Casey: The Life And Legend Of Charles Dillon Stengel – Joseph Durso, 1967 ★★

A Winning Personality

The only man in baseball to have had his uniform number retired by both the New York Mets and the New York Yankees, Casey Stengel won those honors for entirely different reasons.

For the Yankees, he managed a team to an unmatched five straight World Series Championship seasons, and notched two more World Series wins and three further appearances in just 12 years. For the Mets, he diverted attention from epically bad baseball with a unique gift of gab and invigorating showmanship.

That the Mets retired #37 four years before the Yankees seems appropriate. Stengel’s personality often overshadowed his performance. You sense this reading Joseph Durso’s biography of the man, which was published between those two events and commemorating Stengel’s induction in baseball’s Hall of Fame as a case of winning personality.

Before he was a famous manager, Stengel had been a successful player, a minor-league hitting standout who became a New York City legend not with the Yankees or the Mets but the Brooklyn Dodgers, where he debuted in the outfield in 1912. Durso notes he was known less for hitting than his arguments with umpires and his practical jokes:

“I was fairly good at times,” he said later, reviewing his first days in the big leagues with a kind of objectivity. “But a lot of people seem to remember some of the stunts I pulled better than they do the ball games I helped win.”

Casey Stengel as a Brooklyn outfielder. In the 1916 World Series he led his team in batting average (.364) but fell short of victory against a Boston Red Sox team anchored by star pitcher Babe Ruth.
Image from https://www.cmgworldwide.com/2023/07/05/casey-stengel-the-most-colorful-manager-in-baseball-history/

If you want Casey the prankster, Durso’s Casey plays up his most famous stunts, including that time he had a grapefruit dropped on his manager by airplane and the time in the 1920s when, filling a minor league team’s triple role as player, manager, and president, he released himself, fired himself, and quit the team on the same day.

He also sheds light on Stengel’s more cerebral abilities. As a manager, he was very adept at sizing up talent and using it to his team’s advantage, both in games and during the entirety of a season. This attribute was on display the six years he managed the Toledo Mud Hens:

He was a natural judge of potential who could size up a dubious or marginal or troublesome player in the act of falling out of major league grace; then, as a manager, he could play a leading role in rehabilitating the refugee; and finally, as a front-office man, he could resell him back to the majors for new value in cash.

Casey managed nine seasons in Brooklyn and Boston before helming the Yankees. He was seen as brilliant in evaluating and maximizing player talent, but only once (1938) did he lead his team to a winning season.
Image from https://baseballhall.org/discover/inside-pitch/casey-stengel-retires

But Durso’s book is not a deep dive into Casey the field manager or the person. It touches only lightly on the less pleasant side of the man, who publicly ridiculed non-star players whenever his teams struggled. It does raise the needful question of how much of Casey’s magisterial success with the Yankees was from having some of the greatest players ever rather than his being a genius, but sidesteps any firm answer.

Durso, an accomplished sports reporter who plied his trade for over 50 years at The New York Times, was a member of the group Stengel called “my writers.” Durso knew the man very well, and through the course of the book, does offer some fun anecdotes about him.

My favorite was the time he was seen in the Yankees dugout wearing Mexican sandals. This footwear was a tell for the beat writers that Casey nursed a hangover and was better left alone. But he motioned over a photographer, who warily asked Casey if something was wrong.

“One of my relatives died,” Casey said, then smiled and added: “Old Grand-Dad.”

Casey consults with catcher Yogi Berra during a pitching change in 1960. DiMaggio was there at the beginning, Mantle at the end, but Berra was the one constant during Stengel's 12 years managing the Yankees. Stengel called Berra "my assistant" and in 1965 brought Berra to the Mets as a player-coach.
Photo by Neil Leifer from https://www.si.com/mlb/2015/09/23/yogi-berra-obit-yankees-star-dies-90#gid=ci0255853430012511&pid=yogi-berra-and-casey-stengel

Much of the time, Durso’s Casey is duller than it should be. The personality is lost in a sea of anecdotes about other famous ballplayers, some with only a tangential connection with Stengel himself. Much of the book references historic events that occurred at the same time as a milestone in Stengel’s career, or what played on Broadway.

As he did in his Joe DiMaggio biography decades later, Durso pulls long chunks of narrative from other sources, like columns by contemporaries or even the box score from Don Larsen’s perfect game. With DiMaggio: The Last American Knight, Durso lacked a cooperative subject. This time he had no shortage of quotable material direct from Stengel he could have incorporated into his narrative had he wanted.

It is hard to be completely objective reviewing this book, as Durso brings my family into it. My grandfather was a newspaperman who covered baseball in the 1920s and 1930s and thought it would be grand to bring Casey to the house to meet his young son. As Durso tells it, my father apparently was unimpressed. “I want to see Babe Ruth,” he cried.

Dad liked and admired Durso; he was one of the good guys. Durso didn’t use his power of the pen to abuse athletes, and he covered his beat with compassion and care. I don’t want to come off like Leo Durocher, but there is a cost when a writer wants to be liked by his subjects, and it is often carried by the reader.

Durso does offer useful perspective on Stengel’s signal success with the Yankees, a team that enjoyed much success before he arrived and after he left, if not in as concentrated a form.

Stengel in the visitors' dugout at Fenway Park, Boston. When the Yankees let him go after another pennant-winning season in 1960, citing his age, Casey was bitter, saying: “I’ll never make the mistake again of being 70 years old.”
Photo by Leslie Jones from https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:wd375w830

Much of it was his ability to juggle players. He was credited with perfecting the art of “platooning,” but it was also his ability to make do with bench talent when his stars were not available, like in his first year, 1949, when he won a World Series without DiMaggio for most of the season.

He quotes a top Yankees executive, Red Patterson: “Not only did Stengel make changes that paid off in situations like that, but he made the Yankees more popular, more likable than they ever had been. They always want everything but love. But then, when they were hurt, they won the public, too.”

Durso likens Stengel’s impact on the Yankees to that of Pope John XXIII on the Roman Catholic Church, someone who lifted a veil and let in some light. Casey did have something John lacked, a loving wife who supported him both emotionally and materially through ups and downs.

Durso spends time with Edna Stengel, too, touring the Stengel home in Glendale, California and having her a story about how a man came to their New York hotel to claim tickets he said Casey left for him. She handed them over, not realizing until much later that this was one guy in all Manhattan who didn’t know her husband at all.

Casey and his wife, Edna met at a game she was watching and he was playing in. Edna's wealthy family became a source of financial security for Stengel, while Edna herself offered emotional help when Casey's body began to fail him in his last year managing the Mets.
Image from https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/sports/baseball/17vecsey.html

Edna was one of the backstops of Casey’s wandering life; another was George Weiss, the executive who ran the Yankees and was shown the door at the same time as Stengel. Both are well represented in this book.

The book opens with Stengel in his late-in-life element, holding court as manager of the Mets, delivering classic “Stengelese:”

It was a kind of rambling semi-doubletalk laced with ambiguous, assumed or unknown antecedents, a liberal use of “which” instead of “who” or “that,” a roundabout narrative framed in great generalities and dangling modifiers, a lack of proper names for “that fella” or simply “the shortstop,” plus flashes of incisiveness tacked onto the ends of sentences, like: “And, of course, they got Perranoski.”

You do get a lot of Stengel’s voice in that first chapter; it is in shorter supply as the book goes on and is missed.

Durso gives you instead the official Casey as he was known in the last decade of his life. If it lacks for shadows and depth, and it does, it offers some texture of the man himself and an appreciation for what he did.