Homer at the Bat

"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".

Synopsis
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 (mostly from the 1920s-1930s). Thus Mr. Burns orders Smithers to find some current superstar players and hires several Major League Baseball players to work at the plant (Roger Clemens, Wade Boggs, Ken Griffey, Jr., Steve Sax, Ozzie Smith, José Canseco, Don Mattingly, Darryl Strawberry and Mike Scioscia) 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 but Strawberry have different incidents that don't allow them to play. Because of this, Mr. Burns must 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".

Baseballers
The players in this episode were an extremely talented group. They combined for 77 All Star selections, 34 Gold Gloves, 7 Cy Youngs, and 4 league MVP awards. They also won a combined 12 World Series. Smith and Boggs are presently the only members of the Baseball Hall of Fame from this group, although several players are not yet eligible for election. As of December 2006, Ken Griffey, Jr. and Roger Clemens are the only remaining active players (Mike Scioscia manages the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, José Canseco plays for the Long Beach Armada in the Independent Golden Baseball League, and Don Mattingly serves as the New York Yankees bench coach). At the time, only Steve Sax and Don Mattingly had played for the New York Yankees. Four of the other ringers would later play for the Yankees (Boggs, Clemens, Canseco, and Strawberry).