Casey reflected on his long career in baseball as 1959 spring training began. Speaking with Dan Daniel, he was, in a sense, marveling over the changes in athletes:
You know what made so many players very familiar with alcohol? They couldn’t make a decent living out of baseball so they had to get off-season jobs.
What were they fit for? They had no skills off the field and they had to leave come spring. So they became bartenders, and from tending bar to sampling the wet goods wasn’t much of a jump. So when you gathered the players for spring training, you saw pot bellies, rum blossom noses and other evidence of the free and easy life.
In them days, the training season was supposed to be mainly for melting the lard off the fatties and getting the boozers ready to run 90 feet without being winded.
Nowadays, the players report down to weight, there ain’t no bartenders which they have to belong to a union, anyways, and you will be surprised of the number of Yankees now under-weight they showed during the 1958 World Series.
Baseball today is serious business. You don’t tolerate heavy drinkers. No man is so good, so important, that you have to take a lot of nonsense from him and shut your eyes to his wanderings and rule fractures.
The ball player of today is a serious, hard-working, ambitious man eager to get every dime there is in the game for himself and his family. Then, today he must stay around at least ten years to qualify for his full pension, and you don’t stay in your booze. That pension gimmick is a wonderful thing for the managers.
Some called Casey “old-school” and “set in his ways,” but he had clear vision when it came to “today’s players.” He often did not get enough credit for the adjustments in thought and observation that he did embrace.
The 1959 Yankees, with only three new faces on the roster (Clete Boyer, Johnny Blanchard, and Jim Coates), got off to a horrible start—or a continuation of their bad regular-season finish of 1958.
Tempers were quicker. Stengel feuded with Joe King of the World-Telegram & Sun over a story mentioning that Ford had brushed off a photographer. Houk tossed a helmet onto the field to shoo away a television cameraman in Baltimore, where photographers were allowed on the field. Casey even criticized his pitching coach, Jim Turner, in the press after a Washington Senators pinch hitter, Julio Becquer, got a single. “He’s beaten our brains out by hitting the inside ball, and I told Turner to have the pitchers brush him back, then throw outside.”
A week after celebrating his thousandth victory as Yankee manager, he was thrown out of a game while protesting a check swing call. He was now nearly sixty-nine years of age, the oldest man in uniform (six years older than the Cubs’ coach Rogers Hornsby, two years older than the Red Sox coach Del Baker), and some felt it was inappropriate for him to get so worked up on the field.
Newsweek, whose sports editor was Roger Kahn, wrote that a “Yankee executive” felt the Yankees could still win if Stengel were to retire, “but he won’t do it.”
On May 26, the Yankees lost a 12–2 decision to Boston at Yankee Stadium—and fell into last place. The headline writers had a ball: YANKS HIT CELLAR. It was unthinkable. But it was true—they were now 14-22 and would remain in last place for six days, until seven wins in nine games lifted them to sixth. They hovered at the borderline of the first and second divisions for much of the summer. This was very unfamiliar territory, and the usual joy of going to the ballpark abated for the high-payroll team.
It went practically unnoticed that, from Memorial Day to season’s end, the Yankees were 65-55, which enabled them to finish third. That would be called a “respectable third” for any other team, but not this one.
It hurt that the teams above them—Chicago (the pennant winner) and Cleveland—included people who had gloatingly criticized Stengel for most of the season. Frank Lane, the Indians’ general manager, continued to carry on his long-standing public feud with Casey. The White Sox’s owner, Bill Veeck (Casey’s old absentee boss from his 1944 managerial turn in Milwaukee), and general manager, Hank Greenberg, were frequent critics who seemed to enjoy beating Stengel as much as they did winning the pennant. Above the fray was Casey’s old pal and business partner Al Lopez, who had guided the ’54 Indians and now the ’59 White Sox to pennants when the Yankees didn’t make it.
Richardson, playing every day for the first time, hit .301. Duren had a 1.88 ERA. But most of the stars had “off-years,” especially Turley. Though he had won the Cy Young in 1958, in ’59 his game went south. He was 8-11 with a 4.32 ERA. Except for perhaps Bob Grim, no starting pitcher had ever fallen as sharply as Turley did during the Stengel years. Many fingers were pointed at Stengel. Mantle hit a pedestrian .285 with only seventy-five RBIs and thirty-one homers; had Stengel’s criticisms affected him adversely instead of giving him a boost? Bauer, now thirty-seven, fell to .238. Ford reached double digits in losses for the first time in his career.
Still, on Old-Timers’ Day in August, Casey’s ovation was the loudest, even louder than DiMaggio’s. It was part admiration, part rally of support: Yankee fans refused to give up hope. At the after-party for the guests, where Joe McCarthy, Dizzy Dean, and Charlie Grimm sang, where talks were delivered by Paul Waner, Bill Dickey, and Zack Wheat, and where Mrs. Babe Ruth, Mrs. Lou Gehrig, and Mrs. John McGraw were honored guests—Casey was the hit of the evening with his predictably colorful speech at the end of the evening. And then Casey and Edna danced to “The Band Played On.”
On September 8, the Yankees were eliminated from the pennant race. The White Sox were going to win it, and Casey sent Al Lopez a telegram wishing him “the best of luck in the World Series” as soon as they clinched.
So he had finished third, just as Bucky Harris had done before getting fired in 1948. Was this an omen? It was no secret that Houk, the first-base coach, was considered Stengel’s successor, even though a line drive to the head by Larsen had put him in the hospital during the season. (Charlie Keller filled in.)
Casey had another year left on his contract. His bosses all stood strongly behind him. The players, who may have joked among themselves about Casey’s zaniness, respected his record of success and supported him publicly. Even Madison Avenue still banked on him: Skippy Peanut Butter hired him for print ads in national magazines. At the end of the season, Yankee management took the step of announcing, unnecessarily because of his contract, that Casey would be back in 1960.
And Stengel took his share of blame, by bringing up one of his favorite characters. “Now I had been around quite a few years. I wasn’t Little Ned out of the Fourth Reader. Yet I allowed my elation over the 1958 world championship to give me a distorted picture of 1959. I should have known better. That was my first mistake. As for the other errors, I ain’t gonna make them mistakes again.”
But the Yankees also announced that Jim Turner would be retiring as pitching coach. This was not presented as a major announcement, but Turner was not retiring, he was absolutely being pushed overboard, most certainly as a scapegoat for the pitching staff’s failures—notably Turley’s.
“The Colonel,” also known as “the Milkman,” Turner had been with Casey from the start, through all those triumphs. Now he was out, and, as with Billy Martin, Casey was not defending him or lurching into the fray to keep him. Ed Lopat would replace him. (And Dickey would return to the team as batting coach). Turner went home to Nashville and came “out of retirement” to manage his hometown minor-league team. He said nothing in his departure—it was not his style. In fact, Turner long maintained that he was not really “fired”: you are not fired if your contract is expired.
Turner had run the pitching, no doubt. Who’s pitching Sunday? Ask Turner. Who is warmed up and ready to come in? Ask Turner. Casey had relied on him and won nine pennants with him. He was thought to be the best pitching coach in the business, and would resurface with pennant-winning Cincinnati in 1961. From 1966 to 1973, Houk would even bring him back to the Yankees for another tour as pitching coach. But for now, “Certain disgruntled pitchers who had miserable seasons revolted against Turner and greased the skids under him,” The Sporting News reported.
Instead of a World Series share for Casey in 1959, he got fifteen thousand dollars to cover the series for Life magazine—more than anyone on either team got.*
Was he an able reporter for Life? “I’m much too popular,” he said. “Every time I want to say something, somebody gets in my ear and I forgot to write down my observations.”
Casey’s friends in California did not forget him. After the season, there was the now annual salute to Casey at the Verdugo.
Of course, back in the Yankee offices at 745 Fifth Avenue, the feelings could not have been good. Casey was getting fifteen thousand dollars while the team was losing out on its annual expected World Series revenues. It would be natural to expect that certain front-office people—including the owners—were not thinking “Good for ol’ Case.” Even though he had one more year to go on his contract, at this moment the wheels were perhaps beginning to turn.
Late in the season, when the Yankees were playing Kansas City, their manager, Harry Craft, sidled up to Casey during batting practice. Craft was an old veteran of the baseball wars, and had managed in the Yankees organization. He had a pretty good sense that he was going to be fired by the A’s.
He had a friendly piece of advice for Stengel: “My outfielder, [Roger] Maris—he would be a heckuva pickup for the Yankees. He is one terrific player. You should see him on a daily basis.” And, on December 11, the Yankees got Maris, their latest acquisition from Kansas City, along with two other players, for Bauer, Larsen, Siebern, and Throneberry.
“Of course Casey didn’t say good-bye,” said Bauer. “No manager ever does. That’s the way baseball is. But I always did like Casey and thought he was a good guy and a wonderful manager. He handled me fine. He could make me see red—especially when he took me out for a pinch-hitter. I never talked back to him. But then, I never talked back to my dad, either. He was fair. When we won fifteen in a row, he kept us on the ball by reading the riot act after every game. But when we were down and out, he’d leave us alone.”
Bauer would become a player-manager for the Athletics the following year. With his departure from the Yankees, only Berra was left from Casey’s first team. Casey rated Bauer highly—ahead of Mantle, even—but here was a chance to get the twenty-five-year-old Maris for thirty-seven-year-old Bauer, who was nearing the end of a fine playing career.
It was the kind of trade a smart organization makes.
* The Dodgers’ winning share was $11,231. The third-place money for each Yankee was $1,229. All first division teams received World Series money before division play was instituted in baseball.