The 1958 Yankees, Casey’s tenth Yankee team, ran away from the pack; by August 2, they had built up a ridiculous seventeen-game lead. They started out 25-6 and didn’t lose their tenth game until May 30. The season was very uncompetitive for them, even though the Yankees won only 92 games to wind up ten ahead of Chicago. They led the league in both ERA and runs scored, and Bob Turley wound up as the Cy Young Award winner, with a spectacular 21-7 season.
“This Turley guy is amazing,” said Casey. “You sit near him on the bench and you hear the most remarkable flow of observations not only on pitching, but on batting, as well. I call him the Philosopher of the Bench, the Scientist of the Dugout.” Turley and the other Yankee pitchers were told to sit at the far end of the dugout during the other team’s batting practice, to see what could be learned. Like Larsen, Turley worked with no windup.
Ford went 14-7, but no one else on the staff won ten games. A lot of attention was paid to the hard-throwing, bespectacled Ryne Duren, who became the league’s relief star, and whose “Coke bottle” eyeglasses caused hitters great consternation. He was the first big-time reliever the Yankees had had since Joe Page, unless you counted Allie Reynolds’s occasional relief appearances. Duren went 6-4 with a 2.02 ERA, striking out eighty-seven batters in seventy-five and two-thirds innings, while recording nineteen saves.
“The ball makes a strange sound, like a small jet,” marveled Stengel, “as it travels toward the catcher and lodges, kerplunk, in Yogi’s mitt. Duren is a splendid product of the Atomic Age.”
Still, there were moments of discontent despite all the winning. Bobby Richardson would remember:
One day Casey pinch-hit for me in the first inning. I was mad, and as I walked back into the dugout, I muttered, “If you’re going to pinch-hit for me in the first inning, why bother to put me in the lineup at all?” I said it just loud enough for him to hear me, and he followed me into the clubhouse even while the game was going on.
“Young man,” he said, “go get your little glove and warm up Duren in the bullpen today.”
I was being punished, like a schoolboy. And saying “little glove” was intended to be demeaning; a reflection on my height.
He could be a tough man to play for.
With the Dodgers and Giants having left New York for California after the 1957 season, and with rumors swirling that the Washington Senators were taking a serious look at Minneapolis as a new home, congressional legislators who followed baseball’s antitrust exemption were starting to take another hard look at the major leagues and how the organization operated. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Anti-Trust and Monopoly, headed by Kentucky senator Estes Kefauver (who had run for vice president on the Adlai Stevenson ticket in 1956), convened a session for Wednesday, July 9. It was the morning after the All-Star Game in Baltimore (won by Casey’s American Leaguers, 4–3), which made it possible for a number of witnesses to testify and still get back for their games that night.
Casey was to be the star witness, although Mantle, Ted Williams, Stan Musial, and the league player representatives Robin Roberts and Eddie Yost were also to testify. Casey, with his commanding, gravelly voice, stole the show.
Jack Walsh, writing in The Sporting News, said, “Casey Stengel proved one of the most entertaining witnesses ever to appear on Capitol Hill. Never cracking a smile himself, Stengel continually created guffaws among the Senators and the standing-room-only crowd in the Senate caucus room.”
Casey was the first witness called. Wearing a light-colored suit and what he called his “magic glasses” (which he was now wearing in the dugout), he began with a little autobiography: “Well, I started in professional baseball in 1910. I have been in professional ball, I would say, for forty-eight years. I have been employed by numerous ball clubs in the majors and in the minor leagues….I had many years I was not so successful as a ballplayer, as it is a game of skill. And then I was no doubt discharged by baseball in which I had to go back to the minor leagues as a manager, and after being in the minor leagues as a manager, I became a major league manager in several cities and was discharged, we call it discharged because there was no question I had to leave.”
Laughter rose from the room, and from the senators on the committee. The tour de force was under way.
At one point, Kefauver halted the testimony in exasperation and said, “I am not sure that I made my question clear.”
“Well, that is all right,” Casey replied. “I am not sure if I am going to answer yours perfectly, either.”
He went on for about an hour.*1 Other members of the committee could barely wait for their turns. By employing Stengelese in the halls of Congress, Casey was turning a complicated but serious issue into one best left undiscussed.
The testimony was filmed, shown on the network newscasts that evening, and over and over in movie theater newsreels. If Casey Stengel wasn’t the most famous person in baseball before July 9, 1958, he was now.
Included in the reporting was a brilliant comment by Mantle, who followed Casey on the stand: “My views are about the same as Casey’s,” he said. To this Kefauver replied, “If you could define what these views were, it would be a service to this committee.”
He couldn’t.
“We want what the club owners want,” said Roberts when it was his turn to testify, pretty much summarizing most players’ views on the Reserve Clause, which bound players to their teams in perpetuity. Ironically, eight years later, Roberts was involved in the search for a head of the players’ union, which resulted in the hiring of Marvin Miller, whose work led to the end of the Reserve Clause a decade later. But at the time, most players agreed with management that the Reserve Clause was good for the game.
After his testimony, Casey headed back to New York for the team’s eight o’clock game. All in a day’s work.
The season progressed with what some felt was a lack of discipline—such as when Mantle and Ford missed a train to Detroit and were made to buy their own tickets for a later train, or the day Art Ditmar failed to cover first on a routine play, and Casey left him in to absorb a six-run pounding.
By late August, some players were questioning his tactics, and Casey took exception to that. “A lot of them are making a living because they’re playing my way,” he said. “There are always ball players who will complain, but I haven’t heard yet of any of them complaining about taking home that World Series money.”
Stengel always said, “The secret of managing is to keep the five guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.”
When Casey offered wisdom on the secrets of managing, one listener might well have been the team’s new first-base coach, Ralph Houk. Houk had moved up to replace Charlie Keller after a stellar performance as manager of Denver, and almost at once, sportswriters speculated that in Houk might be a Stengel successor one day.
There was a bit of midseason humor after the Yankees picked up forty-one-year-old Virgil Trucks. Trucks and Kucks were warming up in the bullpen and Casey called for Trucks. His directive was misheard; Kucks came in, and pitched the Yankees out of a jam.
Schedule makers had the Yankees in Kansas City again for Casey’s sixty-eighth birthday, and 250 admirers gathered at the Hotel Bellerive on Armour Boulevard for another Casey birthday celebration in K.C. Casey, when he rose to speak, said: “The greatest thing of my life has been what you might call fortunate that I’m sort of a WPA manager that gets fired and rehired….There’s my wife, Edna. I want to get her name in. When the team has had a bad day or you might say the manager had had a bad day, she’s very good with the players’ wives and the players, speaking kindly to them as they leave the clubhouse because she says, ‘Why not, I might as well because I’ll get it from him when we get home.’ ”
Despite the big lead, the season did not play out especially well for the Yankees. There was a complacency, as might be expected. There was a fear that the lackluster play might carry into the World Series, and if that was the case, the manager would be held accountable. The Yanks were only 27-28 in the final two months.
The Yankees clinched the pennant—Casey’s ninth—by winning the first game of a doubleheader on September 14 in Kansas City. There was a sedate celebration in the clubhouse, followed by dinner at the Muehlebach, and then a continued celebration on the Wabash Cannonball train to Detroit, where a six-game losing streak would begin.
On the train, where too much drinking ensued, Duren pushed a cigar into Houk’s face. Houk had been his manager at Denver; they had a history, and Duren was often inebriated. (When his career was finished, he would write two books about his alcoholism.) Houk struck back with a hand, or a fist, to Duren’s face, and Ryne got a gash over his eye, a cut on his hand, and some bruises on his neck.
The traveling beat reporters would likely have ignored the story, as was the style of the day. But not Len Shecter of the New York Post (who eleven years later would collaborate with Jim Bouton on the book Ball Four), who reported it all to his readers and forced the other writers to play catch-up. The story certainly must have looked bad to Topping and Weiss back home.
The Braves repeated as National League champions.
Whether the Wabash Cannonball incident or the previous year’s “busher” incident en route to Milwaukee factored in, this time the Yankees chose to fly to Milwaukee. Their traveling secretary, McCorry, hated to fly; he even took the team across the Great Lakes by boat one year to avoid it. But the days of train travel were winding down in baseball, especially since there were now teams on the West Coast.
Spahn and Ford met in Game One, but it was Duren who gave up a tenth-inning single to Billy Bruton to give the Braves the opener on October 1. Then, in Game Two, the nemesis of the year before, Burdette, stopped the Yankees 13–5; Turley was knocked out in the first inning. Things did not look good for the Yankees as they flew home to New York, down 2–0.
Larsen won the third game, but it was Spahn over Ford in Game Four, aided in part by the left fielder Norm Siebern, a Stengel favorite, who butchered two fly balls in the tough October sun. These events certainly hurt Siebern’s standing with fans (and he didn’t play again in the series), but Casey stood behind his decision to play him over Howard or Slaughter. “Casey stuck by me when I needed him,” said Siebern, “He had every right to jump me, but he didn’t.”
The Yanks were now down 3–1. Few teams had ever come back from such a deficit, considering they had to win three straight from a championship-caliber team. Only the 1925 Pirates had come back from 3–1 to beat Washington, thirty-three years before.
But the Yankees took it one game at a time. And Turley, who had bombed out in Game Two, proved to be the Man. In Game Five, he hurled a 7–0 complete game, a five-hit shutout, as the Yankees finally beat Burdette.
Two days later, back in Milwaukee, Casey called on Turley to relieve Duren in the tenth inning, with the Yankees leading 4–3, but with Hank Aaron on third and Felix Mantilla, pinch runner for Joe Adcock, on first. If they could score, the Braves would win the series. Turley was facing a pinch hitter, Frank Torre, Joe’s older brother. He got him to line out to McDougald at second, and the Yankees won. There would be a seventh game.
Burdette, on two days’ rest, got the ball for the Braves. Casey went with Larsen, who was well rested and had won Game Three.
The Yankees held a 2–1 lead in the third inning when the Braves threatened. With one out, Casey went to the mound and again called on Turley. And Bullet Bob, appearing in his third straight game, got out of the jam, and proceeded to pitch six and two-thirds innings, allowing just one run and two hits. The one run did tie the score in the sixth, but then he hurled three shutout innings, allowing only a leadoff walk in the ninth. The Yankees meanwhile scored four runs in the eighth, largely on a three-run homer by Skowron. The game ended with a third straight Yankee victory, a second Turley win to go with his save, and another world championship for the Yankees.
It would be Casey Stengel’s last one.
For those on the team or in the front office, the 1958 comeback victory would be the most satisfying of the Stengel era. Those who accumulated a lot of World Series wins in that time period tended to wear the 1958 ring ahead of all others. When the PR director, Bob Fishel, turned sixty-five in 1979, he was given a ’58 ring as a gift—front-office people did not receive rings in those days.
The flight home to New York was one of the happiest trips a Yankee team had ever taken. Joy reigned. Ford, taking the ash from a cigar, painted dollar signs on Casey’s cheeks. Three days after the Series ended, the Yankees held a World Series triumph party for some 250 guests at the Crystal Room of the Savoy-Plaza Hotel, across the street from the Yankees’ Fifth Avenue offices.*2 The same week, the press was summoned to the same room, where Casey was rewarded with his sixth two-year contract. He would again receive seventy-five thousand a year.
With that, it was home to California for the Stengels, and the usual banquet of honor at the Verdugo Club, with Del Webb in attendance. Then came a banquet at the Beverly Hilton Hotel at which he received the Manager of the Year award from The Sporting News. Ty Cobb and Wahoo Sam Crawford were there for that one.
Sometime during that period, a reporter got Casey to name the top three players of his tenure. And Casey named DiMaggio, Berra…and Hank Bauer, who had just hit four home runs in the World Series.
He did not name Mantle, who had already won a Triple Crown and two MVP Awards. “He’s not one, two or three at this time,” said Stengel. “He has a tremendous potential. He’s only 26, strong, and now he’s in great shape.” Weiss had notified Mantle that his pay was to be cut. Defending this, Casey said, “This outfielder holds the triple crown, has led in three big points [home runs, walks, and runs scored]. He should lead in all points.”
At an event in Modesto, California, just before he left for spring training, Casey added: “That Mantle could be the greatest player that ever lived. Some days he is—and then there are other days. He constantly fights himself. Mickey actually gets discouraged when he can’t hit a certain pitcher since he hardly believes that it is possible for anyone to strike him out. He’s got everything, but he also is his own worst enemy. Sure he has a great handicap and must play with his legs taped. Still he has broken every distance record in every park he has played in. If he makes up his mind to put in the time that it will take to overcome his weaknesses, he can do things that will make other players look silly. Among other things, he must try to eliminate strikeouts and not go after bad balls.”
There was no Stengelese in these comments. Casey was indeed tough to please, and Mantle’s inability to be even better than he was—perhaps as good as Ruth—was never far from Casey’s thoughts.