One of the first wires of congratulations Casey received came from Wilbert Robinson, who was now president of the Southern Association’s Atlanta Crackers. “I am sure pleased you have the position as manager of the Brooklyn Club,” he wrote. “I know you will do well, in fact better than anyone I know of, with the material you have.”
Casey’s other mentor, John McGraw, was too ill to issue a comment. He died the day after the announcement.
On February 27, Casey was among those named as honorary pallbearers for McGraw’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a list that also included George M. Cohan, DeWolf Hopper (of “Casey at the Bat” recital fame), Jacob Ruppert, Wilbert Robinson (who would himself die five months later), Will Rogers, Tim Mara (owner of the football Giants), Bill Terry, and many more. Elite company.
The next day, Casey arrived in Orlando, five days before camp was to open. In fact, he opened it a day early; enough players were present to run a light workout. “The camera boys are eager to get some pictures,” he said. He knew the newspapermen’s need.
He adopted a pet snake, who roamed the Orlando outfield and seemed to settle in for the whole spring; one of his players clobbered it with a bat, and that was the end of Casey’s mascot.
The team went north with “interesting players” and not much pitching. It was clear that the club’s directors were not going to spend the money for better talent.
The Dodgers went to Ebbets Field in anticipation of their April 17 home opener against the Braves. When he entered the clubhouse, Casey made a right turn, to head for the corner office. In the minors, few clubhouses had “offices”; the manager had an end locker. Now Casey settled behind his desk and chatted with his clubhouse manager, the rotund, cigar-smoking “senator” John Griffin. The “senator,” who had broken in as a batboy when Casey played for the Robins in 1916, made sure there were blank lineup cards in the desk. Casey pulled one out and began to tinker with his first big-league lineup.
He penciled in Danny Taylor, cf. Jimmy Jordan, ss. Joe Stripp, 3b. Johnny Frederick, rf. Hack Wilson, lf. Sam Leslie, 1b. Tony Cuccinello, 2b. Al Lopez, c. Van Lingle Mungo, p. The task was done. It would be his first of more than 3,600 major-league lineup cards.
Twenty-eight thousand turned out for opening day, to see the Dodgers wearing new uniforms with BROOKLYN in block letters. And they won, 8–7, with Wilson and Taylor homering; Casey stuck with Mungo in the ninth even though he yielded three runs, putting a scare into things. This was indicative of his lack of confidence in his other pitchers.
The first time the Dodgers played the Giants, April 30, photographers wanted Casey to pose with Terry, whose “still in the league” remark was already part of baseball lore. They posed. And the Giants won three straight.
In May, when the team had lost thirteen of their first twenty-one, The Sporting News wrote, “The situation is so desperate that manager Casey Stengel is willing to trade anybody on his ball club, value for value if he can get pitching in return.”
That month, the team settled into sixth place—where they would finish. Casey platooned his players as best he could, but the Depression had led to teams’ having only twenty-three-man rosters, which limited maneuverability. He had only eight pitchers on the roster.
The game Casey always loved to talk about came in Baker Bowl in Philadelphia.* Hack Wilson was in right field. Walter “Boom Boom” Beck was getting pounded, letting the Dodgers give back an early lead, and Casey went out to the mound. “Now listen,” said Beck (according to Casey), “don’t go thinking of taking me out. I just commenced feeling good on those last hitters.” (“Commenced” would have been a Casey word, probably added in the storytelling.)
So Casey let him pitch, but he kept getting into more trouble.
In the fifth, I had enough and said, “Walter give me the ball.” He said, “no sir you let me pitch to this next hitter.” I said “Walter let me have that ball.” And he turned and threw the ball out to right field, where [Hack] Wilson was playing. The ball hit that tin fence and bing, it dropped off the ground.
Hack evidently had been standing out there thinking about what he was going to do that night or something, because he heard the ball hit the fence and he turned around and chased it and fired it into second base. And he was good and mad when everybody started to laugh and ridicule him.
Meanwhile Beck came in to the bench and I said, “Well, Walter, you were right about one thing. There’s nothing wrong with your arm or you wouldn’t have been able to throw all the way out to that fence.” He didn’t say anything; he just went over and kicked the pail of water. I said “Walter don’t you dare kick that bucket again. He said why wouldn’t I kick it? I said because you might break your leg and then I won’t be able to sell or trade you.”
Terry named Stengel as a coach for the 1934 All-Star Game at the Polo Grounds, giving Casey a good seat for that historic afternoon when Carl Hubbell struck out Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, and Joe Cronin in order.
If there was such a thing as a season highlight coming long after the team had been eliminated, it came in the final two games of the season, September 29 and 30, when the Dodgers went to the Polo Grounds; thousands of their fans followed them into Manhattan, holding signs: “Still in the league!”
The Giants needed to win those games to defend their pennant. They were deadlocked with the Cardinals, both teams 93-58. But on Saturday, the twenty-ninth, Mungo stopped the Giants for his eighteenth win, a 5–1 triumph, and on Sunday, the last day of the season, the Dodgers scored three in the tenth to beat New York 8–5 and eliminate the Giants from the pennant. What sweet victories those were for the boys from Flatbush.
Casey and Terry had an off-again, on-again friendship, generally off. But Casey remembered one day when they were both with Walter Johnson, and both wanted to be photographed with him for the press photographers.
“We have the darndest time,” said Casey, “as Terry wants to stand in the middle and I also want to stand in the middle because you know when those pictures is printed in the newspapers sometimes they chop off the guy at one end. Which is what happens—Walter Johnson finally stands at one end and when the picture is printed in the paper he is the one chopped off and the picture is just of me and Terry which we didn’t want took together except with Walter Johnson.”
It had been a tough first season for Casey, producing only seventy-one wins.
Despite the sixth-place finish, Casey got a two-year extension to his contract. The fans liked him, the writers loved him, and since the Dodgers were in no position to surround him with good players, they felt they had a good thing going.
The talk of spring training in 1935, apart from the return of the forty-four-year-old Dodger legend Dazzy Vance (who would be a seldom used reliever in his final season), was the arrival of Stan “Frenchy” Bordagaray. He had come over from Sacramento in December, and arrived in camp with an astonishing mustache and beard. The beard disappeared soon, but the mustache was so out of place for the time that newspapers all around the country couldn’t help running photos of him. Casey was okay with it, but warned him that if he didn’t produce, it would really be an object of derision.
Bordagaray was a great Casey character. Once, he was tagged out while standing on a base. Casey said, “How could you be out!?” And Frenchy told him, “I was tapping my foot and he tagged me between taps.”
A twenty-one-year-old shortstop named Rod Dedeaux, who would become one of the nation’s leading college baseball coaches, and a great friend of Casey’s, got into two games in late September.
And then there was outfielder Len Koenecke.
Koenecke, had given Casey a .320 season in 1934, but in ’35 that average was down thirty-five points. He didn’t run well, his home runs were down from fourteen to four, and Casey decided to release him while the team was in Chicago.
There were only seventeen games left in the season. He had hit .294 over his last eleven games. He didn’t see this coming. Maybe after the season, but with two weeks left as the team played down the schedule?
Koenecke did what many players of that era did: he got drunk. He got himself to Detroit on his own, and then chartered a small plane to fly him to Buffalo. It was late at night.
On the plane, he got into an altercation with the pilot and copilot. Some accounts suggested he might have attempted a sexual attack. In any case, to save the plane from crashing and to restrain Koenecke, the pilot, William Mulqueeney, grabbed a small fire extinguisher and hit the ballplayer over the head with it.
“He seemed to be under great stress when we began the flight,” the crew reported, “and he was quiet at first. But about 15 minutes in, he moved into the cockpit and began poking the pilot in the shoulder. He then bit the co-pilot [Irwin Davis], and a struggle went on for 10 to 15 minutes before they had to use the fire extinguisher.”
Koenecke was knocked dead, at thirty-one.
Inside his clothing was a check from the Dodgers for $680, which was how identification was quickly made. The death was listed as having happened over Toronto. The pilots landed on a racetrack, and were charged with manslaughter and imprisoned, but the charges were dropped after a review of the facts.
Casey, in St. Louis with the team, got the news by telephone and was understandably shaken—and feeling guilty.
Tommy Holmes wrote in the Eagle:
Saner minds on the ball club swiftly corrected an impulsive and hysterical feeling that his death was the fault of Manager Casey Stengel because Stengel shipped him East….No one feels worse about Koenecke’s fatal frenzy than Stengel. While he cannot bring himself to admit that he was wrong in sending the moody player East, he’d probably give anything to recall the move that ended so tragically for the sensitive, temperamental yet thoroughly likeable athlete.
“I can’t believe it,” Casey said. “I won’t believe it! How could he have been on a plane at Toronto when he left on one that doesn’t go near there?”
In author Robert Creamer’s account of the night, when newspapers wanted a statement from him, he was unable to deliver one. It was not often that he was speechless.
He went to Sportsman Park early in the morning and spoke to the players without any newspapermen present. Each Dodger wore a black band on his left sleeve for the remainder of the season.
According to Creamer, the general manager, Bob Quinn, persuaded the Times’s Roscoe McGowen to pretend to be Casey (they had similar deep, gravelly voices) and read a statement to the Associated Press.
“I am sorry about this,” said McGowen-as-Casey. “I was upset when I first heard the report and I couldn’t believe it. I can hardly believe it now. Koenecke was a good player last year. He was not quite so good this year and was one of the players sent home so we could try some of our new players. I deeply regret his death and can’t explain his actions, for when he left yesterday he seemed all right and in good spirits.”
McGowen pulled it off.
A lawyer for the pilots insisted that Casey be subpoenaed to testify at the coroner’s inquest as to Koenecke’s mental condition, but he was never called to testify.
The Koenecke story would fade away, and it’s barely known today, but Casey thought of it often in his later years, still with deep personal regrets.
The Dodgers won one less game in 1935 than the year before, but moved up a notch in the standings to fifth. The owners then allowed Bob Quinn to leave and join the Boston Braves as team president. Casey got a raise to $12,500 for 1936.
Spring training of 1936 was its usual challenge for Casey, as he tried to cobble together a roster when he had little to work with. Buddy Hassett, a rookie first baseman, played 156 games that season (there were two ties) and batted .310. And he was also quite a baritone singer. One day, when the Dodgers were traveling by train, he sang a lullaby to a crying baby on the train and put the baby to sleep. Noted Casey, “I know how to get the most out of my players.”
This team would not be known for its power. They hit only thirty-three home runs all season, the fewest in the majors, with catcher Babe Phelps leading the club with just five.
Phelps replaced Al Lopez behind the plate. Casey hated to make this trade; he really valued Lopez, who had been an All-Star in ’34 and was a friend as well. But in December 1935, he went to the Braves in a trade that brought the outfielder Randy Moore to the Dodgers. Moore would be an important addition for Casey—for reasons to emerge later on.
When spring training ended, fourteen players went to Casey to ask permission to drive north. He refused: he wanted the team to travel together. So a few of the fourteen went to a front-office official, possibly the new business manager, John Gorman, and got permission. That was a bad start to the season—undermining Casey by going behind his back on such a thing.
In May, the Cardinals’ Leo Durocher and Casey got into a brawl under the stands after a game, leaving Casey with a cut lip. The police had to break it up.
On June 9, Mungo left the team, after an ineffective start in which the Dodgers had lost their sixth game in a row.
Casey and Mungo had their issues. Once, after refusing Casey’s order of an intentional walk to Dick Bartell of the Giants, Mungo jumped the team and was fined six hundred dollars. He returned to pitch well, but the episode turned the Dodger fans against Mungo, who had been one of the few popular players on the club.
One day, the Dodgers were playing the talent-laden Cardinals, and Dizzy Dean stuck his head into the Dodgers clubhouse while Casey was going over their hitters. “C’mon in,” invited Casey, and he let Diz listen in. In return, Diz told the Dodgers how he would be pitching to each of them that afternoon.
He shut them out.
During the summer, the Dodgers held an open tryout at Ebbets Field for amateur players. Maybe they would get lucky; maybe some local discovery would emerge.
One of the players was a little eighteen-year-old infielder named Phil Rizzuto. As the story came to be told, Casey took a look at him and said, “Go get a shoeshine box, kid.” It would seem that Casey had made a grievous scouting error, for Rizzuto eventually made the Hall of Fame. And, truth be told, Phil told the story himself, just that way, over his lifetime. But occasionally he’d tell what really happened: “I was one of about 150 kids invited to try out at Ebbets field,” he said. “We began with a running drill, running from left field to right field. The first 50 to finish were told to stay, and I was one of them. But Casey never saw me. One of the Brooklyn coaches eventually told me I was too small. He told me to try something else, and forget baseball.”
The season ended with a seventh-place finish. The Dodgers drew just under five hundred thousand fans, which was third best in the league.
Casey stayed in town for the World Series, between the Yankees and the Giants, taking advantage of an opportunity to offer his insights for a New York newspaper. He sat in the press box with his newspaper pals, watching the two New York rivals battle it out.
On Monday, October 5, after the Giants won a 5–4 game in ten innings to extend the World Series to a sixth game, Casey was leaving through the Yankee Stadium press gate when he was told the Dodgers management wanted to see him downtown at the Commodore Hotel.
James Mulvey, the team’s vice president and secretary, and Joseph Gilleaudeau, the treasurer (and son-in-law of Charles Ebbets), broke the news. He was being fired.
John Gorman put out a statement at the World Series press headquarters: “The Brooklyn Baseball Club announces that Casey Stengel will not return to Brooklyn as manager next year.”
A writer shouted, “Will Casey be paid for 1937?”
“Of course he will,” said Gorman.
For a team that struggled to make a buck, this was a very strange business decision—like paying Max Carey not to manage in 1934. Once again, they would be paying two managers, one to manage and one not to manage.
They tried to get him to take a lump sum payment—at a reduced price—but Casey insisted on his full fifteen thousand dollars, payments to be made on the first and fifteenth of each month.
Phil Dooley of The Philadelphia Inquirer had good sources in the New York banking community. “The board decided Stengel hadn’t done a good job with the Dodgers. I take it that the decision was based on what the Dodgers drew at the gate, which wasn’t enough to pay off any of the principal on the mortgage. The Dodgers were in hock for the tune of $380,000. Instead of placing the onus where it belonged, on the ham talent Stengel had to work with, they decided the trouble was all with the manager, and presumably with a shout of ipso facto, non compos mentis, demanded his head. The officials of the Brooklyn Dodgers aren’t responsible to the rude hustling out of the picture of Casey Stengel, but the credit of cooking it up goes to a group of bank directors.”
Casey went back to the World Series the next day, sat in the press box, and received congratulations and condolences all around. He was being paid to offer his expertise, and he was going to meet his obligations.
The firing caused a storm. Tommy Holmes wrote, “The National League must be stunned by the good will the club has lost by firing an intensely popular figure.”
On October 8, a testimonial dinner was held in Casey’s honor at the Hotel New Yorker, thrown together by the New York press. Among those present were George Weiss, farm director for the Yankees, generating some guesses that Casey might be asked to manage the Yankees’ Newark farm team. Meanwhile, Casey said to the gathering about his being fired, “Such things happen in baseball, but I’ve been down and have come up again. I’m down now, and I’ll be up again if I want to.”
Speculation on Stengel’s successor in Brooklyn immediately included Burleigh Grimes, the old spitball pitcher, and Babe Ruth, who had retired in 1935 and made no secret of wanting to manage. Grimes got the job; Ruth was hired as a coach in 1938.
In December, when he was back in town for the Winter Meetings (even without an employer to pay his expenses), fans in Brooklyn booked the twenty-five-hundred-seat ballroom at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights and threw him another testimonial.
A letter to his mother in a Dodgers envelope from around this time survives:
Dear Mother:
…The father [Edna’s father] got a load on today & they have him down town trying to sober him up. Guess he will be o.k. for Thanksgiving….I have not signed with anyone; have not heard about my contract but will lay idle if I have to pay back all my salary from another job. I intend to take care of that business but I know best for a number of jobs will come up later during the season if I don’t get what I want. Well love & good health to all and stop worrying about my job. Your loving son, C.D.S.
Thus ended Casey’s association with the Dodgers as player, coach, and manager. He always loved the borough, the neighborhood, walking to work, the fans, the atmosphere, and the writers. But for the rest of his career, they would be “the opponent,” and younger fans would forget how tied he had once been to this team, his first major-league club.
* This is another story in which the the facts as he remembered them don’t all match, but the story has taken on a life of its own over time.