Don Larsen, whose teammates called him Gooney Bird, had been, with Turley, the key guy in the seventeen-player Orioles-Yankees trade in 1954. He had struggled in ’55 and been sent to the minors, but Casey liked his arm and even his bat. He also liked his lifestyle, which was not unlike his own when he was Larsen’s age: hard to corral.
So, in the spring training of 1956, when Larsen, asleep at the wheel, wrapped his car around a telephone pole at five-thirty in the morning (and, no, he wasn’t up early), Casey did not fine him; if he had any words for him, they were private.
Larsen, whose only injury was a lost cap on a tooth, went to Turley’s home, and Turley advised him to turn himself in. He was later booked for suspicion of speeding and having a faulty driver’s license.
This was an important moment for Larsen and for Stengel. Casey’s maturity on the job enabled him to go against the knee-jerk managerial rule of discipline. Larsen had, after all, broken curfew and embarrassed the team, but Casey was able to see past those infractions.
“This was a man that liked to drink beer,” Casey put in his autobiography five years later. “He could go anyplace very proper, never got in fights or disputes, but he sometimes would get mixed up on when it was time to go home….I was told that if I didn’t do something desperate to him it would kill the morale of the club. But with a group of men who are of age and have families, I doubt that if one man does something one night, the other twenty-four would feel they had to go out and do the same thing. So I stuck with Mr. Larsen after telling him that it would cost him a lot of money if he got into any more trouble, and that his job with the club was at stake.”
“I will handle it my own way,” he told his writers. “Larsen came to me right away and didn’t lie. It was his first trip off the reservation this spring and he has done some fine pitching in the 23 innings in which we have used him.
“McGraw probably would have handled the situation some other way, and his way probably would have worked too,” reflected Stengel.
As if Larsen wasn’t going to be enough to keep things merry, Mickey McDermott, renowned even among players for being on the wild side, joined the team. Casey had earlier said he wasn’t interested in McDermott, but now that McDermott was a Yankee, Casey’s explanation was simple: “You newspaper fellers don’t understand me so good. When I say I don’t want a feller, that’s vice-versa, in reverse, understand?”
McDermott could hit well for a pitcher, as could Larsen, and on May 16, Casey turned in another lineup with the pitcher (McDermott) hitting eighth, and Rizzuto ninth—another embarrassing moment for Rizzuto, as he headed toward the end of his career.
It was never far from Rizzuto’s memory. He used to mention it when he became a Yankees broadcaster, and not with any newly discovered love or understanding of the move. “It was just embarrassing,” he told his listeners. “Just embarrassing.”
If there was a hangover from the ’55 series loss, it was not noticeable when the Yankees got into action in 1956. They won seven of their first eight and were in first place wire-to-wire save for two days in the first week.
Much of the fan and press attention shifted from the team itself to Mantle, who was making a genuine run at the sacred record of sixty home runs in one season set by Babe Ruth.
With sixteen home runs by Mantle in May, and forty-seven by August 31, heads around the nation were turning, a preview of the Mantle-Maris race that would come five years later. Casey basked in the joy of seeing a relatively healthy Mantle available every day, performing great feats. He had matured; he had aged; and his competition for best in game was now Ted Williams. As late as August 14, he was hitting .376.
He was, in fact, on his way to winning the Triple Crown—fifty-two homers, 130 RBIs, and a .353 average. (He also scored 132 times.) It was the first Triple Crown since Williams did it in 1947, and only the fifth in the lively-ball era, when home runs really mattered.
It was also his first MVP season—he was a unanimous winner—after Berra had won it the two previous seasons. (Yogi was second in 1956.)
Mantle’s face, with his handsome country-boy looks, was on every general-interest magazine cover in the country, and the “NY” on his cap made him a fabulous marketing tool for the club. Of course, it was in an era before the game knew how to capitalize on such marketing, but Mantle had now moved into the conversation with Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio, as “the next,” and people were accepting his place of honor in team history.
He hit only five homers in September when he needed thirteen to tie, so the quest was pretty much over by mid-month, but no matter. His speed, his defense, and his emerging leadership all contributed to making him the poster boy for the sport.
The Yanks were in Kansas City the weekend before Casey’s sixty-sixth birthday (a Monday), and a full schedule of celebratory events was scheduled for the hometown boy who made good.
A luncheon in his honor was held at the Muehlebach, attended by former President Truman, his fellow Kansas City celebrity and contemporary. (Truman was seventy-two.) Casey’s brother, Grant, was there, too. It could not have been easy being the “brother of Casey Stengel,” while making a living as a cab driver.
Truman toasted Casey at the luncheon and said, “We are all most happy to celebrate Casey’s birthday with him. His ninety-fourth birthday. All of us admire top-notch people, from the time we are kids, and the way I grew up, there were two things we youngsters had as ideals. One was to become an engineer, like the famous Casey Jones. The other was to become a baseball player or pitcher, in a profession which is represented so well today by Casey Stengel. In those two Caseys I think you could wrap up a lot of the dreams of kids to this day.”
Casey’s Central High classmates George Goldman and Harold Lederman were on hand (the actual building had been razed a few years earlier), and they presented him with a huge bell from the school, with an accompanying inscription saying “To Charles (Casey-Dutch) Stengel, dentist, athlete, manager, raconteur. For whom the bell tolls; tolled at Central High School 1906–1910 from your many Kansas City friends.”
The next day, a day before his actual birthday, five cakes were presented on the field “from your Kansas City fans.” (They were sliced and passed around to the thirty-thousand fans in attendance.) Addressing the crowd, Casey wiped away a tear as he talked briefly about his happy relationship with the city, and everyone sang “Happy Birthday.”
When the team got to Cleveland, their next stop, Bob Fishel hired a hall (Cleveland was his own hometown) and threw the third party in three days, long after their night game had ended. This party was attended by his coaches, club officials, and the press.
Oh, and the Yankees won all three games in Kansas City and that night game in Cleveland, to run their winning streak to six and their lead in the American League to ten. It all helped put everyone in a celebratory mood. (After that final party, they managed to drop six straight, but still emerged seven games ahead after this losing streak.)
One day, Martin, Mantle, Ford, McDermott, and Bauer all missed the train that was taking the team from Boston to Washington. They had to scramble to catch a plane from Logan Airport to get to D.C., since the next train would have arrived too late. “We heard the front office was going to slap fines on us,” recalled Bauer. “As the oldest, I was chosen to be a committee-of-one to go up and tell Stengel our side of the story and face the music. He didn’t say a thing—just looked at me, like a father, and told me to get out there and play ball.”
On August 25, which happened to be Old-Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium, sentiment and business met head-on. Sentiment lost.
Phil Rizzuto, one of the most popular players ever to wear the uniform, a scrappy little New Yorker who made his way to an MVP Award and a lot of World Series rings and checks, was now nearly thirty-nine, in his thirteenth season (he had lost three to World War II service), and was barely playing. He had twelve singles and six RBIs to show for the full season, and had played in only two games in August, once as a pinch runner. He had not played shortstop since August 2.
As Phil later told the story, he was called into George Weiss’s office to “discuss the roster,” perhaps as a show of respect for his seniority and wisdom (a respect Casey seldom showed him). He was told that the Yankees had a chance to again pick up Enos Slaughter (who had been traded to Kansas City the year before). Despite Slaughter’s being forty, Casey liked him a lot, and there were a number of injured outfielders. He was looking to add Enos in time to have him eligible for the World Series.
Rizzuto, thinking quickly of whom he could throw under the bus, suggested a few names, and then realized what this meeting was about. It was going to be him!
Told that he would get a full World Series share but that his Yankee days were over, Rizzuto professed to be shocked. The last of the “McCarthy Yankees,” he had told many that McCarthy was his favorite manager, and none of this would have extended his stay with the Yankees under Casey—that was for sure. But Rizzuto was also embarrassed. His old teammates were gathering in the clubhouse to suit up for the Old-Timers’ Day festivities. Now he was one of them.
Of course, all he could do was disappear quietly. Feisty and outspoken when pushed, he was tempted to speak to the press about this humiliation. But his old teammate Snuffy Stirnweiss talked him out of it, and walked him to his car in the players’ lot. This was the best advice he ever got, because he went home, cooled off, said nothing, and found himself offered a broadcasting job in 1957—which lasted forty happy years.
For Casey, it was a business decision, and seldom did he let any sort of sentiment interfere with those. Besides, Rizzuto was a McCarthy guy, and Casey knew it. He knew Rizzuto had never really liked Casey for his platooning ways, for batting him ninth, for suggesting that Mantle might play short the following year. Theirs was hardly a loving father-son relationship.
Casey said almost nothing, but when pressed by a critical Boston writer, Joe Phelan of the United Press, he let it out: “You’re entitled to your opinion, but I’ll tell you this. I needed an outfielder which when I saw the chance to get Slaughter I took it. It was his first time around on waivers and you don’t think I’d have got him the second time around, do you? Also I got four outfielders hurt, Cerv, Collins, [Norm] Siebern and Noren. If anything happens to Mantle, what happens to me then? Also you got to remember [Billy] Hunter comes through pretty good at short so I don’t need Rizzuto.”
“Let’s get back to Rizzuto,” said Phelan. “Do you think it was smart to let him go on Old Timers’ Day?”
“Listen,” said Casey, “You got your opinions. But that was the day we had to make up our minds. Now let me tell you this. I’m just glad that Mr. Rizzuto has saved his money and also he’s getting paid for the whole season. I wouldn’t be surprised—it’s up to the boys—but they’re a pretty fair gang—they might not forget him in the Series divvy-up. Also Mr. Rizzuto has some offers to go on the radio and television and maybe [he pointed at Phelan] you could recommend him to Mr. Yawkey and he’d hire him as manager of his ball club.”
Casey was over it by the time the Old Timers’ Dinner came around that night at Toots Shor’s. After regaling the gathering, he turned serious and decided to say some things about so many old-time players’ having no pension. (The pension plan had only come to be in 1946 and did not include those who had played before, like him.) “You old timers have no spokesman. But I know what is in your hearts and I am saying it for you tonight. I do not benefit from the pension fund because I am the manager. So I am a disinterested witness, and I ask the players of 1956 to make some provision for the players of long ago.”
The remarks were warmly received, of course, but not by most active players. One who refuted Casey almost at once was Bob Feller, playing in his final season but very active on the player pension committee. “Casey was just popping off in front of the old timers trying to make a big guy out of himself,” said Feller. “He wasn’t sincere in his remarks. If he is sincere why doesn’t he turn over his World Series money or the profit from one of his oil wells, or hotel or investments to the old-timers.”
The Yankees clinched the pennant while in Cleveland on September 16, with nearly two weeks to go to get their rotation in order. Ford was the ace of the staff with a 19-6 record, but Casey had also brought along Larsen (11-5), Kucks (18-9), and Sturdivant (16-8). Though Turley hadn’t won a game in September, he was an available fifth starter.
Larsen had gone 4-0 since Labor Day, since experimenting with a no-windup delivery, as suggested by Turner. Casey liked what he had seen in the big guy, though the no-windup delivery was nothing new under the sun in the baseball mind of Charles Dillon Stengel. “I see that stuff early in my career,” he said, “which ain’t going as far back as Hoss Radbourne, but is long enough.”
The World Series opened in Brooklyn on October 3, 1956, with President Eisenhower, who also happened to be running for re-election, throwing out the first pitch. Attention was equally divided between Mantle, coming off his historic season, and the defending champion Dodgers, matched for the seventh time in fifteen years against the Yanks.
The Dodgers won their first two at home, enjoying a six-run second inning in Game Two after trailing 6–0; they knocked around Larsen, Kucks, and Byrne, and then further pounded Sturdivant and Morgan, to emerge 13–8 winners. The three-hour-and-twenty-six-minute game left Casey’s pitching staff in shambles. He was going to go with Ford in Game Three, at Yankee Stadium, even though his ace had had just two days’ rest. And he read the team the riot act before the game, and they responded. Whitey hurled a complete game 5–3 victory, aided by a Billy Martin home run. Sturdivant followed with a complete-game win of 6–2 in Game Four, to even the Series at two wins each.
On the eve of Game Five, Larsen did what Larsen does: he was out drinking and making the rounds of Manhattan with his pal Arthur Richman of the New York Mirror. Larsen’s season had begun with his auto wrapped around a pole in St. Petersburg. Game Five would be his final start of the year, and on the big stage.
“Don’t be surprised if I pitch a no-hitter tomorrow,” he told Richman—he might have said “today” if the hour was past midnight when he said it, but Richman insisted they were in by midnight, and were using taxis.
And so Larsen took the mound before 64,519 fans, including sixteen-year-old Joe Torre, a Brooklyn high school kid who managed to score tickets to the game. Larsen’s mound opponent, Sal Maglie, had himself pitched a no-hitter just thirteen days earlier.
The first run did not score until the fourth, when Mantle homered near the foul pole in right—the first hit off Maglie. Fans who look for such things were probably noticing that Larsen hadn’t given up a hit, either.
In the fifth, Mantle ran down a long drive by Hodges to left-center to keep Larsen’s no-hitter alive, and in the sixth, Bauer drove home Carey with the Yankees’ second run.
Now came the final third of the game, and the drama was intense. No Dodger had reached base through six, and the concept of a “perfect game” began to be considered. There had never been a no-hitter thrown in a World Series game, and there had not been a perfect game—no base runners—since 1922, when a White Sox pitcher named Charlie Robertson threw one against Detroit. Few remembered Charlie Robertson, except, of course, Casey, who had batted against him while with Toledo in 1929–30. If you wanted to know about Charlie Robertson—or almost anybody in baseball history—Casey was the man to see.
Larsen got Gilliam, Reese, and Snider in the seventh, then Robinson, Hodges, and Amoros in the eighth. When he came to bat himself in the last of the eighth, the crowd rewarded him with a tremendous ovation—Dodger fans and Yankee fans alike. They knew they were seeing history.
In the top of the ninth, Furillo flied to right on a 1–2 pitch. Campanella grounded out to Martin at second. That brought up a pinch hitter, Dale Mitchell, batting for Maglie. The Yankees knew him well—he had been a longtime Cleveland Indian—but the scouting report was long done; Berra saw no need to go to the mound to discuss him with Larsen.
On the fifth pitch to Mitchell, Larsen’s ninety-seventh of the game, the umpire Babe Pinelli called it strike three, and history was served. (Yes, Casey had played against Pinelli in the 1920s, when Babe was an infielder with Cincinnati.)
Someone foolishly asked Larsen in the post-game questions whether it was the best game he had ever pitched. It was certainly the best game Casey Stengel had ever seen, and probably the easiest. After he wrote out the lineups he had no decisions left to make.
The Series returned to Ebbets Field the next day, and the Dodgers beat Turley in ten innings, to send it to a Game Seven.
Who would pitch? For the Dodgers, their ace, Don Newcombe, had had four days off, and although Berra had previously seemed to kill him in their World Series matchups, Walt Alston had no problem naming him to start. For the Yankees, Casey had Ford with three days’ rest, but Turley, Larsen, and Sturdivant were not rested enough. So he would have to look at his Game Two bullpen guys—Kucks, Byrne, McDermott, and Morgan—to come up with his answer. He was very down on the well-touted McDermott, who drove him crazy with his erratic behavior and had won only two games for him. Del Webb, the co-owner, later said that it was Yogi who kept pestering Casey to go with Kucks: “He’ll make ’em hit in the dirt and they won’t get those pop-fly home runs.”
The game ball was resting in Kucks’s shoe when he got to the Yankee clubhouse. The Yankees knocked out Newcombe by the fourth (two home runs by Berra, and one by Howard), and went on to pile up nine runs, while Kucks came through with the win of his life, a three-hit shutout.
Another world championship for the Yankees, number six for Stengel, and the cloud of the ’55 series was lifted.
A year after their loss, the Dodgers would announce their move to Los Angeles. This would turn out to be the last Subway Series played in New York until the Yankees played the Mets in 2000.
The Yankees held their World Series party at the Starlight Roof of the Waldorf Astoria, where Casey and Edna danced to “The Band Played On” (“Casey would waltz with a strawberry blonde…”); this had become somewhat of a customary moment for them, the lyrics taken from a pop song written in 1895. Frankie Laine led a bunch of players—Mantle, Martin, Ford, McDermott, Berra, Bauer, Collins, and Silvera—in song.
Reflecting on his latest triumph, Casey said, “This is the best victory….It showed the class we had after a terrible start [losing the first two games] and we got in and grabbed the ball and went the limit and I’ll never forget it.”
Casey signed his latest two-year contract, at the same seventy-five thousand dollars a year, two days after the Series ended. Casey and Edna returned to Glendale (no round-the-world trip this winter!), where Casey was fêted at the Verdugo Club on November 12; then they settled into a rare relaxing off-season.
He was named Manager of the Year for the fifth time (if you count the various electing bodies—The Sporting News, AP, UPI), and told Bob Myers of AP, “Well, I’d have to say on this award of the year that naturally the first thing you’d have to say, that is, you should be thankful for the award of that kind and you should be thankful it was not given by one man but by a number of men that are authorities on baseball because they have followed the sport so many years and because it’s a voting proposition in which the majority share and therefore that’s why you get the selection and feel honored because you have received the selection from the men who voted you the award, which is the writers, the sports writers.”
This was Casey taking care of business—taking care to thank the writers—the men who had helped make him one of the most famous people in the land.
He then went on to his “second thing,” which was thanking ownership and the scouts who found the players who made the team good. It was good politics to thank his bosses and to acknowledge others, like the scouts.
The third item on his list was thanking the players and the coaches, and he left room for a fourth item—“You got to be satisfied with yourself that you’re doing a good job with the talent entrusted to you.”
Ego was not one of his problems.