The year 1960 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Casey Stengel’s entry into professional baseball, and, including 1937, the year when Brooklyn paid him to stay home, he had been employed in every one of those years.
It was a remarkable achievement, but he had been honored so often by so many over his Yankee years, there was little left to do to pay him tribute.
Of course, the Yankees could win him a tenth pennant; that would be nice. And it is probably what he would have asked for if given the opportunity.
Maris was a nice gift. Casey first thought of him as his left fielder, with Héctor Lopez to play right, and that is what happened during spring training, but by the opening of the season, he felt Maris’s strong arm made him the better choice in right. The unsteady Lopez would play left, and, of course, Mantle would be in center.
Maris would come through with thirty-nine home runs for Casey and win himself an MVP Award, edging Mantle by a very narrow margin. As usual, the trade worked out well, the Athletics looked bad, and Maris’s performance would in fact play a big part in another big season. So impressed was Casey by Maris that when he named his personal All-Yankee team from 1949 to 1960, he put Maris in the outfield with DiMaggio and Mantle, over Bauer. (He also put Coleman at second over Billy Martin. And at least Mantle had surpassed Bauer by now.)
The Yankees played just .500 ball until early June, and there was frequent talk of Casey’s retiring. Of course, that had been going on almost since he arrived in New York in 1949. Even he had told Edna that the Yankees would just be for a year…or two. Speculation continued that Houk would be the successor, and that was bolstered when Casey was hospitalized for ten days (May 29–June 7) with what was variously described as a bladder infection/virus/flu. Signs of illness, as he approached seventy, were quickly translated into “Maybe it’s time.”
During the ten-day stretch, Houk ran the club.
“I’ll tell you something,” said Casey when he rejoined the team. “They examined all my organs. Some of them are quite remarkable, and others are not so good. A lot of museums are bidding for them.”
His support team was in transition, too. The traveling secretary, Bill McCorry, and the trainer, Gus Mauch, both had heart attacks. McCorry’s led to his retirement, and Bruce Henry moved up from business manager at Richmond to take his place; Mauch returned in August but now had an assistant, Joe Soares, to work with. George Weiss, who was sixty-seven, was hospitalized with ulcers during the season, and his workload was taken up by his assistant, Roy Hamey, until he returned.
In 1960, Bill Veeck, feeling flush from having hosted a World Series, installed an exploding scoreboard in Comiskey Park. It was set to send off fireworks every time a White Sox player hit a home run (a rare event).
Bob Fishel, who had once worked for Veeck with the St. Louis Browns, came up with a countermeasure that Casey loved. On a visit to Chicago on June 17, Fishel delivered sparklers to the Yankee dugout, to be lit when a Yankee homered. With July 4 approaching, sparklers were readily available. It was a playful idea, and they got to work it twice that day, first on a Clete Boyer home run, and later on one by Mantle. Casey was among those who held sparklers, which was perfectly fitting for the man who had spent a lifetime of having fun with the game.
The Yankees were home, playing Kansas City, to celebrate Casey’s seventieth birthday. The assistant general manager, Roy Hamey, presented him with a silver tray (which went on display at Casey’s bank in Glendale); the players presented him with a desk set; and the team’s sponsor, Ballantine Beer, presented him with a color television set, to be shipped off to Glendale.
None of those gifts could compare to a purchase ten days earlier, when the Yankees obtained the relief pitcher Luis Arroyo from the Reds’ Jersey City farm team. The team had been transferred there from Havana on July 15 after U.S.-Cuban relations turned bad. The cigar-smoking Arroyo, who had pitched earlier in his career for the Cardinals, Pirates, and Reds, made twenty-nine appearances for Casey down the stretch, winning five, saving seven, and being a genuinely well-liked guy in the clubhouse.
“Who’d have ever thought a guy like that would be laying around dead somewhere?” wondered Casey, marveling at Arroyo’s screwball as well as at other clubs’ lack of interest in him. Duren had been generally ineffective, and Bobby Shantz had stepped up in a relief role in fine style, but the luxury of having a second man to go to proved to be of enormous benefit.
Arroyo took a spot that might have been occupied by a left-hander named Hal Stowe, a Clemson University product with good stuff. “It’s true that Hal Stowe pitched pretty good this spring,” said Casey when the roster cuts were made. “But I noticed that he never ran in the outfield, that he never did all the things he was supposed to do. He never really hustled and he never really worked at it. That’s why he didn’t make the squad cut. He could bullshit everybody but the manager.”
Art Ditmar emerged as the team’s leading winner with a 15-9 mark; Ford only 12-9. Turley made twenty-four starts and won nine, and Ralph Terry, who had come over with Lopez from the Athletics the year before, won ten. Jim Coates was 13-3, a better record than Ford’s.
Another splendid pickup was the first baseman Dale Long, purchased on August 21. Long was a throwback—Casey had discovered him playing sandlot ball when he was managing Milwaukee for Veeck in 1944. He signed Long and farmed him out to the Ohio State League. Now, in 1960, after a journeyman career, Long was back with Stengel for a pennant run, and he hit .366 in twenty-six games—an acquisition reminiscent of the Yankees’ picking up Johnny Mize in the summer of ’49.
Although Mantle finished second in MVP voting, he still was falling short in Casey’s eyes. It seemed as though he could never please the skipper. He hit forty home runs to lead the league, but he batted only .275, and he struck out 125 times. In August, he failed to run out a ground ball in a game against Washington, thinking that a force play was the third out, and Casey took him out of the game and sent him to the clubhouse after the sixth inning. A punishment.
It turned out the game went fifteen innings—it was the second game of a doubleheader, no less—and the Yankees lost it. A lot of players grumbled privately that removing Mantle on what had been a mental error cost them the game, but the press was supportive. “That single bit of managerial strategy may have won a pennant,” wrote one.
Indeed, the Yankees showed signs of better baseball down the stretch, in what turned out to be a tight race. The Baltimore Orioles—no one saw them coming—were the “Baby Birds,” with terrific young pitching, and they nearly pulled off a shocking pennant under Paul Richards. When they beat the Yankees three straight in Baltimore just before Labor Day—behind Milt Pappas, Jack Fisher, and Chuck Estrada, they moved ahead of New York and into first.
The Yankees regained first place on September 10 and held it the rest of the way, winning their final fifteen games of the season, including a four-game sweep of Baltimore September 16, 17, and 18, the last two a doubleheader. Over 150,000 came out for those three dates, as Ford, Coates, Ditmar, and Terry won to build the lead to four games. The Yanks wound up eight games ahead, which belied how close the race really was.
Casey’s tenth pennant in twelve years only increased the talk of his retirement. “A good way to go out,” some speculated. Asked about Casey’s future—and George Weiss’s—before the World Series began, Dan Topping said, “I have not talked retirement with either man, and they have not broached the subject to me.” This pennant tied him with McGraw for most, and put him one ahead of McCarthy and Connie Mack. McGraw, though, won only three World Series.
The National League pennant winners were the Pittsburgh Pirates, who had not been to the World Series since the Murderers’ Row Yankees of 1927 had swept them.
The series opened in Pittsburgh on October 5. Casey had played there as a Pirates outfielder in 1918 and 1919.
Casey had to make a decision on his opening-game pitcher. Ford, long his ace, had started the final game of the season, and pitched just two innings, presumably a move to tune him up for the series. That outing, which was unnecessary, meant he would have just two days off, although he had faced only nine batters on October 2. Ditmar, who had pitched four innings on September 30, would have had four days off. Casey also considered the rookie Bill Stafford, who had come up in mid-August and gone 3-1 with a 2.25 ERA. He had thrown three innings on October 1 and would have three days’ rest.
Casey, conferring with his pitching coach, Lopat, chose to go with Ditmar. If Ford was hurting at all, it was certainly not in evidence. Some in the press raised their eyebrows over the decision, but Ditmar, after all, had been the team’s leading winner.
The choice did not work out. That’s baseball. Casey bet on Ditmar, and started him in Game One (one-third of an inning, three runs) and again in Game Five (one and a third innings, three runs), and the Yankees lost both of those games.
Game One also featured a tough Casey moment, when he called back Clete Boyer in the second inning for a pinch hitter. “When Casey called me back,” said Boyer, “I thought he was going to talk to me—maybe tell me how he wanted me to swing. But when he told me that Long was going to hit for me, I was ready to crawl all the way home. I was never so shocked in my life.”
Meanwhile, his longtime ace, Ford, had a fabulous series, winning Game Three 10–0, and a potential elimination game, Game Six, 12–0, making the Ditmar call look exceptionally bad. Ford would not be available for Game Seven.
The Yankees also took Game Two behind Turley by a 16–3 score, and for the series they would outscore Pittsburgh 55–27, outhit them .338 to .256, out-homer them 10–4, and had a lower ERA, 3.54 to 7.11. Bobby Richardson, who hit one homer and drove in twenty-six runs during the regular season, hit a grand slam, had a record six RBIs in one game and a record twelve for the series. Mantle hit three homers and drove in eleven. By almost every measure that statistics could churn, the Yankees were the better team on the field.
On the eve of Game Six, with the Yankees on the brink of elimination and with so many rumors swirling about Casey’s future, a group of thirty-seven sportswriters signed a petition to retain him—an unimaginable act for supposedly neutral reporters. But Ford’s inability to take the ball for Game Seven continued the second-guessing about Stengel’s strategy.
It all came down to Game Seven in Pittsburgh, on October 13. This game included nineteen runs and twenty-four hits, but not a single strikeout—a rarity that still stands alone in World Series history.
And, given the swirling of retirement rumors, it might also be the last game managed by one Charles Dillon Stengel.
Ford, unavailable after winning Game Six, could only sit and watch as a procession of Yankee hurlers tried to seal the deal for New York. Turley lasted only an inning, and was followed by Stafford, Shantz, Coates, and Terry. Shantz was the one who shone brightest, giving the Yanks five solid innings, making a neat fielding play, and even delivering a hit.
The Pirates jumped out to a 4–0 lead after two, with Rocky Nelson hitting a two-run homer in the first. But Skowron hit a solo home run in the fifth, Berra hit a three-run homer in the sixth, and suddenly the Yankees were rising and took a 5–4 lead. In the eighth, they added two more; it was now 7–4 New York, and the home crowd was silenced.
Now came the fateful last of the eighth. With the leadoff runner on first, Virdon, the old Yankee farmhand who had been traded for Slaughter, hit what should have been a double-play grounder to Kubek at short.
Forbes Field had opened in 1909. Somehow, in this fifty-second season, the ball found a pebble in front of Kubek. How the pebble had survived fifty-one years of infield maintenance was a wonder. The ball struck the pebble and bad-hopped itself into Kubek’s throat. Everyone was safe, and Kubek was down. Stengel went out to short for the medical emergency—Kubek would spend the night in the hospital—and called on Joe DeMaestri to take over.
But now, instead of having the bases empty with two out—Kubek to Richardson to Skowron had seemed like a sure double play—now it was two on, none out, and Dick Groat up. He singled past Boyer at third, as Gino Cimoli scored, making it 7–5.
Casey went to the mound to remove Shantz, and called on Jim Coates.
Bob Skinner sacrificed and Nelson flied out. Up came Roberto Clemente, who hit a slow chopper between first and second, but close enough toward second that Coates’s instinct told him to field the ball. Realizing he couldn’t, he raced to cover first—and was late. It was a single, a run scored, and it was 7–6.
For years after, the Yankee players blamed Coates for extending the inning by not covering first. A lot of them said it publicly over the years. But fifty years later, in 2010, a kinescope of the game was discovered in the archives of the singer Bing Crosby, who was a part-owner of the Pirates. Kinescopes were essentially films made by pointing a movie camera at a TV screen before videotape was invented. The Coates play was not included in the official World Series film produced by Major League Baseball, and thus was never seen or analyzed until the Crosby discovery.
“We had it wrong,” said Richardson, during a screening on the MLB Network. “We’ve blamed Coates all these years. But the ball was hit into a no-man’s-land—he was right to break towards the ball, and it was just bad luck that it was hit there. Anyone would have played it as he did.”
So be it. Hal Smith, who had taken over as catcher in the top of the inning, came up. He was another one of those Yankee farmhands traded off to find a major-league career elsewhere, part of the contingent sent to Baltimore in the Larsen-Turley trade.
And he hit a three-run homer off Coates, to put the Pirates ahead 9–7. On that one, the players could rightfully blame Coates.
What a blow. And what a game this was.
Casey went to the mound to remove Coates and bring in Terry. Don Hoak flied out, and the game went to the ninth inning.
The Yankees needed two to tie—and got them. They scratched and clawed for them, with a grounder to first by Berra scoring McDougald with the tying run, as Mantle, the runner at first, dove back to avoid a double play after Nelson had stepped on the base to remove the force-out.
Now it was the last of the ninth, Game Seven, a 9–9 score.
On Terry’s second pitch to Bill Mazeroski, at 3:36 p.m., the Pirates’ second baseman delivered the biggest single sports moment in the city’s history—a drive over Berra’s head in left, over the scoreboard, and out of the park.
Bedlam! The Pirates won it 10–9 and were world champions for the first time in thirty-five years.
They may have been outplayed over the eight days of the Fall Classic, but when it counted, Maz came through, and the Yankees walked off the field, losers.
As several players, including Mantle, wept in the silence of the visiting clubhouse, Terry went to see Casey in his office “He was great,” said Terry later. “He asked me what I was trying to do on Maz, and I told him I thought I had him set up for a slider. ‘Well,’ said Casey, ‘you were working on him. If you told me you had given him a high fastball that would be another thing.’ He sensed I felt guilty as hell and he was enough of a pro not to make it worse.”
Still feeling the second-guessing over his use of Ditmar, Casey acknowledged “You could say I picked the wrong starter for the first and fifth game. Since [Ditmar] was still my top winner and had pitched only 17 balls in the opener, I had to call him back for the fifth game.”
The team flew back to New York in silence.