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“Homer at the Bat” is the seventeenth episode of The Simpsons’ third season. The episode involves Homer’s boss, Mr. Burns, trying to guarantee victory in a softball game between the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant and the Shelbyville Nuclear Power Plant by signing several Major League Baseball players. Things do not go as planned. The episode’s title is a play on the Ernest Lawrence Thayer poem “Casey at the Bat”.

Plot
The Springfield Nuclear Power Plant softball team has gone through their season undefeated, and in the championship game, they will face the Shelbyville Nuclear Power Plant. Homer is the team’s leading hitter, thanks to his homemade bat (a takeoff of the plot of the film The Natural).

Mr. Burns makes a million dollar bet with Aristotle Amadopoulos, owner of the Shelbyville plant, that his team will win. To secure victory in the game, Mr. Burns wants to hire major league stars, but Smithers tells Mr. Burns that the players he picked are all dead. Thus, Mr. Burns orders Smithers to find some current superstar players and hires several Major League Baseball players to “work at the plant” and to play on the team, much to the dismay of the plant workers who got the team to the championship game in the first place.

However, the night before the game, all the players except for Darryl Strawberry have different incidents that prevent them from playing.Mr. Burns is forced to use actual employees, but keeps Homer on the bench because Strawberry plays his position. Homer does get in, though, with the score tied and bases loaded in the 9th inning, when Burns wants a right-handed hitter against a left-handed pitcher. The very first pitch hits Homer in the head, rendering him unconscious and forcing in the winning run. Homer is then paraded as a hero, still unconscious.

During the credits, Terry Cashman, who wrote the song “Talkin’ Baseball”, sings a take on his hit, “Talkin’ Softball”.

Production

José Canseco was originally slated to wake up in bed with Edna Krabappel and miss the game, but Canseco’s then-wife, Esther Haddad, objected. Because of the change, Marcia Wallace was listed in the credits, even though Mrs. Krabappel didn’t appear at all in the episode.

In the DVD commentary, Al Jean hints that eight of the baseball players were really nice guys, except for one guy whose name rhymes with “Manseco”. He later says that Canseco had a hard time saying his lines and was really difficult every time he was told to do a retake. As well, he insisted that his original part be rewritten, so he was written as a hero.

Several of the players in this episode are purposely given distinctly different personalities than what they are known for. Darryl Strawberry, well known for being self-serving and hard to deal with is depicted as an ass kissing coach’s dream. Jose Canseco, known for his self-promotion and grandiosity is shown as a hero who rescues everything a woman owns from a fire.

Cultural references

1. The episode makes several allusions to The Natural, a movie starring Robert Redford and which is based upon Bernard Malamud’s book by the same name. Homer’s secret weapon, his self-created “Wonderbat”, is akin to Roy Hobbs’s “Wonderboy”. Both bats are eventually destroyed. The scene featuring the explosion of stadium lights as Homer circles the basepaths is taken directly from the film, as is the scene with the team and the hypnotist.
2. The end song “Talkin’ Softball” was actually re-written from an older song “Talkin’ Baseball” by Terry Cashman, singer/writer of the song. Cashman has rewritten his lyrics several times for particular teams.
3. This episode marks the second time in the series that someone mentions the phrase “It’s like there’s a party in my mouth and everyone’s invited!” Ken Griffey Jr. says it after trying Mr. Burns’s nerve tonic. The first being Moe’s exclamation upon sampling the episode’s titular beverage in the season 3 episode “Flaming Moe’s”. This line was parodied in “Parasites Lost”, a season 3 episode of Futurama, another cartoon created by Matt Groening, when Fry eats a very expired egg salad sandwich and exclaims “It’s like there’s a party in my mouth and everyone’s throwing up!” Griffey had trouble performing the line, a number of outtakes of which are presented as a hidden feature on the Season 3 DVD set.