The old Yankee tradition ceased to exist several years ago. There is, therefore, nothing incongruous in the notion of a comedian running the Yankees.— Red Smith on Casey Stengel, October 14, 1948
THE LATE JOHN LARDNER, whose sportswriting is an overlooked American treasure, knew Casey Stengel better than Casey Stengel wanted to be known. Like most, Lardner admired Stengel as a manager and, to a smaller degree, as a humorist. Uniquely among the admirers thronged in Manhattan, Lardner had known Stengel since his own childhood and even, in a sense, before.
John’s father, Ring Lardner, was Stengel’s contemporary — the two were born four years apart — and Ring was already established in sports journalism when Stengel crashed into the major leagues, with lots of line drives, some neat running catches, and, Stengel being Stengel, rivers of verbiage. “Dutch” Stengel intrigued the elder Lardner. Indeed, Ring Lardner used Stengel as a character in his final baseball novel, a touching seriocomic work called Lose with a Smile. (In today’s climate, such genial literary license would loose a legion of lawyers on all our heads.)
John Lardner, who grew up amid his father’s Stengel stories, was a bit put off by the sports page bouquets that at length commenced to fall at Stengel’s feet.* As we shall see, Stengel was delightful, vindictive, cordial, alcoholic, calculating, and thoroughly mean. Press portraits were sometimes tin-eared, often downright misleading.
The young Stengel broke in with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1912 and a season later became the original center fielder at Ebbets Field, a direct ancestor of the last center fielder there, Duke Snider. Stengel’s salary as a Dodger never exceeded $5,400, good for the time but not suitable for Stengel’s lifestyle. As a young player, Stengel loved dice, poker, hand-tailored suits, and whiskey. With his expenses exceeding income in 1914, Stengel cashed a number of bad checks at a bar on Flatbush Avenue, the Broadway, so to speak, of Brooklyn. As the bar owner protested, Stengel promised to cover the rubber with the proceeds of his next Dodger stipend. Meanwhile, here was another check for $100. Sure it was good. Whadaya think! Thanks a lot. Now gimme an Ol’ Overholt.
After three months of this, the saloonkeeper grew desperate. One morning he taped the bad checks — there were more than twenty — to the window of his bar. Passersby on a broad and busy Brooklyn avenue saw two items of interest in the window, each repeated many times: a genuine autograph of Charles D. Stengel; a bank stamp reading INSUFFICIENT FUNDS.
By the time Lardner told me this story, in 1960, Stengel not only was being acclaimed as the greatest manager in modern baseball; he was also president of a bank in Glendale, California. “From bad check passer to bank president in fifty years,” Lardner said. “I think if you could get that on paper, with a little baseball, you’d have a book about Stengel and in a way about America.”
A lot was going on around us. Literary editors of the time spoke frequently about someone composing “the great American baseball novel.” Several even offered small advances. “We want,” one editor said, “the baseball novel Thomas Wolfe would have written if Thomas Wolfe had written a baseball novel. We’re willing to offer twelve hundred dollars up front.”
John Lardner felt that in You Know Me Al, his father had already written the great American baseball novel. He was himself a meticulous and disciplined writer, and as such no great fan of Thomas Wolfe. Finally, as a gifted essayist, John resented America’s worship of the novel, a rival form.
Why didn’t I try and see if I could write the great American nonfiction book, framed about Stengel’s picaresque life? Lardner’s health was failing. The project was quite beyond his energies. I was younger, stronger, promising in certain ways, prolific.
The idea was John Lardner’s final gift to me. A month later, he was dead at the age of forty-seven.
Stengel was a student of sportswriting, specifically sportswriting about himself. He could have given President Kennedy lessons in manipulating the media. He was kind to me, even when I wrote critically about the Yankees, but as far as Stengel was concerned, two things were loudly wrong with John Lardner’s idea. Stengel’s bad-check days had been forgotten by the 1950s. Stengel meant for those days to stay forgotten. He didn’t want a serious, dimensional, variegated book written about him, or even by him. He preferred something adoring and drippy, along the lines of A Boy’s Life of Theodore Roosevelt. So, he explained over breakfast in his suite at the Essex House one October morning, “I like ya fine, kid, but I ain’t gonna help you do no book about me and I don’t want you trying to get with my brother or my wife, neither, because they won’t talk to you, I told them not to, and it’s nothing against you personal, kid. Why ain’t you eating your eggs?”
As I say, Stengel’s first objection was directed against my bent toward adult reporting. His second was entirely impersonal. My projected book would not earn him any money.
In 1961 after Stengel collected a $150,000 advance from Random House and The Saturday Evening Post, there appeared a putative memoir called Casey at the Bat: The Story of My Life in Baseball, written with Harry T. Paxton, who was sports editor at the magazine.
Trying to change substance, look, and image in one majestic swoop, the directors of the Post announced that on September 16, 1961, the “new” Saturday Evening Post would be “like no magazine you ever read before.” Indeed, they promised that with the September 16 issue, “Suddenly reading becomes an adventure!” The centerpiece of that issue was a long excerpt from the drab and drippy Stengel-Paxton book.
Above the blaring ballyhoo for the “new” magazine, someone remarked, “Harry Paxton has achieved the impossible. He’s made Casey Stengel dull.” Criticism of the old Saturday Evening Post maintained that the magazine was mostly trivial and usually flat. The new Post offered glitzy layouts, including a full-page color photograph of Stengel sniffing a red rose. But the story — and the Post was a storytelling magazine — was sheer old Post . The Madison Avenue crowd, whose advertising dollars were lifeblood to the magazine, laughed at — not with — the memoir. “How come the ‘new’ Post reads worse than the ‘old’ Post?” ran the gibe.
The new-old Saturday Evening Post went into a tailspin from which it never recovered. Stengel went on to manage the Mets with astonishing good humor.
The old man outlived The Saturday Evening Post by fully six years.
Casey Stengel, circa 1948, had not yet gone cosmic. He was famous in a minor way as a quintessential old Dodger, a good but less than great ballplayer, and assuredly a bit daft. (Writers called long-ago Brooklyn teams “the daffiness boys.”) Once Stengel tipped his hat to a Brooklyn crowd and a sparrow flew out. To this day, I am not certain how he trapped the bird. When I asked, Stengel said, quite clearly, with none of his customary curlicues or detours, “I don’t want to talk about that anymore. There were funnier things when I was in Brooklyn.”
“Such as?”
“Well, one day I’m in a hurry to leave Ebbets Field and I forget my wallet. I’m on the street with a lot of stuff and there, on Bedford Avenue, is a nice-looking kid on a bicycle. I want to run back without carrying stuff so I say to the kid, ‘Here. Hold my glove. I’ll be right back.’
“I get my wallet and run back to the corner. The kid and the bike and my glove — they’re all gone. And you know the lesson I learned from that, that I never forgot to this day?”
“What’s the lesson, Case?”
“Never trust a boy on a bicycle.”
As Jimmy Durante said of his own jokes, Casey had a million of ‘em. But with all the fun and even some success in Brooklyn — the team won the pennant in 1916 — center fielder Stengel was forever running out of money. He was disinclined to change his lifestyle, cut back on the gambling and the rest. Instead he muttered and roared that Charley Ebbets, who ran the Dodgers, was a cheapskate. That was so, and all the more reason why Ebbets did not like to hear it. In 1918 Ebbets shipped Stengel to the Pittsburgh Pirates, who presently sent him to Philadelphia, a club that dealt Stengel to the New York Giants on July 1, 1921.
Stengel gave the Giants two good seasons. On October 10, 1923, in the first World Series game at Yankee Stadium, his playing career reached a climax. The Stadium was new and vast and the largest crowd in baseball history, 55,307, herded into the Bronx. The Yankees, with Babe Ruth, were brash, muscular, nouveau. The Giants, under John McGraw, were old New York.
With the game tied, 4 to 4, in the ninth inning, Stengel came to bat in an unpromising situation. Two men were out. The bases were empty. “Bullet Joe” Bush, the Yankee pitcher, threw a three and two fastball on the outside corner. “I threw it as hard as I could,” Bush said later.
Stengel, a left-handed batter, crashed the ball on a long high line into left center field. No one has described what happened more grandly than Damon Runyon in the New York American. Runyon wrote:
This is the way old “Casey” Stengel ran yesterday afternoon running his home run.
This is the way old “Casey” Stengel ran running his home run home in a Giant victory by a score of 5 to 4 in the first game of the world’s series of 1923.
This is the way old “Casey” ran, running his home run home, when two were out in the ninth inning and the score was tied and the ball was still bounding inside the Yankee yard.
This is the way —
His mouth wide open.
His warped old legs bending beneath him at every stride.
His arms flying back and forth like those of a man swimming with a crawl stroke.
His flanks heaving, his breath whistling, his head far back.
Such is the stuff of legend. Stengel won the third game for the Giants, 1 to 0, when he cracked a home run into the right field bleachers at Yankee Stadium. Two home runs in a single World Series was extraordinary, but in the end, magnificent though Casey was, the Yankees won, four games to two, and the Yankees’ star slugger outdid Stengel. Babe Ruth hit three homers. Summing up, Heywood Broun wrote in the New York World, “The Ruth is mighty and shall prevail.”
In 1924, when he was thirty-four years old, Stengel married Edna Lawson of Glendale, California. Edna was a tall, willowy sometime actress who came from a monied background. The family’s wedding gift to the couple was a two-story house on Grandview Avenue in Glendale, surrounded by flower gardens and citrus trees. The property included a swimming pool and a tennis court. Ring Lardner’s rascally check bouncer was poor no more. Soon Stengel was investing in oil wells, real estate, and the family bank. His brother Grant had to drive a taxi in Kansas City to survive, but by the time “Dutch” Stengel reached the age of forty, he could have settled back into the life of a California squire. Almost all the investments paid handsomely. He had become a wealthy man.
But by nature he was an anti-squire. He needed tumult. He managed at Worcester and Toledo, drinking hard, brawling, often winning. The Dodgers hired Stengel to manage in 1934 and he held the Brooklyn job for three seasons. He finished sixth, fifth, and seventh. He was fired.
The Boston Bees hired him to manage in 1938 and he held that position twice as long. Under Stengel, the Bees finished fifth once, sixth once, and seventh four times. What everyone remembered was the tough wit. The Boston right fielder, Max West, was no Carl Furillo. West could hit and that was all. In pursuit of a fly ball one afternoon, West ran head first into an outfield wall. Stretcher bearers toted West from the field. Stengel looked down at his right fielder, who was moaning in pain, and remarked, “You got a great pair of hands, Max.”
Stengel went back to the minor leagues, first with the Milwaukee Brewers and the Kansas City Blues of the American Association and then with the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League. Inside baseball, the Coast League was called “the Brother-in-Laws League.” Old ballplayers seemed to gravitate toward California, and their style of play was less than fierce. Pitchers didn’t throw at batters. No one tried to knock down a second baseman on a double play.
In 1948, when Stengel was fifty-eight years old, he flowered. His Oakland team, mostly gentle veterans with the exception of the second baseman, won 114 games, the pennant and the playoffs. (The second baseman, a loudmouthed twenty-year-old named Alfred Manuel Pesano, became famous in later years as Billy Martin.)
“The thing which is very good managing in Oakland,” Stengel said, “is there is this bridge from Oakland to San Francisco, that is a very long bridge. Now it maybe don’t matter much just how long it is, but when you’re a manager, if you get my drift, it’s a good idea to be near a bridge, any bridge.”
When the Yankees brought Stengel to New York and a press conference at the 21 Club on October 12, 1948, Arthur Patterson, the team publicist, tried to stress Stengel’s hard baseball background. “It’s twenty-five years to the day,” Patterson said, “since Casey hit his second homer in the 1923 World Series.”
“Yeah,” Casey said. “Arthur was trying. But I know writers and I kept hearing a hum from writers in the room. And the writers were looking at me, damn near sixty years old, and they’re saying, in this hum: ‘That old bum managed nine years before in the major leagues and he never once got out of the second division.’”
“Stengel. You were asking me about Stengel. . . . When George Weiss signed him, we had a problem. Drinking? No, it wasn’t Casey’s drinking. He could handle the stuff. It was everybody else’s drinking. Ballplayers’ drinking. That was part of it.” The speaker was Arthur E. Patterson, a bright, abrasive character from Long Island, once a sound baseball writer for the Herald Tribune, but by 1948 publicity director of the Yankees. Prior to the Era, ballclubs assigned a minor official, usually the traveling secretary, to shepherd and corrupt the press, as a sidebar to such other duties as booking hotel rooms and assigning Pullman berths. (Rookies had to sleep in uppers; rebels were sentenced to berths over the clattering wheels.)
Skilled traveling secretaries — Eddie Brannick of the Giants was the best — bought meals and drinks for sportswriters, the basic device employed in keeping a benign press nonmalignant. “Ya got everything you need? We’ll have dinner next week. Bring yer wife. What? Ya short a couple bucks. Say, here’s a fifty, and don’t worry about it. If ya can’t give it back, the New York Giants won’t come looking for ya.” Such was the state of the art.
After World War II, the Yankees hired Patterson as publicity director. “I invented the damn job,” Patterson said when we talked in 1991. “I was the first full-time press agent in baseball history.” Coincidental with Patterson’s emergence, reporters, editors, and publishers were struggling toward the beginnings of self-discipline. It was then that the Herald Tribune, the Times, and later the Daily News started paying travel expenses for their writers. Subsequently, several reporters wrote hardnosed stories about Larry MacPhail’s drunken breakdown.*
“What I did,” Patterson said, as we lunched at a restaurant near his home in Anaheim, California, “is what today people call managing news. I’m not apologizing. I was damn good at managing news.
“Look, I saw that the Yankees were not just competing against the Giants and the Dodgers. They were competing against every leisure-time activity that you have in summer. If you decided to go to Jones Beach, you didn’t go to Yankee Stadium. You didn’t buy our tickets, pay our parking charge, eat our hot dogs, or drink our beer. I was trying to make the Yankees more interesting than the Giants and Jones Beach as well.
“In ‘49, we had a lot of injuries. Some — DiMaggio’s heel — were serious. Some weren’t. But I got the idea of keeping count on any injury more serious than a shaving nick. Mel Parnell and Bob Lemon [premiere pitchers] can’t stop Casey’s Yankees. Neither can Ol’ Man Injury Jinx. Come to think of it, I may have counted shaving nicks. The total came to seventy-one, about one injury every other day. The writers ate it up. Come to Yankee Stadium and see the walking wounded hit home runs. You couldn’t see that at the Polo Grounds or at Jones Beach State Park, either.
“When Mantle came up, we knew he could hit very long homers. I made a point of leaving the ballparks [after homers went out] and measuring them, down to the last inch. Or so I told the writers. Did that get ink! Duke Snider hit very long home runs for the Dodgers, but nobody in the Brooklyn organization realized the extra press mileage they could get with a two-dollar tape measure . . .”
The 1948 Yankees finished third behind Cleveland and the Boston Red Sox, and attendance reached a club record, 2,373,901.* But dour George Weiss thought that numbers of players — reliever Joe Page, left fielder Johnny Lindell — were drinking too much. He wasn’t happy with Joe DiMaggio running after showgirls. “Bucky Harris,” pronounced George Weiss, “is too damn easygoing. He’s lost control of the team.”
Harris had to go, Weiss decided, and his employers, Dan Topping and Del Webb, agreed. Casey Stengel and George Weiss had known each other for more than twenty years, at least since Stengel managed Worcester in the Eastern League (he finished fourth) and Weiss operated the New Haven franchise. Across decades they had stayed in touch, Comical Casey and Glum George, an early odd couple. Stengel’s Oakland Acorns won 114 games in the Pacific Coast League in 1948, the year in which Stengel celebrated his fifty-eighth birthday. Wealthy now, successful in California, Stengel was finally considering retirement when Weiss offered him baseball’s golden apple, the Yankee job. “I at once commenced not thinking of retirement,” Stengel said.
This would make Stengel the fifth Yankee manager in four seasons, troubling to many connected with a team once as stable as Gibraltar. In a series of private meetings, Webb, Topping, and Weiss on one side and Stengel on the other agreed on a two-year contract calling for about $35,000 a season. A two-year contract, Red Patterson argued, would show that stability was returning to the Bronx.
In truth, the situation remained uncertain and Stengel’s previous record as a major league manager was not comforting. “What we did about them particular matters,” Stengel told me years later, “is a kind of verbal agreement, the owners, Mr. Weiss, and me. If in one year, they didn’t like my work, or if I didn’t like their baseball methods, I could leave or be removed and so forth, without hard feelings, which you did not know before, because it is a bad custom to talk about private agreements, which you yourself know very well and cannot argue with.”
At one point, Weiss showed Stengel dossiers that two private detectives had compiled for him on a number of players — “night crawlers” in the argot of the time. “I don’t like what I read here,” Weiss said. Although he himself had been a ranking night crawler. Stengel said he would address the problem. He didn’t personally favor private detectives, although Weiss would continue to employ them. Stengel’s device for getting players into their hotel rooms before dawn was more direct. He sat in a prominent place in hotel lobbies into the wee hours. Like everyone else, the players knew he was there. Anyone coming in late had to walk past the manager and endure withering Stengel sarcasm.
“When the hiring was settled, we decided to have a press conference,” Red Patterson remembered. “We knew that Casey could be funny. Weiss said he was a great baseball man. Still, we were nervous. The writers might kill us for firing Harris, a sweet guy. We spread the word Harris wasn’t coming back during the World Series, when the writers were preoccupied with Lou Boudreau and Warren Spahn.
“Then we scheduled Stengel’s conference for lunchtime. More free food and free drink for the writers. We hired the 21 Club. We were the Yankees. We went first class. The day we picked, October 12, was one day after the World Series ended. The writers would maybe be so preoccupied wrapping up the Series that they wouldn’t get around to knocking us.
“I know that sounds crazy, but there it is.”
The Herald Tribune put the story on page one:
YANKEES NAME STENGEL PILOT FOR TWO YEARS
Former Manager of Braves and Dodgers Is Chosen as Harris’s Successor
The piece began halfway down the front page. The Tribune of October 13 was more interested in Soviet and American arms negotiators ranting at one another and in Thomas E. Dewey’s drab campaign to bounce Harry Truman from the White House. Stengel wasn’t even the biggest story in New York City. On the day the Yankees unleashed Stengel, Columbia University installed its thirteenth president, General of the Army Dwight David Eisenhower. With an audience of 20,000 gathered below the steps of Low Library, the general disappointed conservatives by saying in his inaugural address; “Academic freedom includes the right to teach straightforward courses on communism.”
The same day, at “21,” Stengel disappointed just about everyone. Dan Topping, the Yankee president, arrived to introduce him. Topping had a brother named Bob; both Toppings had been married to a sensual brunette movie actress named Arlene Judge. But where Dan became a working baseball man, Bob Topping’s ambitions led him toward nothing but a lush life. The brothers were not close.
Dan Topping introduced Stengel as the man who’s going “to lead our great Yankee ballclub to a pennant.”
Lips pressed together in tension, Stengel moved to the microphone. He looked at his employer Dan Topping and said, “Thank you, Bob.”
Nervous laughter.
“Uh, Dan. I am happy to be back in New York, which is where I played before. I had some other offers regarding managing, but I didn’t want to leave Oakland, where the owner has been very good.” After a while, he threw the room open for questions.
“What are your plans for the Yankees?”
“I, uh, last seen the Yankees play a couple years back. Now I must study the Yankee situation and then, uh, I will commence to draw conclusions.”
To indicate old guard support for the new man, Topping asked DiMaggio to linger in Manhattan and attend the Stengel press conference. DiMaggio sat quietly on the dais.
“What do you think about managing a great player like Joe DiMaggio?” a reporter asked Stengel.
“I can’t tell you much about that, being as since I have not been in the American League so I ain’t seen the gentleman play, except once in a very great while.”
DiMaggio, with an ego as mighty as his bat, grimaced. In their few years together, he and Stengel never got along.
Then it was done. In half an hour Stengel had gotten the boss’s name wrong and offended the biggest star in town.
This is the way old Casey Stengel stumbled at “21” on the first day of the biggest job of his life.
This is the way —
His mouth wide open
His warped old tongue
Saying
the
wrong
bloody
thing.
“Most observers,” commented John Drebinger, senior baseball writer at The New York Times, “were kindly disposed toward Stengel. But after that press conference they were viewing his forthcoming performance with misgivings.”
“I knew what I was getting,” George Weiss insisted twenty years later. “I was not hiring a comedian. In the minors Casey was wonderful working with veterans and great with difficult youngsters like Billy Martin, too. Nobody pushed Casey around.
“He had an uncanny knack for getting the right hitter up at the right moment, handling pitching, running a game. He had been studying for years. He had learned a lot from John McGraw. Everybody agreed that Casey did a wonderful managing job his first Yankee season. But what did they think, that he learned how to manage, all at once, in 1949?”
After the press conference, Stengel retreated. This tough, competitive roustabout was hired not to charm the press or, as some have suggested, ex post facto, to humanize “the lordly Yankees.” Weiss hired Stengel to win the pennant. That was the sine qua non. If Stengel finished second — far higher than he ever had finished before in the major leagues — he would be fired.
“Late in that season,” Stengel later said, “everyone was talking about platooning the players, which I very much did, but we come to a point against Boston where it come down to this: I had to win two games to win the pennant. I was gonna platoon myself out of a job, or platoon myself in, which is what happened as I am certain you recall.”
As a rookie manager, Stengel was given limited authority. Weiss would listen to Stengel on trades and even a bit on whom the Yankees might hire as coaches. But the decisions were made by Weiss.
“I know the league better than you,” Weiss said.
“Yes, sir, you do,” Stengel said. “But there is one pitching coach, who has been working in Portland, Oregon, which is very good.”
Stengel recommended Jim Turner, gruff, gray-haired Milkman Jim, who had had one fine year with the Boston Bees and had closed out his career as a wartime reliever for the Yankees. Turner came from outside the Yankee establishment but Weiss respected his work and hired him. Weiss then told Stengel that Bill Dickey, the greatest catcher in Yankee history, would be another coach, along with bald, quiet Frank Crosetti, who had played shortstop across seventeen seasons. Between them, Dickey and “Crow” had spent thirty-four years as major league ballplayers. Neither had played an inning for any team except the New York Yankees. Weiss was blending his roustabout manager with pillars of Yankee tradition. But the world was less than awed.
“Well, sirs and ladies,” wrote Dave Egan in the Boston Record, “the Yankees have now been mathematically eliminated from the 1949 pennant race. They eliminated themselves when they engaged Perfesser Casey Stengel to mismanage them for the next two years and you may be sure the perfesser will oblige to the best of his unique ability.” As Frank Graham, Jr., commented in Casey Stengel, the most winning and insightful of the Stengel biographies, “Uneasy lay the crown upon this old gray head.”
Stengel spent the winter quietly getting ready to become a manager in New York, meeting from time to time with baseball men, gathering information on Yankee ballplayers, players he had seldom seen at work. He joined the Yankee delegation at the baseball winter meetings in Chicago, where Weiss made a questionable trade. He gave the St. Louis Browns Sherman Lollar, a promising catcher, two other players, and $100,000 for a pitcher named Fred Sanford. The season before, Sanford attracted attention by starting thirty-three games for the Browns and losing twenty-one. In 1948, Fred Sanford led the major leagues in losses.
Red Patterson told the writers that Sanford was “a great acquisition. Last year, like somebody’s ex-wife,” Patterson said, “he shoulda sued the Browns for non-support. Whenever he pitched, all those Brownie fielders went to sleep.” But remember that two measures of pitching are essentially independent of position players. A pitcher should allow fewer than one hit an inning and should strike out more batters than he walks. Sanford allowed 250 hits in 227 innings; he struck out 79 batters but walked 91. His greatest merits, on the record, seemed to be that he was inclined to go to bed early and he didn’t drink much. If Stengel wondered about this curious acquisition, he kept his counsel. Writers who pressed him in the lobby of the Blackstone Hotel gained neither jokes nor specifics. “There is very many good ballplayers on the New York Yankees,” he said. “More than I ever managed on one team before. I think we can win.”
Few newspapermen agreed. When The Sporting News polled 206 baseball writers, the forecast for 1949 looked like this:
1. Boston Red Sox (119 votes)
2. Cleveland Indians (79)
3. Yankees (6)
Platooning — playing more than one man at a position — traces to John McGraw, who so mightily impressed Casey decades earlier. Generally, a right-handed batter has more trouble hitting the deliveries of a right-handed pitcher than he does hitting a left-hander’s stuff. (These assertions apply in exact reverse for left-handed batters.)
When a left-handed pitcher throws, the right-handed batter “sees the ball better.” Actually, he picks up the baseball in flight a fraction of a second sooner than he can when facing a right-hander. An unimpeded fastball goes from pitcher’s hand to catcher’s glove in two-fifths of a second. Every millisecond counts.
A right-handed pitcher’s curve and slider break down and away from a right-handed batter. Put simply, if you are a righthanded batter, the right-handed pitcher’s curve ball starts on a collision course with your head. The left-handed pitcher’s curve starts wide and then veers in. Tricky but less unsettling. “The curve that starts at your head,” said Stengel’s colleague Charlie Dressen, “is so bad I call that pitch, and not John Dillinger, Public Enemy Number One.”
Essentially, a manager wants to play as many right-handers as he can against a left-handed pitcher. But platooning is not simply right against left.
Batters have favorite hitting zones; there are high-ball hitters and low-ball hitters. Every batter is stronger in one zone or the other. Now suppose you are managing a team with two good left fielders. The right-hand-hitting left fielder likes low stuff. The lefty hitter paddles high balls. The rival manager starts a left-hander with a zipping high hard one. Whom do you start? The right-handed batter who prefers low stuff? He won’t see low stuff, but he has an edge facing the left-handed pitcher. Or the left-handed batter who loses something to the lefty pitcher but likes swinging against the sinkers that he will see?
The equation becomes more complicated, quadratic at the least.
Left versus right.
High versus low.
Who’s batting next?
Who’s hot?
Who’s cool?
Who’s hurt?
Who just broke curfew?
Who’s in their bullpen?
Who likes to pinch hit?
Who plays tomorrow?
And what about the psychology of it all?
Other extraordinary baseball men, Leo Durocher among them, felt that Stengel’s creations with and about the Yankee lineup transcended managing. “The guy,” Durocher said in his ceaselessly elegant way, “was a fucking genius.” The course of genius never did run smooth.
Stengel met with his squad for the first time at St. Petersburg on March 1. He spoke quietly and quite clearly in the clubhouse. He had been around for a long time, he said, but he was new to the league. All the men were professional players. They were Yankees. He expected them to win. He wanted them to expect that of themselves. He was not going to make a lot of changes, Stengel said, after which he began to announce a lot of changes.
Instead of the customary single workout, he was instituting two-a-day practice sessions. “Never before,” wrote James Dawson in the Times, “was both morning and afternoon practice known in St. Petersburg. The last time double workouts were a Yankee spring training practice was in New Orleans, 27 years ago.”
Stengel decreed a midnight curfew. “Yer professionals on yer honor to keep it. Don’t make us go and do bed checks now. Just keep the curfew.
“There is, uh, some concern about going to the dog track too many times a week. So the rule is, now, one night a week. That’s all. Thursday night is dog track night. Other nights think about baseball, as I’m sure you will.
“We have, uh, the best group of coaches I think is available as instructors and you can learn from them. You young fellers, I expect you to be willing to learn from the many stars we have here, too, which I wished I coulda done when I was breaking in.
“Good luck.
“All right. Let’s run around the field.”
Stengel split the squad break into individual groups. Jim Turner met with the pitchers; Crosetti spoke with the infielders; Johnny Neun, a functionary who had managed the Yankees for fourteen games in 1946, was placed in charge of first basemen. Simple enough. Delegation of authority. But just a moment, please. Who were the first basemen? Before the 1949 season ended, Stengel would use seven men to play first base.
As outfield coaches-without-portfolio, Stengel appointed DiMaggio and Henrich. That raised another question. Who were the outfielders? Yogi Berra had played fifty outfield games the year before. On the other hand, Bill Dickey wanted to teach Berra catching. Stengel liked that idea. John Lindell, six foot four and 220 pounds, had come up as a hard-throwing pitcher. After that he evolved into an outfielder. What was he now?
Both?
Neither?
“Uh, Mr. DiMaggio and Mr. Henrich, you are experienced men, and would you commence working with the outfielders?”
“Sure,” Henrich said. “Who are the outfielders, Skipper?”
“We will get to that matter very presently, Mr. Handricks.”
DiMaggio was appalled. A few days later he asked Arthur Daley of the Times, “What do you think of the new manager?”
“I never saw such a bewildered guy in my life,” Daley said.
“That’s what I think,” DiMaggio said, “and damned if the other ballplayers don’t feel the same way.”
I traveled with Stengel for many months in later seasons. By then he had divided the American press into categories; “my writers and the goddamn other guys, like them gentlemen from the magazines who take what you say and sit with it for a month so when they use it, everything you said comes out all twisted.”
Simply by being assigned to the Yankees, I became one of “my writers.” Each day Stengel made a careful effort to see that I knew what was going on. When I wrote that the team was flat, he accepted my judgment as fair comment. When I moved on, I thanked him and offered my hand. His gnarled, aged mitt met mine. “Nah, kid,” he said. “I wanna thank you. Ya wrote splendid.”
I talked to Stengel and listened to Stengel on trains and buses, in dugouts and bars. By this time he was famous and revered. He was very proud of his work with the Yankees and here is what he told me about his beginnings with the team:
“I was gonna platoon right from the start. George Weiss knew that and I gotta say he left me alone to do that. We had differences, which I will get to, but he left me to do whichever lineups I commenced to choose.
“We had some great ballplayers, which was getting old, and whatever they felt about it, could not play in a hundred fifty-four games with the old bodies which they had.
“Take Mr. Henrich” — Stengel pronounced that name in various ways. “Handricks” became the favorite — “Mr. Henrich [who was thirty-six years old in 1949] had a knee that would get loose in its socket, although we had a very excellent trainer, Gus Mauch. So I knew Mr. Henrich would not be able to play every day and I would have to platoon him. Henrich was a very sharp hitter, who generally got the pitch he wanted. When they got two strikes on him, he fouled off pitches time and again until he finally got them to throw him the fastball he wanted. He could hit fastballs very hard. He was a great player.
“Mr. Keller” — Charlie Keller — “looked so strong they named him after the big gorilla you remember [King Kong Keller]. He was another beautiful hitter, never afraid of the ball, but he had a bad spine and after he played hard he’d get a stiff back. He couldn’t sleep at night.
“These were two aged players, not their years but their bodies, and I platooned them because of that, also bearing in mind who was pitching and how these two great players would go against that pitcher.
“When a man is aged and you rest him, he will get limber again with his muscles and he runs faster and he becomes quicker with the bat. You do this, rest him good, and then his legs are fresh for five or six days.
“My other outfielder, which I would say was the most famous player in baseball, was DiMaggio, and this excellent trainer, who was working for me now, said that DiMaggio had very bad arthritis. So he would be coming up hurt, which means he would be platooning himself, if you get my drift. And DiMaggio was a very great player.
“So here is what I have, and the writers tell me this should be my outfield, for 1949: DiMaggio, Henrich, Keller. Which is all great and not a one kin play every day. Three years later they’re all retired. You could look that one up, but I’m telling ya, and now some commence to write, ‘What is that crazy old Stengel doing there, platooning great players like DiMaggio, Henrich, Keller?’
“If I made ‘em play every day, I coulda killed them.
“I coulda killed all three. Killed them three great players.
“And what would the writers commenced to have written then, kid?
“You tell me.”
The old ballplayers were tremendously significant for success in 1949, as was the Yankee team’s collective sense of itself. King Kong Keller batted .389 during the Yankees’ great victory over the Dodgers in 1941. Although he stood no more than five feet, ten inches, Keller was broad and massive, with thick eyebrows and a swart, intimidating look. Henrich, full-faced, a wide-framed six-footer, was such a staunch clutch hitter that he became famous, in Mel Allen’s nickname, as Ol’ Reliable. DiMaggio was a faultless hero to the reigning columnists, Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon, who called him Joltin’ Joe, the Yankee Clipper. (DiMaggio’s nickname among teammates was Daig, short for Dago.) The new Yankee manager was well advised to treat King Kong, Ol’ Reliable, and the Jolter like diamonds. To Yankee fans they were jewels beyond price. But age and Stengel’s good sense moved them in and out of the lineup. None played more than 115 games that season. A second platoon — younger replacement players — had to be ready.
Stengel: “Platooning is also good for the young players, which they is the last to agree, because they get to come along at a slow pace. Now it is possible to see a young player who thinks he can hit any pitcher, which he did in the minor leagues. And he goes to the plate [in the majors] and gives it a great fight but those balls coming in have too much stuff for him to handle, too much curve, because the pitchers are more expert, which is not even talking about the change of speeds.
“After a while the young player don’t think he can hit any pitcher anymore. When a young player loses confidence in hisself, that is a terrible thing. I have seen them, good ones, blow up in a single season. They never make it back. They have been humiliated in professional baseball and will go somewhere else for their livelihood. You platoon the young players depending on the pitcher and so forth but you also platoon them when they are getting distressed. You platoon them for their mental condition.
“Which they do not like. When these strong, young men are being platooned for their mental condition, they get angry.”
As Stengel knew, I had heard platooned players complaining about him, with hot fury. The players believed that days spent on the bench worked against them during salary negotiations. More than today, there existed a stigma in “not being good enough to play every day.”
One night at the old North Station in Philadelphia, I chatted briefly with Stengel as we waited for a train, then moved on. Gene Woodling, a splendid left-hand-hitting outfielder, muttered in my general direction. “The son of a bitch. I wouldn’t want him in my house. I wouldn’t want him near my wife and kids.”
“Who are you talking about, Gene?” I asked.
“Stengel, that son of a bitch.”
Beneath a controlled manner, stocky, round-faced Gene Woodling thundered with intensity. The outburst against Stengel meant mostly that Woodling resented being platooned.*
“Ya don’t listen to what the players say,” Stengel maintained, “because the ones which is mad at you can win the most games.” He jabbed a finger into my forearm. “Now that’s something which I would say you never knew, kid, even though you been to college and have read numerous very learned books.”
Stengel had no fewer than seven major league outfielders looking for work in St. Petersburg: DiMaggio, Henrich, and Keller, Big John Lindell and strong-armed Cliff Mapes, plus two wonderful rookies, Hank Bauer, a right-hand-hitting strong boy with the visage of a gargoyle, and Woodling, up from the San Francisco Seals, where he batted .385.
Stengel encouraged DiMaggio, as coach-without-portfolio, to teach the others the mysteries of his own outfield play. Stengel noticed at once the quick grace with which DiMaggio ran down fly balls, the early break, the smooth striding run.
That style was a matter of concentration, vision, hearing, and knowing intricate pitcher-batter patterns, not matters that are easily taught, if at all, even if one loves teaching, which DiMaggio did not. He did not rebel, but his enthusiasm was limited.
Stengel had two good third basemen. Billy Johnson, who had “an amazing arm to first base, never threw bad,” batted right-handed with decent power. Bobby Brown’s classwork at Tulane Medical School forced him to report late, but when Brown did arrive he would tote a major league bat, along with Gray’s Anatomy. Platoon.
George “Snuffy” Stirnweiss, the veteran second baseman, had good speed, fair bat, not much power. Stengel respected Stirnweiss, but he liked a tall, diffident rookie named Jerry Coleman. “He throws beautiful overhanded. On the double play, he jumps up in the air and whilst in there throws over-handed to first base, very accurate. He’s like a great basketball player that jumps and makes a perfect shot.”
Stengel also liked the way Coleman wore his uniform. “Instead of putting the pants way down, which some do, he rolls his pants tight over the knees, which shows all them nice baseball stockings. The umpires are less likely to call low strikes on a player which wears his pants like that, which made him harder to pitch to. And this kid is a fighter. Soft-spoken and so forth, but he can be vicious to a pitcher.” Platoon.
At first base Stengel had Jack Phillips and Dick Kryhoski, and Joe Collins. He sent Collins to the minors, which he said later was a mistake. (Collins, born Joseph Kollonige in Pennsylvania coal country, spent most of 49 tearing up the American Association.) Platoon.
There was not much question that Yogi Berra could hit. He swung at bad pitches. He belted bad pitches. A joke held that Berra’s weakness was a fastball down the middle. (He also hit those hard, to be sure.)
Berra’s problems as a catcher were technical and physical. Blocking low pitches. Moving into position to throw out runners trying to steal. Dickey wanted to work with Berra. “He wants to steady him,” Stengel said. A few weeks later Berra reported that things were “going very good. Dickey is learning me all of his experiences.”
Ever flexible, Stengel moved away from platooning catchers. Berra would be the Yankees’ regular catcher for the next eight years, paralleling the career of Roy Campanella in Brooklyn. “My other catchers were fine men,” Stengel said, “but they could not hit the ball for distance like Mr. Berra.” No platoon.
Curiously, the smallest, lightest Yankee was the bulwark. Shortstop Philip Francis Rizzuto would start 153 of the Yankees’ 155 games. Rizzuto stood about five foot five. Fourteen years earlier Rizzuto had presented himself at Ebbets Field for a tryout before Dodger manager Casey Stengel. After the workout Stengel said irritably, “Yer too small. Ga wan. Go home. Get a shoebox.”
Unlike DiMaggio, Rizzuto is not inclined to brood. “I liked him right away when he came to the Yankees,” Rizzuto says. “I was established. I’d been the shortstop since 1941. He came on low-keyed. What did I care in 1949 with the Yankees what had happened in 1935 over in Brooklyn? Casey wasn’t the only guy who didn’t think I could make it. That was just so much water over the dam. By ‘49, I didn’t need a shoebox, anyway. The clubhouse boy at the Stadium shined my Yankee spikes every day.”
Stengel would not discuss his early wrong call on Rizzuto. He was hypersensitive to any criticism of his baseball judgments and, when pressed, exploded into profanity. Harold Rosenthal of the Herald Tribune questioned him on a minor judgment once, more intensely than Stengel wanted to be questioned. In front of a mixed assemblage of sportswriters and ballplayers in the Yankee dugout, Stengel shouted at Rosenthal, “Yer fulla shit and I’ll tell ya why.”*
Stengel said Rizzuto “had somewhat hurt his arm previously [to 1949]. I was asking around and some players told me it was hard for him to throw out a man, once he went deep for a ball toward third base.
“I said in the spring, why don’t he loft the ball to first base, which he commenced doing, getting rid of the ball with an amazing quick throw. It would fly in the air but he’d get the throw off so fast he would beat the runner, which is better than a bullet throw, which takes the shortstop so long to get rid of that the runner to first base beats the bullet to the bag.”
Stengel’s views of Yankee pitching were complex. Reynolds, as he said, could start and relieve better than Cy Young. Glowering Vic Raschi was “the greatest I ever had to be sure to win one game.” Ed Lopat was “a first-class starting pitcher, and Joe Page, they called the fireman because he put out fires, could do an amazing job in relief. I believed in platooning with relief pitching. It was different when the ball was dead. Now I didn’t want to put extra strain on my starting pitchers who you need over a long pennant race.”
During Stengel’s great years, no Yankee pitcher was permitted to work 300 innings in a season, not even the bellwethers, Reynolds and Raschi, both broad-shouldered and imposing specimens.* “In the dead-ball days [Christy] Mathewson and Cy Young, they could just throw it in there on some hitters when they were ahead because there wasn’t gonna be a home run. But I ain’t managing this club in the dead-ball days, which my pitching coach, Mr. Turner, and I remember every day.”
Stengel had an extraordinary, mystical (to me) sense of when to lift a pitcher. When I asked him to explain how he perceived pitchers at work, the answer was no more than partly satisfactory. “If I see a man getting hit hard, which is even if the balls are caught, very long flies, line drives hit at somebody, and so forth, I take him out after an inning where he has given no runs, no hits, and some say how could you take him out so soon?
“But he is throwing as hard as he can and they are hitting the ball hard and he’ll just get worse from here on in. So I bring in another pitcher and when I do that I have a third one warming up, in case my second pitcher is not right on that particular day, which gives me another shot at stopping them, and does that answer your question for you, sir?”
When Stengel took over the Yankees, American League managers warmed up relief pitchers one at a time. Sometimes you’d see a starter hit hard. Then the relief pitcher was hit hard. By the time a backup reliever warmed up, the game was lost. Stengel’s thinking was a full generation ahead of that of his colleagues. I think it is fair to say that the modern pitching staff, with short relievers and long relievers, with carefully chosen left-handed and right-handed spot pitchers, this whirling, complex, twenty-armed beast, the pitching staff of today, was invented by Casey Stengel of Kansas City, Missouri, St. Petersburg, Florida, Glendale, California, and the Bronx.
How did the Yankee ballplayers respond to their first exposure to managerial genius? DiMaggio was profoundly negative. He didn’t care for Stengel’s long-winded style and thought platoon baseball was chaotic. DiMaggio was a laconic and introverted man. Before retiring at night, he habitually stacked his coins on the bedroom dresser, one pile for pennies, others for nickels, dimes, and quarters. Stengel’s platooning offended DiMaggio’s sense of order.
“I don’t get this guy,” he complained to Phil Rizzuto. “Nobody knows when he’s playing or where. With this guy managing, we can’t possibly win.” Unhappy, DiMaggio came down with heel spurs and missed the first sixty-five games of the season.
Others were more tolerant. “You see, whatever he was doing with the club, Casey came on in a very low-keyed way to us veterans,” Rizzuto says. “He didn’t tell us all his ideas all at once. He was really pretty humble. To me and the other veterans, he said, in one way or another: ‘I know you’re big leaguers. You know what you’re doing. Just whatever little input I can give you I will.’
“If he had come in with a big speech, telling us a whole lot of stuff up front, there would have been trouble. Casey did a lot of smart things with the Yankees but the smartest thing he ever did was come on slow.”
Charlie Silvera, a backup catcher for nine years, is renowned among teammates for his vivid memory.* “Remember,” Silvera says, “I was a rookie Yankee catcher the same year Stengel was rookie Yankee manager. I was only twenty-four, but I knew the tradition, that Joe McCarthy had been a stern taskmaster and that Bucky Harris was looser.
“I caught for Portland in the Coast League, playing against Casey’s teams for two years. He could get noisy. He put on a pretty good show just in the dugout.”
“But there was none of that in St. Petersburg, none of that the whole first year. Starting out, I think the first thing was to put that clown background behind him. He wanted to get the players on his side and the writers on his side, as a sound baseball man.”
I mentioned Stengel’s gruffness and sarcasm.
“Face it, he was one gruff old man,” Silvera said. “With the platooning, some players said he wasn’t fair and then he’d say, quietly, ‘Well, you don’t like me very much now, but when you get your check for playing in the World Series, you’ll like me a little better.’
“And, of course, he kept on platooning, which caused the guys being platooned to play even harder when they got into the lineup. They’d say, ‘I’ll show that crooked-legged old bastard.’
“That was fine with Casey. He wanted to win. And win today. None of that wait-till-next-year stuff. That was Brooklyn. None of that we’ll-get-’em-tomorrow.
“You were a Yankee. You got ‘em today.
“Anybody who didn’t understand that did not play for Casey very long.”
Jerry Coleman, he of the rolled-up knickers, was a bright, sensitive California kid, tough enough to fly fighter planes during the Korean War.
“First of all, about the pants,” Coleman says. “I didn’t wear ‘em the way I did to shrink the strike zone, whatever Casey said. The truth is when I wore ‘em longer I could feel fabric against my knee and that was inhibiting. Rolled up they felt comfortable and I believed I could run better. But if Casey thought I was being shrewd, I won’t argue.
“When he came to the Yankees, he was up against an old-school-tie type of thing. Rizzuto, Henrich, DiMaggio, Keller all became stars under Joe McCarthy. They loved McCarthy, and why not? They looked at Stengel as an outsider.
“Everybody was wary that first spring. Stengel treated Joe DiMaggio the way everybody else treated Joe DiMaggio. Like an icon. Whatever may have been muttered, there never was a confrontation between them. Even when Casey thought DiMaggio was past his peak in center, he never said anything like that directly.
“But Casey was not exactly a wimp. That first spring, the squad split one day in Texas. One squad went to Austin. One went to San Antonio. We lost both games to Texas League clubs.
“Casey went crazy. Nuts. You’re professionals. You’re Yankees. Minor leagues beat you! Damn you! GO OUT AND WIN!!
“Nobody knew about DiMaggio’s bad heel, but one day Joe just disappeared. We read about it in the papers. Joe was just gone. You look around. There’s rookie Gene Woodling, rookie Hank Bauer, almost rookie Bobby Brown, Yogi Berra who never caught regularly before, three pitchers nobody knew that much about, and rookie Jerry Coleman. They were picking us anywhere from third to sixth.
“There are four basic parts of managing,” Coleman said. “Keep the fans interested and happy. Get along with your front office. Handle the team. Contend with the media.
“Great as Stengel was with our team, he was just as great with the media.
“Somebody says, ‘Hey, Case, who’s a greater player, DiMaggio or Ruth?’ and he doesn’t want to answer that question. For obvious reasons.
“So he says, ‘Well, Mr. DiMaggio can do this, and Mr. Ruth could do that, and don’t forget Mr. Cobb,’ and now he’s back to 1912 with John McGraw and then he’s telling the reporter what was going on in Kansas City when he was a child.
“By this time the reporter has forgotten the question.
“I’ve never seen a manager to match him.
“Casey Stengel was a brilliant man, but you knew that, didn’t you?”
Well, I suspected.
*Lardner was particularly annoyed by Arthur Daley, the genial and inept sports columnist for the New York Times , who wrote enraptured accounts of a saintly Casey. Groping toward realism, Daley spelled one verb coming out of Stengel’s mouth “w-u-z.” “Now how else would you spell that word?” John Lardner asked me. “W-a-s?” That was Lardner’s only comment on Daley’s efforts to reproduce Stengelese.
*Writing about drunkenness had been absolutely beyond the bounds of sports pages. The famous Yankee manager Joe McCarthy went on a bender during spring training in 1938 and failed to show up at the ballpark for five days. The few reporters who mentioned that manager McCarthy was missing from the Yankee bench attributed his absence to “Florida flu.”
*The record was not broken until 1979 when a well-remembered Yankee ballclub, starring Reggie Jackson and Lou Piniella and managed by Bob Lemon and Billy Martin, drew 2,537,765. Curiously that Yankee team finished no better than fourth.
*I never reported this episode in the Herald Tribune, and readers may well ask why I did not. I felt that if a quote was pretty much nonsense, then I wasn’t going to report it, even though a nonsensical quote might make headlines. And the Woodling quote was nonsense, as Woodling himself agreed, once his rage passed. I was employed by the Tribune, not the Yankees, but we were never encouraged at the paper to lob grenades just to see how loud a bang they would make.
*Rosenthal was outraged. He telephoned me at home and announced, “I’m not speaking to Stengel. I thought you’d want to know.” Since Rosenthal was the reporter, the note taker, the important question seemed to me whether Stengel was still speaking to Rosenthal, which, of course, he was. Rosenthal’s indignation softened quickly but recurred for decades afterwards, whenever someone suggested that “Casey must have been a sweet old guy.”
*As Reynolds and Raschi anchored Stengel’s Yankees, the Dodgers of the 1960s were anchored by Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax. Drysdale pitched more than 300 innings for four consecutive seasons. Koufax pitched more than 300 innings three years out of four, reaching a peak of 336 innings in 1965. A year later arthritis in his pitching elbow forced Koufax to retire when he was thirty years old. In essence Koufax at his peak was pitching seven or eight more complete games a season than Stengel permitted Reynolds or Raschi or Whitey Ford to work.
*During our talk, Silvera described himself as “a spear carrier among a bunch of emperors and lords. You gotta have spear carriers and I was a damned good one.”