The Mighty Casey: Baseball's Immortal Goat - June 3, 2008

Looking at it objectively, it wasn't all Casey's fault. Mudville wasn't playing well, anyway. Down 4-2 in the bottom of the ninth, Cooney and Barrows grounded out quickly (and why Mudville's manager had Flynn and the light-hitting Blake batting ahead of Casey is a matter best left to the Sabermetricians). But it was Casey who went down swinging, so he gets the blame. Our friend from Mudville was hardly the last baseball player who choked when the pressure was on, though. Why, just 20 years after Casey's K, New York Giant Fred Merkle failed to touch second base after getting the apparent game0winning hit in a crucial game (the "Merkle Boner"), and cost his team the 1908 pennant.   Ralph Branca had had a perfectly respectable 1951 season for the Brooklyn Dodgers, but it was the pennant-winning pitch he served up to Bobby Thomson that gets remembered.  Dennis Eckersley had 45 saves for the 1988 Oakland A's, but one backdoor slider to Los Angeles Dodger Kirk Gibson gave Gibby the most dramatic moment in World Series history and Eck the goat's horns.  And need we add Bill Buckner, whose misplayed ground ball cost the 1986 Boston Red Sox a world championship? There's something about Casey's futility, though, that caused a national sensation. Vaudevillian DeWolf Hopper became as famous as Casey himself, reciting the poem of the latter's failure tens of thousands of times to rapt audiences.   Ernest Lawrence Thayer's "Ballad of the Republic" has been parodied, adapted, and referenced in every sort of American media since its first appearance on June 3, 1888 (in the San Francisco Examiner, of all places). So, while Casey may have fanned that one time, his failure gave him an immortality that few other ballplayers -- or people -- of his era ever achieved otherwise. Suggested Sites... The Eternal Misery of the Baseball Goat - they may have failed, but at least we remember them. Wikipedia: Casey at the Bat - annotated version of the poem, with its history and extensive lists of parodies and references. Major League Baseball: Casey at the Bat - a more-or-less official look at the poem and its legacy. "Casey at the Bat" - De Wolf Hopper performs the poem in his inimitable style in one of the first sound films ever made. Wikipedia: The Curse of the Billy Goat - the ultimate example of goats and infamy.