his mastery of elegant rhythms and clever rhymes. This non-traditional ballad tells the story of the speaker’s doomed tragic love for the young Annabel Lee. While Ernest Lawrence Thayer uses the conventions of the ballad for tragicomic effect, Poe develops a far more somber, emotional storytelling tone that nevertheless teaches a simple lesson about how love is stronger than death.
“John Henry” by Anonymous (late-19th century)
Thayer’s Casey, given his larger-than-life-presence, has become a central figure in American folk tales. “John Henry” is another such larger-than-life figure. Henry, a burly African American railroad worker, dies in his heroic challenge to a steel-driving machine designed to put workers out of work. Henry busts his heart to prove humanity’s dominance over machines. Like Casey, John Henry fails; but, because Casey fails in a meaningless baseball game and will live to play another game, unlike Casey, John Henry’s failure ennobles him.
“The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert W. Service (1907)
Another fin-de-millennium ballad that enjoyed staggering popularity and also first appeared in a newspaper, Service’s epic ballad tells the story of a doomed miner so enthralled by the longshot possibility of finding gold in the wintry wasteland of the Yukon that he freezes to death. The poem uses the ballad genre, its meter and rhyme schemes, to connect with a middle-class readership. Like “Casey,” Service’s ballad teaches a critical lesson: the danger of greed.
Further Literary Resources
“Lebron Who? ‘Casey at the Bat’ Was Hating Arrogant Athletes 125 Years Ago” by Luke Epplin (2013)
This Atlantic pop culture piece examines the impact of Thayer’s poem as a cautionary tale centered on how fan adoration can too easily inflate the egos of major sports figures. The article takes a hard look at the psychology of fan worship and the dynamics of making ballplayers into larger-than-life figures as a problem facing organized sports in ways that Thayer could never have imagined.
“Casey at the Bat” by Martin Gardner (1967)
The piece, written for American Heritage, by one of the era’s most popular and widely read essayists, reviews the history of the poem and the life of Thayer. The article includes an overview of Thayer’s background in philosophy and his own relationship to sports not as a player but as an early pop culture psychologist. The essay includes the long history of recordings of the poem and its impact on both radio and film.
“Where Baseball Literature Begins” by Glenn Stout (1988)
The article was commissioned by Major League Baseball as part of a special ceremony at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, Pennsylvania, to mark the centennial of the poem. It summarizes the cultural position of Thayer’s poem as the landmark first poem about baseball that, in turn, helped elevate the game to its status as the national pastime. By invoking the tone and diction of classical tragedy, Thayer created about a baseball player a larger-than-life mystique that has since become routine as every generation elevates long ball hitters, despite their frailties and moral flaws, to the status of modern gods.
Listen to the Poem
Because the poem has been interpreted as high tragedy and as hilarious comedy, the best way to approach the poem is to listen to two radically different readings, both available on YouTube. The first, part of the Smithsonian collection of landmark American pop culture recordings, dates to 1922. Broadway comic icon DeWitt Hopper, who made a career reciting the poem to packed theaters on Broadway, delivers a rollicking mock-comic reading.
Another interpretation, recorded in 2012, features James Earl Jones, known for his deep distinctive voice—most famously the voice of Darth Vader. Jones delivers a tragic reading that, accompanied by era music, creates about Casey and his strike out a sense of grandeur.
