Wartime travel restrictions forced spring training north in 1943, and the elite, private Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, 125 miles southwest of Boston, would be the Braves’ training site.
As with most teams working out in cold climates, a lot of time was spent indoors, practicing throwing and exercising, and few exhibition games were actually played. (They did play one against the Yankees in Yankee Stadium.)
The most interesting new face in camp was the veteran Lefty Gomez, who had been sold by the Yankees in January. Now thirty-four, he was as funny as Casey and great copy for the writers. But alas, he would be on the team until May 19 without ever getting into a game.
Opening day was Saturday, April 24, in Boston. This would be Casey’s sixth year as the Braves’ manager, and his thirty-fourth year in the game. He was soon to turn fifty-three.
On the 19th, Patriots’ Day, the Braves beat the Red Sox in the last exhibition game of the spring. Late that night, a stormy night made all the gloomier because of World War II blackout rules, Casey was crossing the difficult intersection at Kenmore Square, walking across Commonwealth Avenue; he was heading, he later said, for a lunchroom, probably Charlie’s, on the south side of the busy street. He had left his hotel, the Sheraton, around midnight.
As part of the wartime blackout rules, the top halves of auto headlights were taped over. Casey held his raincoat high so it shielded his face. The moment must have had the look of a black-and-white film noir.
Suddenly he was struck hard by a car. Imagine the sound of impact mixed with the driving rain and the screams of other pedestrians. Casey was laid out on the pavement as a crowd gathered in horror. Few if any recognized him in the rain and the darkness. The impact caused severe fractures to his right leg. Both the tibia and the fibula were shattered. Thomas Hastings, the driver of the car, got Casey to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Brighton, which was so crowded that he was placed in the maternity ward. His shattered leg was raised by hanging weights.
It was bad. His shortstop Whitey Wietelmann said, “That leg was snapped off clean in two. They did a tremendous job just to save it.” Fortunately, Wietelmann was exaggerating.
For the first minutes in the hospital, amputation was considered. The Braves’ team doctor, Edward O’Brien, Jr., said the leg was so severely swollen it could not be set for a week. Then the surgeons went to work and did their jobs. Saving the shattered leg was a very complicated procedure. The surgeons put nearly twenty-five pounds of metal into his leg, all dangling from a spike through his heel to draw the bones into place. The limb would be saved—there would be no amputation—but the effects of the injury would be with Casey for the rest of his life.
Frankie Frisch, managing the Pirates, visited him in the hospital when that team came to Boston and brought him roses—and diaper pins (given that he was in the maternity ward). He had earlier sent a telegram stating: THIS IS NO TIME OF YEAR TO TRY TO COMMIT SUICIDE.
Players old and new sent him get-well wishes, playfully addressed to the hospital’s psychiatric ward. The New York writers visited him, en masse, on May 5, bringing a huge ice cream cake and a travel clock, not that he was going anywhere soon. Braves players visited him, one at a time or in small groups.
But make no mistake: When he looked up at his leg suspended above him, Casey felt depressed. He was older now, but he was still an athlete, and such a setback does not play well for anyone, least of all an athlete. “He brooded about it and finally decided that if he was going to be a cripple, he would never again appear before the public,” wrote Edna. “For the first time in his life, he talked about quitting baseball.”
Bob Coleman, a coach, would be acting manager, assisted by High Pockets Kelly. The best Casey could do was listen to the games on WNAC on his bedside radio.
On May 22, just over a month after the accident, he got out of bed for the first time, and stayed out ever so briefly. The leg was finally put into a cast on June 5; three days later, he began to walk on crutches.
Edna interrupted her care for her dying mother to fly to Boston on June 12, in time to accompany Casey to the Myles Standish Hotel after fifty-three days in the hospital. Casey had understood her absence before then, and wired her, “Don’t come unless you can set a broken leg.”
On June 18, still on those crutches, Casey returned to Braves Field for the first time to resume managing. In his first game back, he sent Chet Ross up to pinch-hit in the ninth, and Ross delivered a three-run homer, to beat the Giants 8–6.
The Bees had been 21-25 under Coleman, in sixth place (which is where they would finish). Casey had missed forty-six games.
On June 19, Edna’s mother, Margaret, died in Glendale; back Edna went, although Casey wasn’t able to accompany her.
In September, Casey had improved enough to come out of his cast and discard his crutches, but he now walked with a pair of mahogany canes, his leg in a brace. Despite the compliments Casey paid to the hospital staff, his leg never healed perfectly.
The sportswriter Harold Rosenthal would write in 1961: “Ever notice the way Stengel used to walk out to the mound, one leg seemingly shorter than the other and a definite bow to the shorter one down around the ankle? Well, it was shorter and there was a definite bow to it, tracing to a wet-night accident in Boston. A fellow driving an uninsured car knocked Casey down, and the accident put Stengel in the hospital for a couple of months. The leg healed with an unsightly burl-like knot, and the doctors cautioned him not to get any severe blows on the part where the healed bone seemed to be struggling to burst through the pale skin.”
The acerbic and sometimes cruel Boston Record sportswriter Dave “the Colonel” Egan wrote that the prize given by the local chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association for the man who had done the most for baseball in Boston in 1943 should go to “the taxi-driver who knocked Stengel down and put him out of commission from April 20 until July.” (News accounts vary on whether it was a car or a taxi.) Casey never publicly responded to this, though he did go on to tell some people that Egan had a drinking problem.
Even though the season ended with the Braves up a notch to sixth, it was over for Casey. Perini had grown tired of hearing explanations doled out in Stengelese. He wanted answers and he got double-talk. It may have been charming for the press, but it wasn’t working with the boss. “I decided that at the first opportunity I was going to give Stengel some of his own double talk as well as a pink slip,” said Perini. “But I never got the chance. Casey resigned before I could fire him.”
On January 28, 1944, Casey resigned in a letter, sent airmail to Perini from Chicago. “Whenever a new group purchases control of a corporation they have the right to dictate the policy. And in order that there be no embarrassment on the part of this group I hereby tender my resignation. Casey Stengel.”
To Bob Quinn, he wrote a longer and more personal letter:
I am sure the city of Boston, with the Braves, will profit by the young players who I have developed since I have been there. Many of the players are now in the service.
No one realizes more than you, the interest and faith I have in the city of Boston. You are familiar with the substantial amount of my personal cash which I invested in the club. You also know that whenever the directors asked for more cash I put up as much as any other director.
I want to thank you and believe it or not, my many friends in Boston, my able coaches, and particularly the newspapermen who were kind to me while I was trying to win and also develop young players for the future of the Boston club.
I sincerely hope the new owners have every success and that Boston will have a first division team.
And so he went home to Glendale, probably assuming that his baseball career was over. He had no job for 1944 and would have to count on his oil money, never a sure thing. But he was not willing to admit he was done. In February 1944, Casey told friends, “I have a few irons in the fire. I won’t be out of baseball this year.” He had hoped to be part of a group buying the Dodgers with Max Meyer, but it didn’t happen. One newspaper report had him succeeding the retiring Earle Combs as a Yankee coach, but the job went to Johnny Neun. Ed Barrow, running the Yankees, was said to have recoiled at the thought of hiring Casey.
Edna wrote: “He was on crutches, he was inconsolable. ‘If I gotta walk out on that coaches box with a old man’s limp,’ he repeated over and over, ‘I just don’t belong in baseball.’ ”
Edna reflected on those first weeks of spring training in 1944:
I had my man around the house at last, that nine-to-five guy, but (I hate to confess) he was a nuisance. After he finished reading the ups and downs of both baseball and stocks, he didn’t know what to do with himself. He’d grumble aloud about the trades, the choice of starting pitchers, and to anyone he met—the mailman, the gardener, the delivery boy, my father—he’d grab the chance to talk, talk, talk baseball.
Lonesome? He was dying.
This was different than his 1937 “vacation”—then he had been bustling with plans for going back.
As the winter went on and his leg showed little improvement he convinced himself he was through.