(1962 Random House Book Club Edition.)
1962 Random House Book Club Edition.
https://www.amazon.com/Casey-bat-story-baseball-Paxton/dp/B0006AXOES?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B0006AXOES
Charles was born on July 30, 1890 in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, the youngest of three children. His father, Louis Stengel, had emigrated from Germany in 1851 and sold insurance; his mother, Jennie Gordon, was Irish. "Charlie" was the youngest of three children, and the second son.
At Kansas City Central High School, Charles was an all-around athlete: he was captain of the football team, and pitched the baseball team to the state championship in 1909. Enrolled in Western Dental College (which later became a part of the University of Kansas City), he could tell that his dexterity with the drill and probe was not developing as fast as his baseball skill.
Intent on earning enough money to study dentistry, he became a professional baseball player in 1910, signing with the minor league Kansas City Blues, who promptly farmed him out to Kankakee, Illinois, in the Northern Association. When the league went broke he finished the season with Maysville of the Blue Grass League.
In 1911 he played at Aurora, Illinois, in the Wisconsin-Illinois League. Throwing and hitting left-handed, he led the league in batting with a . 352 average. A scout for the Brooklyn Dodgers (then known as the Trolley Dodgers and also as the Superbas) chanced to see Stengel play when he was having a good day and signed him up. The following spring the Dodgers assigned him to the Montgomery, Alabama, team of the Southern Association and in September promoted him to the big leagues. By now his nascent career as a dentist was finished.
The Dodgers traded him in 1918 to the Pittsburgh Pirates, who traded him to the Philadelphia Phillies in 1919, who shortly traded him to the New York Giants where, in 1922, he had his best season, hitting . 368 in eighty-four games.
He won two games for the Giants in the World Series of 1923 with two home runs and a series batting average of . 417. But shortly after the season began the Giants sent him on to Boston, where he ended his big league playing career with the Braves in 1925. His lifetime batting average was . 284, compiled in 1, 277 games.
Already he was famous as a prankster, and known in his playing days as the "king of the grumblers, " a group of players feared and respected for their locker-room antics. Stengel was endlessly imaginative in devising shenanigans which could be puerile as well as simply funny. Once, playing the outfield, he disappeared down a drainage hole, hid there until a fly ball was hit in his direction, and then, as if by magic, rose from the netherworld and caught the ball, with the cover of the hole under his arm. One of his best-remembered stunts marked his return as a Pirate to Ebbets Field, where the Dodgers played.
As the intensely partisan Dodger fans gave him the bird, he bowed low before the grandstand, yanked off his hat, freeing a sparrow trapped there, thus reciprocating the insult majestically. Casey labored for seven years as a manager in the minor leagues--sometimes taking the field as a player, too--with indifferent success, serving with Toledo in the American Association after his stint with Worcester.
He became a shrewd judge of baseball talent, which made him a clever trader of players. And if his teams were not often winners, he provided entertainment for the fans and the teams whose admiration he inspired. Stengel finally returned to the majors in 1932 as a coach for the Dodgers. He became the manager two years later and served through 1936, when he was fired.
In 1938 he was appointed manager of the Boston Braves, where he remained through the 1943 season although up to this point the big league teams he ran never finished higher than fifth (and that only twice) in the eight-team league. Still, his lectures to young players, full of humor and sound advice, earned him the sobriquet "The Old Professor. " Although he had by now become a rich man through sound investments that included real estate and oil properties and the Valley National Bank of California, he could not leave baseball, his abiding love.
He went back to managing in the minors. After considerable success in the American Association (at Milwaukee and Kansas City) and the Pacific Coast League (at Oakland), the top minor leagues, the famed New York Yankees startled the baseball world by selecting him to be their skipper in 1949. Many baseball fans and sportswriters viewed Stengel as an elderly buffoon (he was fifty-eight years old) who was surely not in the permanent plans of the Yankee owners. But in his tenure from 1949 through the 1960 season, Stengel's triumphant teams earned him a reputation as baseball's greatest manager, albeit he had the services of some of the outstanding stars in the history of the game.
The team fell to third in 1959 yet took the pennant once more the following year. By now, perhaps because of his advancing years, perhaps because of his unparalleled success, Stengel had become imperious and impatient with his players, and increasingly at odds with the Yankees owners. They fired him shortly after the team lost the World Series to the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1960. Now seventy years old, he rusticated for a year at his beloved home in Glendale in the foothills of the Sierras.
Then in 1962 a call he could not resist came from his old friend George Weiss, the longtime general manager of the Yankees, who had also been released and who was now organizing the New York Mets. Weiss offered Stengel the unenviable opportunity to manage the Mets, an expansion team in the National League that somehow was expected to replace in the hearts of local fans both the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, franchises that had moved to greener pastures in San Francisco and Los Angeles respectively. Casey accepted the challenge with alacrity and his fruitless efforts to teach the young men he was assigned how to play winning baseball and to revive the fire in some tired veterans became a charming piece of national theater.
With possibly the worst team ever assembled in the big leagues (the team lost 452 games out of the 646 it played in its first four years) sometimes even Stengel grew discouraged: "Don't anybody here know how to play this game?" he is said to have moaned. The public, nevertheless, took to its heart these feckless "Amazin's, " led by their indomitable "Philosopher of the Dugout. "
After two years of playing at the old Polo Grounds in Manhattan, the Mets moved to their gleaming new home, Shea Stadium in Queens. Despite their ineptness on the field, they cavorted before huge crowds that filled the stands out of a curious mixture of affection and pity for them and for the old man at their helm. By this time, the hitherto unknown tongue that Stengel generally spoke in public had become famous as Stengelese.
Delivered nonstop and full of malapropisms, mangled syntax, and doubletalk, his monologues to his players and his interviewers became his trademark, half "put on" and half natural. Stengel's time with the Mets ended abruptly on July 25, 1965, when he fell and fractured his left hip. That afternoon as he lay in the hospital, a huge throng was on hand at Shea Stadium to celebrate Casey's seventy-fifth birthday. The following month he was on his way back to Glendale, his remarkable baseball career now over.
The Mets honored him with a sinecure as vice-president for the West Coast. A year later he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York, along with Ted Williams, the incomparable slugging outfielder of the Boston Red Sox. Stengel was an authentic folk hero, and for all his mischief and blather (which sometimes seemed to deflect attention from the bad play of his charges) he was a master of the game.
Stengel died of cancer in Glendale, California.
Charles Dillon Stengel's Yankees won the World Series five consecutive times (1949–1953), the only time that has been achieved. As part of professional baseball's centennial celebrations in 1969, Stengel was voted its "Greatest Living Manager". Stengel is the only man to have worn the uniform (as player or manager) of all four Major League Baseball teams in New York City in the 20th century: the Dodgers, Giants, Yankees and Mets. He is the only person to have played or managed for the home team in five New York City major league venues: Washington Park, Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds, Shea Stadium and the original Yankee Stadium. The Yankees dedicated a plaque in Yankee Stadium's Monument Park in Stengel's memory on July 30, 1976. He was inducted into the New York Mets Hall of Fame in 1981. In 2009, in an awards segment on the MLB Network titled "The Prime 9", he was named "The Greatest Character of The Game", beating out Yogi Berra.
(1962 Random House Book Club Edition.)
In his minor league wanderings he had picked up the nickname Casey, not, he said, because he hailed from Kansas City ("K. C. ") but because of the popularity of the poem "Casey at the Bat, " which had led people to dub many ball players "Casey. " Stengel played the outfield in the major leagues for fourteen years, although he was built somewhat slighter than many of his fellow players, standing five feet ten inches tall and weighing 175 pounds.
Stengel also earned a reputation as a clown. At a game in Brooklyn in May 1919, he released a sparrow from under his cap as he was about to bat. "The higher-ups complained I wasn't showing a serious attitude by hiding a sparrow in my hat, " he remembered later, "but I said any day I got three hits, I figure I am showing a more serious attitude than a lot of players with no sparrows in their hats. " He also began to speak to reporters in tortured syntax and fractured words woven around rambling digressions, a style of speech that came to be known as "Stengelese. "
Quotes from others about the person
Commissioner William Eckert said of Stengel, "he's probably done more for baseball than anyone".
Richie Ashburn, a member of the 1962 Mets, stated, "Don't shed any tears for Casey. He wouldn't want you to . .. He was the happiest man I've ever seen".
In 1923 he had met Edna Lawson on a blind date at the old Polo Grounds, the Giants' home park, and they were married in 1924. The Stengels had no children.
