Casey Stengel
Charles Dillon "Casey" Stengel (born July 30, 1890 and died September 29, 1975) was a famous baseball player and manager. He got the nickname "Casey" from Kansas City ("K. C."), Missouri, where he was born. In his early days, he was also known as "Dutch", at that time a common nickname for Americans of German ancestry.
Playing career
He was an outfielder on several teams in the National League beginning on September 17, 1912: the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1912 to 1917; the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1918 and 1919; the Philadelphia Phillies in 1920 and part of 1921; the New York Giants from 1921 to 1923; and the Boston Braves in 1924 and 1925. He played in three World Series: in 1916 for the Dodgers and in 1922 and 1923 for the Giants.
Template:MLB HoF He threw left handed and batted left handed. His batting average was .284 over 14 major league seasons.
He was a competent player, but by no means a superstar. On July 8, 1958, discussing his career before the Senate's Estes Kefauver Committee on baseball's antitrust status, he made this observation: "I had many years that I was not so successful as a ballplayer, as it is a game of skill." [1]
Nonetheless, he had a good World Series in a losing cause in 1923, hitting 2 home runs to win the two games the Giants won in that Series. He was traded to the perennial second-division-dwelling Braves in the off-season, a fact which apparently stung him. Years later he made this pithy comment: "It's lucky I didn't hit 3 home runs in three games, or McGraw would have traded me to the 3-I League."
Yankee manager
He is better known for managing than playing. His first managerships were on the Brooklyn Dodgers (from 1934 to 1936) and Boston Braves (1938-1943), where he was not very successful, never finishing better than fifth in an 8-team league. As he said in 1958, "I became a major league manager in several cities and was discharged. We call it discharged because there is no question I had to leave."
Stengel demonstrated he could be successful as a manager of a team having worthy talent. In 1944, Stengel was hired as the manager of the minor league Milwaukee Brewers, over the strenuous objections of club owner Bill Veeck (who was serving in the South Pacific with the Marines at the time, and therefore unable to prevent the hiring). Veeck was proven wrong as Stengel led the Brewers to the American Association pennant that year. In 1948 Stengel managed the Oakland Oaks to the Pacific Coast League championship. This caught the attention of the New York Yankees, who were looking for a new manager.
Despite a good deal of initial skepticism in the press, Stengel was hired as the skipper of the Yankees in 1949, and finally had a chance for success at the major league level. His astuteness and realistic viewpoint as a manager is revealed in this comment about the Yankees when he took their reins: "There is less wrong with this team than any team I have ever managed." That would happily prove to be an understatement.
He proceeded to set records for championships, becoming the only person to manage a team to five consecutive World Series championships as the late-40s, early-50s Yankees became a juggernaut. He won two additional world championships and three additional league pennants afterward. While managing the Yankees he gained a reputation as one of the game's sharpest tactitians: he platooned left and right handed hitters extensively (which had become a lost art by the late 1940s), and sometimes pinch hit for his starting pitcher in early innings if he felt a timely hit would break the game open. While praised for his platooning strategy, he downplayed it: "There's not much of a secret to it. You put a righthand hitter against a lefthand pitcher and a lefthand hitter against a righthand pitcher and on cloudy days you use a fastball pitcher".
He was also known as a wit and raconteur, whose stream-of-consciousness monologues on all facets of baseball history and tactics (and anything else that took his fancy) became known as "Stengelese" to sportswriters. They also earned him the nickname "The Old Perfesser".
In the spring of 1953, after the Yankees had won four straight World Series victories he made the following observation, which could just as easily have been made by The Perfessor's prize pupil, Yogi Berra: "If we're going to win the pennant, we've got to start thinking we're not as smart as we think we are."
Casey's Amazin' Mets
After losing to the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1960 World Series after a ninth inning game 7 winning home run by Bill Mazeroski, Stengel was involuntarily retired from the Yankees, because he was believed to be too old to manage. "I'll never make the mistake of being 70 again!" Stengel remarked. He was talked out of retirement after one season to manage the New York Mets, at the time an expansion team with no chance of winning many games, from 1962 to 1965. Mocking his well-publicized advanced age, when he was hired he said, "It's a great honor to be joining the Knickerbockers", a New York baseball team that had seen its last game around the time of the Civil War.
The Mets proved to be so incompetent that they gave Stengel plenty of Stengelese-material for the New York City newspaper writers. "Come see my "Amazin' Mets," Stengel said. "I've been in this game a hundred years, but I see new ways to lose I never knew existed before." On his three catchers: "I got one that can throw but can't catch, one that can catch but can't throw, and one who can hit but can't do either."
Though his "Amazin'" Mets finished last in a 10-team league all four years, Stengel was a popular figure nonetheless, not least due to his personal charisma. The Mets themselves proved to be as loveable, due in part to Stengel's charisma and the "loveable loser" charm that followed the team around in those days. Fans packed the old Polo Grounds (prior to Shea Stadium being built), many of them bringing along colorful placards and signs with all sorts of sayings on them. Warren Spahn, who had played under Stengel for the Braves and for the 1965 Mets commented "I'm probably the only guy who worked for Stengel before and after he was a genius." Stengel's retirement, announced on August 30, 1965, followed a fall at Shea Stadium, in which he broke his hip.
Honors
His uniform number 37 has been retired by both the Yankees and the Mets. The Yankees retired the number on August 8, 1970, and dedicated a plaque in Yankee Stadium's Monument Park in his memory on July 30, 1976. The plaque calls him "For over sixty years one of America's folk heroes who contributed immensely to the lore and language of the Yankees and our national pastime baseball." He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1966 and inducted into the New York Mets Hall of Fame in 1981.
Stengel is the only person to have worn the uniform (as player or manager) of all four Major League Baseball teams that played in New York City in the 20th Century (while each team was in New York City): The New York Giants (as a player), the Brooklyn Dodgers (as both a player and a manager), the New York Yankees (as a manager), and the New York Mets (also as a manager).
In 1975, he was asked if he would like to return to managing. He responded, "Well, to be perfectly truthful and honest and frank about it, I am 85 years old, which ain't bad, so to be truthful and honest and frank about it, the thing I'd like to be right now is...an astronaut."
He died in Glendale, California and was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, Glendale, California.
The day after his death, Los Angeles columnist Jim Murray wrote, "Well, God is getting an earful tonight."
The plaza surrounding Shea Stadium is named after Stengel (Casey Stengel Plaza), as is the New York City Transit Bus Depot (Casey Stengel Depot) across the street from the stadium.
Source
- Quotations sprinkled through this article are from the book The Gospel According to Casey, by Ira Berkow and Jim Kaplan, (c)1992.
- Pietrusza, David, Matthew Silverman & Michael Gershman, ed. (2000). Baseball: The Biographical Encyclopedia. Total/Sports Illustrated.
Trivia
Casey Stengel is the first of four men (as of 2005) to manage both the Yankees and the Mets. Yogi Berra, Dallas Green, and Joe Torre are the others.
External links
- 1891 births
- 1975 deaths
- Baseball Hall of Fame
- Baseball managers
- Boston Braves managers
- Boston Braves players
- Brooklyn Dodgers managers
- Brooklyn Dodgers players
- Kansas Citians
- New York Giants baseball players
- New York Mets managers
- New York Yankees managers
- People from Missouri
- Philadelphia Phillies players
- Pittsburgh Pirates players