Before the Yankees’ 1952 instructional camp at Lake Worth, Florida, marking what would be the franchise’s fiftieth season, Casey and Edna took a vacation to Puerto Rico. All Stengel vacations were arranged by Edna. Casey, who had no hobbies, would have been perfectly fine sitting at home and reading The Sporting News. Edna would write about this:
The first night we are [in Puerto Rico], he can’t go to sleep. Not too far off there is a familiar muffled roar. “Sounds like a baseball game,” Casey said, peeping over the covers. I urged him to go to sleep. “It’s probably some sort of festival,” I said. “These people are great for festivals. They have them every night. Now turn over and get some rest.” Well, three hours later he’s back in the room and telling me about a pitcher and shortstop he saw and cussing out George Weiss. “We have both of these guys signed up as prospects,” he says, “and Weiss don’t tell me nothing about ’em and he knows I’m coming down here.” Of course George knew nothing about our plans. I had purposely kept them secret. That was the end of our baseball sabbatical.
Edna followed her Puerto Rican vacation with a two-week vacation, without Casey, to Hawaii. This could be seen as a vacation from vacationing, or a truly relaxing one without her husband.
When spring training opened in St. Pete, Mantle would again be the big news: he was competing to take over DiMaggio’s center-field post. DiMaggio was not about to disappear; he signed two television contracts for over a hundred thousand dollars to work on NBC and WPIX, the Yankees’ local station in New York.
Casey was looking for more maturity from Mantle. “[He’s] not just any player. He is a definite type,” he said. “He stands out in a lobby, he stands out on a field.”
Mantle would earn the center-field job that everyone had been predicting for him, and would, in fact, finish third in 1952 MVP voting, his first full season in the majors. (Allie Reynolds was second to the winner, Bobby Shantz, a slight Philadelphia Athletics pitcher for whom Casey had great respect. Berra finished fourth.) Still, Stengel was concerned—and thus the press and the fans were concerned—over his propensity to strike out, even if the numbers pale by today’s standards. His 111 strikeouts broke the team record of 105 set by Crosetti in 1937. Not even Babe Ruth, baseball’s all-time leader at that point, ever topped a hundred during his Yankee career.
“I cut down noticeably on my fanning in the final six weeks,” Mantle reflected. “I began to pay attention to instructions from Casey and Bill Dickey. They had been warning me that I swung too hard and went after too many bad pitches. I cut down on the swing; I waited for better deliveries.”
Stengel loved sitting in his hotel lobby, observing his players as they returned at night (noting those who were breaking curfew), and making his keen observations from a stool in the hotel bar. That was where the writers knew they could find him and get good quotes from him—some even usable.
He would pay for everyone’s drinks by signing a tab to his room, and the team would cover the cost. The generosity was never questioned; it was great PR for the Yankees to have the manager entertaining the press on overtime, long into the nights. And that wasn’t all. The gossip columnist Leonard Lyons reported that the team also paid for various club memberships for Casey, such as the Elks Club, which Casey explained thus: “That’s a business office expense; it comes under the heading of promotion.”
As comfortable as Casey felt in this routine, it was not to Edna’s liking, since she stayed in their room while Casey entertained downstairs. “If he does not quit baseball this year, I’m going to leave him, and I want you to put that in the paper, too,” she said to a beat reporter, probably playfully. But he used it.
This was just Edna going back and forth on the subject. She never really objected, and in fact loved the glamour and the glory. Still, Casey had promised her “just one year.” She was a strong woman, not the shy, retiring type, and her encounters with the press and the public complemented Casey’s.
The Yankees did not get off to a strong start in 1952. Their 18-17 record as of May 30 (fifth place) did not cause panic, but it looked as if this season would be Casey’s toughest challenge. He lost Jerry Coleman to military service in April, Bobby Brown in July, and Whitey Ford was gone for the season. The team picked up the outfielder Irv Noren, whose .235 for the year was a disappointment, and Lopat won only ten games. But the Yankees would lead the league in batting average and in ERA and, even in a so-called off-year, had the most talent in the league. Berra, replacing DiMaggio as cleanup hitter, belted thirty home runs, a record for catchers.
The season progressed. On June 3, Casey worked out an eighteen-year-old bonus kid from Memphis named Marv Throneberry. He’d make the majors a few years later, and a decade from his workout, would become a legend with Casey’s Mets.
When the umpire Jim Honochick ejected Casey on July 6 (his first regular season ejection as a Yankee), Casey claimed he said, “Jim, we all know you’re entitled to blow a few, but this is getting to be ridiculous.” He told the press after the game, “I had a hunch I was about to leave the premises.”
When it came time for the All-Star Game, Casey picked his oil partner and onetime player Al Lopez (now manager of Cleveland) as a coach, and picked the Negro League legend Satchel Paige as one of just six pitchers on his staff. (He would pick him again in 1953.) Paige was now pitching for the St. Louis Browns, owned by Bill Veeck, who had also employed him earlier with Cleveland, when he owned that team.
On Old-Timers’ Day, at the evening party held at the Ruppert Brewery, on the Upper East Side, Casey got to converse with five members of the 1903 Highlanders, the very first Yankee team. Jesse Tannehill, Clark Griffith, Dave Fultz, John Ganzel and Wid Conroy were all there. Casey knew Griffith (owner of the Washington Senators) from his regular attendance at Winter Meetings, banquets, and so forth, but the other four were actually out of the game by the time Casey broke in with Brooklyn in 1912. It was rare for him to encounter anyone he hadn’t played with or against.
Casey juggled ninety-five different batting orders in 1952. On September 5, after the team lost two of three in Philadelphia, there was too much frolic over steaks on the short train ride to Washington for his taste. “You men amaze me,” he said to the team, in the presence of the newspapermen. He then proceeded to berate the “fun makers” and to give the season much more serious thought. “Stop counting on the Browns to win this pennant for you.”
The story got reported. The newspaper guys always traveled on the train with the team; they heard and saw everything, but their discretion was counted on. This time, however, Casey’s verbal thrashing of the full team seemed like appropriate fodder for print.
The Yankees went 15-4 after that dressing down to take them to the final days of the regular season.
More controversy arose near the end of the season, when Clay Felker and Ernest Havemann wrote a major feature story about Casey for Life magazine. Life was the nation’s most important cultural weekly at the time, and even though chorus girls in tight sweaters danced on the cover, the Casey story dominated the conversation among those in the sports world.
“Lend an Ear to Old Case” was the name of the piece, which playfully described his pantomime gifts while telling stories and his lobby-sitting habits, at least those observed at the Sheraton-Cadillac in Detroit by the authors.
“Frequently,” they wrote, “Stengel begins to tell a story at the start of an evening but gets so sidetracked in footnotes or reminiscences he is still approaching the point five or six hours later, and the bartender will step up, point to the clock and say ‘the bar is closing.’ Then Casey will rise, smooth his plaid coat and say, ‘Gentlemen, there is much more which could be said, but my man here in the white jacket has said it all. Goodnight.’ ”
Casey was not happy about the story, and claimed to have been fooled into thinking it was about the team, not just him. He took exception to such literary flourishes as the authors’ suggestion that if the Yankees happened to be on a losing streak, he could be found in a “nearby saloon.”
“That’s what I get for being nice to people. I have refused permission to many writers, some of them friends of long standing, to do the story of my life. I would like to do that leisurely,” he told Dan Daniel in The Sporting News.
He also resented the claim that he dressed “like a burlesque actor.”
“I would not know, and I don’t care how a burlesque actor dresses. That’s the actor’s business. I buy my clothes in Los Angeles from a place which really is more expensive than I can afford.
“I’ve had a lot of nice offers to do my book, but the time isn’t ripe. I don’t want people to think I am important, that I am the great man I am. When I quit, I might do a movie about Casey.”
(Undaunted by Casey’s reaction, Felker would produce a heavily illustrated book about Casey, Casey Stengel’s Secret, in 1961, several years before founding New York magazine.)
Dan Daniel, Casey’s “senior” writer, took the occasion to write glowingly about Stengel and, not surprisingly, Casey’s respect for the press: “If he isn’t sure about something, he will say so….He will never equivocate and he is one manager who has a sense of news and loyalty to the writers covering the club. When the picture men charged into the Shibe Park clubhouse and began to take over, Casey said, ‘Gentlemen, in your time and turn. I am talking with the writers covering my club and with me they come first.”
They clinched their fourth straight pennant on September 27 in Philly. Now it was party time, and the club returned to New York and celebrated with a big one at the Warwick Hotel on Sixth Avenue.
And now, as three years prior in 1949, the New York Yankees would face the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series. As more and more Americans were owning televisions, the World Series was taking on a look and sound that a generation of baby boomers would come to know. The musical theme of the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports would play as their animated parrot, Sharpie, appeared on the screen. A commanding baritone would come in to introduce the venue—“From Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, New York, it’s the first game of the 1952 World Series…featuring the Brooklyn Dodgers, seeking their first world championship, and the New York Yankees of Casey Stengel, going after a fourth straight….Hello there, everybody, this is Mel Allen, along with Red Barber, on a beautiful autumn day in Brooklyn….We’ll be back after this word from Gillette Foamy shave cream and join public address announcer Tex Rickard for the introduction of the teams….”
And onto the field would come some of the great names of postwar baseball—Robinson, Hodges, Snider, Reese, Campanella, Mantle, Berra, Rizzuto, Martin, Reynolds, Raschi, Lopat, Mize….What a time it was to be a baseball fan, especially in New York.
Before Game One, Casey took Mantle to right field in Ebbets Field to show him the concrete wall and the unusual way balls caromed off it. The Yankees had played in pre-season exhibitions there before with Mantle, but this time Casey felt a short tutorial was in order.
“The boy never saw concrete before,” Casey told people. “So I told him not to worry about the angles. I told him I played that wall myself for eight years.
“Know what he said when I told him that? ‘The hell ya say?’ and looked at me as if I was screwy. Guess he thinks I was born at age 50 and started managing immediately.”
Among the Mantle-Stengel stories that people loved to tell, this one was usually high on the list.
This was a terrific series; it would go seven games. In Game Five, with the series tied 2–2, Casey had a tough call to make—selecting a starting pitcher to oppose Carl Erskine. Reynolds, Raschi, and Lopat were not rested. And when the players entered the big clubhouse in Yankee Stadium, their pitching coach, Jim Turner, had placed a baseball in the shoe of Ewell Blackwell. The job was his.
Blackwell, who had been so devastating in the National League, was nursing a sore arm and had made only five appearances since coming over from Cincinnati on August 28. But in those five appearances, he had allowed only one earned run in sixteen innings. This six-time All-Star, whom most National League hitters saw as one of the top pitchers in the league, was widely perceived to be the Yankees’ annual late-season surprise, but there wasn’t much gas left in his tank.
Blackwell gave the Yankees five innings that afternoon, allowing four runs including a two-run homer by Snider. The Yankees scored five times in the last of the fifth, but Johnny Sain, hurling six innings in relief, lost the game 6–5 in eleven innings, with Erskine going all the way on a five-hitter.
Now the Yankees needed to win two straight.
The Yanks won 3–2 in Game Six, with Reynolds relieving Raschi to save the victory.
The final game was also a thriller.
Lopat learned he was getting the start at 11:25 a.m., ninety minutes before game time. Stengel used a combination of Lopat, Reynolds, and Raschi over six and a third innings, and the Yankees built a 4–2 lead. With the bases loaded and one out in the seventh, he again turned to Kuzava, an otherwise ordinary pitcher who had been a hero the year before.
Kuzava got Snider to pop out to third. Then Robinson hit a pop to the southpaw side of the pitcher’s mound—an unusual place for a ball to be put in play. It was a no-man’s-land just thirty feet from home plate, requiring a play one seldom sees in baseball. There was some confusion over whose ball it was, but Billy Martin raced in from second at full speed and caught the ball at his shins. It was a game saver, and a series saver. The runners were going, and, almost certainly, two would have scored.
The final pitch of the series was a curve ball thrown to Reese, who flied out to left. Up to that point, Kuzava had thrown only fastballs. Suddenly Stengel signaled curve ball to Berra (perhaps on Jim Turner’s suggestion), and again Kuzava rose to the occasion. He hurled two and two-thirds hitless, scoreless innings, facing nine batters, of whom only one reached—Hodges, on a throwing error by McDougald. (Hodges was 0-for-21 in the series.)
The series was over. The Yankees had their fourth straight world championship, and Stengel tied Joe McCarthy for performing such a feat as manager. (McCarthy had won in 1936–39, Joe DiMaggio’s first four seasons.)
Within hours, the team was back at the Biltmore Hotel, which was standing ready. They knew the drill. And another great party celebrated the victory.
Casey’s post-season schedule was fast and furious.
Six days after the series ended, he signed a new two-year contract, worth as much as two hundred thousand dollars with bonuses. Again there was a “good job bonus” clause, not requiring a championship season. Certainly, with DiMaggio retired, Casey was making more than any of his players. He also was accruing money annually in the team’s profit-sharing plan, which was to be given to him at such time as he left the organization.
The very next day, he flew to Oklahoma City, partly to check on his oil wells, but specifically to be the main speaker at a dinner honoring Oklahoma sons Allie Reynolds and Mickey Mantle. The event took place on Mantle’s twenty-first birthday.
On October 29, when they had gotten back home, the Los Angeles sportswriter Braven Dyer tricked Casey into going with him downtown to accept an award. Surprise! There was no award, but a live appearance on the hit TV show This Is Your Life, hosted by Ralph Edwards. The production staff managed to recruit Zack Wheat, Bob Meusel, Chuck Dressen, Duke Snider, Billy Martin, and Casey’s boyhood pal Harold Lederman to appear on the show, and the surprise worked out perfectly. The people at Central High School in Kansas City even shipped two bricks from the school to be used as bookends.
To appear on This Is Your Life was a very big deal in the 1950s, and for those regular viewers unfamiliar with Casey, his story, and his speech patterns, the broadcast was a wide introduction to this increasingly famous character. (This was the fifth episode after it moved from radio to TV.) If there were any Americans left after Life magazine and This Is Your Life who didn’t know Casey Stengel, they were few in number.
On November 3, he was honored at the Verdugo Country Club in Glendale, and then, on November 12, the ballpark in his town was renamed Casey Stengel Field. “I’ve been thrown out of a lot of baseball parks,” he said, “but this is the first one named for me.”
At the end of the year, “Casey Stengel No. 1,” the oil well near Magnolia, Arkansas, came in, and Casey, Grimm, O’Neill, Dykes, Cavarretta, and Richards were present when it gushed. “[Stengel and Grimm] washed their hands and face in the black gold and were smeared from head to foot,” reported the Associated Press. This was Dick Burnett’s well in which eleven major-league managers were said to have invested.
On Sunday morning, November 30, just as things were quieting down, Jackie Robinson was the guest on the local New York TV show Youth Wants to Know, on WNBT (later known as WNBC). A youngster in the audience asked Robinson if he thought the Yankees were prejudiced against Negro players. By now, six years into his Dodgers’ career, Jackie was freely expressing his thoughts on whatever was asked of him. “You’ve asked me the question and I’ll answer it as honestly as I can. Yes, I think they are. I don’t mean the players are—but I think the Yankee management is prejudiced. They haven’t a single Negro on the team and very few in the organization. You asked the question and I’ve answered it honestly. That’s my opinion.”
Since Jackie Robinson’s entry into the major leagues in 1947, only three of the eight American League teams had promoted a black player. The topic would come up especially among teams that failed to do so.
For the most part, the national news and sports media were not openly discussing the lack of Negroes in corporate management positions, on boards of directors, holding political office, on police and fire departments, at law firms, or even on television commercials. It was just business as usual, with little scrutiny applied. The civil rights movement had yet to take center stage on the national agenda. Old attitudes were accepted as long as they seemed to be applied without prejudice.
Jackie was now venturing into how another team conducted its business and he didn’t hold back: prejudiced.
Asked to respond to Robinson’s charge, George Weiss said, “Our attitude always has been that when a Negro comes along who can play good enough ball to win a place on the Yankees we will be glad to have him—but not just for exploitation. Our scouts have been instructed to make every effort to land good prospects.”
It was basically the same argument Judge Landis had used as far back as 1920, when he became the game’s first commissioner.
Stengel had a shorter answer for Robinson: “Tell Robi’son he’s Chock full o’Nuts,” referring to the local coffee brand that Robinson did commercials for.
Ruben Gomez, a dark-skinned Puerto Rican (the “ban” extended beyond American Negroes to include dark-skinned Latino players as well), pitched just five games at Kansas City in 1952 and got away from the Yankee organization that summer by buying his own release, to pitch in a summer league in the Dominican Republic. Gomez was one of those Casey had seen pitch when he slipped away during his and Edna’s Puerto Rican vacation. He told the front office it was a mistake to let Ruben go, and he was right. Gomez was signed by the Giants, made the major-league club in 1953, and went 30-20 in his first two seasons, hurling 425 innings.
Vic Power, another dark-skinned Puerto Rican, was the organization’s best prospect; he had just completed his second year in Triple-A, batting .331 with 109 RBIs at Kansas City.
But Power was a bit of a showboat—cocky, even—by the staid Yankee traditional standards, and whether he was black or white, he didn’t seem to be in the right organization to advance. Cocky white players didn’t make it, either, although a case could be made for Billy Martin. And, of course, the Yankee manager was pretty cocky himself!
Two days after Robinson’s remarks, at a dinner in Phoenix, Stengel addressed the matter again. He didn’t avoid the controversy. “I don’t care who you are in this organization, you’re going to get along and make the big team if you’ve got the ability. We’ve got some good coaches, a good front office, good scouts and good minor league managers, and we’re not going to play a sap at second base just because [he’s black].”
Casey didn’t like Robinson, and it was mutual. A lot of it was competitive, a Yankees–Dodgers thing, when that rivalry was very strong. But some of it was surely subtle racism.
The door had opened a bit. It would be another couple of years before there was a black face on a Yankees team photo, but Robinson had stirred the pot and perhaps caused the Yankees to consider the possibility. Though some in the management would never budge, attention would be paid.
Power was not invited to the Yankees’ spring training in 1953; he would hit .349 that year at Kansas City. It was whispered that he “dated white women.”
“Our manager in Kansas City recently benched Power for lack of hustle, and our scouting reports rate him a good hitter, but a poor fielder,” said the co-owner Topping. “My information is that Elston Howard, at Kansas City, has a better chance to come up than Power.*
“Who brought up the first Negro football player into the All-America Conference? I did,” continued Topping. “I signed Buddy Young. How can anybody accuse any organization of which I am the head of Jim Crowism? We are eager to get a Negro player on the Yankees, but we aren’t going to bring up a Negro just to meet the demands of pressure groups.”
But this issue wasn’t going away.
* Power would win six Gold Gloves for fielding excellence in the American League.