New York was the nation’s most exciting city, the Polo Grounds was the most majestic ballpark in the land, the Giants were baseball’s glamour team, and John McGraw, at forty-eight, the most celebrated manager in the game. He had already won six pennants and finished second seven times. The Giants were the toast of the Broadway crowd, and now the colorful Casey would be joining a star-studded roster that included Frankie Frisch, George Kelly, Dave Bancroft, Irish Meusel, and Ross Youngs. Casey and Irish would be roommates.
McGraw was still a scrapper, the kind of guy Casey admired. He was a member of New York’s prestigious Lambs Club—and missed a chunk of the 1920 season “through injuries sustained in a brawl” at the club, according to Reach’s Base Ball Guide.
On August 24, Casey was on the bench for a game against his old Pirates. It was a “learning moment” for him.
The Pirates were up 2–0 in the seventh, with Babe Adams on the mound for the Bucs. The Giants loaded the bases, and George “High Pockets” Kelly was up. The count went to 3-0.
“Look at those clowns,” muttered McGraw so his players could hear him. Casey later said:
I almost didn’t bother to look, because I know McGraw will flash the sign to take the next pitch. But I nearly fell off the bench. McGraw is giving him the sign to hit, and Kelly hits a grand-slam home run.
It bugs me, though. I can’t figure it out. It worked, but why should Mac go against the percentages? So after the game, I ask him.
“I’ll tell you why,” shouts McGraw. “Kelly couldn’t hit Adams’ curveball if he stood at the plate all day. But on this one pitch Adams has to come in with his fastball. And since it would be the only fastball Kelly would get all day, I let him hit it.”
McGraw and Stengel. Teacher and student. Casey was about to learn a lot about managing. It was the start of a beautiful era in his life. Casey recalled:
Some men didn’t play good for McGraw—at least they said they didn’t. They’d say, “Why this man’s never satisfied with me.” I thought that McGraw did great with me because I had to run out every ball; I had to play good. And if I didn’t play good, he thought that there was something wrong with me or that I wasn’t putting out enough. I thought I was hustling all the time, but he’d see where I could have put out a little extra.
One day we are playing the Cardinals and we have them 4 to 1 and sailing along easy, when things begin to pop. In the eighth, the Redbirds score five and beat us. In that eighth, a hard grounder is hit to Frankie Frisch’s left. He dives for it. He throws the man out. But what we needed was a double play.
When we return to the bench, I say, “Frankie, you made a wonderful play. It’s a long time since I saw one as good.”
McGraw is sitting next to me and he grunts. I know that he doesn’t agree. I know that grunt.
McGraw looks at me and says, “Stengel, no wonder you are traded off one club after another. You don’t know a damn thing about baseball.”
This is a big shock on account of I figure I know plenty about the national pastime.
“A player with the best legs in the National League, like Frisch, doesn’t have to dive. All he has to do is get the jump on the ball and dash into the play.
“If he handles the ball right, he gets a double play and the Cardinals get no five runs. Since he dived, we may lose this one.”
I sat back and studied his remarks and said to myself, “Hey, the old guy is right.”
As Casey turned thirty (really thirty-one), and as he kept seeing himself called “Ol Case” in the paper, he knew that his peak playing days might be winding down. He was going to get a heavy dose of platoon baseball, as Meusel, Youngs, and George Burns did most of the outfield time. But he was going to school on this, observing McGraw’s tactics, learning about moving players in and out of the lineup. What he learned would one day come to define his own managing style.
Over the final three months of the pennant-winnning season, Casey played in only eight games in the outfield, and had five hits. He still had problems with his back. And even though he was among the twenty-five eligible players for the World Series, he did not get into any games. He did, all the same, manage to get thrown out of one of them for excessive arguing from the dugout of umpire George Moriarty’s call at first base. The Giants won the world championship, beating the Yankees. In fact, if there was an example of no platooning, this was it. McGraw used only thirteen players in the eight games, including the exact same starting lineup in each game (except for alternating catchers) and four pitchers. Still, each winning player on the Giants received a record $5,265; Casey got a half-share, commensurate with his time on the team.
He was happy to be a Giant, but probably had some concern about his status for 1922, after barely making eye contact with McGraw during the series.
He was still young at heart, a bachelor enjoying the big city, but lines were appearing in his face that made him look older than he was. The press enjoyed picking on his age. Will Wedge of the New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser wrote a poem in The Sporting News called “Lines to Casey Stengel”:
You wouldn’t let ’em count you out;
You wouldn’t warm the bench:
Thought thirty years or thereabout
Your spirit would not quench
And thirty’s old in baseball land—
And you admit to more—
Yet bounce with pepper of the brand
Of birds of twenty-four
It seems they cannot tie the can
To guys from Kankakee
You played there, yes, you did, old man,
When was it, 1903?
You came from Kansas, wasn’t it?
From Kansas City, Mo.
“K.C.” they called you, and it fit;
Eh, Casey, long ago?
Since then you played in Brooklyn town,
In Pittsburgh and in “Phil”;
Now in New York you earn renown
Ey keeping at it still
Your limbs may feel the stiffening
Of age that mounteth slow;
You keep it, though, a secret thing
And never let it show
How do you do it, Casey, how
Still swing so mean a mace?
So old! (or young?) Well, we will vow
That Casey, you’re a case!
The Giants trained in San Antonio in the spring of 1922. On the way north, to play a game in Wichita Falls, Casey had some fun. He pulled a pair of dirty blue overalls over his uniform, donned a straw hat and an old coat, and heckled the players from the stands. “Tramps! Bums! Rotten players!” he shouted. “Go get a real job!”
His teammates were in on the joke and played along. One shouted back: “If you can do better, you fresh appleknocker, why don’t you come down and do it!”
“Well, give me a suit and I will show yer,” said Casey. And with that, he threw off his costume and raced to the field in his Giants uniform to play the rest of the game, to the delight of the fans.
Casey was thought of as a fourth outfielder, and some thought his place on the team might be tenuous. But the Giants had paid seventy-five thousand dollars in cash and players for him (and Johnny Rawlings), and that at least seemed to secure his spot on the roster for ’22. Youngs and Meusel both hit .331 and were secure in the outfield. Bill Cunningham (.328) was now the third man. Casey appeared in only four games in all of April and May. But at one point both Cunningham and Youngs were injured, and Casey got more playing time. And, oh, did the hits start to fall.
As late as July 29, Casey was hitting .402. And this came after a pitch from the Cubs’ Virgil Cheeves on July 11 that hit him in the face. They feared that his cheekbone was fractured, but the X-rays were negative. He spent a few days in the hospital and was back in the lineup ten days after being hit—playing with a swollen face, but with his usual gusto. His average continued to rise after he returned. He led the league in hit-by-pitch that season, with nine, in just eighty-four games.
He batted a robust .368 for the season, the highest mark of his career, and the highest mark on the Giants that season. In the National League, it was topped only by Rogers Hornsby of the Cardinals, who hit .401 (although Casey did not have enough plate appearances to qualify among league leaders). His average at home was .397, and he struck out only seventeen times all season. Long a right fielder, he adjusted to center and earned McGraw’s admiration by playing the sun so well—tilting his cap just so to shield his eyes from the rays, frequently using sunglasses. His popularity soared, and he was the toast of another pennant-winning Giants team.
Adding to his joy in the big season was the summer-long presence of his mother and sister at the Polo Grounds. He set them up in a rental apartment on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River. “Charlie is a home boy,” said his mother. “And I guess he likes to have us around.”
Unfortunately, nine days before the World Series began, he pulled a muscle in his leg and, just like that, he was an old man again. The fountain of youth he had discovered in June was gone.
In the World Series, he only started the first two games, and McGraw sent Cunningham in to run for him in the second inning of Game Two, after seeing Casey limp to second on a ground ball. McGraw was angry that Casey had faked being fine, instead of letting a pinch runner go in when he was at first base. “His run could have scored,” groused McGraw. “It cost us a win.”
Whether or not McGraw’s analysis was completely on the mark, the Giants didn’t get the win. The game was called for darkness—despite bright sunlight—a very controversial tie in which Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis awarded the gate receipts to charity. McGraw’s feelings on the matter were pretty clear; this was the only mention he made of Stengel in his memoir My Thirty Years in Baseball.
The Giants won the series in five games, and Casey whooped it up in the clubhouse like the kids on the team. He chased after a teammate who had swiped his detachable shirt collar and, curiously, recited lines of classical literature as he paused in pursuit. He had just won another world championship, and a World Series share of $4,546.