Abstract
In Striking Out (Capps 2011a), I explored two meanings of the phrase “striking out.” One means to begin, advance, or proceed, especially in a new way or direction. The other, associated with baseball, means an out by a batter charged with three strikes. The book focused more on the first than the second meaning. In this article I take up the second meaning by considering the mythical case of “mighty Casey,” whose strike out is portrayed in Ernest Thayer’s poem Casey at the Bat (Thayer 1888). I suggest that at the time Thayer wrote the poem he identified personally with Casey’s failure. I also use my proposal in Agents of Hope (Capps 2001) that failed hopes may engender a spirit of modesty to interpret the change in Casey’s own self-understanding as presented in certain sequels to the original poem written by other authors. In addition, I imagine a scenario in which a local pastor, in his role of agent of hope, helps Casey deal with his despair and accompanying depression in the wake of his failure and to recover his capacity to hope. I conclude that Ernest Thayer’s life also reflected a spirit of modesty.
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Notes
One of the reviewers of an earlier draft of this article proposed five words that personify those who stand in the way of a boy’s progress or cause him to strike out in the negative sense: stumpers, sticklers, stunters, stoppers, and stinkers. In Striking Out (Capps 2011a) I discussed the father’s advice to his teenage son in the biblical book of Proverbs and noted his word of caution against walking in the way of evil men, men who cannot go to sleep at night “unless they have made someone stumble” (4:16). The implication here “is that evil lurks in the bushes alongside the pathway, for this is where those who are up to no good hide and ambush those who are journeying from home to their intended destination” (p. 13). The reviewer’s creative proposal helps the boy identify these troublemakers, which is the initial step in devising ways to avoid or neutralize their power and influence.
Other cases of a strikeout not being a total failure can be identified. For example, the batter who strikes out in the first or second inning may nonetheless succeed in getting the pitcher to reveal his repertoire of pitches, thus assisting subsequent batters in their at-bats. Or if the catcher fails to catch the ball after the third strike the batter may run to first base and arrive there before the catcher is able to throw him out.
Gardner notes that there were a couple of printing errors in the first published version. I have made the corrections in this version.
Lulu means something extraordinary; it is used here in a somewhat derisive sense. Cake is a slang word meaning a dude or a dandy; its use here suggests that Blake was greatly concerned about his personal appearance but was a rather weak player (see Gardner 1995, p. 181; see also Agnes 2001, pp. 854, 205).
Moore and Vermilyea (1994) add that James began teaching a course on the philosophy of evolution in 1879 and they note that the behavior of baseball fans made Darwin’s theory seem at least plausible, although “The wonder was not so much that the monkeys could actually be our uncles but that the jungles were so far removed from the bleachers” (p. 85).
Moore and Vermilyea (1994) also note that Henry and William James were among Child’s warmest admirers. Henry described him as a “delightful man, rounded character, above all humanist and humorist,” and William said of him: “He had a moral delicacy and richness of heart that I never saw and never expected to see equaled.... I loved Child more than any man I know” (p. 86).
Moore and Vermilyea (1994) note that when plans were being made in 1935 for establishing the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, Daniel Casey revived a claim he had first made in 1900 that he was the Casey in Thayer’s ballad. His story received a great deal of publicity, and a new generation of baseball fans began clamoring to know the truth about Casey. However, “A poet to the end, Thayer did nothing to dispel the clouds of obscurity that had gathered about the legendary slugger over the years” (pp. 3–4).
Moore and Vermilyea (1994) also indicate that the New York Sun claimed in 1895 that Kelly at the Bat was the original poem and that it had first appeared in the Sun. Will Hearst challenged this claim, but many baseball fans continued to believe that the Kelly version was the original. They cite Burton Stevenson’s (1935) observation that “many old-time devotees of the diamond still treasure it in its adapted form, believing it to be the original one” and also cite a comment by one of Thayer’s classmates that the substitution of Kelly for Casey was “easily understood by those who are old enough to remember that 45 years or so ago Mike Kelly was by far the most conspicuous player in the country” (p. 2).
The first meaning of striking out in my book Striking Out (Capps 2011a) is also relevant here because returning home after a period of striking out may be viewed as a failure by the boy or young man himself even if, as was Thayer’s case, his family considered his return to be a step in the right direction.
In The Annotated Casey at the Bat Martin Gardner (1995) notes that although Archibald Gunter wrote 39 novels he “has found his way into terrestrial immortality only because he happened to take Casey out of a newspaper and pass it along to Hopper” (pp. 6–7). Gardner adds that we must not belittle this achievement and cites the following comment by Burton Stevenson (1935) in his anthology of famous poems: “It is easy enough to recognize a masterpiece after it has been carefully cleaned and beautifully framed and hung in a conspicuous place and certified by experts. But to stumble over it in a musty garret, covered with dust, to dig it out of a pile of junk and know it for a thing of beauty—only the connoisseur can do that” (quoted on p. 7). Stevenson’s observation that Gunter “stumbled” onto Thayer’s ballad relates to my identification of the stumbler as one of the vulnerabilities that teenage boys experience on their religious journeys, for among the various ways in which one may stumble—trip or fall while walking or running; speak or act in a confused, blundering manner; or fall into sin or error—there is also the experience of discovering something by chance, as in stumbling onto an important clue or insight (Capps 2011a, p. 8).
Hopper mentions Buck Ewing in his description of the evening performance. William “Buck” Ewing, who played for the New York Giants, was widely regarded as the best catcher of the era and one of the best players of the nineteenth century. He was the National League home run champion in 1884 and had a career batting average of .303.
In his biographical sketch of Joyce Kilmer, Robert Cortes Holliday (1918) states that Kilmer “was a poet’s poet who declared (with considerable vehemence, I remember) that he certainly wished he had written Casey at the Bat” (p. 70). Kilmer is best known for his popular poem Trees (Kilmer 1914, p. 19). It begins, “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree” and concludes, “Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree.” My parody of Trees begins, “I think I’ll never cease to see / A poem barking up a tree,” and concludes, “Poems are made by fools like me, / On paper made from such a tree” (Capps, 2011b, p. 443). In light of the fact that I am concerned here with a poem about baseball, perhaps it is worth noting that most baseball bats are also made from trees.
Gardner indicates that he has been unable to find out where this ballad was first published; the earliest printing he could find was in a quarterly magazine titled The Speaker (vol. 2, June 1907, pp. 205–207).
When our grandson Eamon was 6 years old we were having dinner at a restaurant that had iron chairs. He leaned back and his head struck the back of the chair. It was clear that it hurt but he did not say anything. Later he leaned back and his head struck the back of the chair again. He said “Not again!” This phrase—“Not again!”—has become part of our family vocabulary, and it is striking how often we have found occasion to use it. In my chapter on good humor role models in Laughter Ever After (Capps 2014a) I cite the case of the allegedly dumb blonde who, on noticing a banana peel on the sidewalk in front of her, commented, “Here we go again.” I suggest that her comment makes a great deal of sense, and note that I realized this after I had taken a rather bad fall on a sidewalk where the pavement was uneven, and recalled that I had done the very same thing in the very same place a few months earlier. I conclude that the allegedly dumb blonde gets it right, that “Here we go again” is the story of our lives (p. 80).
This poem uses the pseudonym Nitram Rendrag which reverses the letters of Gardner’s first and last names. Gardner also wrote parodies under the pseudonym Armand T. Ringer, which is a scrambled version of the letters of his name (see Gardner 2001).
Note that Gardner locates Mudville in Kansas. As we have seen, Moore and Vermilyea (1994) make a strong case for Stockton, California, as the locus of Mudville. But in the opera The Mighty Casey, which had its world première in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1953, Mudville’s opponent is identified as Centerville. In 1888, the year that Thayer wrote Casey at the Bat, there was a farming village named Mudville near the eastern border of Anderson County in Kansas, some 60 miles southeast of Topeka. It was on the south bank of Polecat Creek, seven miles west of where Centerville in Linn County is located. Mudville no longer exists. Gardner (1995) gives the clear impression that Mudville, Kansas, was the mythical locus of Thayer’s ballad, and Moore and Vermilyea (1994) include Gardner among recent writers who “have downplayed the California connection, preferring to concentrate on Casey’s rise to prominence in the East” (p. 333). Although their argument that Stockton is the likely locus of Mudville is very persuasive, perhaps there is also something to be said for the Kansas location as this may serve as a compromise between a Western and Eastern location. Also, Gardner’s allusion to Earth as Mudville (p. 16) suggests that Mudville is here, there, and everywhere. So, we are all Mudvillians wherever we happen to live.
In this and the preceding sequel Casey is a stranger. In Striking Out (Capps, 2011a) I noted that teenage boys may “experience themselves as strangers to other teenagers, to parents, or to other adults because of changes occurring in their self-perceptions, their perspectives on the world, attitudes, and behaviors.” They may also “experience themselves as strangers to themselves because of the emergence or development of new aspects or features of their personalities that they themselves do not understand and may seem foreign or alien to them” (p. 116). These two sequels to Casey at the Bat suggest that the stranger may be an older man who demonstrates that his teenage self is still alive within him (see also Capps 2014b, pp. 14–31).
In light of the fact that Casey at the Bat is a ballad and that Thayer’s English professor at Harvard, Francis J. Child, was an expert on English and Scottish ballads, it’s worth noting that there is a Scottish ballad, written by an anonymous poet in the 16th century, in which God and Saint Peter are walking along a path and see a pile of horse turd on the path ahead of them. Saint Peter, in a sporting mood, asks God if he can make a highlander out of horse turd and, of course, God can and does. For the rest of the story, see, “How the First Heilandman of God was Maid of Ane Horss Turd in Argylle” (Watson 1995, pp. 143–144).
Martin Gardner (1995) points out that the phrase “hope springs eternal in the human breast” is from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, epistle 3: “Hope springs eternal in the human breast: / Man never is, but always to be blest” (quoted on pg. 181).
It might be worth noting here that a baseball player would be mindful of what an agent could do for him. In fact, Gardner (1995) cites another Mad magazine sequel titled Casey at the Talks in which “the owners of the Mudville team are in deep gloom because they have been unable to sign up Casey for the coming season. In strides mighty Casey, accompanied by two lawyers, three accountants, and his business agent.” The owners offer Casey a million dollars, plus 10 % of grandstand sales, shares of stock, a butler, and a custom-built Rolls Royce. But the ballad ends with the mournful lines: “And somewhere fans stand up to cheer a bases-loaded clout, / But there is no joy in Mudville—Mighty Casey has held out” (pp. 213–214).
In the foregoing use of Agents of Hope (Capps 2001) to interpret the case of Casey I have not had much to say about the role of desire in the fueling of hopes, the threat that apathy (the state of desirelessness) poses for hoping, and the role that patience plays in enabling one to keeping one’s hopes alive, especially in relation to frustration. However, I would suggest that the pastor needs to be alert to the possibility that as his despair with its accompanying depression begins to subside, Casey will enter a period of apathy which manifests itself in the feeling that baseball is rather meaningless and not worth the frustration that it involves. He may need this period of apathy in order to anticipate and prepare for the next stage in the therapeutic process, i.e., confronting the implications of his failure for his understanding of himself and of what will become of him in the foreseeable future (pp. 107–122, 148–154).
My comments in the preceding footnote are relevant to Phelps’s observation here that “our ability to accomplish any feat is in reverse ratio to the intensity of our desire.”
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Acknowledgments
I want to thank Dover Publications for permission to quote several poems from Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Casey at the Bat. I am also grateful to members of the Group for New Directions in Pastoral Theology for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper at its conference at Princeton Theological Seminary in May 2015. My special thanks to Craig Rubano, who concluded his comments as the assigned respondent with the following quatrain:
Yes, somewhere in this muddy world, the mighty Casey slugs;
Upon the hearts of “stumbler” youth, his strike-out moment tugs;
And somewhere, too, sit “straddlers,” furrowed brows upon their mugs;
But Ernest Thayer, looking on his “Casey,” merely shrugs.
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Capps, D. Striking Out: The Case of Mighty Casey. Pastoral Psychol 65, 167–195 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-015-0670-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-015-0670-4