That Fella

(See Cover)

This is the way old Casey Stengel ran running his home run home to a Giant victory by a score of 5 to 4 in the first game of the World's Series of 1923.

This is the way old Casey Stengel ran, running his home run home when two were out in the ninth inning and the score was tied and the ball was bounding inside the Yankee yard.

This is the way--His mouth wide open.

His warped old legs bending beneath him at every stride.

His arms flying back and forth like those of a man swimming with a crawl stroke.

His flanks heaving, his breath whistling, his head far back . . .

The warped old legs, twisted and bent by many a year of baseball campaigning, just barely held out under Casey Stengel until he reached the plate running his home run home.

--Damon Runyon in the New York American, Oct. 11, 1923 This is the way old Casey Stengel ran his team home for his sixth pennant in seven years. This is the way Casey came down the stretch, running his team, the flag still hobbling like a loose ball among the leaders of the American League.

This is the way--His seamed old eagle's face slanting out in rage as he stormed from the dugout.

His old hands clapping in exasperation.

His tired arms flapping like those of a man going down for the third time as he waved for help from the bullpen.

His chest heaving as his lungs kept time with his runaway larynx.

His wise old baseball brain whirring with wonderful precision, clicking out strategy that outraged strategists, but guessing right so often it could hardly be called guessing.

Always a Surprise. Running the Yanks this hectic season, Casey was caught in a pennant race as wild and uncertain as his 1923 inside-the-park homer. He got started slowly; not until May 21 did the Yanks pick up the lead. July 1 saw them 6 1/2 games in front. Then they stumbled. By the end of August, Cleveland and Chicago were fighting for first. But in September the Yanks made Casey look like a prophet. He said that the team that won eight straight in the stretch would wind up in the World Series against the Dodgers. In the stretch, the Yankees won exactly eight games in a row.

It was the roughest melee the American League had seen in years. And Casey came home with a team full of trouble. Few teams win a pennant without a first-class shortstop to tighten up their infield, and veteran Phil Rizzuto was five years past his prime, a step too slow in the field, a little too tired to play regularly. Jerry Coleman, who could have filled in, broke his collarbone April 22 and was out for three months. No sooner was he back when he was beaned and bench-ridden again. Often, Casey's pitching was pitiful.

Eddie Lopat, the Junkman who helped win so many pennants, faded and was sold.

For weeks on end, Bullet Bob Turley could hardly find the plate. Big Moose Skowron might have added power to the batting order; he played a month and pulled a leg muscle. Just when the Yankees straightened out for the run to the wire, Mickey Mantle hobbled himself beating out a bunt. Then Rizzuto was skulled. Time was when Casey clobbered the opposition with two platoons. Now he was hard put to field a team.

To make matters worse, the opposition never let him relax. Before they fell apart in the season's last few days, the Cleveland Indians got by on pitching alone and almost ran off with the race. Ted Williams came back to baseball and the Boston Red Sox got into the scramble for the lead. In Chicago the White Sox caught fire. Detroit with its hothanded kids--Kaline, Kuenn and Tuttle--was always tough.

Washington, Kansas City, Baltimore--even the second division turned into tartars at embarrassing moments.

But Casey switched and shuffled, wheedled and roared. His line-up was seldom the same two days running. His batting order was always a surprise. His choice of pitchers broke every baseball rule but one --the categorical imperative to win.

Even last week, on that day in Boston when the pennant was grabbed for good, Casey defied convention. Fenway Park, with its short leftfield foul line, has always been tough for left-hand pitchers. In the afternoon, Casey started Lefty Tommy Byrne--and lost. In the nightcap, when Righty Don Larsen was shelled from the mound, Casey turned stubbornly to another southpaw, stocky Whitey Ford, who is not only a left-hander but also a valuable starter, too important to tire in relief. It turned out to be the right move.

Ford held off the Sox, and the Yanks won the big one 3-2. Once more, out of long memory and infinite experience, Casey had shown his club how to play like Yankees--which, this year at least, is better than they really are.

Anarchic Grammar. The work has been trying. At 65, Casey's temper has become frayed. He began the year by drop-kicking a press photographer out of spring training; during the regular season, he raged at the umpires more than usual, erupted from the dugout in a uniform that looked like well-worn pajamas, and even got himself heaved out of a game--something of a record for Stengel as a Yankee manager.

In between times, though, he was still the elder statesman of the national game, a grey-haired philosopher given to anarchic grammar and startling non sequiturs.

When the spirit moved him, he was still the racy raconteur and acrobatic vaudevillian who could have panicked the Palace. He was also the best manager in the majors. But even Casey was hard put to explain how he did it this year.

"I guess the best guy I got is Berra who catches every day and then Mantle." said Casey in pure Stengelese, as he stole a quick look backward over the season. "Skowron maybe, but Skowron played a month only and then he got hurt so he can't count. Rest of our infield is pretty good; hard to pick out the best.

"I put that fella* [Bob Cerv] in left and he can't field now, somebody else would use him maybe, but I can't. So I wait, and then my big fella [Mickey Mantle] gets hurt because he's goin' at half-speed and he's got to bunt once in a while because he can't always swing from his heels. Especially when he hits the ball to either side of the other fella [the opposing pitcher] he's sure to get on because nobody can catch him. But he [Cerv] wants to hit now and I give him his chance to play center and he does me a good job because he's a strong fella. But some fellas don't know about getting a bat with a thick handle like that Chicago fella [Nellie Fox] does. He knows when you get it on the fists your muscle ain't worth a damn. But do you think these fellas understand that?"

I Play the Percentages. "All my fellas came through. You take this fella who pitches left-handed [Tommy Byrne]. Why, he deserves the comeback of the year. No, make it that other one on second that I moved to third, but he can play anything. McDougald, I mean.

"The other fella [Billy Martin] comes out of the Army but he don't look at big-league pitching and I put him at short, but the Little Old Man [Phil Rizzuto] comes up with a good job for me and I shift the second baseman [McDougald] to third and put the Army guy [Martin] where he belongs, on second with the Old Man [Rizzuto] back on short and we click pretty good.

"Another fella deserves credit and where would I be without him? Phew! He can give me a job in the outfield and he can catch, too [Elston Howard, first Negro ever to play with the Yankees]. Good kid, too, if they leave him alone and stop fighting the Civil War all over and they almost ruined him. He's good.

"That fella on first, he gives me the big pinch-hit with 16 home runs in his first 32 hits [of his three first basemen. Casey is now talking about Ed Robinson]. So they say he won't be an outfielder [now, Joe Collins], but I'm not afraid to stick him in the outfield in the '53 series, and phew! What do they say in Brooklyn about me using a first baseman in the outfield? But he does me a good job.

"I've got to say something for that other fella in right [Hank Bauer]. I even used him as a catcher and I gamble and I lose [here Casey remembers a game with the White Sox when Berra.

Silvera and Howard, all his catchers, were gone and he had to call on Bauer]. But the fella hustles all the time.

"I think that the biggest reason this club has stayed in the fight is because of Mickey Mantle, who showed tremendous improvement this year and came nearer to fulfilling his potential than ever before.

"I don't know when I'm going to get a well-pitched game out of any of my fellas. In the beginning, it was an old fella [Jim Konstanty, ineligible for the Series] and a kid [Johnny Kucks] hold ing me up. So I had to send the old fella [Konstanty] down to the minors, but he comes back with the proper attitude.

"This Yankee team hasn't been my idea of a solid ball club so I had to play the percentages." A Matter of Time. Playing the percentages, of course, can be a pastime for men without imagination, who get all their answers by adding a column of figures. Casey gets results by using some weird arithmetic of his own, by grappling with private statistics in a man ner that barely makes sense to ordinary mortals.

As an awkward, left-handed student in a Kansas City dental college, Charles Dillon Stengel put in three grinding years and then discovered that dental-equipment colleges of those days catered to right-handed drill-pushers. Casey figured it would cost him $150 for special gear, played ,the percentages and quit dentistry.

That summer of 1910, at the age of 20, he signed on at $75 a month as an out fielder for a bush-league club in Kankakee. Ill. In July the league folded. Not Casey. He moved to Maysville, Ky., in the Blue Grass League. He was in base ball for life.

As a busher, he was already a clown.

He wore loud ties with his baseball uni form and he insisted on practicing sliding while he trotted to his position in the outfield. "There was a lunatic asylum across from the centerfield fence," he remembers happily. "Them guys in the loony bin always cheered when they saw me slide. But my manager used to tap his forehead and point at the asylum and say, 'It's only a matter of time. Stengel.' "

"Somebody Help Me!" By 1912, gags and all, Stengel had made it to the majors. He stayed on as a cocky, combative outfielder for Uncle Wilbert Robinson's Dodgers. He was still overburdened with brash Middle Western corn. He carried his home-town manners around with him, and his teammates quickly tagged him "K.C." The nickname stuck.

He was a baseball player after Uncle Robbie's happy heart. In spring training at Daytona Beach. Fla. in 1916. Casey helped talk the Dodger manager into trying to catch a baseball dropped from one of those new-fangled flying machines. Robbie waited confidently on the beach, mitt poised, unaware that Casey had substituted a grapefruit for the ball.

The plane passed overhead at 400 ft.

Uncle Robbie settled under the diving speck that dropped toward his hands. But the big sphere whipped through his hands and burst in a fine mess against his chest. He dropped, covered with pulp and grapefruit juice. "Jesus!" he moaned, sitting on the sand, his eyes squeezed shut.

"I'm killed! I'm blind! It's broke open my chest! I'm covered with blood! somebody help me!" The only help he got was a horse laugh. Only Casey could have pulled the stunt and gotten away with it.

Brooklyn Gets the Bird. Two years later, Casey was traded to Pittsburgh.

Brooklyn fans, who had learned to love him, cheerfully razzed him the first time he turned up at Ebbets Field in an enemy uniform. Casey understood, but he saw a chance to get even. Out in the field in the first inning, he watched a Dodger in the bullpen catch a sparrow. He borrowed the stunned bird and slipped it under his cap.

"I could feel it breathing as I hustled to bat," he recalls, "or maybe it was smothering from inhaling dandruff." Anyway, Casey walked to the batter's box brandishing five bats as if he were going to knock down the ballpark. The stands booed. Casey stepped to the plate, waited until the pitcher was about to throw, then called time. Elaborately he went through the motions of getting a cinder out of his eye. The Brooklyn stands roared with fury.

Casey caught his cue. He stepped toward the crowd, bowed low to his former fans, and removed his cap with a wide, sweeping gesture. Revived, the sparrow took off and headed toward Canarsie. There was a sudden silence. Seconds later, Ebbets Field rocked with laughter. Casey had given Brooklyn the bird.

Paths of Glory. Briefly, Stengel stayed with Pittsburgh and the Phillies. Then he came to the Giants. He won two games of the 1923 World Series for them with two home runs, but after that he was too old (33) to hang on. He was promptly traded to Boston. Undaunted, he quipped: "The paths of glory lead but to the Braves."

By 1926, Casey had slowed down too much even for the Braves. They made him president and manager of their Worcester, Mass, farm club. When they refused to release him from his contract for a job with the Toledo Mud Hens, Casey, as club president, wrote his own release and moved on. After six years learning his trade as Mud Hen manager, Casey was called back to the Dodgers. His teams were resounding flops. For three straight years, the Dodgers' Daffiness Boys finished in the second division. Next year, Brooklyn paid Casey his salary but told him they could do without his managing. After that, the paths of glory led him once more to the Braves.

Buy Pennsy. If possible, the Braves under Stengel (1938-43) were even worse than the Dodgers. But Casey's managerial genius began to flower. When a long game dragged on into darkness and the umpires refused to end it, Casey suddenly found it necessary to bring in a relief pitcher. He signaled to the bullpen by flashlight. Minutes later the umpires called the game.

When he discovered that his seventh-place players were spending their spare time playing the stock market, Casey called a clubhouse meeting. Looking furtively over his shoulder, he whispered that he Was going to give them a great tip on the market. "Buy Pennsylvania Railroad stock," he hissed. Then he roared into the snapper: "Because they're going to declare a dividend when you bums start getting shipped out of here!"

"We Wouldn't Dare." But it was Casey who was shipped out. In 1944 he was back in the minors, managing Milwaukee to an American Association pennant. In 1946 he moved to Oakland and the Pacific Coast League. Back in New York, meanwhile, the New York Yankees were looking for someone to take over from their aging manager, Joe McCarthy. "I know the man," said George Weiss, then Yankee farm system manager. "Get Casey Stengel."

"That comic?"sneered the Yankee owners. "That funnyman? We wouldn't dare bring him to New York."

While Casey went on to win a pennant for Oakland. Weiss moved up to become the Yankees' general manager. A shrewd, hardheaded businessman, Weiss was, and is, mercilessly efficient. He wasted no time firing Bucky Harris at the end of the 1948 season, sent for Stengel. The Yanks were off and running for their first of five successive pennants.

Weiss was the kind of horse trader who had picked up such stars as Phil Rizzuto and Yogi Berra practically for peanuts. Gil McDougald cost him only $1,500; Joe DiMaggio came for only $25,000; Mickey Mantle drew a bonus of a scant $1,000. He could also let the good ones go as coolly and quickly as he got them. Vic Raschi got short shrift last year when he kicked about a salary cut; Eddie Lopat and Enos Slaughter were traded away the minute their usefulness ended. Sentiment never won ball games, and during the 23 years Weiss has been with the Yankees they have set a remarkable record of 15 pennants and 13 World Series victories.

Make 'Em Pay. During the last seven of those years, Stengel has understandably edged Weiss out of the spotlight. He has done it by making Yankees out of whoever Weiss got for him. DiMaggio and Keller and Henrich, who won championships, are all gone; so are the great pitchers, Reynolds and Raschi, Lopat and Page. But the Yanks go on--mainly because Casey Stengel honestly believes that to be a Yankee is something special, and he never lets his players forget it. He gets them good salaries, blasts the front office for nickel-nursing policies, draws down a reported $100,000 a year himself, and insists that every Yankee is worth every penny he gets.

"Make 'em pay," he tells his men when they are asked for special interviews or to make personal appearances. "Make 'em pay you a thousand dollars. Don't go help those people with their shows for coffee-and-cake money. You're the Yankees--the best. Make 'em pay you high." Crossing the Bar. This respect for the dollar has made Casey himself a rich man --mostly because he wisely invested his early winnings in real estate and oil. He could, if he entertained the outrageous thought, retire in luxury and ease. But the very idea terrifies him. He wants to be a Yankee all his life.

He wants to be a Yankee so much that he sputters with envy and anger when he attends annual "alumni" meetings and listens to oldtimers rant about "the real old Yankees." A couple of years ago, Waite Hoyt, a first-rate pitcher of the Babe Ruth era, tearfully talked about his great teammates "who have passed into Valhalla." Casey couldn't stand it. "If I remember right, this fella Hoyt used to be a mortician," he said when it came his turn to speak. "It used to be his business to cry over those fellas. But this cry must be on the house." Then Casey sat down and bawled.

On most other occasions, Casey is a much more jovial actor. Professional comics have refused to follow him to the microphone after his after-dinner speeches.

He is too good. He acts out every story.

He can be the bush-league outfielder catching flies on his head, or Uncle Robbie catching that grapefruit. He can be the fading shortstop who can't go to his left any more--he will do a stiff-legged dance in the direction of an invisible ball; his face will break into naive wonderment as the phantom sphere whistles past. He thinks nothing of ruining a good suit of clothes to make his point. This summer, after the All-Star game in Milwaukee, he acted out that 1923, inside-the-park.

World Series homer. He waved his audience back, circled the bases by rounding the pillars in the Schroeder Hotel lobby, and then slid home beautifully on his stomach, skidding to a stop under the bar.

Maybe They Remember. By now, George Weiss is not alone in realizing that Casey is a good deal more than a clown.

This week, when Casey sends his team out after his sixth world championship, he knows it will not be easy. "Those fellas," says he, "they want to beat us. They never have. But I don't think their pitching is any better than ours. We beat their big fella [Don Newcombe] twice in the 1949 series. The first game it was 1-0 and Tommy Henrich hits one out of the park in the ninth inning. But that's what you need and I had DiMaggio and Keller and where do you find outfielders like that now? But we beat the fella [Newcombe], and we beat the other one [Carl Erskine] although he's a good pitcher.

"But let me tell you something. They don't roar around the bases like they used to. The first time I face Jackie Robinson, they tell me he steals home six times. I don't need anybody to tell me. It's in the papers, ain't it? So I watch him and I say: 'He ain't gonna steal on me.' I got me a play all set for him. So he gets on third base the first time and off he goes. He's already sitting back in the dugout when my fellas are trying to put my play in execution.

"These fellas [the Dodgers] haven't got the speed they had even two years ago when we played them last. And I'll tell you something: we won the World Series back in Vero Beach this spring when we polished them off 17-3. That scared 'em. That scared 'em so much they win 22 and lose only 2 to start the season. But I showed them some of my old power and maybe they remember."

There is no doubt that the Dodgers remember that fella [Stengel].

* To Casey, everyone is a fella; the listener supplies names at his own risk.

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