Warren Spahn, God rest his soul, enunciated best the dilemma that plagues our memory of Casey Stengel even three decades after his death left baseball bereft for its most singular mind and personality. "I played for Casey," the Hall of Fame lefthander thrived upon saying, "before and after he was a genius."
Spahn had been a short-lived Boston Brave rookie, toward the end of Stengel's troubled tenure managing that impeccably mediocre ensemble, and he became in due course a short-lived addition to the 1965 New York Mets, after what wrote his Cooperstown ticket had abandoned his arm. The rookie had had his manager's affection until the day he refused to drill Pee Wee Reese and the old man farmed him out on the grounds of no guts.
Spahn went on to earn a Bronze Star and Purple Heart in World War II service, to say nothing of coming out of the Battle of the Bulge alive and returning home to forge a career that included a mere 42 plunks in 5,245.2 lifetime major league innings pitched. In a La Guardia-esque moment, Stengel owned up to his error. "I said 'no guts' to a kid who wound up being a war hero and one of the best pitchers anybody ever saw," he mused later. "You can't say I don't miss 'em when I miss 'em."
What people forget of Spahn's observation illustrates our dilemma in assessing Stengel objectively, the blank that Steven Goldman, in his imperative new book, Forging Genius: The Making of Casey Stengel (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books; 301 pages, $24.95), fills in, and it only begins with the rest of Spahn's commentary. Spahn "also said that no one knew baseball or cared more passionately about the game than Stengel," Goldman writes. "Perhaps that's why Stengel never pointed out that he was the only manager to work with Warren Spahn before and after he was a great pitcher."
Goldman's volume says it is long past time that we got sick and tired of a particular Stengel stereotype, the class clown who lucked into managing the greatest baseball team of all-time when anyone with a body temperature and a blood count could have done it. By slipping the meat of his baseball mind's development between the wheat bread of his hiring by, and first spring and season managing, the New York Yankees, Goldman serves up a crow sandwich to those who persist in believing, with apologies to Branch Rickey, that design was the residue of Stengelese luck.
"What does it do to a man," Ed Linn wrote in due course, in the Saturday Evening Post, "to know that he can do his job better than anybody else in the world — to know in his heart that he knows how it should be done — and not only be denied the opportunity, but to be looked upon as a garrulous fool?" To Goldman, based upon the evidence as it is, the answer was (is) self-evident.
It hurts badly. Casey Stengel neither gave in to that pain, nor believed his critics. When wounded, he fought off feelings of bitterness by laughing outwardly. He used his time in the wilderness to better his own understanding of his profession and himself, regroup, and attack again.
Goldman's will stand as the definitive analysis of Stengel as a baseball mind and manager, the way Robert W. Creamer's Stengel: His Life and Times has stood as a pure biography. One of the crew at BaseballProspectus.com, the crew which suffers no fools gladly and refuses to let a good story get in the way of the facts, Goldman could hardly resist having a crack at Stengel, especially considering the Smithsonian-size archive of documentary evidence available to re-examine and re-analyse.
But when the facts of the Ol' Perfesser get in the way of the good stories (and you can count on one hand how many bad stories snake up from Stengel's ghost), he looks better and his critics look ridiculous, and they will have Goldman to thank and blame for putting it in one place.
"The only thing we knew about Casey," young third baseman, future cardiologist, and future American League president Bobby Brown said, "was what we'd read in the papers. That he was eccentric, that he was kind of a baseball clown ... no one realized the depth of his baseball knowledge." Even after he finally had the team that could execute the depth of that baseball knowledge, a lot of people barely realize it. In 1949, it was ignorance as smugness, Goldman writes.
That spring, the Yankee players were all about entitlement. They were pros, the children of (Joe) McCarthy, smarter than (general manager George) Weiss, and more dignified than Stengel. Unable to see the forest for the trees, they missed the decline of the team as it fell down around them ... somehow avoiding the unpleasant truths that McCarthy was drinking himself out of a job in Boston, (Lou) Gehrig was dead, (second baseman Joe) Gordon was gone, and the three outfielders (Joe DiMaggio, Tommy Henrich, Charlie Keller) had left their youthful health and vigor in the decade of the 1930s.
In the same decade in which those Yankees' youthful health and vigor was left, Stengel was trying to make a collection of Brooklyn Dodgers, whom their owners had thrown together with little rhyme and less reason, beyond saving dollars at every turn (the Dodgers of that time were bedeviled by the heirs of Charlie Ebbets and Steve McKeever, heirs who couldn't even agree on what they agreed upon), into a baseball team. He went on to try to make a team out of a group of Boston Braves likewise bedeviled by shortsighted (and short-dollared) owners and having something else in common with the prior Dodgers: the very few good players Stengel was allowed were smothered by the very bad players that dominated the team.
The very quality that made Stengel a survivor is the quality that made him so puzzling when he, of all people, was hired to take over the Yankees for 1949. Goldman offers one very intriguing suggestion: Stengel's fearlessness toward finding and provoking laughter even in the middle of the murky months in Brooklyn and Boston provoke people to judge him far worse — and without justification — than they have judged, for example, the records of men who have been called geniuses in spite of abundant evidence to the contrary.
God rest their souls, but how on earth did Gene Mauch — a masterful tactician but a shortsighted strategist — become a "genius," he with 19 consecutive less than inspiring finishes between the 1964 Philadelphia Phillies and the 1982 California Angels.
How did Connie Mack, a beloved Philadelphia institution, become that in the first place, despite his idea of a perfect season following the last Athletics championship era, the early 1930s: "(a season) in which the A's got off to a hot start, stimulating attendance, and then dropped off rapidly so players could not demand raises?" Aside from his modest financial resources (Mack, after all, also owned the team), Mack did as Stengel wouldn't do even if he had every gun in the league at his head.
How the hell did Leo Durocher become considered a seminal manager, and a Hall of Famer in the bargain, when a thirtysomething-year resume produces (count it) one World Series championship to show for (count 'em) three pennants, and numerous seasons in which he alienated as often as he assimilated his players and employers, while overplaying his hot hands and underplaying his reserve cards?
Is there something wrong with those pictures but right with Casey Stengel's, after all? Damn right there is, says Goldman's 301-page answer.
Stengel would never have allowed one rookie's unanticipated steal of home plate turn him against one of his best pitchers, the way Mauch did when Chico Ruiz (with Frank Robinson at the plate) stole home against Art Mahaffey to begin the losing streak that sank the Phillies in the end. (Mahaffey only got one or two starts the rest of the way and pitched well enough to win, and it was not, apparently, enough to lift him out of Mauch's doghouse.)
Stengel would have fought with every bullet in his guns to keep an owner — even himself (and he did have partial such interests in several teams he managed pre-Yankee) — from dismantling with impunity a great team such as Mack dismantled. (Goldman frequently cites the Stengel ethic of rebuilding a team concurrent to its success and not after its success, a little-appreciated factor in the Yankee success under his command.)
And Stengel would never have worn down his players only to call them gutless quitters when they were clearly exhausted by the time the stretch drive was on in earnest, nor would he have jockeyed umpires to the extent that they might exact a little revenge on the close calls come crunch time, then blame everyone else for a team's collapse, the way Durocher did. (Two words: 1969 Cubs.)
The Ol' Perfesser had played for several less-than-contending teams himself, and a few less-than-acute managerial minds, before his comparatively brief but edifying late-career turn with John McGraw's New York Giants, in the final period of McGraw's greatness. What he learned from McGraw about baseball is legend enough, but Stengel was never content to be a mere McGraw disciple. He developed, advanced, and refined McGraw's teachings into his own philosophy and style, from strength platooning and percentage play to teaching and pacing his players, from surviving inflated or overbuttressed egos to melding isolated performance measures with particular players' personalities. Stengel in Goldman's hands comes out better in the much-recorded "feud" with mythic but fading Joe DiMaggio than the "legitimate" histories have allowed, while he heeded on-base percentages and situational numbers years before they became linchpins of Moneyball.
The cynics snorted at Stengel's major league managing record when the Yankees hired him, but they ignored at their peril that Stengel won when he had the players who could execute, his favorite single word for playing the game correctly. He had also managed minor league teams in Milwaukee and Oakland in a pair of minor leagues (the old American Association and, even better, the old Pacific Coast League) that were major league in everything except name, and he won with them. (Goldman's is perhaps the single best analytical telling of Stengel's success with the Oakland Oaks.)
Goldman's analysis of just how Stengel bent, shaped, and reshaped the 1949 Yankees is as good as it can ever become for a pocket examination, to say nothing of a preliminary course in just how it was that the Stengelese Yankees became such continuous (if barely stable: Yankee turnover in the pre-free agency era was at least as frequent and, sometimes, arbitrary as it has been in the Steinbrenner era) champions. (Worth a reminder: Ralph Houk in his first term as the Yankees' manager looks better than he really was — his teams, essentially, were the last of the Stengel-refined Yankees.)
But somewhere in there is the exclamation point to the Stengel story, which Goldman acknowledges in the breach. His analysis ends prior, but the idiosyncratic Mickey Mantle (supposedly Stengel's trump card down on the farm, after the stupefying 1949 success) proved mostly unwilling to be taught, and he was almost (underline that) lucky that his outsize talent compensated for it. If there was one side of the Stengel myth that is absolutely true, it was that the old man wanted something in hand with pennants that his old mentor McGraw had (see Mel Ott): one player above all that he could make into a monument to everything he knew and hoped to teach about baseball.
He did have that player, and from the moment he opened his first Yankee spring. It took Ott himself — managing the Giants, sending the Yankees a message that $50,000 was theirs for the taking if they would agree to sell that player off the Newark farm — to awaken the Yankees to the fact that there just might be more to this kid than his caricaturable looks suggested. The kid's name was Yogi Berra. And what the deposed Bucky Harris began, Casey Stengel took up, advanced, and finished.
Because Yogi has become so beloved a character (if to some extent manufactured — but only some) as time has passed, he is not seen as Stengel's monument on the terms of Stengel's definition. But Stengel saw the rest of what the Yankees almost missed. Seeing and raising Harris a score, he saw a kid whose talent should have been obvious, whose hunger to learn should have been nurtured even further (and was, especially when Stengel and Weiss coaxed Bill Dickey into coaching Berra on the fineries of catching, in the classic case of the student blowing the teacher out of the proverbial water), and whose courage to laugh through the cruel abuse he took over his looks and his awkward speech was almost as poignant as it was telling. More than anyone before him, Stengel made it possible for Yogi Berra to play baseball the way he and Stengel each believed it should be played.
The result is a Hall of Fame catcher against whom everyone to follow him must be measured, no questions asked, of course. Yogi Berra was the greatest catcher in the history of the game; Johnny Bench was an extremely close second. But Stengel's handling of Berra also bequeathed a powerful argument (isolated brilliantly by Allen Barra, in Brushbacks and Knockdowns, punctuated by the World Series rings Berra has: 10) that Berra — whose least appreciated ability was his ability to turn pitchers who never had winning records elsewhere into pitchers who pitched over their own heads as Yankees — may have been the single greatest team player in the history of team sports, the player who meant more to his teams' winnings than any player, in any sport, anywhere, anytime.
In the hands of any other manager, Berra might have become merely useful, maybe a good hit-suspect defence catcher, maybe even a by-the-numbers Hall of Famer based almost entirely on his hitting for his position, but not quite close to what he actually did become. Yogi Berra probably deserves a re-examination more than anyone who has ever played the game (his almost-namesake, Barra, only commenced to it, to use another Stengelese expression), and we have Casey Stengel to thank for that.
Maybe Berra struck Stengel with a kind of shock of recognition. If it took Berra a bushel of guts to laugh his way around the stupidity with which he was handled at first, it must have taken Stengel a ton to laugh his way through being blamed more readily for mediocrity than he was credited for success. It takes superhuman ignorance to frown at Stengel's Yankees and presume it was a freak accident that rudely interrupted the mediocrity to which providence had plighted his true troth.
And it will be difficult to read even Goldman's kind of evidentiary analysis without bursting out laughing — this is Casey Stengel, after all — but it will be impossible to read it and conclude ever again that Stengel was just the luckiest man alive from 1949 through 1960.
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