"Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright,

The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,

And somewhere men are laughing, and little children shout;

But there is no joy in Mudville - mighty Casey has struck out.

CASEY TOOK his first two borderline strikes, swung at the third. The sadness in Mudville could be muted over time by that, by the thought their slugger had taken his shot and just plain whiffed.

It will be different here this winter. The way Ryan Howard went down at the end, standing, bat on shoulder, giving his best "not my style" look to plate umpire Tom Hallion after taking a 3-2 pitch for a season-ending strike three?

Standing amid media an hour later, unapologetic when someone asked if he thought, in retrospect, that he should have taken a hack at what seemed to be a hittable pitch?

Bristling when it was conveyed that his manager postulated that he had not found his hitting stroke after being sidelined by a wrist injury?

"Did I ever find my swing?" he said, repeating the question.

"My swing never left."

Your manager said it did, he was told.

"Um, I guess I didn't find it then," he said, a mocking tone in his voice. "I mean if you hit 31 home runs and 108 RBIs, you must have found something."

Eek. Reading your regular-season stats after leaving two runners on in the ninth inning of a playoff game you had to win? Whether Howard really believed this last season of his was not subpar, this was really bad timing, bad form.

To the national media that measures him against the likes of Albert Pujols or Joe Mauer, Howard at times came across as petty and petulant Saturday night. His insistence that the strikeout pitch was low rings hollow from the lips of a man who tied a record in this series with 12 strikeouts in 22 at-bats, who swung at ball four the pitch before, who K'd in the third inning after Placido Polanco and Chase Utley reached base to start the inning, after a near brawl resulted in Giants starter Jonathan Sanchez being removed from the game.

"You think if the pitch is a ball, you're not going to swing," said Howard, apparently disregarding a baseball staple dating back to the days of Mudville.

It goes something like this:

Two strikes, anything close, put the ball in play."