What is the theme of "Casey at the Bat"?

Teachers have several different ways of looking at the
concept of “theme.” Sometimes we ask students to state a theme as a “statement about
human life or human nature,” rather than as just a single word or
idea.

If we look at theme this way for “Casey at the Bat,”
we have to consider what the crowd at the baseball game expects from Casey and what
actually ends up happening. It is obvious from the poem’s description of Casey that he
is considered to be a great hitter:

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“If only Casey could but get a whack at
that—

We’d put up even money now, with Casey at the
bat.”

The fans at the game
who haven’t left yet are watching, hoping that Casey will get a chance to hit. They
clearly believe that he has a good chance to win the game for the home team. Keep in
mind that in baseball, hitters fail more often than they succeed, even the great ones.
So to be willing to put up “even money” on a hitters’ chances is to express great
confidence in that hitter.

However, as is often the case in
baseball, the best are likely to fail, and the poem ends this
way:

But there
is no joy in Mudville—Mighty Casey has struck
out.

Themes should be
universally true, so we cannot confine our theme to just baseball—we need to make it a
little more general. A statement that encompasses the ideas presented in the poem in a
universal way could be:

Even the best, despite the
expectations of others, are liable to fail sometimes.

This
is a viable theme (although not the only possible theme) because it makes a statement
about human life that is universally true—it applies to all people, everywhere, all the
time.