On October 10, three days after the World Series ended, Casey walked over to the Yankee offices at 745 Fifth Avenue—the Squibb Building—took the elevator to the twenty-ninth floor, and signed a new two-year contract for what was reported to be between sixty-five and eighty thousand dollars a year, plus bonuses for “doing a good job,” not necessarily for winning the World Series. Again, he would be paid over twelve months, not six, with responsibility for running the instructional camp included.
Red Patterson summoned the press to watch as Casey sat at George Weiss’s desk and signed the contract with his right hand. (If he’d been able to operate dental equipment that way, would he have been there that day?) He was to be the highest-paid manager in the game and, probably, all time. It’s possible, though unlikely, that Lou Boudreau of Cleveland made more, but that was as a player/manager.
There had been whispers of Casey’s considering retirement, somewhat fueled by Casey himself, and probably encouraged by Edna. But this announcement put that to rest.
Only a couple of weeks later, Whitey Ford was drafted into the army for twenty-one months. Just like that, he was out of the picture for the next two seasons.
“Anytime you lose a man like that it’s going to hurt your ball club,” said Casey from his Glendale home. Suddenly speaking of Ford in the past tense, he continued: “Whitey had uncanny control for his age, showed splendid nerve on the mound and good judgment. He was a very good player from the time he came up last year.”
The Yankees trained in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1951. It was Del Webb’s hometown, and he made arrangements with the New York Giants’ owner, Horace Stoneham, to swap sites for one year, so that the Giants—and their prized rookie, Willie Mays—would go to St. Petersburg. The Yankees made the Adams Hotel their headquarters, but the rookies lived at the Continental Motel.
One attractive result of the swap was that the Yankees would play twelve exhibition games in southern California, including one against the White Sox on March 20 at Verdugo Park Municipal Baseball Field in Glendale. The park was built in 1949, and would be renamed Stengel Field in 1952 in honor of its favorite local citizen. (It had a long run; it was condemned in 2011 and torn down in 2015, but there is an ongoing effort to rebuild it.) The Yankees lost to Chicago 5–0, but a banquet at the Verdugo Club (founded in part by Edna’s brother John M. “Jack” Lawson, after the game was attended by writers and dignitaries from New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. This was a very high-profile event for the small city of Glendale.
The Yankees’ early camp opened on February 15. Twenty nonroster players were invited, including Mickey Mantle, who was on the Binghamton roster, and who would be moved to the Kansas City roster during camp. Others included the catcher Clint Courtney, the pitcher Lew Burdette, and the third baseman Bill Skowron (who would be shifted to first). Casey would run the school, assisted by Neun, Dickey, Turner, Crosetti, and Henrich, who had just retired as a player. Henrich would take charge of Mantle, and of his conversion from a Class C shortstop to a major-league outfielder. In his unpublished memoir, Crosetti wrote:
Casey brought out and taught these kids an “Offensive Routine.” I had been in the game for 23 years and I had never heard of anything like this, and never saw anyone teach anything like this before. He no doubt learned this from McGraw.
I believe that Stengel would have been a success at anything that he wanted to do. He was very talented. I believe also that he would have made a good comedian, as he was a natural. In fact, he was even funny to look at with his big floppy ears. The expressions that he would go through were unbelievable.
The parent roster would include rookies Gil McDougald, an infielder, and Tom “Plowboy” Morgan, a pitcher. McDougald did so well in camp that he beat Billy Johnson out of a job at third base. Johnson was soon sold to the St. Louis Cardinals.
Johnson was not a fan of Stengel. “He always wanted to make himself look good. By shifting a guy in there one day and out the next, he thought he was making himself look good in the newspapers and in the front office.” This was a rough comment, open to the interpretation that all the players hated the way Casey used them, keeping them unsure of what their role was. But Casey responded with a great deal of class and dignity, two characteristics some may have felt he had been lacking in the past: “I thank him for all the hard work he did for me,” he said to his writers about Johnson, from his perch on the Yankees bench. “He was a true Yankee and always played like one, hustlin’ every minute and never givin’ anything less than his best. He’s one guy I never had to worry about. I always knew he’d be in bed at the right time and ready for work the next day. But he told me he needed to play every day in order to be a top-grade performer. And I just couldn’t give it to him. Now he’ll have it and I hope he’s a success. I truly hated to see him go.”
Molding Mantle as an outfielder was a wonderful pet project for Stengel, a former right fielder himself. “The first thing I had to teach was to run in the outfield, looking back over his shoulder, which DiMaggio was so great at, and not run looking down at the ground. ‘They have no plowed fields up here, boy,’ I tell him, ‘and you don’t have to run and watch out for furrows at the same time because this is the big leagues and the fields are all level and they have groundskeepers and everything.”
But it wasn’t a perfect transition. In an exhibition game against the Indians on March 11, Mantle had trouble with his sunglasses, and a fly ball hit by Ray Boone hit him over his left eye. Fortunately, he sustained no injury of significance.
Casey knew sunglasses could be dangerous and awkward, since he had been among the first to wear sunglasses in the outfield himself, going back to his Brooklyn days.
If there was a moment when it seemed Mantle needed to be considered for the opening-day roster, it came on March 26, 1951, during the Yankees’ spring-training trip through southern California. As a favor to Casey’s old Dodger player Rod Dedeaux, now the baseball coach at USC, the Yankees were to play the Trojans at the university’s Bovard Field.
Mantle connected for two home runs that day—one from each side of the plate. No measurements were taken, but each was said to have traveled about five hundred feet. (James Dawson, writing in The New York Times, said nothing about their distance, which makes one skeptical. However, distances were not routinely reported then.)
There were still three weeks to go before opening day, but attention was now clearly focused on this muscled-up teen from Oklahoma who might one day—was it possible?—be the successor to DiMaggio. Comparisons were made with Mel Ott, who broke in with the Giants at seventeen under John McGraw. Ott went on to hit 511 home runs, a National League record, and, remarkably, led his team in home runs in eighteen consecutive seasons. No one else has ever come close to that.
But Mantle offered more. In the first place, he was a switch-hitter. Today there are many switch-hitters in the game, and it could be said that Mantle influenced their fathers to teach them switch-hitting. But in the early 1950s, switch-hitting was really quite rare. The only other switch-hitters in the majors at that point were Dave Philley (the only American Leaguer), Red Schoendienst, Pete Reiser, and Sam Jethroe. Mantle, if he made the grade, would be the first significant switch-hitter on the Yankees since the shortstop Mark Koenig, from the Murderers’ Row era of the 1920s. Mantle also had tremendous speed, which made his bunting—especially from the left side—a big weapon. Rizzuto, the best bunter in the game, worked with him at that skill.
On April 14, Whitey Ford was set to marry his sweetheart, Joan Foran, right after the Yankees played a pre-season exhibition game at Ebbets Field. He was on a weekend leave from the army. They had a small ceremony planned in Queens. Probably just as an announcement to let the front office know, Whitey had sent an invitation to Red Patterson, the team’s public-relations director. Maybe he thought he’d get a nice gift basket out of it; no attendance was expected.
But Red told Casey about it, and Casey had Bill McCorry (the new traveling secretary) order a bus and take the whole team to Donohue’s Bar in Astoria, Queens, for the evening reception. Whitey could not believe it when the team entered. Mantle, who didn’t know Ford, shyly stayed in the bus until the Fords came out to greet him. That was the first time Mantle and Ford met—on a bus parked outside of Donohue’s.
It was, to quote from Casablanca, “the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
Mantle made the team without going to Triple-A. On opening day, his name was announced by the new public-address announcer, Bob Sheppard. It was a perfect-sounding name for someone with a perfectly sculptured body. And read by a PA announcer with perfect diction, to boot.
“We were in the lobby of the Concourse Plaza Hotel waiting for our husbands to come downstairs for the Welcome Home Luncheon,” recalled Yogi’s wife, Carmen. “We had been hearing about this very handsome boy named Mickey Mantle, which sounded like a made-up name. Was it a nickname for Michael Mantle, or something like that?
“Suddenly, the elevator door opened and out he stepped.”
“Oh my God,” she thought. “Look at this boy!”
At the Washington Senators’ home opener Vice President Alben Barkley did the first-pitch honors, and a photograph showed Casey, Bucky Harris (now the Senators’ manager), and the “Old Fox,” Clark Griffith, owner of the Senators, alongside the vice president. That made three Yankee managers in the picture, Griffith having managed the original team, the New York Highlanders. But the photo would be bested on Old-Timers’ Day that summer, when the same three were grouped with Joe McCarthy, Bob Shawkey, and Roger Peckinpaugh—six Yankee managers in one shot. Somehow, Red Patterson missed getting Dickey into the photo, too. Or perhaps Dickey refused, given his unpleasant experience as manager.
Future managers Yogi Berra, Ralph Houk, and Billy Martin were also “in the house.”
There was much speculation on the future of DiMaggio, and whether 1951 would be his final season. He seemed to have no qualms about saying it was, as early as spring training, but, still, people felt his mind could change.
Whenever he was discussed (more often in magazine pieces than in the daily press), so was his strained relationship with Stengel. The only difference between 1949 and 1951 was that now Casey had established strong credentials on his own, and was more of a significant figure in the discussion.
On July 7 in Fenway Park, with DiMaggio in center in the second inning, Casey saw something in Joe’s movement that suggested leg or heel pain. After Joe ran to center in the third, Casey sent Jensen out to replace him. DiMaggio stood still for a few moments before he jogged off. He didn’t show Casey up, he didn’t shake his head or make any gesture, but his teammates knew “Oh boy, you don’t embarrass Joe DiMaggio.” Joe was, of course, seething, and told the press afterward, “You’d better talk to Stengel about that.” He called him Stengel, not “Casey,” not “the manager.”
Casey explained to the press that Joe had a sore leg and the rest would help him.
Joe did have a sore leg muscle, and he and Casey had a controlled conversation at his locker. It did not deal with the drama on the field, just with the condition of his leg. “I don’t want to take a chance on hurting it more, so I got out,” he finally said, standing at his locker. The injury was confirmed by Gus Mauch.
“He’ll go to the All-Star Game, and maybe I can use him as a pinch-hitter,” said Stengel in his office, and then turned attention to how hard Joe slid into second base.
Joe DiMaggio was famously thin-skinned and easily insulted, but Casey lacked the proper skills—or didn’t care if he hurt Joe’s feelings. “Insensitive” would be the best way to describe his current relationship with Joe.
But, for all Casey’s such actions, he was still beloved by the press, who had their own moments of insensitivity with DiMaggio. “He kids his players, he mocks them on the bench, and [the writers] think he’s a funny man, a fine ribber,” noted the Cleveland Press writer Franklin Lewis.
Casey was effective at charming umpires, too. He didn’t get tossed from a game (as a Yankee) until April 7, 1951, during an exhibition, and that was by a National League umpire, Augie Donatelli. (He wasn’t ejected from a regular season game until July 6, 1952.) Of course, many who rooted hard against the Yankees’ success felt it was all a big plot to keep awarding championships to the Yankees, since that was thought to be good for baseball.
A moment that particularly played into the hands of the anti-Yankee crowd came on July 27. The Yankees led this home game 3–1 after eight, but the White Sox scored three in the top of the ninth to take a 4–3 lead. Rain clouds were approaching, and Casey sent McDougald to the mound to stall for time. It was so blatant that McDougald was ejected. The rains came in torrents, and after a ninety-minute delay—it was now twelve-thirty in the morning—the umpires called the game, and the score reverted to the last full inning, to make it a 3–1 Yankee victory. Chicago’s three in the ninth didn’t count.
“It wasn’t impossible to play,” stormed the Sox manager, Paul Richards. “They told us we could stay until dawn, that there was no time limit. Why such a hurry? If they want a time limit let the league put one on. Somebody should have the authority to order the game played from the point it was stopped.”
It was moments like this—the win broke a first-place tie and put the Yankees up by a game over Boston and Cleveland—that could really rile fans. Feuding with the White Sox seemed to take on a life of its own. There was never a rivalry between New York and Chicago as storied as the one with Boston, but the White Sox always seemed to have it in for Casey. When Hank Greenberg and Bill Veeck took over the Chicago club, it grew even stronger.
One day in Chicago in 1951, Casey criticized Chicago fans, and indirectly the management, for allowing firecrackers and paper debris to be thrown on the field. The general manager, Frank Lane, another long-running Casey critic, said, “I believe Stengel has enough of a job just managing the Yankees without trying to tell us how to run our ballpark.”
Richards called Casey a clown—an insult that was tossed out less and less with each pennant—and other disparaging things. However, this enmity didn’t prevent him from later becoming partners with Stengel on an oil deal.
Casey’s schedule had by now fallen into a predictable pattern.
The calendar year would begin with the sportswriter dinners in Los Angeles, New York, and Boston, with an occasional smaller one thrown in, such as the annual “Dapper Dan” awards dinner in Pittsburgh. Then would come the instructional camp followed by spring training. The team would barnstorm north, make it to the Bronx, have the Welcome Home Luncheon (or Dinner), and then raise the pennant on opening day. The season would roll on until the All-Star Game, which he usually managed, and then the summer months would give way to the World Series. Then came the World Series party. There would be a visit to the team offices to sign a new contract every other October, the Winter Meetings, and the holiday break. And then it was time to crank it all up again. Always, it seemed, the familiar face of Charles Dillon Stengel was a presence.
One thing not in the schedule was a health interruption.
In 1951, a kidney stone put Casey in the hospital for several days. He recovered without surgery, but a second flare-up landed him back in bed at the Essex House. Oddly, a car trip that the Stengels and the Weisses took to upstate New York somehow cured his kidney-stone issue for good. Or maybe it was a coincidence. Casey felt great after the trip and had no further episodes.
Edna thought her husband’s energy was remarkable. Yes, she was always trying to get him to retire, but she had to admit, his stamina was awesome. “Casey is a physical marvel,” she said. “He’d come home after a hard game, eat a big meal, entertain a gang of people, go to bed, and be snoring in ten minutes.”
The kidney stone did have one other result: for some time, he gave up drinking, although eventually he resumed.
Meanwhile, the Mantle experiment (jumping him up to the majors so quickly) was hitting some bumps. He seemed overmatched at times. There were those traces of power and moments of great speed, but after a 1-for-5 game with three strikeouts on July 13, he was hitting just .260. His timing was off—he had hit only one home run in his last fourteen games and had seven for the season thus far. This was a pennant race, and Stengel needed more reliable bats in the outfield.
In his autobiography, The Mick, Mantle wrote that Casey called him into his office to tell him he was being sent down to Kansas City for additional seasoning.
“He had tears in his eyes,” Mantle wrote. “He says, ‘This is going to hurt me more than you, but—’
“No, skip. It was my own fault.”
If Casey did have tears, it would have been an uncommon moment. His history with teenage players in the majors was limited, and though he could be an emotional man, he also saw baseball as a profession in which things like this happen. A lot of players get sent down, and for many it is often seen as the last call.
“He’s just a green pea out there,” Casey told reporters. “But he’ll be back soon, and you’ll see something.
“I am not disposed to quit on the boy. I just want to make his task easier. I was an outfielder myself, and I know what he is up against.”
There was talk of abandoning his switch-hitting, but Mantle continued to hit from both sides at Kansas City. In the forty games he played for George Selkirk with the Blues, he batted .361, with eleven homers and fifty RBIs.
He returned August 24, and though he only raised his average to .267 and hit six more homers, people agreed he’d had a good rookie season, given that he was still nineteen and playing under such a spotlight, even if it wasn’t brilliant. McDougald would win the Rookie of the Year Award.
Then there was the Jackie Jensen saga. The prized All-American boy was seeing only limited action—fifty-six games in 1951—and he, too, would be sent to Kansas City; the following May, he would be traded to Washington. “I was fed up,” he said after the season. “I felt so badly about the treatment, that although I was in New York at the end of the season, I didn’t feel like sticking around to even watch the club play in the World Series.” (He was not selected for the World Series roster.)
As for Stengel, Jensen later looked back with kindness. “Casey is a wonderful, sweet old guy. I think he is the smartest manager in baseball. I know he taught me more in two years than anybody before or since.”
By 1960, after Jensen had won an MVP award and blossomed into a star at Boston, Casey was calling the trade of Jensen “my worst mistake as Yankees manager.” Casey even named him to the 1952 All-Star team, just weeks after trading him away.
The Yankees had picked up Mize in 1949 and Johnny Hopp in 1950; their mid-season surprise in 1951 turned out to be Johnny Sain, acquired in a trade for the farmhand Lew Burdette on August 29. Sain, of course, had pitched for Stengel in Boston in 1942, so this would be a reunion after nearly a decade. With the Braves, he and Warren Spahn had become pitching stars (“Spahn and Sain and pray for rain”). It was Stengel who made him a pitcher in Boston, when there was some question whether he was a pitcher or an outfielder.
Now he would earn three World Series rings under Casey in New York.
Sain could immediately see Stengel’s organizational abilities. “His willingness to delegate responsibility to his coaching staff is one of the reasons for the Yankees’ domination of the American League,” he said.
As for Burdette—more would be heard from him before the 1950s were over.
By Yankee standards, the 1951 team struggled. They were still tied for first in mid-September and unable to break free. In the end, they won their last five games—all against Boston—on the last three days of the season, to win the pennant. They actually clinched with three games left after a doubleheader sweep on Friday, the twenty-eighth, as Reynolds threw his second no-hitter of the season in the clincher, inducing a second pop foul by Ted Williams after Berra dropped the first one. (His earlier one had been on July 12, and the two would be the only major-league regular-season no-hitters Casey ever managed—or played in. As a minor-league manager, he had been on the losing end three times.)
After the clinching no-hitter, the clubhouse was quiet, and more restrained than in previous seasons.
Casey walked over to DiMaggio’s locker and said, “I want to thank you for everything you did.” Joe accepted this politely. When asked about retirement, he only told reporters, “I don’t know, this isn’t the time to talk about it.” Despite his spring announcement that this would be his last season, which would make this his final championship, the time was not right for a grand pronouncement.
There was always talk of Joe’s becoming manager, or perhaps Tommy Henrich. But Henrich, seeing a better financial future in a beer distributorship he invested in with his former teammate Snuffy Stirnweiss, resigned as a coach after the season and pretty much left baseball for good. George Selkirk’s name was also mentioned, in case Casey retired.
The Yankees won ninety-eight games, a solid showing, but, as Shirley Povich wrote in The Washington Post, “This is the year when the worst Yankee team in a generation won the pennant, and it is Casey Stengel’s greatest triumph.”
Added Arthur Daley in the Times, “The Yankees are not a great team. They barely qualify as a good team. Their pitching couldn’t begin to compare with Cleveland’s or their hitting to Boston’s. This was a triumph for their manager.”
Casey would win Manager of the Year honors from United Press International.
The focus of the final days of the season was not on the Yankees—their winning was all too familiar—but, rather, on the spectacular comeback made by the New York Giants in catching the Brooklyn Dodgers and tying for first place in the National League.
So New York City had three first-place teams. The Giants had their own version of Mantle in their center fielder Willie Mays, who, like Mantle, needed a stint in the minors before he got going.
But it was another Giants outfielder, Bobby Thomson, who would become a household word that fall, when his pennant-clinching, walk-off home run off Ralph Branca, “The Shot Heard ’Round the World,” concluded “The Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff” as the broadcaster Russ Hodges screamed, “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”
The World Series opened at Yankee Stadium on October 4, with Mays in center for the Giants, and Mantle in right for the Yankees. Maintaining their late-season momentum, the Giants won the opener 5–1.
The next day, on a fifth-inning drive to right-center by Mays, Mantle moved to his right and DiMaggio to his left, to converge on the ball. Mantle felt he would catch it, but at the last moment, DiMaggio called him off. “It was the first time he spoke to me all season,” Mick later said, half-seriously. Mantle put on the brakes, but his spikes caught a drainage pipe in the vastness of the outfield grass, and he collapsed to the ground as DiMaggio made the catch.
He was carried off on a stretcher as Bauer replaced him in right. The injured knee would affect Mantle’s play for the rest of his career. Never again would he be as healthy as he had been as a rookie, even though he had been diagnosed with osteomyelitis (a serious bone infection) while still playing high school football. (It had also kept him out of the army.)
The Yankees won the game behind Eddie Lopat, and then the action moved across the Harlem River to the Polo Grounds, where the Yankees took two of three, Lopat again winning Game Five. In the fourth game, DiMaggio hit what would be his final home run, and in the fifth game, McDougald, with his odd, wide-open batting stance, became the first rookie ever to hit a grand slam in a World Series game.
Then, back in Yankee Stadium, they won Game Six, to capture their third straight world championship, with Bauer the hitting hero. The most talked-about managerial moment came in the ninth inning of that game, when Stengel summoned the southpaw Bob Kuzava, an otherwise ordinary pitcher, to face the right-hand-hitting Monte Irvin, who had eleven hits in the series, not to mention a steal of home and a spectacular catch. Kuzava retired three in a row and closed out the game, to walk off a hero.
“I am not too interested in which arm a pitcher uses,” said Casey, surprising some, who felt his platooning—now widely considered the trademark Stengel move—was usually lefty-righty based. “To me, a pitcher is a pitcher, and if he is worthy of a locker in Yankee Stadium, I don’t care if he has two heads and pitches with two left arms. Performance is what counts. I don’t belong to that old-fashioned school which is too taken up with the percentages in alleged favor of one scheme over another. When I called on Kuzava, the press box gasped. I could feel the draft in our dugout. Well, you know what Kuzava did to those righthand batters.”
The party that night, again at the Biltmore, lasted until four in the morning. There were no speeches (always a setback for Casey, who loved making them), but a lot of satisfying merriment through the night.
Mantle wasn’t there. He was in the hospital, recovering from the terrible knee injury, and was sharing a room with his father, Mutt, who, along with his grandfather, had taught Mickey to switch-hit. Mutt was ill with cancer, and would die the following May. It was Casey who called Mickey at the Concourse Plaza Hotel, near Yankee Stadium, to break the news of his father’s death. Casey kept him out of the lineup that night, and then Mickey flew home to Oklahoma the next day for the funeral.
Losing his dad at twenty was a deep emotional setback for Mantle. His father could “talk sense” to him like no one else. He’d talked him into playing hard at Kansas City instead of quitting. “After my dad died, Casey treated me as a son and taught me a lot off the field too,” Mantle would recall.
Since Edna and Casey were childless, having an “adopted son” in Mantle was significant in both of their lives. Neither man was sentimental, but the bond between them was genuine and meaningful. Many people saw their relationship as each man filling a gap in the other’s life. Mutt’s death during the baseball season left a large void for Mickey, and there was the sixty-year-old Stengel to play the role of surrogate.
After the season, Casey and Edna stopped in Oklahoma on their way home, where Casey broadened his oil holdings by investing in a new oil well with a fellow named Bob Jordan. He further broadened them the following year with the “Casey Stengel No. 1” well in Magnolia, Arkansas, where his partners included Charlie Grimm, Steve O’Neill, Jimmie Dykes, Phil Cavarretta, Carl Hubbell, Pinky Higgins, Fred Haney, Eddie Stanky, Marty Marion, Rogers Hornsby, Al Lopez, Hank Greenberg, Dizzy Dean, J. G. Taylor Spink of The Sporting News, Gabe Paul, and Paul Richards. The deal was put together by R. W. “Dick” Burnett, owner of the Texas League’s Dallas franchise and himself an oilman from Gladewater, Texas. Casey’s oil empire was expanding.
It wasn’t until late 1953, and seven dry wells, that oil was struck in Oil City, Louisiana, which enabled the partners to get their money back and show a small profit.
But when they returned home, tragedy struck the family. On October 27, Edna’s brother Brigadier General Larry Lawson was found dead in a car parked in his garage in Glendale. He was only fifty-three, and the death was ruled a suicide. He had served as base commander for the U.S. Army Air Corps base in Okinawa, Japan, after the Japanese surrender.
The Lawson family gathered in Glendale for the somber funeral. Larry was the brother who had helped bring Casey and Edna together in marriage. Edna’s sister, Mae Hunter, and her baby brother (by ten years), John, lent support to her. (John Lawson was a formidable figure in Glendale—he was, at various times, the city’s mayor, city councilman, and head of Valley National Bank, which opened in 1957.) This was a difficult time for this prominent family.
Casey flew back from Glendale to New York and reported to the Yankees’ Fifth Avenue offices for a press conference on December 11. Joe DiMaggio was announcing his retirement. It was important that Stengel be there, especially to show that there were no bad feelings between the two.
“I’ve played my last game of ball,” said Joe. Casey said:
What is there to say? I just gave the Big Guy’s glove away and it is going to the Hall of Fame, where Joe himself is certain to go. He was the greatest player I ever managed and right now I still say there isn’t another centerfielder in baseball his equal.
When they played the Star Spangled Banner, every player would stand in the dugout and they’d look at Joe. When the music stopped, Joe would charge out on the field and they’d charge after him and I knew I had a leader.
And when the game was over, 10,000 people would be waiting to look at him and I knew I had something.
But Casey was probably relieved. Joe had slumped to a .263 average in 1951, the lowest of his career. His twelve home runs were embarrassing by DiMaggio standards, and his selection to the All-Star team was a Stengel courtesy.* He had not earned it, but it gave him the record of having made the All-Star team in every one of his thirteen seasons.
Casey would no longer have to concern himself with Joe’s hurt feelings about being in and out of the lineup, when Casey knew he wasn’t the DiMaggio of old. He would now move Mantle to center, and have greater control over his daily lineup.
The DiMaggio-Stengel relationship had been tense at times. To close observers, Casey was not very sensitive to Joe’s declining skills and strong ego. He could talk to “my writers” about “the Dago” and know they would respect his late-night meanderings and not quote him or write about it. Similarly, DiMaggio could never bring himself to respect Casey, not even after three straight world championships. This he would not tell the press, but he did share it with Toots Shor and all of his nonbaseball friends. Publicly, both would always be properly respectful toward each other. Both understood the consequences of doing any less.
* This was still a time when most of the player selections for the All-Star Game were made by the manager.