26 FIVE STRAIGHT

The Yankees added a second, even earlier instructional camp that began on February 1, 1953, right in Casey’s backyard. Casey Stengel Field in Glendale was good enough for professionals to work out there (later, the Portland Beavers of the PCL made it their spring training home). But the added two weeks of drills, which included Casey’s neighbor and pal Babe Herman as an instructor, proved to be simply too much, and this was the only year this early Glendale camp was run.

Beginning with that camp, and, of course, in all of the pre-season baseball magazines that were published, attention was drawn to the possibility of an unprecedented five straight world championships. If ever winning a pennant but losing a World Series would seem like failure, this was the time. It had to be all or nothing. To win five straight when no team had ever done it before, even if you turned the calendar back to nineteenth-century baseball—well, that would really be something. And that was the mission.

The spring camp of 1953 was also the first time that Mantle, Martin, and Ford were together: Whitey had been discharged from the army after two years. The friendship formed by that trio, all in their early twenties, would last their lifetimes.

Sometimes they would get into trouble; ultimately, it was thought that Martin was a “bad influence.” But the reality was, they were young, had spending money, and were Yankee heroes; the world was their oyster.

Of course, they were adults and capable of making decisions on their own—even bad ones. And no one expected a manager to supervise nighttime behavior, save for curfews. Meanwhile, the writers had their backs; no improper behavior was reported.

Besides, Casey liked hard-drinking players. He did not have much use for the “milkshake drinkers,” as he called them. By the same token, he preferred tobacco chewers to gum chewers (of whom Mantle was one). So, in that sense, he was an enabler, and is it fair to say that in that role he let three young lives get caught up in what we now classify as the disease of alcoholism? The three were hardly alone—it was the culture of the game to pass the nights by drinking. Casey set the example himself, spending hours in the hotel bars after games, regaling the writers. “Stengel’s drinking has been overplayed,” wrote Tom Meany, a regular member of “my writers.” “He stays with a party, but never goes under the weather or under the table. His thirst is not for alcohol, but for an audience.”

Given what we now know about the later health and behavior of Mantle, Martin, and Ford, it seems appropriate at least to bring their “father figure” (actually old enough to be a grandfather figure), Casey Stengel, into the discussion, even if there is no right or wrong conclusion to draw.

The dean of New York baseball writers, Dan Daniel, wrote: “Mickey is badly in need of guidance and so far he has not received it. He needed it very badly last season and he still needs it right now, as much as ever. But neither Stengel nor the front office has taken the young man in hand. The time has come for a change in method.” Daniel was talking about Mantle’s playing basketball, hiking, and hunting after knee surgery, but veiled within those sentences was the issue that couldn’t quite be written about: drinking.

Meanwhile, if an owner was ever more pleased with his manager than was Dan Topping (winning four straight titles can do that), you would be hard pressed to find one. “We’re keeping him as manager for as long as he wants and that has nothing to do with what happens in 1953,” said Topping. “Casey is a great juggler; he is never afraid to jerk his big guns. Stars don’t matter. Casey isn’t afraid of kids and he likes to bring them up and put them in the lineup. He’s really a hell of a manager.”

These were glory days for the Topping-and-Webb ownership, and Casey was a poster boy. Even though there were handsome stars like Mantle (whom Casey sometimes called “Ignatz,” a comic mouse drawn from 1913 to 1944 in the Krazy Kat comic strips), Casey was often the face of the franchise on magazine covers and in advertising. The cameras loved him, and his cooperation was great for the team. Ownership put more money into the stadium, televised more games, and added more parking garages. Business was booming, even with the drop in attendance figures since the immediately postwar years.

On April 28, 1953, the Yankees engaged in a fairly major brawl in St. Louis, resulting in a seventeen-minute delay. At the end of the ten-inning Yankee victory, the team members, including Casey, grabbed bats and held them like war clubs to fend off any attacking fans and get safely to their clubhouse in the just-renamed Busch Stadium (formerly Sportsman’s Park).

One player on the Browns that day, the shortstop Willy Miranda, wound up going to the Yankees in June. It was long on Casey’s mind that he would need to replace Rizzuto one day—though not too soon, he hoped. He even floated the idea of moving Mantle back to short. (On July 24, 1954, when he ran out of infielders, Stengel did play Mantle at short; Miranda played second, and they switched when a man got on base, so Mantle would be the one to cover first on a bunt. And that’s exactly what happened: Mantle recorded the putout as a second baseman.)

Miranda, a five-foot-nine Cuban, whose brother was sports editor of a Spanish-language newspaper in New York, didn’t play often, but he got a little “Casey treatment” on June 25 in a home game against Chicago, when Casey batted him ninth in the lineup, with pitcher Johnny Sain batting eighth. This would be very embarrassing to any player, and it came when Willy’s brother, Fausto, was sitting in the press box at Yankee Stadium. Sain was batting .256, Willy .167, but many in the game would argue, “You just don’t do this to a man.”

Said Casey’s frequent critic Paul Richards, who was managing in the White Sox dugout: “All those lineup changes he makes aren’t necessary. Somebody said he used more than 100 different lineup combinations last season. My only answer to that is that there’s a lot of Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey in old Casey. Don’t misunderstand me, I believe Stengel is a smart manager. However, nobody can convince me that he’s winning because of shifting his lineup around every five minutes.”

It was easy for opposing managers to criticize Casey’s platooning system, largely because they simply didn’t have the depth of talent to work with that Casey did. There were few players on the Yankee roster who wouldn’t have been regulars on another team. Platooning them had the added benefit of keeping them less grumpy about not starting every day.

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The ’53 Yankees were in first place from beginning to end (or at least after the sixth game), and, as usual, positively cleaned up on the worst teams in the league, going 64-22 against Detroit, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Washington. This was the pattern throughout the fifties. The Yankees’ arrival in town would mean big crowds—and lots of “L”s for the home team.

People weren’t necessarily surprised when the team ran up an eighteen-game winning streak—the most in team history—between May 27 and June 14, although beating a strong Cleveland club (and pitchers Early Wynn, Bob Feller, Bob Lemon, and Mike Garcia) for the final four of those games could not have been expected. What caught fans by surprise, and caused nerves to fray, was a losing streak that began just a week later. “Start looking like Yankees again!” a frustrated Casey shouted at his team in the visitors’ clubhouse at Fenway.

He fretted over the late nights he knew some players kept. He watched them eat breakfast. “A boy who’s putting away juice, ham and eggs, toast and milk has had a good night’s sleep,” he said. “The guys I looked for were those who were having a double tomato juice and black coffee. Chances are they’d gone out about 3 am to mail a letter….”

He thought about the recent batting slumps and decided that, besides the late nights, this new pitch, the slider, was causing his men to fail. “The batters just haven’t learned how to hit it,” he mused as the losing streak grew to seven. “The averages will not rise until they can tell the difference between a slider and a curve.”

Casey was not calm and cool during this un-Yankee-like slide. In fact, he shut the doors on the working press, preferring to stew in his office late in the streak. A press boycott always got a lot of attention, because the press, naturally, made a big story of it. The slammed door on the press happened in Fenway Park, where the clubhouse was small and stifling and tempers were rising.

“He can’t qualify as a major league manager in the true meaning of the word until he learns how to be gracious in defeat as he has been in victory,” said Bob Cooke, sports editor of the Herald Tribune. (Sports editors were not “my writers,” and Casey really didn’t know them.)

“The conduct of the lovable old man Stengel only proves you never know a guy until he’s down. The Yankee action came as no surprise to this editor. They are the most arrogant outfit in baseball. This is just typical,” said Ike Gellis, the sports editor of the New York Post.

This was a nightmare for the Yankees’ publicist, Red Patterson. Was Casey giving back all the goodwill he had built up in four and a half seasons?

Dan Daniel stepped in. He got an audience with Casey back at the Kenmore Hotel, and reminded him of all the support the writers had given him over the years, even bestowing awards on him. Casey agreed to open the doors to the press, but the writers, now stewing over the situation, decided that they would boycott Casey.

Raschi finally ended the slide at nine straight on July 2 with a ten-inning victory, and Daniel got the writers to relent and make nice. So the losing streak and the war with the press ended together, and the good ship Casey returned to calm waters.

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Five days after the losing streak ended, the team bus (not the good ship Casey), pulling into Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, hit a low-hanging structure, frightening the players as the roof and the sides of the bus accordioned. That the team trainer, Gus Mauch, was unconscious on the floor did not help matters. Charlie Silvera, Reynolds, Woodling, and Jim Turner were the most badly hurt, though none of their injuries were life-threatening. Casey was injured slightly but was said to be suffering from shock.

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The Yankees clinched their fifth straight American League pennant at home on September 14, overcoming a 5–0 deficit to beat Cleveland 8–5. The team celebrated at the recently expanded Stadium Club on the mezzanine level of the stadium, a club that boasted the longest bar in New York City.

The man who had once been paid not to manage the Brooklyn Dodgers was going to his fifth straight World Series. (Despite the run of success with the Yankees, Casey’s career won-lost record as a manager did not go over .500 until this fifth pennant season.)

Twelve members of the team—about half the roster—had played in all five seasons: Reynolds, Raschi, Lopat, Berra, Silvera, Brown, Coleman, Mize, Joe Collins, Woodling, Bauer, and Rizzuto, along with Stengel and the coaches Crosetti, Dickey, and Turner. (Coleman played only nineteen games over 1952–53, while in military service; Brown’s twenty-nine games in 1952 also reflected service time, and Mize played only partial seasons in 1949 and 1950.)

But now came the pressure of winning another World Series, and again it was against the extremely talented Brooklyn Dodgers, later dubbed “The Boys of Summer” by author Roger Kahn. Also, this was the Golden Anniversary World Series, fifty years since the first one, in 1903.

Before the series began, the pitcher Johnny Sain had a private meeting with Stengel and told him he was going to retire and run an auto agency. “I wanted Casey to know about this before the Series so he would have plenty of time to go out and get a replacement,” said Sain. “I knew that sometimes deals were made at the World Series.” With the days running out on his career, Sain was called upon in Game One in Yankee Stadium, and he got the win in relief of Reynolds. Lopat outdueled Preacher Roe for a 4–2 win in Game Two, and it looked like clear sailing for number five. But the Dodgers won the next two in Brooklyn, before an emergency Yankee starter, Jim McDonald, got an 11–7 win in Game Five, highlighted by a Mantle grand slam.

That set the stage for a Game Six at Yankee Stadium, and, reminiscent of the series finale in 1950, Whitey Ford, who led the staff with eighteen wins, pitched brilliantly. Reynolds came on in the eighth inning for relief, with the score 3–1 Yanks.

“I was startled and didn’t know what was going on,” said the Dodger manager, Chuck Dressen. “We weren’t hitting that Ford very good, but I guess Casey knows his players.”

“I was not tired,” explained Whitey after the game. “At the moment when Casey removed me I was somewhat on the angry side, but the manager knew what he was doing. He was right, as he has been the last five years.”

In the ninth, Reynolds gave up a two-run homer to Carl Furillo, which tied the score, but in the last of the ninth, Martin singled home Bauer with the winning run, and the Yankees won the series.

“Bauer was actually our fastest runner after Mantle got hurt,” said Berra in his ninety-first year, reflecting on those years while at an assisted-living home. “He could really run. DiMaggio had the best instincts—he knew immediately whether to go from first to third or stop at second. Rizzuto was wily on the bases. But Hank had speed that fooled you.”

Five straight world championships!

Photographers captured the annual Stengel-Weiss-Topping-Webb celebratory photo in the clubhouse (the one time each year when Weiss would smile), surrounded by the jubilant players, playfully mussing each other’s hair, a tradition that has since gone by the wayside.

“Someone call the Biltmore, please. We’ll have the usual.”

For Martin, who seemed to rise to the occasion each year, it was his twelfth hit of the series, tying a record, and it gave him a .500 batting average over the six games, including two home runs—a fabulous performance. “Martin’s accomplishments are important for baseball,” said Casey, taking a broad overview. “They show what a young man can do in these United States, what a game and determined kid can accomplish in our great sport of baseball.”

The setback was so tough on the Dodgers that when Chuck Dressen asked for a two-year contract he was shown the door. Walter Alston would be his replacement as manager.

The idea of five straight in today’s baseball seems unthinkable, because today’s teams have to get past fourteen opponents in their own leagues (not seven), and then three rounds of post-season (not one).^* (Still, the Yankees of 1996–2000 almost did it, losing in the 1997 playoffs.)

Yankee fans were happy, but few others in baseball were. People felt it was enough already.

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On October 13, the Yankees added Elston Howard and Vic Power to their forty-man roster. Howard would be the first black man to play for the Yankees. Living at his parents’ home on the North Side of St. Louis, he heard about it on the ten o’clock news. The Sporting News, long a supporter of Judge Landis and the “unwritten rule” supporting segregation, published a glowing portrait of Howard, and called him “the All-American Boy.” Power was traded to the Philadelphia Athletics on December 16 for Harry Byrd and Eddie Robinson. He went on to play twelve seasons in the majors.

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Casey stopped in Oklahoma on his way home to check on his oil wells. In December, he actually went deer hunting with Randy Moore, his original patron in oil investment. This was a rare foray for him into that popular baseball player hobby, which he had long avoided. He came back empty-handed.

Otherwise, he stayed home. No one in baseball got more banquet invitations than he did, but the man who rarely said no was starting to pace himself.

The Sporting News named Casey Manager of the Year, and Sport magazine named him Man of the Year, a major award up against all the MVPs, Heisman Trophy winners, and champions in boxing, racing, and golf.