One might say that Casey Stengel reinvented the selling of professional baseball with the 1962 Mets.
Sure, he expected better results on the field. He did not know that his team would go 40-120, the worst record of the twentieth century. Or that they would be last in team batting, last in ERA, and last in fielding. Given that, it was hard to point a finger at anything specific that went wrong. But he had something special brewing—something he could not have anticipated. He created the only expansion team ever to be considered “lovable losers,” and did it in a city that was known for accepting only winners. No expansion team that followed was able to mirror this formula. It wasn’t as though anyone figured, “Hey, let’s be the worst team ever and people will love us.”*
The newspapers did not focus on that, however. In fact, they championed the Mets’ accomplishments and forgave their sins with understanding smiles. And, in many ways, this was due to Casey: he was as quotable as ever, as lovable as ever, and the writers bought it. He made them feel “we are all in this together.” The writers, then, became part of the team’s effort to sell the club to New York, and when the Mets won the World Series seven years later, they awarded those same writers with World Series rings—something that had never been done before in baseball. Among “my writers” who got rings were Maury Allen, Jack Lang, Dick Young, and Barney Kremenko, all still on the scene in ’69.
Whitey Herzog—a Yankee prospect in the 1950s and a Mets executive later in the 1960s, and later a successful manager—said, “Casey taught me how to handle reporters. He said, “Be very nice to them. You feed them. You drink them and you put them to bed at 4 a.m.—too late for them to remember the score.”
The Mets were perfect fodder for a new breed of sportswriters who called themselves “the Chipmunks.” They were perpetually curious writers who had a measure of disdain for the perfection that was the Yankees, and the Mets’ arrival fell right into their hands—a team of very human failures, at a perfect time.
“The new young baseball writers were writing who the players were as people—with a special consideration for sense of humor,” recalls one of them, Newsday’s Steve Jacobson. “The old school guys called us Chipmunks and we liked that. Dick Young had been doing the same thing without the humor, but he rejected identifying with us. The Mets, with [Richie] Ashburn’s wit and Stengel, fit just right. Jimmy Cannon refused to write about the Mets without a sneer as if they were less than human. There is no question that if Stengel had been a writer, he would have been a Chipmunk. He was all Chipmunk.”
Casey did not participate much in the October 10 expansion draft. While Houston, the other 1962 NL expansion team, drafted young, the Mets drafted old and went for known names to populate their roster. Each of the eight National League teams left an unprotected list of what amounted to unwanted players. Weiss, assisted by the coaches Lavagetto and Hemus, took Hobie Landrith as their first pick, because, as Casey would later tell the announcer Lindsey Nelson, “You gotta start with a catcher ’cause if you don’t you’ll have all passed balls.”
The other fifteen players the Mets picked that day had some familiarity to fans—Gus Bell, Roger Craig, Gil Hodges, Don Zimmer—or would become well known over time, such as Jay Hook, Craig Anderson, Jim Hickman, Choo-Choo Coleman, Al Jackson, Felix Mantilla, Elio Chacon, and Joe Christopher.
“They really gave it to us,” Casey later reflected. “They sold us all the disabled players they had.”
The Mets tried seven catchers in 1962. “I’ve got one that can throw, but can’t catch, and one that can catch but can’t throw; and one who can hit but can’t do either,” Casey reflected at one point.
On November 28, 1961, they acquired three-time All-Star outfielder Frank Thomas, who would lead the team with thirty-four home runs and ninety-four RBIs; on December 8, they bought four-time All-Star Richie Ashburn from the Cubs. Thomas would give them genuine power in the middle of the lineup, and Ashburn would give them a .306 season. But more than that, the erudite Ashburn became an immediate friend to the press corps, a counterbalance to Stengelese. The writers loved his insight, loved his leadership, loved his intelligence, and loved how he could speak the truth without compromising the magic that was going on amidst the losing.
Casey had reversed all the “clown” talk and memories of his failed Brooklyn and Boston assignments with his Yankee success. He was often asked whether he was concerned that this new assignment would tarnish his great reputation as a manager. “How big is baseball and how big is a record?” asked Stengel. “Well, I’ll tell ya—baseball is far bigger than any record, including my own. I’m here to help baseball by helping Weiss rebuild this new club in a hurry.”
Leonard Koppett, the scholarly reporter with The New York Times (he considered himself a badger, not a Chipmunk) and The Sporting News, saw it like this: “It was a loyalty and obligation Stengel felt with deep sincerity—that he might be able, by his promotional flair and perhaps by his instruction on the field, to contribute something to the game-business-sport that had been his life and had made him wealthy. That he could indulge his ego while doing so was simply icing on the cake.”
In January, the Mets hired Rogers Hornsby as a hitting coach, to work both at the major- and minor-league levels. Hornsby was a heavy drinker and was always a difficult hire for teams. He was one of the great hitters in baseball history—.358 lifetime!—but a difficult man to work with, whether managing or coaching. The deal he made with the Mets was that he wouldn’t have to make road trips. His own autobiography, the controversial My War with Baseball, was published that spring, and Casey agreed to write a foreword for it. In midseason, however, Hornsby was transferred to “special assignments” and more or less vanished from the scene. He died in January 1963.
Then they changed Red Ruffing’s assignment from scouting to coaching, naming him pitching coach. Ruffing, the leading winner in Yankee history (at that time), had scouted in the Cleveland organization from 1948 to 1958. He and Casey had never worked together. Red Kress was also named as a minor-league pitching coach, with time assigned to the major-league club. He died of a heart attack in late November 1962, at age fifty-five.
This, along with Lavagetto and Hemus, would be Stengel’s support staff, and much more involved in running the games than the coaches on the Yankees had been. Casey’s age would slow him down, and he turned over much of the daily duties to his coaches. He also brought back his Yankee trainer, Gus Mauch, to train the Mets.
Flying to Florida from the West Coast for his first spring camp, Casey had to show resiliency at seventy-one, and he did. Unable to land in Tampa because of fog, his plane was rerouted to Miami. Another plane took them on a short hop to Orlando. Casey told the airline people he needed another plane to go the ninety-five miles to Tampa to complete this long journey. But the airline couldn’t provide one, and got him a bus for his party of five. And that’s how Casey got to his first Mets camp.
The Mets were taking over the Yankees’ St. Petersburg facilities, the Yankees having moved to Fort Lauderdale. Everything would be done in surroundings familiar to Casey, including the hotel, the Colonial Inn, which featured a lobby sign: STENGELESE SPOKEN HERE. It was Casey’s first National League camp since 1943. He wore the familiar uniform number 37.
He was a delight in spring training, talking endlessly to fans, signing everything from pizza boxes to plaster casts, dancing the Twist for TV cameras, basking in the adulation of “my writers,” who included Dick Young of the Daily News. Young, by now the most influential columnist in town, really took to the Mets, loved that Stengel had been hired as their manager, and took to calling their fans “the New Breed.”
The fans took to chanting “Let’s Go Mets,” which remained part of the culture of being a Mets fan past the team’s fiftieth anniversary.
Casey did interviews with anyone who had a tape recorder or a camera. He talked about the “Youth of America” growing up to play for the Mets. He talked about babies being born whose first words would be “Metsies, Metsies, Metsies.” When fans started to bring banners to games with clever sayings (to be captured on TV), he said, “The placards are amazin’ ”—he liked saying the word “placards.” (Nonsense like placards was banned in Yankee Stadium.)
He latched on to the word “amazin’ ” for everything Met. The fans were amazin’. His writers were amazin’. Choo-Choo Coleman (his catcher whose specialty was catching low pitches), was amazin’. He might latch on to an unknown prospect like Ken MacKenzie and call him an amazin’ phenom.
“I pitched for Yale,” said MacKenzie, who at 5-4 would have the only winning record on the ’62 Mets, “and I’m not sure Casey admired that or not, but one day he came to the mound and told me to ‘pretend you’re pitching against the Harvards.’ I think he actually knew that I was 6-0 against Harvard; I was the only Yale pitcher in history to beat them six times. He knew. He knew everything.”
Even though the writers were enthusiastically supportive of the Mets’ efforts to put a decent team on the field, it was becoming apparent that the band of over-the-hills they had assembled were not, in fact, going to challenge for much. Asked where he thought the Mets would finish, Casey responded, “Chicago.”
Robert Lipsyte, a twenty-four-year-old reporter for The New York Times, was assigned that spring to do some stories on the Mets. He didn’t have Casey the Yankee to fall back on, and he was observing the legend for the first time.
Thirteen years later, Lipsyte wrote in his book SportsWorld that Stengel “was treated as a clown and a breathing museum piece. He was neither….He was unfailingly true to himself. He thought the Mets were ‘horseshit’ (a favorite baseball epithet for incompetence), and that ‘Mrs. Payson and the attendance got robbed’ every time they played. This was treated as a charming eccentricity by the press rather than honest appraisal, which they were not used to.
“He worked hard diverting the writers for the Mets, but he soon lost interest in the team itself….He was capable of foul-mouthed nastiness, especially toward ballplayers who messed up or dogged it, and he could be incredibly kind.”
Lipsyte told of Casey’s patience with the handicapped, how he actually walked through the stands to greet someone in a wheelchair so the person wouldn’t have the bumpy ride down the steps toward the field. There was also the story of an old fan in Houston who came down to meet Casey, with his embarrassed teenage son in tow, telling Casey they had played against each other at Kankakee in 1910. Casey had no idea who the guy was, but he went to great lengths to recall the fellow’s skills so that the son would be impressed.
On March 22, the Yankees returned to St. Pete for the first spring meeting between the New York teams, and Casey delighted in winning 4–3 against a lineup that included Mantle, Maris, Richardson, Howard, Skowron, Lopez, Boyer, Cerv, Stafford, and Terry. He happily posed for all sorts of photos with his old charges—anything “my photographers” needed.
Optimism is always the hallmark of spring training—for everyone. The New Yorker had Roger Angell on hand for the Yankees-Mets game; he reported: “The Mets are an attractive team, full of echoes and overtones, and one must believe that George Weiss has designed their clean, honest, but considerably frayed appearance with great care. Gus Bell, Frank Thomas, Eddie Bouchee, and Richie Ashburn are former headliners whose mistakes will be forgiven and whose accomplishments will win sentimental affection….Finally, there is Casey himself, a walking pantheon of evocations. His pinstripes are light blue now, and so is the turtleneck sweatshirt protruding above his shirt, but the short pants, the hobble, the muttering lips, and the comic, jerky gestures are unaltered, and today he proved himself still capable of the winning move.”
The Mets opened the regular season with a single game on the road before coming home. It was an 11–4 loss in St. Louis, after a stuck hotel elevator almost caused half the starting lineup to arrive late.
The next day, April 12, Bill Shea arranged for a ticker tape parade up Broadway to welcome National League baseball back to town (just a week after a similar parade for the astronaut John Glenn), followed by a reception at City Hall. All the players sat outdoors behind the podium, as Mayor Robert Wagner, relieved of the burden of having lost the Dodgers and Giants, addressed the fans assembled in front. Then it was Bill Shea’s turn. After a less-than-rousing, almost apologetic speech, he paused, looked at the crowd, leaned into the mike, and said, quite dishearteningly, “And fans, all we’re asking for is a little patience until we get ourselves some real ballplayers.” One can imagine how that went over with Hodges, Zimmer, Craig, Ashburn, Bell, Thomas, and all the other veterans sitting up there behind their new owner.
Attendance for the home opener the next day was small—12,447 for a game played with the lights on, on a gray and murky afternoon. Clearly, the Mets still had some work to do.
Casey’s office in the Polo Grounds was not what had been the manager’s office for McGraw, Terry, Ott, Durocher, or Bill Rigney. That area had been carved into quarters, with the traveling secretary Lou Niss, the PR director Tom Meany, and the statistician Joe McDonald each getting a piece. Casey had a round table rather than a desk—a place to entertain his writers. His office had a window onto the field, where he could watch batting practice with binoculars.
And then he accidentally locked himself out of the office on opening day, and a locksmith had to be found so he could retrieve his lineup card.
Casey loved having the presence of Zimmer at third. “Zimmer is going to give me a spark in that infield,” he said. “You can put him down as the third baseman and forget about it.” But Zimmer somehow knew better. “The first time he took BP at the Polo Grounds,” says Roger Craig, “he said, ‘I won’t be here long—I can’t pick up the ball out of the Rheingold sign in the scoreboard.’ ” (The Rheingold sign graced the bottom of the inning-by-inning scoreboard, and would light up with an illuminated “h” for “hit” and “e” for “error,” which were plentiful.)
Zim went 4-for-52 in fourteen games, and was traded to Cincinnati on May 7.
As he recited his opening-day lineup on video for the announcer Lindsey Nelson, a classic Casey moment emerged. He listed his players and said a little about each one, but when he got to right field, he drew a blank.
Nelson said, “He paused for just a second or two, trying to remember Gus Bell’s name. Then he resumed talking, saying, ‘We got five or six fellas that’s doing very good and the best played for Hornsby at Cincinnati, bats lefthanded and hit .300, done very good, delighted to have him, is married, has seven kids in the station wagon he drives down here from Cincinnati where he lives….’
“Twelve minutes after I asked the original question, he said, ‘Yes, sir, he comes down for spring training with his whole family and if he can hit for us like he hit for Hornsby, he’d ring the bell—and that’s his name, Gus Bell!’ ”
The Mets lost the home opener 4-3 (they would go 19–39 in one-run games), and then they lost again, and again, and again—until the losing streak was nine. Finally, on April 23, Jay Hook beat the Pirates 9–1 at Forbes Field, and the Mets had a victory. But by then they were already eight and a half games out of first.
Few victories would follow as the season played on. And Casey was already a different manager from the one he had been in the Bronx. He relied on his coaches more. He didn’t learn his players’ names or always know who was available. These games were not pennant-contending, and he knew it.
“It seemed like a lot to ask for him to know all the pitchers he had on any given day,” recalled MacKenzie. “They didn’t write all the extra players on the lineup cards in those days. One afternoon the phone rang in the bullpen. [The bullpens at the Polo Grounds were in fair territory, out along the running track in the outfield.] Ruffing answered it and Casey said, ‘Get someone up!’ Ruffing said, ‘Who do you want? Casey couldn’t think of any names, so he just said, ‘Better get two guys up,’ and he hung up. Red got to choose.”
The Mets would go 2-16 against Los Angeles, 4-14 against San Francisco, and an embarrassing 3-13 against Houston, the other expansion team that started the same day they did.
They were only 17-61 in the second half, when improvement might have been expected. They were 4-13 in extra-inning games. They led the league with 210 errors, and each loss seemed to feature a unique error that had everyone talking.
And laughing. Yes, the manner in which the Mets blew leads or got clobbered was indeed the stuff of water-cooler talk the next day.
“They commenced to hit the ball over the building,” Casey would say, in describing what happened following a loss. And he wasn’t talking about foul balls leaving the ballpark. They were all fair.
“It wasn’t very good but at least it was long,” he would say after another loss on a hot summer’s day.
Humorists were catching on. Johnny Carson took over The Tonight Show the day after the season ended, and, since the show originated in New York, he quickly worked Mets humor into his monologues.
The only one who didn’t seem to “get it” was Howard Cosell, who was doing pre- and post-game radio shows with Ralph Branca. Cosell pretty much reverted to calling Casey a clown, and regularly berated the team for its lack of progress. “We would watch the game on TV at WABC on Seventy-seventh Street,” said Branca later. “Or sometimes at [Cosell’s] home in Pound Ridge. I’d let him have his say; I didn’t really agree or disagree. Howard definitely didn’t like Casey, but off mike, he never said anything critical about him. He saved it all for the live reports on air.”
Casey took defeat as hard as ever—he still needed to walk off the games around Central Park South at night—though he tried to point out positives. If he was upset with a veteran player’s mistakes, he let him know it. He encouraged Weiss to make trades—he counted on them! But they never seemed to materialize in a big way.
The victories, of course, were special events. When the Mets beat the Phillies April 28 in the Polo Grounds—only their second win of the month!—he trotted all the way to the clubhouse in center field, stopping a few times along the way to bow to the fans.
Casey and Edna loved the players’ families. The first “Met baby” was a son born on February 23, 1962, to the catcher Chris Cannizzaro (whom Casey always called Chris “Canzonari”). As Cannizzaro recalled:
He was born in California, so I didn’t get to see him until we went to San Francisco for the first time. Except I wasn’t going to San Francisco; I was being sent to Buffalo! So our equipment man, Herb Norman tells me, “Casey wants to see you.” And Casey said, “I’ll bring you back in thirty days,” which he did. By then, my wife came to New York, so I finally got to see him there.
Edna was great with little Chris, would hold him and take pictures. The two of them were great with kids, they loved Family Day, and Casey always knew which kids belonged to which players.
If Casey had a pet player that would have been Rod Kanehl. He knew him as a Yankee farmhand, same as Marv Throneberry, but Kanehl never got called up to the Yanks like Marv did. Now Casey thought he could be a breakthrough player.
Kanehl, a minor leaguer since 1954, scored the tying or winning run seven times, six as a pinch runner, and that was enough for Casey to consider him a lucky charm.
“I think Casey saw Kanehl as his Mets version of Billy Martin,” says Joe McDonald, the team’s original statistician, who years later became their general manager. “He saw Rod as the dirty-uniform type who would do anything to win a game. He liked that.”
“Casey called Kanehl ‘My little scavenger,’ ” says the sportswriter Steve Jacobson. “This was a big advance from being a ‘road apple,’ which is a term he used for bad players. ‘Road apple’ was a euphemism for ‘horse manure.’ ”
Marvin Eugene Throneberry (check out those initials) became a media darling, and hence a fan favorite. There was a fan club, whose members wore T-shirts that said “VRAM” (“Marv” backward). He made base-running errors and fielding errors and missed bases while running. His history really wasn’t that bad! He had played first for Houk at Denver and done very well!
On June 17, he hit a triple against the Cubs. But he was called out when the umpire ruled that he’d missed second base. When Casey came out to argue, the umpire Dusty Boggess reportedly said, “Don’t bother arguing, Casey, he missed first base, too.”
Charlie Neal, a former Dodger playing second for the Mets, homered the next day, and Casey popped out of the dugout and pointed to each base so Neal wouldn’t miss any.”
One day, the roof was leaking in the Mets clubhouse—right on Throneberry. And Marv said, “Fine, I deserve it.’ ”
“I was in awe of Casey when I met him for the first time in 1960 with the Yankees,” Jacobson remembers. But you could talk to him—he was seldom hostile. He could get riled up talking about the Yankees when he managed them, but with the Mets he was far more explanative. “And funny. When I introduced him to my new wife, he took her by the elbow and said, ‘I don’t even know you and you could be my number-three catcher.”
Casey kept selling his team. On April 15, he appeared as the “Mystery Challenger” on What’s My Line?, whose panelists included Bennett Cerf, the head of the Random House publishing company. Cerf had just published Stengel’s book, Casey at the Bat. Casey signed his name on the blackboard as he entered to a wild ovation from the audience—enough to make the blindfolded panelists think it was a beautiful film star. But they quickly guessed his identity and treated him with awe, praising him for giving New Yorkers the underdog team they needed.
He posed for billboard advertisements with Miss Rheingold, holding a bat in a bunt position with the beauty queen behind him in the posture of a catcher. There was no beer in the photo, but Casey was fined five hundred dollars by Commissioner Ford Frick for violating the ban on uniformed personnel appearing in alcoholic beverage advertising.
In June, the Mets picked up the aging outfielder Gene Woodling, who had been a member of Casey’s five straight world-champion Yankees. “One day, we’re dropping throws, wild pitching, getting clobbered and Casey catches my eye while I’m sitting in the dugout,” said Woodling. “He winks at me and whispers, ‘Ain’t like the old days, is it?’ ”
It was just after a big Memorial Day in New York when the Los Angeles Dodgers came “home” to play the Mets. The Mets had just lost six straight in California to the two former New York teams. A total of 55,704 turned out—mostly Dodgers fans, of course—to see the Mets lose a doubleheader, the first game to Sandy Koufax. The Giants came next, with Willie Mays returning to the Polo Grounds, and they also swept the Mets. Before this was all over, the Mets had rolled up a seventeen-game losing streak.
In fairness, a huge part of the Mets’ first-season box-office success (they set an attendance record for a last-place team with 922,530) was due to New York’s longing for the Dodgers and Giants. And when the relocated Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants returned to New York for the first time in five years, those fifteen games accounted for 51 percent of the total attendance. The remaining fifty home dates averaged only 9,009 paying customers apiece.
On June 30, in Los Angeles, Koufax no-hit the Mets, striking out their first three batters on nine pitches. Unfortunately, it was for that game that the City of Glendale had bought twelve hundred tickets. “I thought it was just dandy, until I found out they had sold a lot of ’em to my own bank!” said Stengel.
Casey, of course, was one of the few people in baseball who could watch Koufax and compare him with long-departed legends. When asked if he thought Koufax might be the best pitcher he’d ever seen, Casey responded, “I would have to say that [Grover Cleveland] Alexander was the most amazing pitcher in the National League,” he said. “He had to pitch in the Philadelphia ball park, with that big tin fence in right field, and he pitched shutouts, which must mean he could do it. He had a fastball, a curve, a change of pace and perfect control. He was the best I batted against in the National League.”
It was true that Casey hadn’t seen everyone, of course—not quite. Cy Young was retired for four years before Casey broke into the majors.
On July 3, Casey went to the Stockton, California, home of the amateur pitching prospect Bob Garibaldi to persuade him to sign with the Mets. The next day, Garibaldi signed a $150,000 bonus contract with the Giants. For a twenty-year-old raised in California, perhaps there was little connection and little big-league glamour associated with the Ol’ Perfessor.
The Cincinnati manager, Fred Hutchinson, managing the National League all-star team, picked Casey as his first-base coach for the game in Washington, D.C., in July. This was the first time Casey had coached at first since he had managed the Boston Bees. (He coached third a few weeks later, when Solly Hemus was ejected from a game.)
President Kennedy was in attendance, and word was received that he would like to meet with Stan Musial, Warren Spahn, and Casey. Musial and Spahn arrived promptly; Casey was a little late and didn’t stay long.
“Mr. President,” he said, “I am delighted to meet you but I am not my own boss today and I have to work for another union.”
Hutchinson was one of Casey’s special people. “He loved him,” recalled Steve Jacobson. A few years later, Hutch was dying of cancer; everyone knew it. The Mets were leaving town and Casey was upset with himself. He had neglected to say goodbye to Hutch in the Reds’ clubhouse. The Mets were on the bus when he said out loud, but to himself, “Oh, maybe I better not.”
Closer to home, on July 23, Casey’s older brother, Grant, who had been in bad health, died of pulmonary tuberculosis in Kansas City at age seventy-four. He had been hospitalized for a week. Casey always said Grant was a good player, maybe the better of the two, but that freak accident that injured his foot when he was a boy killed off any hope of Grant Stengel’s turning pro. Instead, he became a taxi driver in Prairie Village, just south of Kansas City. That left their sister, Louise, who was unmarried and still lived in the old family house, as Casey’s surviving sibling. Casey left the team to go to the funeral.
A week later, he received the customary birthday cake at home plate—for birthday number seventy-two—before a game in St. Louis.
* Eventually, the means for stocking expansion teams improved, largely because of what happened to the Mets.