"Don't shed any tears for Casey. He wouldn't want you to," said Richie Ashburn, who had the honor of calling the Ol' Perfesser "Skip" in the final season of his career. "He loved life and he loved laughter. He loved people and above all he loved baseball. He was the happiest man I've ever seen."
One rests secure knowing Ashburn's wish was probably denied, for a little while, because the laughter Casey Stengel loved was equal to the laughter Casey Stengel provoked, and the latter's source would be here to feed it no more.
"God is getting an earful tonight," said Jim Murray, a Los Angeles Times columnist who was not unknown for provoking a share of mirth in his own right, when Stengel slipped at last in the swift grip of lymphatic cancer. It was only one further reason to reply, whenever it was quoted that He the Lord is a jealous God, that we had reason enough to be jealous of Him from that day forward.
Stengel died September 29, 1975. It was the Monday after the regular baseball season ended, and his funeral was not conducted for a week. "It was delayed that long," wrote his biographer, Robert Creamer (Stengel: His Life and Times, "because Monday was an off-day during the pennant playoffs then underway in each league, and baseball people traveling west to the American League [Championship Series] in Oakland would be able to attend. Stengel might have enjoyed the humor in that: Funeral postponed because of a game."
The best tribute to Stengel, Creamer noted, was not in the funeral's game plan. "As the congregation waited for the service to begin," he wrote, "there were little whispers of conversation here and there, and then a low chuckle, a muffled laugh, a giggle. They were talking about Stengel, remembering him, telling stories about him, and the bubbles of laughter kept rising all through the church — 'as though,' [former sportswriter Harold] Rosenthal said, 'the mourners had completely forgotten the current condition of the guest of honor and the reason they were all there.'"
About the only times Stengel never left them laughing were those times at which he would have to inform players of their trade or release, as managers in his day were empowered to do. The players would not laugh, but his listeners otherwise would, particularly years after the fact. "Managing the team back then was a tough business," he recalled once, of his years managing the mid-1930s Brooklyn Dodgers. "Whenever I decided to release a guy, I always had his room searched for a gun. You couldn't take any chances with some of them birds."
I never knew him to require such measures in the period which made him my Stengel, though it was a period which some may have believed would acquit him had he chosen to keep a gun at his side to use upon himself. ("If anybody wants me," he would say one night during a particularly arduous road trip, "tell 'em I'm being embalmed.")
My Stengel was not the sesquipedalian tactical maestro who brought his closer (as we would call Joe Page today) in the third inning of a pennant clinching game because, damn the book, he needed a stopper like right now, en route 10 pennants and seven World Series rings in 12 seasons, including five consecutive Series rings from the word "you're hired." (There are those who suspect, I among them, that it will prove easier to pass Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak than Casey Stengel's five consecutive World Series championships as a manager.)
Nor was my Stengel the man who hit (in 1923) the first two World Series home runs (one of them an inside-the-park number) in Yankee Stadium history. Nor was he the teacher who nearly collapsed at Ebbets Field's concrete and fold, scoreboard-bisected right field wall, before which he had played in ancient days as a Dodger outfielder, instructing a rookie named [Mickey] Mantle how to play the wall and its angle collection.
"He pointed out the cement bevel near the ground that could make a ball rebound oddly and described how a ball hitting the scoreboard above the wall could stop dead and drop straight down," Creamer wrote. "Warming to his task, he said, 'Now, when I played out here...' and Mantle looked at him in astonishment. 'You played out here?'" he asked.
"When Casey returned to the dugout, he was laughing. 'Boy never saw concrete before,' he explained to the sportswriters. 'I told him not to worry about it, that I never had no trouble with it and I played that wall for six years. He don't believe what I'm telling him. I guess he thinks I was born 60-years-old. They never believe we done anything before they did.'"
My Stengel was the elder whose laughter, his own and his inspired, was like Figaro's, that he and his listener might not weep. Come an' see my amazin' Mets. I been in this game a hundred years, but I see new ways to lose I never knew existed before.
"They are, without a doubt, the worst team in the history of baseball," said Bill Veeck to Jimmy Breslin, to whom we owe thanks for the supporting evidence, a charming little book which was republished at last almost two years ago, the title of which ought to leap into your lap shortly. "I speak with authority. I had the St. Louis Browns. I also speak with longing. I'd love to spend the rest of the summer around the team. If you couldn't have any fun with the Mets, you couldn't have any fun anyplace."
Stengel spent portion enough of his 73rd birthday talking in his customary manner — nonstop, labyrinthine Stengelese — when he suddenly unloaded in Breslin's company about an Original Mets' road jaunt West.
We're going into Los Angeles for the first time, and, well, I don't want to go in there to that big new ballpark in front of all them people and have to see the other fellas running around those bases the way they figured to on my pitchers and my catchers, too. Wills and those fellows, they start running in circles and they don't stop and so forth and it could be embarrassing, which I don't want to be.Makes a man think. You look up and down the bench and you have to say to yourself, "Can't anybody play this here game?"
Well, we have this Canzoneri [he meant Chris Cannizzaro] at Syracuse and he catches good and throws real good and he should be able to stop them. I don't want to be embarrassed. So we bring him and he is going to throw out these runners. We come in there and you never seen anything like it in your life. I find I got a defensive catcher, only who can't catch the ball. The pitcher throws. Oops! The ball drops out of the glove. And all the time, I am dizzy on account of these runners running around in circles on me and so forth
Three guesses which phrase got mangled into one of the earliest watchwords of Mets malcompetence.
"The hiring of Stengel was a masterstroke," wrote Veeck, in The Hustler's Handbook, "because Casey could have given PR lessons to FDR. Having been fired by the Yankees for becoming the oldest living manager ever to win ten pennants in twelve years, he was returning to New York as a beloved and somewhat ill-used figure, full of years, honors, and sympathy. (Managers, like politicians, Casey has found, are far more beloved once they are out of office.) He created a feeling, I suppose, that if he could come out of retirement in his old age and suffer through a Met ball game every day, the least the rest of the subway commuters could do was to come on out and suffer along with him."
Those who call this Stengel theirs as I call him mine choose one or another moment to freeze in a frame as the singular symbol of that team and its kaleidoscopic calamity. For all his sesquipedalic speeches mine own was an instance in which he actually said nothing. Perhaps you had to be there, and I was, sort of. There was no funnier comedy on American television than the 1962 (and 1963-65) Mets, including Bugs Bunny.
First inning, Chicago Cubs versus the Mets, at the ancient Polo Grounds. The Cubs in the top of the first had delivered a bit of a shock when Lou Brock, of all people, became the first since Joe Adcock to hit one out over the straightaway center field bleachers, over 460 feet from the plate. The Mets in the bottom had just been stunned when the aforesaid Marv Throneberry whacked a triple down deep right center field, gunned it safely to third, and got himself called out when Ernie Banks called for the ball, stepped on first, and nodded to the umpire, "Didn't touch first, you know."
The umpire punched a hole in the sky with his thumb. Before Stengel could reach the umpire, intent on punching a hole in the centerfield clubhouse with the umpire's flying carcass, first base coach Cookie Lavagetto stopped him: "Forget it, Case. He didn't touch first, either."
Well, I know he touched third, because I can damn well see him standing on it.
The next Met hitter was second baseman Charley Neal, an erstwhile Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodger. He banged one off the upper deck overhang for a home run, and before he was three steps up the first base line Stengel hobbled out of the dugout and halted him in his tracks.
The Perfesser said nothing and merely pointed to first base, stamping his foot. Only then did Neal dare to run toward first, where he crossed the bag in the prescribed manner and continued on to second. He glanced back to see Stengel pointing to second base and stamping his foot again. Manager and bombardier repeated the ritual around each base until Neal crossed the plate unmolested. Then did Stengel return to his seat in the corner of the dugout. The Polo Grounds audience went nuclear.
Once Stengel visited pitcher and future split-fingered fastball rabbi Roger Craig on the Polo Grounds mound, after Willie McCovey of the San Francisco Giants had hit a second home run off Craig. "Do you see them stands there?" Stengel asked, pointing to right field. "Do you know they are going to tear down this ballpark at the end of the season? Well, you just keep pitchin' that way to that fella and you'll give 'em a head start on the right field stands."
The Polo Grounds ended up coming down shortly after the Mets moved into spanking new Shea Stadium in April 1964. "Lovely," said Stengel, seeing the completed park for the first time. "Just lovely. The park is lovelier than my team."
Only once in awhile might we see the Stengel who had actually managed over a decade worth of Yankees, because only once in awhile did the Original Mets play baseball as though they knew what they were doing. And even then there could not be such baseball without a prelude straight from the discards of Mack Sennett, the second game of an August doubleheader against the Pittsburgh Pirates standing in memory as the perfect exhibit, particularly because I was there to see it at all of 6-years-old.
The Pirates had won the first game and had a 4-1 lead going to the bottom of the ninth and their best relief pitcher, Elroy Face, in on the bump. Early in the game, the Mets lost third base coach Solly Hemus for arguing with an umpire; first base coach Cookie Lavagetto moved to coach at third and Gene Woodling, Stengel's former Yankee platoon now reunited with his former boss as a utility player who could still hit a little, was sent out to coach at first. Midway through, Stengel needed Woodling to hit and thus another first base coach.
At Richie Ashburn's prodding, Stengel sent Marv Throneberry, whose earnest but bumbling defense balanced against his occasional offense turned him into a classic antihero. The moment he poked his nose out of the dugout to make for the coaching line, the Polo Grounds audience gave him a standing ovation. And there he stayed, working competently enough, until the Mets got something started on Face in the bottom of the ninth.
Ashburn started with a single, Joe Christopher continued with a walk, and Felix Mantilla — a third baseman whose tireless genius had been to dive exactly the wrong way on any ball grounded or lined his way — singled Ashburn home. By this time, the Polo Grounds rocked in a shift of chants from "LET'S GO, METS!" to "WE WANT MARVELOUS!" Stengel called Throneberry back from the coaching line and ordered him to fetch his bat. He stood in against Face and hit one into the right center field seats for the game, 5-4.
This is not to say that Stengel was without his critics, and here we mean not merely the ancient Boston sports columnist, reviewing a season in which Stengel was lost to the hopeless Boston Braves (whom he then managed) thanks to a fractured leg courtesy of a cab driver hitting him as he started to cross the street. The columnist proposed the cabbie receive the city's highest commendation for having done Boston baseball its biggest favour of the year.
Managing the Mets his critics included Hemus, "who was fired," the late sportswriter Ed Linn remembered, "because he ignored Stengel's admonition that coaches should be seldom seen and never heard, and more particularly because he ignored so frequently on the television show conducted by Howard Cosell, an abrasive critic who has gotten under Casey's skin." And, players who chafed under his withering sarcasm when they failed, in a favorite Stengelism, "to execute."
Those critics also included Jackie Robinson, who pronounced Stengel had become so old that he had lost his mental alertness. But Stengel's critics tended to forget that, Linn wrote, "while Casey has occasionally been caught without a pinch hitter, he has never been caught without a line." Robinson was no different, particularly with his then-employer providing an inadvertent hook. "I don't want to get involved with Robinson," Stengel retorted to the writers ("my writers") covering the Mets. "He was a great ballplayer once, but everybody knows that he's now Chock Full o'Nuts."
"Everybody knows that Casey has forgotten more baseball than I'll ever know," said Jimmy Piersall, very briefly a 1963 Met. "That's the trouble. He's forgotten it." That from a man whose shining moment as a 1963 Met was hitting his 100th career home run and shuffling around the bases backwards.
Take fieldin'. You got carelessness. A fly ball goes out there and you got those two fellas in the outfield sayin' 'I don't want it, you get it,' and they bunk heads. I ain't seen no one die on a ball field chasin' balls. Also I bet I lost six games fieldin' by a pitcher. He's got an $18 dollar glove, ain't he? He ain't blind. He got good eyes, but he's a pitcher. Fieldin' ain't his job. So I lost six games fieldin' by a pitcher. I'm workin' every day for a double play combination. Why, do you know a double play is 2/27s of the ball game? Us, we get one out, not two.
Them pitchers got to get out there thinkin', 'I'm greater than those hitters, the majority of them, anyway,' but how long can they go on gettin' shell-shocked and get out there with the spirit and attack and better control? If I tell you to pitch low and you pitch high, then what've you got? The brightest man in the world, maybe, but if you can't get that ball over, the umpire's gonna beat you if the batter don't. Throw those sinkers. Make 'em hit ground balls. Never heard anyone gettin' home runs on ground balls.Go to the hitters. We got too many men strikin' out, too many men left on bases, too many one-run losses. If I can keep you from strikin' out 12, 15 times with men on third, I'd probably be more satisfied or near more satisfied. Can't platoon men if they don't hit against righthanded and lefthanded pitchin', sacrifice, bunt, beat the pitchers and the umpires.
Take one of those young players. All he wants is home runs, say. He looks terrific out there. Lovely swing. So he strikes out and comes back to the bench and tears up the equipment when he doesn't get a home run. When what he wants is a hit. I tell him, "Oh, that pitcher, he's a good one all right, but hit him easy — not too hard, not too soft — the ball'll move; otherwise, you're a strikeout king, not a home run king."
I'd like to get some of these Youths of America. Now if I wanted to be a big leaguer, I'd say to myself, "This is a team can give me the experience." No doubt about it, it's a terrific opportunity for the young men of America. I'd think to myself, "If I went to any other club, it'd take me longer to become a pitcher or an outfielder or an infielder, whatever." On this one, if you can outplay another player there's a possibility that in one or two years of hard work you can become a major leaguer. ... Look up the record of every player on this club. He's played more with us than he did the year before with anybody else. We need about 10 more players and that could be the youth of America. Look at all the prospects this club's had. There's good pay, a good annuity plan, live first class, go everywhere, the best hotels. And, if I was one of those prospects, I'd say to myself, "I won't let that other fella take this job away from me. I'll just play so good, the manager and the coaches and the owners have got to like me and I've got a regular job.
We got clean uniforms if you get 'em dirty. Why, the owners is just dyin' to have you get 'em dirty; I like to see 'em dirty. There's laundries. You tear a uniform, they're just waitin' to take it right off you and give you another one. There's never been such an opportunity.
The youth of America could learn things from Stengel today other than swinging easy or throwing grounders. When he first returned to Ebbets Field as a visiting player, he chatted with an old Dodger buddy and noticed him nursing a tiny sparrow. Stengel asked to borrow the creature for a spell. An inning later, he stepped in to hit and received a rather lusty booing from the Ebbets Field crowd. Then he bowed and tipped his cap. The sparrow flew out from under it and the crowd howled. There is a right way and a wrong way to get away with flipping the bird.
I saw Stengel last at an Old Timers' Day in Shea Stadium, in 1975. After the customary on-field parade of elders, through the bullpen fence came a Roman-style chariot with Stengel in it, waving an antique buggy whip. The chariot pulled to the infield area and Stengel dismounted. He looked almost twice his age (he was 85-years-old), his head seemed to sink somewhat into the shoulders of his old Met uniform, the number 37 on his back looking almost twice as large.
He was deprived by then of the only love in his life equal to baseball. Edna Stengel was confined to a nursing home following a round of small strokes robbing her of her competence, Stengel unable in his own ancient age to care for her properly, though he visited her daily when he was home. He spent his final spring training making his customary rounds and wearing their love on his sleeve: "She went crazy on me overnight. I miss her."
Creamer in Stengel shared a story "that I hope is true": hospitalized for the final time, Stengel lay in bed when a baseball telecast began, including the playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" (they still showed that pleasing ceremony on regular-season baseball telecasts at the time). Stengel is said to have swung his legs over the side of his bed and stood at attention, his hand over his heart, saying to himself, "I might as well do this one last time."
"A lot of people are going to be surprised that Casey died," Murray wrote. "Because they didn't think he was born. Casey just came walking out of the pages of Grimm's Fairy Tales years ago. He escaped the wicked old witch's oven or jumped the club on Snow White. Disney invented him. Part moose, part mouse, sometimes he was all seven dwarfs. ... He was a genuine American heirloom, like a railroad watch. What Fernandel was to the eternal Frenchman, Cantinflas to the poor put-upon Mexican, Chaplin to tramps, Stengel was to Americana."
It sounds like a man after whom they ought to name a major league ballpark, if not retire number 37 across the major league board. (The number is worn at this writing by 17 players — all pitchers — including three on teams for whom Stengel once played or managed.) The Mets' new park has been designed but not yet built. Stengel Park, anyone?
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