Response to “Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Thayer

By: Sean Beecher

Casey at the bat is a poem in which a baseball team is losing their game in the ninth inning. In the first paragraph it talks about that the first two batters in the game both “died”, so they got out. The major conflict is that they are down four to two in the last half inning.
In the next following paragraphs everybody seems to be having their hopes down because their team has one out left in the game. When the crowd started getting down, the team showed a little bit of life left in them when Flynn singled and Blake hit a double. That left runners on third base and second base.
Then the crowd seemed to have hope in their team when their most anticipated batter stepped up to the plate, Casey. The crowd thought that Casey was for sure going to get a hit. It seemed that Casey was into himself showing off to the crowd and such.
Than Casey steps into the batter’s box at this point in the game a couple thousand eyes are watching him in the stands, so there is a lot of pressure on him right now. Casey let two strikes go right through for two called strikes, which the fans did not like at all. They booed him and taunted the umpire saying things like kill him. At this point in the story he cannot go back no walking out, no redo and he had one more strike before he struck out and let down his team.
The story says that when he steps back up into the batter’s box it looks like Casey is not going to miss any more pitches. The author describes his look as a look of confidence. But unfortunately the tragic part about this story is that even though he felt confident on a 0-2 count he swung and miss at the third pitch. The game was over he blew it for his team. And the whole city was dead with silence that day. Casey striking out is defiantly a big part of this story. I believe that this story has some tragic and comedic things in this story.