One of the oddities of the first half-century of baseball was the players’ habit of leaving their gloves on the field when they went to their dugouts. It made no sense, but it became tradition and the accepted norm. And few could ever cite a game—or even a play—that was adversely affected.
The outfielders would leave their gloves in the outfield, the middle infielders on the grass behind them, the corner-position players and the pitcher on the area between the baseline and the dugout.
Crazy.
In 1954, it was decided that a rule needed to be implemented to keep the gloves off the field.
Casey hated it. He was old-school on this one. “Suppose your center fielder makes the last out sliding into second,” he said. “He has to run back to the dugout for his glove and then out to center field? That’s a terrible rule.” He did not immediately foresee the reality: that a teammate would pick up the glove and run it out to the field. But his outspokenness on the matter was a strong signal that he was a traditionalist in the strongest sense.
On February 1, 1954, just after Casey departed for the annual instructional school in Lake Wales, burglars broke into the Stengels’ Glendale home and grabbed $18,400 worth of furs while Edna was off at a restaurant with friends. A few days later, three teenage boys were arrested in Amarillo, Texas, with her mink coat, mink stole, and sable piece. They had ignored all of Casey’s baseball treasures, including his World Series rings. Nobody thought these things had much value back then.
It was a bad omen, but not quite as bad as the news delivered at a press conference summoned by Red Patterson in Room 240 of St. Petersburg’s Soreno Hotel on February 23: the Yankees were selling Vic Raschi to the Cardinals. Raschi had been a holdout, and Weiss pulled the switch and got rid of him. This reliable presence in the starting rotation was gone.
“I can’t put the rap on Raschi,” said Casey. “He certainly wasn’t sold for anything he did on the field. They must have been awfully sore at him in the front office.”
Said the general manager of the White Sox, Frank Lane, “It could be that the Raschi deal will cool off that Yankee spirit a bit. If so, it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy than my old pal, Stengel.”
Behind the scenes, Casey had agreed to the deal if Weiss would call Johnny Sain and coax him out of his brief retirement. General Motors had to agree that Sain could take a leave from his Chevy dealership in Arkansas. With that accomplished, Sain became a relief pitcher and saved twenty-six games that year. Raschi’s starting spot would be taken by a rookie, Bob Grim, who won twenty games and the Rookie of the Year Award in 1954.
Privately, Casey also told people that it was a shame Raschi hadn’t made some sort of gesture or statement about wanting to continue with the Yankees—he thought that could have helped. For close observers, this was a rare indicator that Weiss and Stengel were not joined at the hip on roster decisions. Casey would grumble over this one for much of the season.
Spring training featured the rarity of a black player in a Yankee uniform—two, in fact. Elston Howard was invited to camp along with a pitcher named Eddie Andrews, who had gone 11-2 in the Class D Pony League the year before. Nobody expected Andrews to move up, but, given the standards of the time, Howard needed a black roommate.
As it developed, when the Soreno Hotel wouldn’t take Howard, he had to find private accommodations in the Negro section of St. Petersburg. He would not be able to dine with his teammates, share cabs with them, or sit out at the pool with them. But he was on the roster.
Casey was at once taken by Howard’s natural talents, and Bill Dickey was also a help in tutoring him on catching, as he had done with Berra. “Howard is already a major league hitter,” said Casey. “He has one of the greatest arms I ever saw and is fast for a catcher.”
Fast for a catcher? Even Ellie was stunned by that evaluation when writers told him what Casey said. He was actually one of the slower runners on the team, but he had beaten other spring-training catchers in a foot race that Casey observed. These “other catchers” included a lot of future major leaguers who were just not going to unseat Berra to earn a roster spot. And so, over time, most of the rest of the game was populated by onetime Yankee catching prospects. But Casey told Howard, “There’s no future for you as an outfielder and you will never make it big there. You have a good future as a catcher because Yogi and you are the only catchers who could hit the long ball.”
Everyone in the organization took to Howard at once. His promotion was still a year away, but people could see that if he wasn’t traded he was going to be the first Negro Yankee. Unlike the situation on other clubs, including the Dodgers with Jackie Robinson, there were no reported incidents of Southern players on the Yankees asking to be traded, or any slights against Howard within the confines of the field and the clubhouse. Even Elston’s wife, Arlene, who could speak out as needed against injustice with the best of them, found the Yankees welcoming and supportive, or at least more so than she might have expected. Everyone knew what Jackie Robinson had gone through seven years before.
The spring was abuzz with trade rumors and roster shifts. On March 5, Ewell Blackwell called from Tampa to say he was retiring because his arm hurt. Martin was called into the service. Bill Virdon, an outfield prospect, was traded to the Cardinals for Enos Slaughter, still considered a productive player.
Virdon, who would one day manage the Yankees himself, was in the outfield with Mantle, Bauer, Woodling, Noren, and others, taking fly balls and firing to the cutoff man. When it was Virdon’s turn, his throw somehow nailed Casey in the back.
“Oh gosh, I got him right in the ‘37,’ ” recalled Virdon in a 2015 phone call. “And down he went. All the other guys were laughing their heads off, shouting, ‘You killed Casey Stengel! You killed Casey Stengel!’ When Casey got up and dusted himself off, he looked out at us and yelled, ‘Who made that throw?’ And everyone pointed to me. And he yelled, ‘If you guys keep throwing that way, you might just throw someone out!’ ”
Bill “Moose” Skowron was going to make the club. Big things were hoped for from the pitcher Harry Byrd, whom the Yankees had gotten for Vic Power. Bobby Brown stayed with the team until June 30, when he left for San Francisco to take up his medical residency. “If I ever want an appendix out, Doc Brown will get my business,” said Casey in a farewell.
Casey observed, “Players today are intelligent and civilized. When I was manager in Brooklyn, if I released one of them birds, I first searched his room to make sure he didn’t have a gun.”
Casey was getting older, and his spring evenings were getting shorter. The pressroom at the Soreno opened at five-thirty, and Casey would be the dominant figure in the room, regaling everyone—writers, coaches, club officials, Dr. Gaynor—with his old stories. Weiss was seldom present. Then Casey would have dinner and go to bed at nine-thirty, so he could be up at six.
The 1954 season began with the presidential opener in Washington, and Casey got to meet Dwight Eisenhower. But the Yankees did not take off to the front with their usual pace, and were only 11-10 before running off a six-game winning streak. Meanwhile, Cleveland was very strong and on their way to a record year with 111 victories. The Yankees would occupy first place for barely one day in the whole season.
Tempers were quick to emerge when things weren’t going well. Fans were booing more than usual, especially booing Mantle on each strikeout. Stengel and Ford had a shouting match in which Whitey walked off saying, “Go fry an egg.” Casey got even. On May 21, a game scoreless through five against the Red Sox, Whitey had a bad sixth inning, allowing six runs on six hits, two walks, and a wild pitch. And Casey left him in, let him take his punishment for the rest of that inning. More than a few people thought it was payback for the show of disrespect. But they patched it up, and Casey started Ford in the All-Star Game.
Casey himself was thrown out of three games during the year, after having been ejected just once in the previous five years.
And Frank Lane continued to goad Stengel, even if his White Sox were finishing a distant third. Said Lane: “Casey is just getting too big for his britches. He thinks he’s the biggest brain in baseball. The guy reminds me of an actor who has been playing the part of a clown with success and now wants to be a Hamlet.”
In July, Lane sent Casey a long-winded birthday message that included, “After watching you in action here last Wednesday supervising our very efficient ground crew, because the game was stopped due to heavy rain and then one hour and eight minutes later, even though it was still raining hard, through sheer force of your commanding personality you made the umpires resume play on a field that was a quagmire until your excellent second placers had won, I am more than ever convinced that life begins at 63.”
Casey gave it back. “Lane has a few failings. In the first place, he talks too much about things which he should not discuss. Now, I like to talk. But not about confidences. You discuss a possible deal with Lane and he will rush right off and spill the whole works to baseball writers. He is their biggest source. Also he is over-hungry for publicity. Notice how he times his cracks about me for the Sunday papers.”
After having lost four All-Star Games in a row, Casey finally won one in 1954, beating the National League 11–9 in Cleveland when he got a pinch-hit home run from the Indians’ own Larry Doby, and then a two-run single from Nellie Fox in the last of the eighth.
In August, however, after Edna returned from a trip to Europe, Casey reflected on his future to her. “I am paid by the Yankees to win, just as the players are paid to win, and if we can’t do it, they should get rid of me and get someone who can.”
The Yankees’ last hope for the season seemed to fall on September 12, when they had a doubleheader with the Indians in front of a record 86,563 fans at Municipal Stadium. They were six and a half games out, going in. A sweep would put them at four and a half, and they would still have a pulse, with eleven games left. But the Indians swept them, and the lead was now eight and a half. It was, for all purposes, over.
Stengel shouted to the policeman at the clubhouse door, “Don’t let nobody in. I don’t want nobody in here.”
After Casey was showered and dressed, the Cleveland sportswriter Hal Lebovitz offered him a ride up the hill to his hotel. “Nope,” he grunted. “I’ll walk.” A hand was extended as a goodbye gesture. He took it, halted in his tracks for a moment and said, “If we don’t win it, and right now it looks as though we ain’t, I hope you do.” Wrote Lebovitz: “He resumed his rapid gait and soon his brown suit was lost in the homeward-bound mob…one frustrated, bitterly disappointed soul among that happy, holiday-like crowd.”
The Yankees won eight of those remaining eleven, to give them 103 wins for the season, but it was too late. The streak of five straight world championships and pennants was over. “We tumbled from four and a half to eight and a half faster than the stock market in 1929,” said Casey, “which didn’t do me no good either.”
Bob Fishel, who had taken over for Red Patterson as PR director on August 10, prepared a four-page flyer for distribution, honoring the past champions on a hastily arranged “Salute to the Champions Day,” Saturday, September 25. (Patterson and Weiss had had a falling out over complimentary tickets for an elevator operator; Patterson quit and went over to the Dodgers.)
The Yankees got .300 seasons out of Berra, Mantle, Carey, Skowron, and Noren; Casey called Noren “close to untouchable.” Besides Grim’s surprise twenty-win season, Ford-Lopat-Reynolds went 41-16, with Reynolds making half of his appearances in relief. Harry Byrd, of whom much was expected, was only 9-7, and was shipped off to Baltimore on November 17 in a record seventeen-player deal that brought Don Larsen and Bob Turley to the Yankees, and sent Woodling to the Orioles.
There was no statistical failure to point to—hey, it was 103 wins! It was the most wins a Yankee team managed by Stengel would ever have.
The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant was, coincidentally, the name of a book by Douglass Wallop published that year, which was made into the film and Broadway musical Damn Yankees. Casey met the author in person at a Senators game late in the season. “We had quite a conversation!” said Casey. “But I ain’t gonna comment about a guy which made $100,000 writin’ how my club lost.”
On September 22, Casey persuaded Edna to go out and buy a new hat. At least, that was his story. And while she was doing so, he signed a new two-year contract in Topping’s private dining room at the stadium, with the press all invited. It called for seventy-five thousand dollars a year plus the usual bonus provisions. “We think Casey has done a truly outstanding job and at no time did we consider a change,” said Topping. Casey talked to the reporters about possibly moving Mantle to short and Berra to third in 1955. As for Edna, who always wanted him to retire, he said he told her, “Now Edna, you know I just wouldn’t be happy working around the yard all summer, would I?”
After the season, Casey wrote a letter to his sister Louise back in Kansas City:
Oct 11, 1954
Dear Louise:
Edna & myself had to stay over in N.Y. & Cleveland to see the World Series &then we went back to N.Y. to close out some meetings with the ownership in regards to trades & winter work for the Yankee club. We then flew home by air from N.Y.
I signed a two year contract at my former figure but should I get in physical shape not to carry on will retire.
We had Harold & Anne [Lederman, his best friend in Kansas City] out for a visit at the end of the season.
This morning’s papers states that the Philadelphia Club will stay in Philadelphia as 10 men are to put up the money to continue. Sure thought K.C. would & [sic] Grant or myself that he had them on deposit at the Law Firm.
Personally suggest they make settlement & give the certificates etc. to you & Grant as I know my mother wanted the certificates to be left to you (Louise).
Since you were unmarried & live in the home 4149 Harrision St, K.C. Mo., I will not claim any of the money as am well fixed financially & will pay for any amount cost of the legal transaction.
Sincerely,
Charles D Stengel