We live in a world of absolutes. Sports, in particular, don’t allow for much gray area in this realm. Your team is either the very best or an abomination unto whomever or whatever entity you pray to. A season is either a success or a failure. Middle-of-the-road? Save that conversation for something more level-headed. May I suggest politics?
For this particular thought exercise, I want you to envision the 2025 Ole Miss baseball team. As of this writing – just days removed from a gut-wrenching, season-ending defeat in their own regional at the hands of massive underdog Murray State – I’m sure many are leaning toward “failure.” And, yeah, that’s reasonable at the moment. Ole Miss – the No. 10 national seed – fell to a team in its first NCAA Tournament in more than two decades and became just the 10th regional host to fall to a No. 4 seed.
But I was recently reminded by a former editor of a childhood poem that I, quite frankly, had long forgotten. I haven’t read “Casey at the Bat” since I was in grade school. I don’t put much stock in short stories of yesteryear at this juncture in my life. As someone whose life revolves around traveling to stadiums and watching games, consider me jaded.
But as I reread the poem’s 600 or so words Tuesday, I couldn’t help but think of how its themes echoed so closely to what I watched from February to early June in Oxford.
The feelings of impending doom with Mudville down two runs in the ninth inning didn’t sound too dissimilar from Ole Miss’ 12-3 seventh-inning deficit Tuesday night or their facing elimination for four straight games after losing to the Racers in their opener. It also felt a lot like the expectations for a Rebels team picked to finish 15th of 16 teams in the SEC’s preseason poll after missing two straight NCAA Tournaments.
Then there are the two batters who reach base in the bottom of the ninth ahead of the titular character, Casey. That’s where “hope” enters the fray. Ole Miss rallied back from that nine-run deficit to cut the Racers’ lead to a lone run, having won three elimination games in a row to set up Monday’s matchup itself. As there was in Mudville that fictitious day, hope abounded at Swayze Field. And if we’re doing the whole comparison-to-the season-as-a-whole thing, what better representation of “hope” than the team that exceeded all outside expectations and earned a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament?
And then, of course, there is the end of the poem, the fall from Cloud 9.
Casey strikes out. The Rebels lost.
The most inspiring stories can – and often do – end in failure. That rings especially true in baseball, where the best batters on earth get hits less than 40% of the time. But that doesn’t mean the entire exercise was a failure. Because it made you believe. And these Rebels made you believe when no one else did.
“There was no expectations from the outside perspective with this team. And this team, at the end of the day, put their head down and went to work,” third baseman Luke Hill said through tears. “I’ve never been around a group of guys that are so committed to their craft. … I just want to be remembered as people that don’t give up. And I just want us to be (the) true definition of Rebels.”
A team that won a combined 17 SEC games the previous two seasons rattled off a total of 20 this year alone, with the Governor’s Cup and SEC Tournament included. A program that lost a pair of eventual first-team All-SEC selections in the offseason won its most games in four years. A team that lost key pitchers in the offseason to Florida State, Texas and Georgia ended the season with an ERA 1.23 runs better per game this year. The team picked second-to-last in the conference defeated the No. 15, No. 5 and No. 1 teams in the country in the SEC Tournament and nearly won the whole thing.
Belief doesn’t just happen. It comes from inside, from the top down, from veterans like Hunter Elliott who have seen the top of the mountain (the national title in 2022) as well as the lowest valleys (6-24 in SEC play in 2023, anyone?). The Rebels stuck together in an era when it’s easier than ever to run. But they didn’t and instead embraced the challenge. Elliott, senior pitchers Mason Nichols and Riley Maddox and junior veterans like Hill and Will Furniss wanted to be great. They helped keep the team together and found players around the country who believed in that same greatness.
They knew what was possible because they had hope. And their hope gave you hope, too.
“The other mantra of the team that’s on the shirt is ‘our dugout vs. everybody else.’ And, you can take that a lot of different ways,” head coach Mike Bianco said Monday night. “But it was not to listen to the noise, don’t listen to the polls, don’t listen to any of those things.”
Enjoy this team for what it was. This wasn’t “The Little Engine that Could” or “Cinderella.” That would be a discredit to the talent on the team and is a bit too cliché for my liking. This was a team that believed it was one of the best in the nation, even if you didn’t in February. Each and every one of the 64 times it took the field in 2025, Ole Miss believed it was going to emerge as victor.
Yes, Casey struck out at Swayze Field on Monday night. Mudville fans went home thinking about what almost was. But don’t let the final chapter make you forget the rest of the story and why you read it in the first place.
Michael Katz covers Ole Miss athletics for the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal.
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