Welcome to The Simpsons Greatest Hits, my never-ending quest to find the greatest episode of The Simpsons. Please come find me on twitter @FirsttoLastpod and let me know what is the best episode, and keep a look out for it on this weekly column.
Homer at the Bat
Season 3/Episode 52 overall
First aired: 20 February 1992
Written by John Swartzwelder
“Ken Griffey’s grotesquely swollen jaw.”
“Homer at the Bat” is an incredible feat of television skill. The episode features nine guest stars who all make an impact, and it manages never to feel as though the creators are just showing off that they’ve bagged this many famous baseball players.
A lot of episodes of TV shows, including The Simpsons, have collapsed under the weight of a single guest star with their star power overshadowing the cast or their presence bringing the show to a standstill. Other times it just feels gimmicky, or the show struggles to use their star organically (see the Lady Gaga episode of The Simpsons’ 23rd season).
“Homer at the Bat” juggles its nine guests with aplomb, giving them funny lines, unique misadventures, and manages to tie them in a Simpsons plot to which they add value instead of pulling focus.
“Steve Sax had his run-in with the law.”
The main way the episode threads this needle is to devote the first act to Homer and his softball success. Once the stakes are set with the Springfield team in the final on the back of Homer’s achievements, the guests arrive as a counterbalance to that. And once they arrive the episode becomes a series of vignettes and montages, stacking jokes on jokes in an incredibly satisfying way.
The montage of mishaps towards the end is a fantastic showcase of surreal jokes and payoffs. In some cases, like Ken Griffey Jnr, Mike Scioscia, and Roger Clemens, the mishap is foreshadowed throughout the episode, and we’re given a hilarious (though pretty dark) punchline to each. In other cases, we’re given weird, heightened mishaps that sideline the players like Steve Sax’s run-in with Springfield’s corrupt police department and Wade Boggs’ beating at the hands of Barney over who is the greatest English prime minister.
“We’re talking Homer, Ozzie, and the Straw…”
I think what amazes me the most about this episode is how accessible it is. If a show made in England did an episode with nine guest stars who were all football/soccer players, I can’t imagine it would translate well overseas. And yet somehow, The Simpsons does an episode with nine baseball players and somehow manages to make it completely inclusive of every audience whether they know MLB or not.
And this comes down to the writing. John Swartzwelder, possibly the greatest Simpsons writer, keeps the jokes universal. The fact that Burns has brought in these famous ringers is funny enough without there needing to be deep-cut baseball jokes or topical references to their careers. We understand that these are famous athletes, so dumping them in Springfield and having them interact with Homer is joke enough.
This also gives the episode a timelessness as, even though these players have retired or moved into coaching positions (or, in Canseco’s case, are now charging $5000 to anyone who wants them join them on a hunt for Bigfoot), the episode doesn’t feel dated or old. It would have been easy to fill the episodes with winking asides and in-jokes, but that would have left Homer at the Bat in 1992, instead of seeming completely fresh out of the box in 2019.
Finally, enjoy having Terry Cashman’s “Talkin’ Softball” stuck in your head for the rest of the week.
Overall score: 5 Magic Bats out of 5
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