Just after losing Game Seven of the World Series of 1964, the Yankees fired their manager, Berra, in a move reminiscent of the firing of Casey four years earlier. It was even done in the same hotel and produced the same public-relations backlash.
Yogi reached out to Casey to inquire how his coaching staff looked for ’65, and the Mets hired Yogi, reuniting the two. Yogi had to pay two tolls to get from New Jersey to Flushing, but he was glad to stay in uniform and to be working with Stengel again. The Mets also signed Warren Spahn as a pitcher and coach.
So it was off to St. Pete for spring training with the can’t-miss photo opportunity of Casey and Yogi together, and even the ironic photo of Casey with Spahn—who had played for him at the very start of his pitching career, “before [Casey] was a genius,” with the Boston Braves.
Yogi did not make too many bad decisions in his career, but he made one in late April, when he agreed to be activated and do some catching for the Mets at age forty. Beginning on April 27, he appeared in four games, two of them complete games behind the plate, both as Al Jackson’s batterymate. (The Mets were 1-1 in those games.) Yogi had two singles in nine at-bats and retired again, this time for good. He came to regret the foolishness of his decision to play, because it took him off the rarified air list of men who had played for only one team over lengthy careers. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said.
Spahn lasted until July 14, when Casey just told him it was time for the team to go with younger players. He’d gone 4-12 in nineteen starts.
A milestone of sorts was reached on May 8, when Jack Fisher hurled a 4–2 victory over Milwaukee and someone calculated that it was the three thousandth victory of Casey’s managing career, minors and majors included. The victory lifted the Mets out of the cellar into ninth place, and they would stay at that “lofty” point until May 28, when they returned to their accustomed position.
Ron Swoboda, still just twenty, was a delight to Casey early that season. The rookie slugger from Baltimore hit .333 in April with four home runs, and represented what Casey had always hoped for—the “youth of America” coming to play ball for the Mets. “He can hit the ball out of the building,” bragged Casey, secretly hoping for his next Mickey Mantle. Swoboda would remember:
On opening day, we’re playing the Dodgers, and suddenly I hear “Sa-boda—grab a bat.” He sends me up to pinch-hit—and to bat against Don Drysdale. I “hear” a fastball go by me for strike one, and I foul off strike two. Finally, I hit a liner to second—I had survived. The next game, he started me and I hit a homer off Turk Farrell. And I was his guy that month.
But in mid-May, I had a bad moment. I forget my sunglasses and screw up a fly ball in Busch Stadium; it gets by me for a triple in the ninth inning. I wanted to dig a hole and climb in. The Cardinals tie the game.
I was due to bat in the tenth and I wanted to make up for this in the worst way. But I pop out, and when I get back to the dugout, I throw my helmet down. There it sits. No one moves it or says anything. We don’t score and I have to go back in the field. Before I do it, I decided to stomp on the helmet, give it one good shot. And I cracked it. Team equipment, and I cracked it.
That was enough to Casey. He bounces up the stairs before I could go to my position and he says, quite sternly, like a father might, “Goddamn it, kid, when you screwed up that play in right field, did I run into the clubhouse and throw your watch on the floor?”
And he was right, of course. He yanked me out of the game, and I went into the clubhouse and cried. But he put me back out there the next day, which was his way of saying, “I hope you learned your lesson.”
I was a right fielder and Casey was a right fielder. I felt privileged to play for him. I was enthralled.
He had his own way of explaining things. When he was teaching me about hitting the cutoff man, he told me to throw like I was picking up grass—to follow through like that. One day in St. Pete, I was throwing with Carlton Willey, and my throw sailed over his head and broke the middle panel of the three windows in Casey’s office. I could see his silhouette peering through the hole—and I know I’m in his bull’s-eye.
Swoboda liked talking to the “old man.” A conversationalist at heart, he once engaged Casey in nonbaseball talk at a writers’ dinner: “ ‘Would you be having this much fun if you were a dentist?’ ” he asked? “And Casey said, ‘If I was a dentist, I’d be an orthodontist. People will pay to have things done for their kids before they pay for themselves.’ Very smart observation.
“He had a face right off Mount Rushmore, those incredible blue eyes, the gimp in his walk—what a wonderful character.”
The game when Swoboda threw his helmet was on May 23. Swoboda remembered that Casey’s arm was in a cast. On May 10, an off-day on the regular schedule, the Mets took a bus up to West Point to play an exhibition game against Army. These exhibitions had been going on for years against the New York teams, and Casey himself had even played in one in 1922, while with the Giants. That long-ago game summary in The New York Times noted that the Giants were “aided and abetted by Casey Stengel, whose comedy amused the cadets in the stands.”
As he had done when the Yankees went up to West Point in the 1950s, Casey read the Orders of the Day in the cadets’ mess hall before the game, and had a good time with that. But, leaving the gym where the team changed, and walking in his spikes to the bus (which would take the team to the playing field), Casey slipped on the concrete walk. He had asked the clubhouse boy to put shoes without spikes in his bag, but the shoes he found in there had spikes. His right wrist was fractured. It was set at the West Point hospital, and he rode back to New York with a cast on his right arm.
“It was my fault,” he said. “I should have been early, and then I wouldn’t have been rushed to move fast on the concrete with my spikes.”
It wasn’t enough to sideline him, of course. The season moved ahead.
The July 31 issue of The Saturday Evening Post came out on July 24 and featured a story by Ed Linn titled “The Last Angry Old Man.” It was fairly unflattering.
Linn had collaborated with Bill Veeck on his best-selling memoir (Veeck—As in Wreck) and was no doubt influenced by Veeck’s rather dubious overview of Stengel.
“Casey Stengel has two faces,” wrote Linn. “There is the face the public has come to know and laugh at, the gimpy, dog-eared old man winking, grimacing and babbling on in what is taken, on faith, to be profound—if not always decipherable—wisdom.
Veeck acknowledged that Casey was a “wonderfully funny and engaging man” and cited his loyalty too, but criticized him for being more loyal to his writers than to his players. He also raised suspicion that his coach, Solly Hemus, had been fired for attracting too much attention away from Casey (something that would have come as a surprise to Mets followers).
After the story circulated, Hemus was moved to respond. “I know Casey had nothing to do with my leaving the Mets, and the story is unjust to Stengel. I got along with Casey and it was a pleasure to work with him. He would be the first to tell a man if he couldn’t use him any longer; if he had fired me, there would have been no secret about it.”
The dustup over the magazine piece came and went, and it was back to business.
Casey’s seventy-fifth birthday was coming up, on July 30. Three-quarters of a century. Fifty-five years in baseball. The fortieth anniversary of his first managing job.
On July 22, Mayor Wagner presented him with a scroll in honor of his milestone birthday and all he had meant to New York baseball over the years. Casey graciously accepted and said a few words in Stengelese. (He paid Lindsey Nelson two dollars to write him a speech, and Lindsey wrote, “Thank you very much.” Casey expanded a bit.) The next day, Friday, July 23, was proclaimed “Casey Stengel Day” in New York City.
Saturday, July 24, was Old-Timers’ Day at Shea Stadium, and Casey participated in the festivities by wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform. Then he filled out a lineup card for the regular game against Bunning and the Phillies.
He had Chuck Hiller at second, Roy McMillan at short, Ed Kranepool at first, Charlie Smith at third, Johnny Lewis in right, Ron Swoboda in left, Gary Kolb in center, Chris Cannizzaro catching and Tom Parsons pitching. Bunning went the distance to beat the Mets 5–1, in a two-hitter. The Mets fell to 31-64, still in tenth place, twenty-four games out of first.
After the game, all the Old-Timers’ Day participants, the writers, and the Mets officials headed for Toots Shor’s on West Fifty-second Street in Manhattan for a party. “He heard someone speak about the continuing glories of the game,” wrote Leonard Lyons in the Post, “by quoting Branch Rickey at 82: ‘My greatest thrill? I haven’t had it yet.’ ” When Dan Daniel said, “If he hasn’t had it at 82, then he’ll never have it,” Casey applauded.
The party went late into the night, and Joe DeGregorio, the Mets’ comptroller, suggested that Casey spend the night at his house, since he would have to be at Shea early the next day; they had a doubleheader, and Casey would be honored for his birthday again, between games. DeGregorio lived in Whitestone, eight minutes from the ballpark. It sounded like a good plan, even though the Essex House was just seven blocks from Shor’s.
Like most people at the party, Casey had been drinking. He slipped and fell sometime in the next hour. There is some uncertainty about where the fall happened. If it was at Shor’s, there would have been many witnesses, so that seems unlikely, although Joe Durso thought the fall took place in the men’s room. It was either at Shor’s or at DeGregorio’s home, early in the morning hours of July 25. He could even have had a fall at both places. For history’s sake, it was like the punch from Ali that knocked out Liston in Lewiston, Maine: nobody really saw it.
DeGregorio got him into the house and into bed. But Casey woke up at 8:00 a.m. in great pain. DeGregorio called the trainer, Gus Mauch, to come over. By 11:00 a.m., Casey was in an ambulance on his way to Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan. He had suffered a displaced fracture in his left hip. There would be no Casey at the ballpark that day. Wes Westrum would run the team.
Two days later, July 27, the Mets’ team physician Dr. Peter Lamotte operated on him, inserting a ball made of a cobalt-chromium alloy, vitallium, called a Moore hip prosthesis. Casey would require at least three weeks in the hospital. There was, at once, a growing belief that he would not manage again.
Yogi Berra was among the first to visit him, and observed, “He’s got more flowers in his room than there is in a garden.” Edna had been home in Glendale all season, nursing a bad back and wearing a brace. But, despite her own back pain, which had her in bed most of the day, she managed to fly east on July 26 to be at Casey’s side.
By August 6, Casey was starting to get around with a walker, and was in his usual gregarious form. The Mets scheduled a press conference at the hospital, in which Casey entertained everyone for forty-five minutes, sitting up in a yellow kimono. He popped up to show his mobility, and answered every question. As for the big one, “Will you be back?,” he could only say, “I couldn’t tell you.”
On August 8, the Mets held their annual Banner Day at Shea, with many of the “placards” sending love and good wishes to Casey.
He was discharged from the hospital on August 13 and returned to the Essex House, a few blocks away. He wanted to stay in New York, because if he went home to Glendale, he would be out of TV and radio touch with his team. In New York, he could at least follow the games.
Coincidentally, his sister, Louise, who was now seventy-eight and lived alone in the old family house in Kansas City, took a fall at home around this same time and fractured her hip. She was alone when it happened, and she lay on the floor for more than a day until a neighbor heard her cries for help.
On August 30, Harold Weissman and Matt Winick, the Mets’ PR men, called around to alert the media to a press conference at the Essex House that day. Casey entered the room with the help of a black metallic crooked cane, and went to sit with Weiss and Joan Payson at a head table.
“After much consideration,” he said, “I have decided to retire as manager of the Mets at the close of the 1965 season. This is due to my wish to be relieved of the arduous duties of active management and on medical advice following my injury. I am delighted to be remaining with the Mets organization in an executive capacity.”
A long question-and-answer session followed. “I’ll probably be the highest-paid scout you ever saw,” he said, and he described his new activities and his salary. (He would receive $50,000 in 1966, $25,000 in 1967, and $12,500 in 1968, but no pension. He would continue with the Mets organization after 1968 because of “all the club did for me.”)
“You don’t expect me to go onto the mound and take a pitcher out by putting this around his neck, do you?” he laughed, holding up the cane. “If I can’t run out to the mound, I don’t wanna finish out my service.”
It was time. The Mets made him a vice president.
“I had hoped to do better, but it didn’t work out that way,” he said. “However, I can see some good coming out of it. We have eight or nine players who could become big.”
He wasn’t far off. The ’65 Mets had Kranepool, Swoboda, Cleon Jones, Bud Harrelson, and Tug McGraw—five players who would be on the roster of the world-champion Mets four years later. Larry Bearnarth, Ron Hunt, and Jim Hickman were also developing into good players.
His coach, Wes Westrum, the opposite of Casey in personality, would succeed him as manager.
On September 2, Casey returned to Shea to say goodbye to his players, and to hobble to the mound with his cane before an empty ballpark, holding a folded number-37 Mets uniform. “I don’t know if they’re going to burn it. If they don’t put this old uniform away, I hope 37 gets a good prospect in it some day.”
But the Mets were retiring his number that very day, the first time this had happened in the franchise’s short history. “I hope they don’t put ME under glass,” he said.
He was next on his way home to Glendale, but first came a stopover in Kansas City to visit Louise. In Glendale, he was greeted by kids from Hoover High School holding WELCOME HOME CASEY signs.
Casey did not go to the first Mickey Mantle Day at Yankee Stadium, on September 18, 1965—celebrating his having played in two thousand games—but he was invited, and he did send a handwritten postcard:
To: Mickey Mantle; c/o Yankee Stadium.
Regardless of being the greatest distance hitter. Regardless of winning pennants for the Yankees and Casey Stengel, the two thousand games will be known as your greatest day.
Casey Stengel.
Casey might really have wished to say “You hit amazing home runs for me, but I always wanted more.” His postcard was a bow to public relations, knowing it would be read on the field.
Invited to throw out the first pitch at Game Three of the World Series at Dodger Stadium, he cast away his cane, stepped out of the dugout-level boxes, and threw a nifty pitch to the Dodger catcher, John Roseboro.
It was time to figure out what retirement would mean.
There was no doubt that, by taking on the Mets job, he hurt his reputation as a manager. Once again, it was clear that with good players he was a good manager, and with bad players, not. Still, his Yankee years had put him so high on the list of games won, championships won, etc., that he will always be included in conversations about the greatest managers.
The Mets job gave him fame in mainstream America and made him one of the nation’s most beloved citizens—even among people who cared little about baseball. He was a living American folk hero. On balance, it was a good tradeoff.