Casey attended the Pacific Coast League meetings in Los Angeles on October 26, which were called largely to talk about trying to turn the league into a major league by 1949.
With the war over, anticipating boosts in attendance and revenue (which came to be), the PCL was thinking big. Although the league’s ballparks were inferior to major-league facilities, it occupied strong markets, and had loyal fans and a great history. The West Coast was growing rapidly in population.
In 1946, baseball officials reclassified the minor leagues and created “Triple-A” ball. This moved the International and Pacific Coast Leagues, plus the American Association, up to a newly created grade. They were still the highest minor-league level.
To West Coast fans, before the Dodgers and Giants moved west in 1958, the PCL really felt like a major league. This was their baseball. The East Coast games were over by lunchtime; following them before television was difficult. The quality of play in the PCL was always high, the competition keen, and the media attention strong. For Casey and Edna, one of the benefits of being in the league was that they could be “home” in southern California to play Los Angeles, Hollywood, and San Diego in two trips each season, a total of thirty-three days. That gave them a chance to be in their Glendale home more than ever before. They had cookouts for the team at their home.
“I went up to Oakland with Casey,” wrote Edna. “It was so close I could fly home in an hour and a half. We had a marvelous time. Oakland is a gay town. To Casey and me the associations were like Toledo all over again. Casey was an intimate friend of colorful Brick Laws and Cookie DeVincenzi, owners of the team, and we were one of the gang with the players.”
Oaks Park was actually located in Emeryville, between Oakland and Berkeley. It was built in 1913, seated eleven thousand people, and was in an active business district with fan-friendly eating establishments just outside. There was also the California Packing Company plant across the street, which produced the scent of cooked tomatoes in the air around the park. Visitors developed a hunger for pasta almost daily.
Laws put $250,000 into park renovations after the war in anticipation of a big attendance boost.
The franchise, like the city of Oakland itself, was a weak stepsister to the San Francisco team, and had won only one pennant, in 1927, in its PCL history. Brick Laws bought control of the Oaks in 1943, and the ’44 team made the playoffs. He saw in Casey a man who could motivate players to success.
The team’s home opener on April 2 drew 15,189, a home attendance record. Governor Earl Warren (later chief justice of the Supreme Court) came from Sacramento to throw out the ceremonial first pitch. Casey coached third base and wore uniform number 1.
The Yankees sent Spec Shea to Oakland (he who would later pitch for Casey in New York), and he had a 15-5 season, tying Gene Bearden (who would star for Cleveland in 1948) and Rugger Ardizoia for most victories on the staff. Ardizoia, who played one game for the ’47 Yankees, called Casey “the nuttiest guy I ever met” in a 2015 interview for The New York Times, when, at ninety-five, he was the oldest living Yankee.
“I came under the wing of Casey Stengel, a great guy, a remarkable student of baseball, a smart analyst of pitching,” said Shea. “He showed me plenty. He instructed me in such matters as holding a man on base, moves with runners threatening you, and the desirability of pitching that ball low.”
Casey wrote about this:
We used to get in fights with the San Francisco club. The rivalry there…was so great. It was like Brooklyn and the Giants used to be. A free-for-all would break out during a game, and our tough players would run on the field, and their tough players. It would look pretty good, so I’d run out and get into it too.
I was in my late fifties then. And every time you looked at a picture of the fight afterward, you’d see maybe fifteen or eighteen men standing up and fighting with each other, but you couldn’t see me. There’d be a long arrow pointing down at the ground at the bottom of everything, and there’d be a line on it that said, “Stengel.” So I found out that I was slipping.
Jimmy Dykes was managing the Hollywood team…and he said to me, “Don’t you think you’re getting a little old to be doing all that fighting?” And I commenced thinking, “Well, he’s probably right.” After that I decided to become a bench manager and let the players do the fighting.
Casey was named to manage the PCL “All-Stars” in a game against Lefty O’Doul’s San Francisco Seals in August. The entire net proceeds went to the Association of Professional Baseball Players of America, a charitable organization for which Casey served on the board for many years.
The ’46 Oaks got into the playoffs, winning 111 of their 183 decisions (yes, the PCL played very long seasons), and finished second, four games behind San Francisco. They then swept the Los Angeles Angels in the first round of playoffs, before losing in six games to the Seals in the championship round. (The Oaks had been up, 2–1, before dropping three straight games.)
Casey held off on signing a 1947 contract because his name was being floated in the press as a manager for either Pittsburgh or the Yankees. But in October, he signed to return to Oakland. The Oaks finished fourth in 1947, with Vince DiMaggio, released by the Seals, reuniting with Casey. Nick Etten, the 1944 American League home run champion with the Yankees joined the team, and a nineteen-year-old local kid from Berkeley came up late in the season. His name was Billy Martin.
Casey first saw Martin when he was sixteen. The Oakland trainer persuaded Martin to take some ground balls for Casey, and Casey himself hit to him at third base. Casey didn’t hit any past him. “I hit that kid everything I had and he took them all,” he said. “I’ll say he’s got the stuff it takes, even though he’s a little shrimp.”
Billy had broken in in 1946 with the Class C Idaho Falls Russets, and started ’47 with the Phoenix Senators of the Class C Arizona–Texas League. A .392 average there got him a late-season promotion, all the way up to Oakland. He got into fifteen games and hit .226.
The Oaks won the first round of the 1947 Governor’s Cup, four games to one over the Seals, before losing in five games to Los Angeles in the championship round.
Johnny Babich, who had pitched for Casey in Brooklyn in 1934–35 and coached for him in ’46, came back in 1948 to coach again. Casey was still coaching third base at this time, but he was spending so much time in conversation with the nearby fans along the third-base line (including a lot of “regulars” he had come to know) that Babich finally suggested Casey manage from the dugout, and he would coach third. The shift happened in midseason.
The ’48 Oaks had forty players who came and went (about half of them former major leaguers), and many of them were up there in years and in experience. If an older player is “on his way down” in the minor leagues, it can be a time of discontent. But when surrounded by a roster of people in a similar situation, a good manager can bring them together to have a lot of fun. That is what happened for the Oaks in 1948, even with the long season of nearly 190 games.
Among the “elders,” he brought in pitcher Jim Tobin and catcher Ernie Lombardi, thirty-five and forty, respectively. Lombardi was a big local hero, who had played for the Oaks in 1928–30. His slow speed and big nose made him the object of some ridicule over his career (including from Casey), but he eventually went into the Hall of Fame, with a lifetime .306 average, two batting titles—and no infield hits that anyone remembered. Casey had managed Lombardi in Boston in 1942, when he won his second batting title, and he also had Tobin there (a twenty-one-game loser). The pitcher Lou Tost, now thirty-seven, had been on that club as well, and Casey brought him back.
Also on the club were Ralph Buxton (37), Nick Etten (34), Brooks Holder (33), Cookie Lavagetto (35), Dario Lodigiani (32), Billy Raimondi (35), Les Scarsella (34) Maurice Van Robays (33), Thornton Lee (41), Jack Salveson (34), and Floyd Speer (35). Billy Martin, who turned 20 in May, stood out for his youth. Merl Combs, 28, was his double-play partner at short. Catfish Metkovich, 27, was a rare young outfielder.
“We look better on paper than we really are,” Casey told Taylor Spink of The Sporting News. “Fellows who should be pitching well by now have sore arms, and my team is riddled with injuries. And one of the damnedest things you ever heard of happened to one of my young outfielders who can also play first base, George Metkovich. A catfish chawed off a hunk of his foot.” It was true, a freak fishing accident; George would forever be known as Catfish Metkovich.
Lavagetto, an Oakland native, had been a hero of the 1947 World Series for Brooklyn, coming through in the clutch to break up a no-hitter off Bill Bevens. Casey appointed him as a roommate and “mentor” to Billy Martin, who had his nose surgically trimmed down in May and wore bandages on the field. (Cookie would later be a coach for Casey on the Mets.)
What a time this club had, winning 114, and losing 74. There wasn’t a single “league leader” in any category among them, but Etten clubbed forty-three home runs and drove in 155, Metkovich hit .336, and Martin hit a very creditable .277.
“Casey let me handle the pitching rotation,” said Babich. “But he liked to play hunches. He would ask me for my starting pitchers for the week—but to leave Thursday blank. And he would pick the Thursday pitcher. No special reason he picked Thursday, he just wanted one day to pick the guy. And he was usually right.”
Someone called the Oaks “the Nine Old Men” (a frequently used term for the U.S. Supreme Court judges). When Billy Martin assumed an everyday role in the infield after a slow start, some took to saying “The Eight Old Men and the Kid.”
There was no doubt that Casey was taken by Billy’s scrappy brand of baseball and self-confidence. And Billy had never seen a manager like Casey, someone who could pick out the smallest things on the diamond. He could tell if a fastball was coming by how quickly the pitcher was chewing his tobacco, or by how wide the third baseman opened his eyes. Billy never knew there was this much to learn about “inside baseball.”
When Billy wasn’t on the field, he was serving as a profane bench-jockey, and was egged on by Stengel to do even more. He got into his first on-field fight in a game at Portland that summer, a fight made notable when Casey, at age fifty-eight, joined in the fray and had his uniform torn and his arms scratched, despite his earlier promise.
There were rumors in The Sporting News during the summer that Casey and DeVincenzi (who was now operating Sacramento) were trying to buy a PCL team. “Stengel,” said the paper, “owner of several oil wells and apartment houses, is said to be a millionaire.”
“I might have gone to Sacramento but only as a part owner,” Casey later said. “I was too happy in Oakland to move just for another job.”
The Oaks went 24-6 in the final month, and were tied for first with the Seals on September 20, with a week to go. The local press called Casey’s lineup juggling, which he applied instead of platooning, the “revolving door technique.”
On the 26th, they hosted Sacramento in a doubleheader—except that Sacramento batted last, as the home team, their own ballpark having burned down. Oakland rallied late in the game to win the first game 10–8. With that, the Oaks had won their first pennant in twenty-one years.
Oakland fans went crazy and stormed the field.
The pennant meant more than the Governor’s Cup, but they sure didn’t want to lose the cup after such a great year. And they won it, beating first Los Angeles in six, and then Seattle in five, to leave no doubt as to the champions of 1948.
“These are the finest, strongest, and best men in a pinch I’ve ever managed or played with in my long years of baseball,” Casey said at the banquet saluting the team.
Everyone got a ring, a parade ran through downtown Oakland, and Casey was given a new five-thousand-dollar Cadillac Fleetwood. A full championship share of $1,007.93 also went to each player, including Casey. The Sporting News named him Minor League Manager of the Year.
“It was the biggest thing that had happened in that city since the Bay Bridge was built,” said Edna. “Oakland went wild….His fame spread, his antics became legend. All these years, Casey had lived in California, but the fans and press had never known him. Now they took the prodigal to their heart. It’s ironic that he had to come home to find great success, because Oakland was the turning point of his baseball career. Casey was a little too famous for the Coast League to keep to itself any longer.”