3 LUNATIC BEGINNING

So Casey Stengel began his career as a Lunatic.

The Kankakee team officially called itself the “Kays,” but newspapers in the league’s cities took to calling them the “Lunatics.” The ballpark was located across the street from the sprawling 119-acre Kankakee State Hospital, which until 1910 had been called the Illinois Eastern Hospital for the Insane.^*

LUNATICS WIN FIRST, headlined the Decatur Daily Review, and the story read, “The Lunatics found them for nine safe hits in the sixth round, winning the game 7 to 6.”

“There were a lot of things I couldn’t do,” Casey recalled of his days in Kankakee. “One of them was running bases. Instead of sliding into the bag, I’d come in standing up, and the manager showed me how to do it right and told me to practice every chance I got.”

So, to the amusement of patients at the hospital who could see the field from their windows, Charlie (not yet “Casey”), would practice his sliding during batting practice, or while standing in the outfield between pitches.

“Stengel is one fellow who won’t be here next year,” said a teammate, Joe Gilligan. Asked if he was going to the major leagues, Gilligan reportedly responded, “No, he’s going into that building over there,” and pointed to the hospital.

“It’s just a matter of time,” said more than one teammate.

In the telling, Casey (and thus later biographers) would confuse Kankakee with his next stop: Maysville, Kentucky, where there was no asylum near the ballpark.

—

Charlie Stengel made his debut on May 10, batting cleanup and playing center field. He had a single and stole a base in a 3–2 loss to the Jacksonville Jacks. A teammate of note was Bobby Veach, who would go on to hit .310 over fourteen big-league seasons and share outfield duties in Detroit with Ty Cobb for most of those years.

Charlie’s manager at Kankakee was Dan Collins, and the Jacksonville manager was Clarence “Pants” Rowland, who would later be a Chicago White Sox manager, an American League umpire, and president of the Pacific Coast League when Casey managed there. That three such prominent baseball figures as Veach, Stengel, and Rowland could one day wink at each other when one mentioned the Northern Association was no small coincidence.

“We did not draw and getting paid was quite an adventure,” Casey later recalled.

“In those days a player in the minors had no protection against getting swindled, because there was no commissioner. You could write to the office of the chief of the minors, but that was a one-way thing.”

The Class D Northern Association was brand-new to Organized Baseball in 1910. It consisted of eight teams and began play in May, but within a month, the Decatur team disbanded and the Joliet team moved to Sterling, Illinois. Clinton and Freeport dropped out soon after, and on July 7, a new schedule was cobbled together. Four days later, Elgin and Kankakee were done. “Owing to lack of attendance at week day games, the management of the Kankakee and Elgin teams called off games scheduled to take place here today and tomorrow,” reported the Chicago Daily Tribune on July 15. “The members of the Kankakee team have received their releases and most of them have left to join different clubs with which they have signed.”

The remaining four clubs went on for another week before the league formally disbanded.

When the club folded, Charlie was owed half of his monthly paycheck, fixed by the Kansas City contract at the salary of $135 a month. So he swiped his uniform—or several uniforms—to make up for the difference. And that wasn’t all. The players were each given a meal ticket to eat at McBroom’s in Kankakee, the best-known restaurant in town. Charlie still had $3.50 left on his ticket when the end came.

Stan McBroom himself showed up at the Yankees’ spring training camp in 1959. Casey remembered him, and he remembered the $3.50. The restaurant was still in business—forty-nine years later—and Old Man McBroom offered him a free steak when Casey called him out on it.

In 1956, at his big birthday party in Kansas City, where they gave him the school bell, the Kankakee Federal Savings and Loan Association presented Casey with a check for $483.05—which was the $67.50—the missing half of his paycheck—plus forty-six years of interest. (He gave the money to the Kankakee Little League.)

For years, Casey’s record at Kankakee was lost because of the dissolution of the league, and his stat line would show only “League disbanded in July.” But Ray Nemec, one of the sixteen founders of the Society of American Baseball Research, was determined to piece together league records for the Northern Association, largely because Casey had this one line bare in his record. During the 1960s, after visiting newspaper archives in the league’s cities, Nemec found the old accounts and box scores of those missing games. Casey played in fifty-nine games, batting .251 with one home run in 203 times at bat. A missing line on a baseball immortal had been filled in.

With the demise of Kankakee, Kansas City management assigned Charlie to another Class D team: Shelbyville, Kentucky, in the Blue Grass League. It was another struggling franchise in another struggling league, but he was glad to have a job to finish out his season. It would have been embarrassing to return home in midsummer.

The Shelbyville Millers were deep in last place, and just a month after Kankakee had slipped away, Charlie found himself surrounded by rumors that Shelbyville was also doomed. All of their home games were shifted to their opponents’ ballparks. On August 26, The Bourbon News of nearby Paris, Kentucky, confirmed the sale of the team to new ownership, in Maysville, Kentucky, for six hundred dollars. That made two defunct franchises in three months for Stengel, just starting out. There were only a few weeks left of his first season in uniform—any uniform.

Charlie, perhaps because he was the youngest on the team, was chosen to return to Shelbyville, about 110 miles away, to collect the team’s equipment. He filled a freight car with the bags and reported back to Maysville, with just a little railroad soot on the goods.

On August 26, Maysville hosted Paris at the East End Park. “The grounds have been hurriedly put in fair condition, bleacher seats have been erected, and 300 temporary and comfortable chairs will be placed as an extemporized grandstand until the real thing can be erected,” reported the Maysville Ledger. “Preparations are already under way to have the Park fenced and other improvements added just as soon as work can be done. The general admission for both men and women will be 25 cents, children, 15 cents.”

A few days after the opener, Maysville lost a home game 6–4 when “an automobile running across the field prevented [Warren] Fieber getting to a fly that would have perhaps saved the day for the home team.”

Charlie’s record—which sometimes shows only Maysville for 1910, not Shelbyville—says he played sixty-nine games and hit .223. A home run on September 4—the first in the new ballpark—earned him a five-dollar Duplex razor outfit and a five-pound box of candy as a prize. Another homer that week earned him a three-dollar hat.

The season ended September 22, with the team having finished deep in last place. Casey returned to Kansas City, where the Blues put him on the roster for the final week of their season. He got into four games and went 3-for-11. For his three teams in four cities, two of whom went broke, he played 132 games and batted .237—an inauspicious debut, but he did play that final week, at age twenty, at the highest level of minor-league baseball.

—

The season over, Charlie reunited with his Central High pals and caught up with their prospects and plans. A few were going to college; some were going to try business, or join their fathers in business. Charlie’s contract with Kansas City was renewed for 1911.

An old teammate from his semipro days, Billy Brammage, decided to enroll in Western Dental College in Kansas City. Charlie thought about it, knew his father was all for developing a backup profession to baseball, and said, “I’ll go with you.”

“I have no objection to your playing baseball,” Louis Stengel said to his son, “but some day you’ll get married and have to support a family. You’ll be in much better position to do that if you can sign D.D.S. after your name.”

So Charlie enrolled in the dental college. He had enough high school credits to do so even without graduating, and enough money saved from baseball to pay for it. He supplemented his baseball money by driving a taxi, just like his brother.

Thirty-nine men and one woman were enrolled in the school, and though we don’t know how many were left-handed, we know that Casey was, and he had trouble adjusting to the equipment. Today the equipment provides for greater maneuverability, and it’s not so difficult to adjust it for righties and lefties. But in 1910, this was quite a barrier. Special left-handed dental equipment was available, but it would cost about $150.

The school president, a fellow named Workman, suggested that Charlie stick with baseball while going to school, so he could earn enough to open his own practice right away. He also suggested that Charlie look into orthodontic dentistry, which was just catching on.

Besides, as Casey noted, “in those days, you only got 50 cents a filling.”

Casey liked to tell the story of the day a local bum came in to have a tooth pulled—bums got free dental care, and the students got to practice. Charlie didn’t lower his chair enough, and by the time he had the tooth in clamps and ready to be yanked, his arm couldn’t go any higher.

“The battle was on,” he said. “And we hadn’t settled on who was going to have that tooth—him or me! It took me an hour to wrestle him out of it.”

It would be the only tooth he ever yanked.