Talk:Casey at the Bat

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[edit] Commentaries

There is a lot of unsourced editorializing showing up in this article. Baseball Bugs 11:57, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

I've done some work on it. I apologize for stepping on the toes of the concurrent writer, but the article reads like a review, either the writer's own invention or lifted from a book about poetry, but either way it was (and still is) much too editorial for wikipedia standards. Baseball Bugs 12:32, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Now my good Baseball, I was quite happy with your initial corrections (the ones with the bullets), but now you turned it into a poor text commentary and it gained tremendously in messiness and lost in clarity. You know baseball but what do you know about poetry and narratology? You do whatever you want, I do not care that much, but maybe you should consider going back to your initial formulation, the one without all these quotes.

I'm not done with it yet. Baseball Bugs 01:23, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Very good. I am your most captive fan. I was a little surprised that you censored the developpment about "Fraud!". Casey's reaction to that second accusation of the crowd is ambivalent. He feels accused and becomes suddenly hateful and violent. Did you remove it because the dark side of your favorite sport manifests itself in that double entendre?

Where are you getting that from? Baseball Bugs 01:44, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

From the text, Baseball, from the text itself and nothing else. After that shout of the crowd, Casey looses completely his nonchalance. The texts speaks suddenly of violence, of hate. I even believe that that accusation is what finally made him strike out...

I'm working mostly from Martin Gardner's book. Putting your own spin on it is considered "original research". Can you find a citation for that interpretation? Baseball Bugs 01:59, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

So you will discard a valid argument on scholastic grounds, and give me the quote your master line? Come on, Baseball, you can do better than that. The writer you quote is just another "original researcher" who was printed on paper, what does that mean fundamentally? Can you find a citation - and more importantly: an argument - that invalidates that interpretation? If that citation comes from your own free-thinking head, it even interests me more.

It's not on scholastic grounds, it's on wikipedia rules grounds. You need to find a verifiable source, other than your own imagination. The burden of proof is on you to find a citation. Baseball Bugs 02:15, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

To put it another way... it may well be that there is something published that makes that argument. Wikipedia rules require verifiable citations on points of controversy or obscurity especially. That means from reliable sources (Gardner is a published author on a variety of subjects) and not quotations from weblogs and such stuff as that. Baseball Bugs 02:23, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Your rules, my dear Baseball, are self-proclaimed and self transgressed. I doubt that you can provide quotes to ground the bundle of mish-mashed comments yout turned your own work into. The connections you build with The Natural and with these other baseball figures you mention are also the result of your own improvisation. The final result is more "know-it-all" than descriptive. The fact that Casey wears a hat and not a cap is in the text. It is factual then to mention it. It is not an act of imagination and is in full conformity with the adequate understanding of the wiki rules.

Wikipedia's rules, not mine. You can argue against some of the fill-ins I've provided. And I kept some of the spin that you and that other editor put in. But the theory that he threw the game requires a citation. As far as the "hat" situation... well, "cap" doesn't rhyme with "bat", don'cha know. Baseball Bugs 02:39, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Well I can find you a flow of citations proving that the rhyme does not allow to distort the semantic endlessly. If that hat would have actually been a cap, the author would have organized the movement and the rythm differently and rhymes constraints would not have alterated his content. The fundamental, Baseball, is this: as a typical wikiman you behave as if you own that article. Your improvisations are legitimate and the interventions of others are subordinated to your own subjective choices. Be informed that I will not edit a single line in that article anymore. You can screw it up as deeply as you wish and wrap yourself in the wiki-rules to legitimate yourself. It will be just one more tiny episod of the endlessly growing wiki-biais. Let me exemplify the distortions you introduce. You write:

Casey adopts a surprisingly modern attitude when he neglects to swing at the first two pitches. Many years later, Rogers Hornsby advised Ted Williams that the secret to hitting was to "wait for a good pitch to hit". As Carlos Beltran knows, sometimes that good pitch never comes.

This "know-it-all" set of correlations with the history of baseball would have a certain anecdotal interest if they would not introduce a mere falsity. It gives wrongly the impression that Casey is patiently waiting for the good pitch... All the "quotes" you can find about the main thematic of that text (including from your own text: Casey, Mudville's star player, is beloved by the fans and so confident in his abilities that he doesn't swing at the first two pitches) will tell you that what he actually does is to nonchalantly neglect the two first pitches out of a self-indulging lack of modesty. There is nothing specificly modern about that and all that segment of your development about "waiting for a good pitch" is "imaginative", unsubstantiated and, most of the most: wrong.

Baseball Bugs, why is it that you do not want any mention of the fact that many people have construed (either because they are overly optimistic or because they wanted to write/dramatize etc. a comic retelling of the poem) the line "The score stood four to two with but one inning more to play" to mean that the game is in the bottom of the ninth? I would be in full agreement with your edits if you were changing a comment that claimed this, but what you have edited out are mentions of it that immediately discredit the claim and state that the game is in fact in the bottom of the ninth. I'm not accepting your 'nobody thinks that' explanation because anyone with a precursory understanding of baseball who is not familiar with the poem could easily think that. I don't know about you, but at the bottom of the ninth with two outs and two poor hitters coming up to bat not many people would say there's another inning left. Of course the situation would not be nearly as desperate if there were another inning, and so it is ridiculous to think that it is the last of the eighth, but it is an easy misunderstanding or a clever conceit to use, and so I think it bears mentioning here. Christopher Bing felt the need to mention that theory in the back matter of his amazingly well researched (and Caldecott nominated) version of the poem (which you would probably highly enjoy, look it up on amazon). I do not at all agree with the patronizing tone that the other, anonymous user has been using with you, but his early criticism that your edits of this page seem much more geared to people who like baseball than to people who are interested in poetry or this poem is quite true. An editor of this page must consider that there are more issues involved than just creating a highly baseball-fan oriented explanation of the poem.B.T.Carolus 09:17, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

"With but one inning more to play" cannot possibly be the start of the eighth, because there would be at least three "half-innings" remaining in that case: two for the home team, one for the visitors. No matter how you define the term "inning", you can't have more than two half-innings in one inning. Also, that statement is not made when there are two outs and none on, it's made at the start of the inning, before anyone has batted. More to the point, though, assuming anyone ever did make that stretch, it was uncited. It was just someone's opinion. You hint at a citation. You could add that dubious point if you can cite it. Baseball Bugs 09:48, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

I took away that uncited claim, and substituted an explanation that will hopefully make it clear why it must be the ninth. Notice I did not say the last of the ninth. Under the rules of the day, it could have been either the top or the bottom of the ninth, because at that time teams were allowed to choose (by coin toss) whether to bat first or last. I feared that would complicate matters, as would the other possibility - that the game is in extra innings, and the visitors scored 2 in the top of the tenth, or whatever. Or, it could be earlier, if there is a curfew or if the daylight is running out. But there is no hint of those possibilities in the poem, so normally it would be taken to be the ninth. In any case, it is Mudville's final inning. Baseball Bugs 10:01, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Baseball Bugs, I don't think you get the point of this article. It is nice that you have an incredibly in depth understanding of baseball and all of its little intricacies. For the 99% of the English-speaking people on this planet who come to this page looking for information on a poem, or to provide information on that poem, no one cares about split hairs about half innings. Guess what, two half innings, added together, make a whole inning. That is how every average joe -- reading this poem because they remember it fondly from elementary school or wanted to figure out where that last stanza came from -- understands baseball. The point of this page is to make non-avid baseball fans able to understand a poem. Not to split hairs about this stuff. Which is why I and several other people have included the reference about the eighth inning. It is not to make you mad, or spark paragraphs of possible explanations of what inning it actually is, it is to give (for example) an eighth grader doing a project for his literature course a clear understanding of the poem. To keep said eighth grader, or another like him, from going down a rabbit hole about something that can't happen. That is why we have a reference about it. Not because it is impossible, but because it seems like it could be and therefore could be confusing to someone. That is, in fact, why we have put in many of the things we have put in. It's also why you can't necessarily delete them just because of your particular brand of knowledge. Your expert knowledge of the subject of baseball can be a valuable asset to the quest of making this poem -- about baseball -- more accessible. It can also be a detriment if you lose sight of the fact that this is an article about a poem, not an explanation of a historical epoch of your favorite sport.B.T.Carolus 10:24, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

So where is the citation for the claim that some see it as the eighth inning? I've seen that statement in the article, but there is no actual citation. "...has sometimes been used by optimists or comedians..." is not a citation, it's just an unsupported statement. Baseball Bugs 10:39, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Aside from the fact that two or three people have independently put that in (I didn't realize that you'd deleted it multiple times until after I started looking through the article's history), you can find the claim that various people have thought that it took place at the end of the eighth in the backmatter of Christopher Bing's 2000 edition of the poem. Although not technically a scholarly work, Bing is one of the leading children's book illustrators of our day and he got that way because he literally spends years doing pre-research on his subjects (which are all re-illustrations of old masterpieces). His "Casey at the Bat" is no excpetion. In addition to amazing 'woodcut' illustrations in the style of a period newspaper, he wrote a half-dozen 'newspaper articles' that recount the issues baseball faced in the late 1800s including the adoption of gloves, new pitching rules, arguments over outfield fences, etc. He found period baseball memorabilia and, using cutting edge digital techniques, created 'Mudville' baseball cards, pins, and medals which are digitally overlaid onto the pages. He also wrote an explanation of the style of artwork he used, an acknowledgements section that describes some of the places he did research at (like the baseball hall of fame), and (in the backmatter) a short 'obit' of Thayer and a detailed explanation of the context of the poem, including mentioning that optimists sometimes use an alternate explanation of which inning everything happens in. Obviously that is not a perfect academic citation (although it's a lot better than some on Wikipedia...) but I'd imagine that if anything else Bing would be able to point to the research that led him to say it. I cannot look at the book and see if there is anything more about that particular issue because it is (alas) at the public library right now. I do not know where the other people who wrote that in got their information from.B.T.Carolus 11:15, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Once you find the book, a specific citation is needed: Author, Publisher, Year, page(s), and the exact quote. Meanwhile, if the author knows so much about baseball, he would also know that any such claim is ridiculous. But if you can pinpoint the actual citation, it could theoretically be added. As a qualifier, I asked an admin to weigh in on this, if he cares to. He rang me up for the lack of a "valid" citation that John Belushi's "pep talk" from Animal House is used as a "rally starter" in many stadiums... which is absolutely true, but no "authority" seems to have commented on it, just many-many individual fans in weblogs. That tells you something about the level of citation that can be required, if someone decides to make a thing of it. Baseball Bugs 11:22, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Baseball Bugs quotes wiki-regulations and obligations that apply to everyone but himself. But Bugs breaks the supreme rule of Wikipedia. He denies the cooperative wiki-authorship and behaves as if this article is his own.

"The last line above reflects the casual attitude towards betting and baseball that existed at the time." At the time? as opposed to today? I'm no historian but I'd bet you the casual casual attitude between baseball and betting at the time is exactly the same as it is now, at least among people who don't write wikipedia articles.

My 2 cents. For an article about a poem, this article dissects each line like a dead frog. Talk about killing any understanding of poetry, and the poetry to be found in baseball, which Thayer did, and if truth be told, makes the article pedantic and flat out boring.--Buckboard 03:49, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm guessing you weren't too fond of English Lit. 101, where they would slice and dice the Dickens out of the classics. Baseball Bugs 03:55, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for making my point. It was merely a suggestion for improvement. To quote M. Vick, I have no dog in this fight.--Buckboard 04:06, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Except that in wikipedia, restating a poem or song or whatever is generally frowned upon as "wikipedia is not a source" or some such; instead, quoting a poem or song is expected to be done for the purpose of analysis. Meanwhile, I see you charitably put a "fact" tag on the "misogynistic" rant. That section is clearly someone's editorial, and would be ripe for deletion, beyond whatever actual facts might be in it. Baseball Bugs 04:11, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Indented commentary

Maybe this is covering old ground. A spot check of prior versions didn't show indenting of the commentary. Having the text closer to the left margin and indenting the commentary reads easier for me. But that's me.

A spot check of prior versions did show italicizing of the text. That makes some sense to me, but I find italicized text harder to read. That is covering old ground. For whatever reason, the text isn't italicized today.

Perhaps indenting the commentary suffices in giving prominence to the text. -Ac44ck (talk) 18:49, 26 April 2008 (UTC)