Charlie went home a hero, at least in his own mind. He was a major leaguer. He played in a few barnstorming exhibitions, including one in Coffeyville, Kansas, where Walter Johnson made him look so bad, he went back to the bench with only two strikes on him.
He hung out with friends at the YMCA and the local billiard room and waited for his 1913 Brooklyn contract. When it arrived, it was not for the salary increase Larry Sutton had told him to expect. Although he was a veteran of all of three weeks in the big leagues, he sent it back, unsigned, and would wind up being the last man on the roster to agree to terms, not signing until spring training was about to unfold in Augusta, Georgia. He would get about twenty-one hundred dollars for the year, and he had to fight Ebbets to get it. “The stars got $4,000,” he would say. “And we all got $2.50 a day in meal money, which you tried to save. First class hotels do not like ball players in them days, so we’d sleep in second rate quarters and the ball club gives you $2.50 daily and says this is a lot of dough, don’t spend it foolishly. You lived on meal money and did your best to save something for a rainy day. Of which we had many.”
Dahlen didn’t hand him the center-field job. He had to compete with another rookie, and he got banged up early and didn’t do so well. But by the end of spring training, as the team began to barnstorm north, he found his batting stroke and won the job.
Ebbets Field was the tenth new ballpark to open in the last five years. This was an important time for major-league baseball; it was emerging from its infancy, exemplified by the more substantial architecture and building materials going into the parks.
The first test of Ebbets Field and its unique concrete outfield walls was an exhibition game against the Yankees, scheduled for Saturday, April 5. Stengel borrowed a bag of baseballs from the clubhouse man Dan Comerford and practiced fielding balls off the concrete.
He hit leadoff for the Superbas. More than twenty-five thousand turned out for the inaugural—a huge crowd for an exhibition game—and Charlie gave the fans their money’s worth with an inside-the-park home run in the fifth; the Yankees’ center fielder accidentally kicked it to the wall, enabling Stengel to scamper around the bases. Generous scoring called it a homer, and that was the first one hit in the new ballpark, albeit in an exhibition. It looked like the real deal in the box score.
The ballpark with its imposing round brick rotunda at Sullivan and Cedar welcoming arriving fans, this new sports temple in the Borough of Churches, was hailed as beautiful when it opened. Four decades later, it would be considered cramped and grimy. It was finally demolished in 1960, three years after the Dodgers’ final home game before the team moved to Los Angeles. Though it came to be remembered as a wonderful temple of baseball, it was in fact always cramped and grimy. Still, for baseball fans in Brooklyn, it was home.
It was during these early days at Ebbets Field that Stengel seems to have acquired his nickname “Casey.” One story was that a teammate in a poker game said, “About time you took a pot, Kansas City.” Or maybe someone just said, “Where ya from, kid?” If he answered “K.C.,” the nickname may have been born right then. The sportswriter Fred Lieb said he had “Charles Stengel—K.C.” stenciled on his luggage, and that got picked up.
The hometown Brooklyn Daily Eagle, for whom Abe Yager was the beat writer (the first of many whom Casey would warmly embrace and call “my writers”—a term used both affectionately and politically to win them over), first used “Casey” Stengel in a photo caption on June 17, 1913. By season’s end, the name was used more or less regularly.
On April 9, Casey played center field and led off in the first official game played at Ebbets. The pre-game celebrations were grand, although someone forgot to bring an American flag to the flagpole for the flag raising. (A batboy had to run and find one.) Every woman in attendance got a complimentary hand mirror.
Brooklyn lost to the Phillies 1–0, with Stengel going 0-for-4.
But Casey played well after that in April, enjoying a two-hit game against Christy Mathewson on the twenty-ninth. He got his average up as high as .352, and on April 26, he hit the “real” first home run in Ebbets Field, this one clearing the wall onto Montgomery Street. In July, Baseball Magazine’s Bill Phelon wrote, “Few greater youngsters have been landed in recent years than Stengel, of the Brooklyn outfield.”
By the season’s end, Casey’s play had faded, and he’d missed twenty-five games because of a shoulder injury. Another player, Bill Collins, came up from Newark to start against left-handers (Casey’s first taste of being platooned). One afternoon, Louis Stengel went to Chicago to see his son play, and Casey was riding the bench in embarrassment. Nevertheless, he hit .272 with seven homers in his rookie season. But a sixth-place finish couldn’t save Dahlen’s job; they let him go in November.
Casey had grave concerns about his future when the shoulder injury ended his season. He didn’t play until the off-season, in the annual “American Series,” when he went to Cuba with a dozen Superbas to play fifteen games against teams from Havana and Almendares. Jake Daubert served as manager, and one can only imagine how the twelve Brooklyn boys bonded over the shared experience of being turned loose in Havana. Among the Havana players were Mike Gonzalez and Dolf Luque, of whom Casey would see more in the future. Brooklyn won ten of the fifteen games, and Casey played in all of them, batting .241. The shoulder was fine, and he had a great time.
He went home and brooded, anxious to see his next contract in the mail. His worries were short-lived. A new rival league—the baseball moguls quickly called it an “outlaw” league—was launched, the Federal League, which even had a franchise in Kansas City. Was Casey interested? Of course he was. He was seen making “mysterious trips” to St. Louis to meet with the Federal League founders.
HAVE BEEN MADE FLATTERING OFFERS BUT TO DATE CAN’T NAME CLUBS, he wired The Brooklyn Daily Eagle in response to their inquiry.
Ebbets was worried enough so he took trains around the country to sign up his players in person. Casey agreed to a one-year deal for four thousand dollars in early January, even though Ebbets wanted to lock him up for three. He was keeping his options open.
Also in January, Casey got an interesting invitation from his old Central High baseball coach, Bill Driver, who was now the athletic director and baseball coach at the University of Mississippi in Oxford: “Charlie, would you like to come down and help me coach our baseball team over the winter?”
It sounded immediately appealing, and so, at age twenty-three, he accepted his first coaching job. “Tell ’em I’m single yet,” he told an interviewer for The Daily Mississippian, the college paper, thinking of the coeds on campus.
Since the position did not pay, he was also designated an assistant professor so he could draw some salary. This first coaching position would be long forgotten and seldom mentioned, but the nickname “The Ol’ Perfessor” may have had its roots in his time at Ole Miss. When he returned to the Brooklyns, even some teammates, not surprisingly, called him “Professor.”
His college team went 13-9 over six weeks, and his center fielder, Alexander Powe, later said that Casey was “a peach as a coach. Sometimes he would get me out in the field and knocked flies to me. He would get a kick out of pulling me in and then hitting one far behind me and shouting catch THAT ball. He was good with the pitchers too.”
His players bought him a gold-handled cane at the end of the season, so he could strut around with it in the major leagues.
When he showed up for spring training after his Ole Miss season, he fell under the tutelage of the new Brooklyn manager, Wilbert “Uncle Robbie” Robinson. Kid Elberfeld came aboard as a coach, which went against Casey’s observation that most coaches are “related to the manager’s wife.”
Uncle Robbie was already a baseball legend, although his reputation was largely as a sidekick to John McGraw. He had been the catcher for the legendary and innovative Baltimore Orioles, National League champions in 1894–96, the team of McGraw, Hughie Jennings, and Willie Keeler. Such terms as “butcher boy” (or “Baltimore chop”), used to describe chopping down on a pitch into a high bounce for a base hit, came from that club. These terms remained in Casey’s vocabulary for the rest of his life.
The rotund Robinson, at the time coaching the Giants for McGraw (with whom he co-owned a business in Baltimore), questioned a decision by his boss after the last game of the 1913 World Series and found himself unemployed. They didn’t speak for the next seventeen years. So, when Ebbets hired him to manage Brooklyn in 1914, a rivalry was lit.
Such a great Brooklyn character was Robinson that the team almost at once became the Brooklyn “Robins,” and headline writers would call the team the “flock” for years to come—long after Robinson left and the team nickname reverted to “Dodgers.”
Casey, needing to get his new manager’s attention, made a fast impression in Augusta, hitting a much-talked-about home run over the spot where a center-field fence should have been (the wall had been knocked down by a storm). “The twenty-eight fans present gave a whoop of delight as they saw Boss Ebbets’ dollar and a quarter piece of leather disappear into the beyond,” reported the Eagle.
Facing a left-handed pitcher just starting his own career with the minor-league Baltimore Orioles, Casey hit two doubles against “Jack Dunn’s babe”—a fellow named George Herman Ruth. (Dunn owned the Baltimore club.)
Robinson moved Casey from center to right, the position he would play most of the rest of his career.
Ebbets, meanwhile, wanted to tighten up discipline on the club, even though his new manager was anything but a disciplinarian. He identified “four rascals” as being most in need of “watching,” including Stengel, and kept close watch on them. Fred Lieb, writing in his late-in-life memoir, Baseball As I Have Known It, said that Casey greatly resented this, and it became another irritant in his relationship with Ebbets.
Ebbets thought of Casey as the world’s greatest ballplayer—“from the neck down.” He had questions about his instincts on the field. He once fined him fifty dollars for sliding into second when the base was already occupied.
“The four rascals” according to Lieb, would take the trolley to nearby Coney Island after games, or on the Sunday off-days. Coney Island, with its honky-tonk atmosphere, its amusements, and its young visitors, was a natural destination for high-energy ballplayers.
“Every so often,” wrote Lieb,
Ebbets would hold a Monday morning “court session” in his office. He usually started with Stengel. “You’ve been drinking and fighting again. We kept tab on you and you owned eight beers inside of an hour,” he would bark. “No Mr. Ebbets,” said Casey. “I had only four beers,” said Casey holding up four fingers. “Who started the fights?” asked Ebbets.
“It was them other guys,” explained Stengel. “Some of those toughs try to add to their reputation so they can say they licked a lot of Dodgers.”
“Did they lick you?” asked the owner.
“No they didn’t. We wouldn’t have permitted that, for your sake as well as ours. What would people say if a bunch of bums beat up some of your best players?”
“Well, you got a point there,” said Ebbets. “Of course, you had to stand for the integrity of the club.”
Case dismissed.
Lieb, who began covering New York baseball in 1909 and wrote his memoir sixty-eight years later, went on to discuss Stengel’s drinking. “He wasn’t a seasoned alcoholic. Every so often he would turn down his glass and say humbly, ‘Doctor’s orders.’ He was a man with a very high capacity for holding alcohol. He didn’t get stupid or slovenly in his speech when he drank. His mind seemed as keen after eight drinks as after one, and his memory remained keen after a night of drinking. In that respect, he was a man in a million, or maybe a hundred million.”
Indeed, Casey’s capacity to drink a lot without showing any more effect than prolonged talking was legendary in baseball circles. Most people simply marveled at his capacity for drink and his ability to go on till the early morning, continuing to hold his own while closing up bars around the country.
Uncle Robbie, who had owned a billiard parlor/saloon with McGraw, could tell the good drunks from the bad. It was pretty certain that he had no problem with Casey. Ebbets was the thorn in Casey’s side on this issue.
“Wilbert Robinson was a lot of fun to work for,” said Casey.
In July, during an exhibition in Bellaire, Ohio, Casey took a perch in the infield before the start of an inning and initiated a phantom infield drill, throwing and catching in rapid order with his teammates, none of whom actually produced a baseball. The fans loved it, and it went on for nearly ten minutes. Casey was settling into his role as a very entertaining ballplayer.
By the end of Robinson’s first season, the team had moved up a notch, to fifth, but still played under .500. Casey, though, was a revelation. His .316 average was fifth in the National League, and his on-base percentage (which no one gave a thought to in 1914) was a league-best .404.
Robbie showed some previously untapped skills as a communicator and a manager. If he benched a player and the substitute didn’t deliver, he might tell the benched player (sometimes Casey), “I couldn’t sleep all night. I messed up. I should have played you.” This kept morale high. (Casey, as a manager, would never do anything like it. He was from the McGraw school of “no excuses.”)
Casey earned raves for his outfielding, and at twenty-three he was one of the league’s shining faces. He could certainly feel secure in his standing. Sure enough, with the threat of Casey’s jumping to the Federal League still out there, Ebbets signed Casey to a two-year deal at six thousand dollars a year right after the 1914 season ended. For Casey, it was big-time money.
For Ebbets, always just a step ahead of creditors, it was a bold move.