Book Excerpt

Chapter Two from “Forging Genius”

By Steven Goldman

(Part Two of Two; click here for Part One)

In 1841, the United States had three presidents. In the Bronx, 1946 was the year of three managers. McCarthy’s replacement, veteran Yankees catcher Bill Dickey, refused to finish out the season under MacPhail. The season was completed under interim manager/organization man Johnny Neun. Neun “had let it be known after about a week that he knew now what McCarthy and Dickey had been talking about and, by God, he didn’t have to take that from anybody either.” The second-division Cincinnati Reds seemed a better option, and off he went.

That September, Stanley Raymond “Bucky” Harris was hired to serve in an undefined executive capacity (MacPhail acted as his own general manager, and Weiss, the club’s farm director since 1932, was on hand to take care of anything that might escape his notice. Barrow, ostensibly a consultant to the club, was also available, though MacPhail never called) and asked to evaluate the team. Almost a quarter century earlier, Harris had been the twenty-eight-year-old “boy manager” who had guided the Washington Senators to consecutive pennants in his initial seasons at the helm. After that the going was not nearly so smooth. Harris’s initial command of the Senators lasted until 1928, at which time owner Clark Griffith terminated him, in part for not following up on his earlier success, and in part for failing to recognize the talents of second base prospect Buddy Myer.

Harris moved on to Detroit, where in five seasons he failed to produce a first-division finish. Still in demand, in 1934 he became the first manager hired by Tom Yawkey as owner of the Boston Red Sox. The team’s 76–76 record was its best since 1918, but Harris clashed with general manager Eddie Collins and was dismissed. He returned to Washington, where sentimental Senators owner Clark Griffith was never loathe to reemploy an old pal. In the following eight seasons, the club finished fourth once and otherwise could be counted on for a sixth or seventh place finish. Harris made way for another Griffith buddy, Ossie Bleuge.

Harris then briefly managed the Philadelphia Phillies under owner Bill Cox, whose own term was foreshortened by Commissioner of Baseball Judge Landis after it was revealed that Cox had bet on his own club. Cox fired Harris after ninety-two games, claiming that he had called his players “a bunch of jerks.” In fact, the players threatened to strike when informed of Harris’s termination. Said Harris, “If there is any jerk connected with this ball club, it’s the president of it.” That seemed to have been the last encore for the graying, forty-six-year-old, non-boy manager. When MacPhail hired him, Harris had been serving as the general manager of the International League’s Buffalo club. This was actually fine with Harris; after two decades on the managerial merry-go-round, he desired to become an executive—preferably with the Detroit Tigers, but if their general manager’s job wasn’t open, a job with the Yankees would have to do.

It was MacPhail’s original intention to keep Harris in the front office and lure Durocher back to the Yankees (Durocher had begun his major league career as New York’s shortstop. He had been abruptly dumped after demonstrating that he was even less coachable than Babe Ruth. For the Yankees, one loose cannon was enough, especially when this midnight reveler was no slugger but rather the “All-American Out” and did not hesitate to confront the Victorian Barrow with profanity). Durocher was still in Brooklyn working for Rickey, and having experienced the Mahatma’s cerebral, civilized ways, he had no desire to re-experience the volcanic tantrum-a-day executive style.

The thought of stealing Durocher from Rickey, or even making him nervous about the possibility, had to be enormously titillating to MacPhail; Durocher’s feelings on the matter did not necessarily enter into his calculations. He had already taken a stab at Red Barber, the Brooklyn broadcaster, by offering to make him the highest paid broadcaster in the game. Barber ultimately turned MacPhail down, in part because Rickey was willing to match MacPhail. “My offer didn’t hurt you, did it?” MacPhail chortled to Barber. He had made Rickey spend more money. The next salvo, which brought yet another potential manager to the Bronx, involved stealing both of Durocher’s coaches, Chuck Dressen and Red Corriden.

Dressen, who had managed the Reds for MacPhail, was considered the tactical brains of the Dodgers. He had been hanging around Brooklyn since 1939, waiting for Durocher to slit his own throat (Durocher cooperated on more than one occasion, but Durocher was a survivor). Dressen had a guaranteed contract with one out; he could leave the Dodgers only to take a managerial position. MacPhail doesn’t seem to have considered him for the Yankees job, but that may not be what Dressen was told.

To this day, it is not clear whether MacPhail actually wanted to hire Durocher, was merely trying to tweak Rickey’s tail, or even floated the rumor to help Durocher in salary negotiations with Rickey. Later, MacPhail denied having made an offer. Durocher insisted he did, and that he turned it down.

The story gets stranger; this was just the overture of what would be a watershed year for the Yankees. What follows is merely the sketchiest of outlines. In a ghost-written column, Durocher accused MacPhail of consorting with gamblers, something of which Durocher was constantly (and correctly) under suspicion. Rickey jumped in: why was there a double standard for MacPhail when everyone was always sniping at Durocher? Suddenly the case was a matter for baseball’s second commissioner, Happy Chandler.

As with most commissioners of baseball, Chandler weighed in with all the grace of a ten-ton gorilla and with twice as much mystery. He suspended Dressen for thirty days, either because he broke his contract, bet too much on the ponies, or both. He fined both the Yankees and the Dodgers organizations $2,000 apiece. As the piece de resistance, he suspended Durocher for the entirety of the 1947 baseball season. Finally, he slapped a gag order on everyone involved. They couldn’t say anything to defend themselves, and Chandler chose not to explain his actions—though the fact that Chandler owed his job to MacPhail might have had some bearing on his thoughts.

With the Yankees now down four managerial candidates, Bucky Harris became the manager by default. He reluctantly agreed to undertake the job, insisting on a two-year contract, after which he expected to return to the front office.

The 1946 Yankees had suffered from the lack of continuity in the manager’s office. Although the team had stars Joe Gordon, Phil Rizzuto, Joe DiMaggio, Charlie Keller, Bill Dickey, Tommy Henrich, and Red Ruffing together on the roster for the first time since World War II military service broke up the team, New York still finished a distant third, seventeen games behind the Red Sox. Many of the players seemed to have aged badly while away from the game and would clearly not last much longer, but with the team in such disarray it was hard to sort out the keepers. The pitching staff saw eighteen different pitchers take a turn in the starting rotation. Wartime first baseman Nick Etten bombed against regular competition, Joe Gordon hit only .210, there was no regular third baseman, and so on.

The list of problems was long and deep, and MacPhail threatened to gut the team. “Lindell, Johnson, Stirnweiss, Rizzuto, Bevens, Page and Robinson were in MacPhail’s doghouse,” said Weiss, who was himself desperately trying to get away from MacPhail. “He wanted to trade them, two or three at a crack, to Washington for Jimmy [Mickey] Vernon and to St. Louis for Jack Kramer and Vernon Stephens.”

Fortunately, the Dr. Jekyll version of MacPhail prevailed and he and Harris did a good job of sorting out the problems. In 1947 the Yankees ran away with the pennant. Already leading by 4.5 games at the end of June, the team buried the competition with a nineteen-game winning streak. As the boy wonder of Washington, Harris had made a spectacularly perspicacious move in taking pitcher Fred “Firpo” Marberry and converting him into a bullpen ace. This was a time when pitching complete games was a manhood issue for pitchers and the bullpen was considered the last refuge of wasted arms. Harris’s willingness to put a fresh arm in the game at the same time that the opposing pitcher was trying to figure out how to get some zip on his 150th pitch gave the Senators a tremendous competitive advantage. Now Harris repeated the move, taking wild, hard-throwing Joe Page—the same man who had helped to break Joe McCarthy’s spirits—and turning him into a reliever. At first, it seemed as if Page would break Harris’s spirits too, but by the end of the 1947 season he was “The Gay Reliever,” possessor of a 14–8 record with a league-leading (retroactively figured—the saves statistic had yet to be invented) seventeen saves. Harris fell in love; after each win, he would begin his postgame press conference with a toast to Joe Page.

The Yankees won the 1947 World Series from the Durocher-less Dodgers—barely—with a curious decision by Harris to intentionally put the winning run on base in game four contributing heavily to the “barely.” Nonetheless, Harris’s job should have been secure. Instead, he was finished. His patron had self-destructed.

At the Yankees victory party, MacPhail came undone. He congratulated George Weiss as “the man who really built the Yankees,” and was happily emotional at the team’s triumph. He returned shortly thereafter, presumably drunk and in a rage. He found Weiss again, insulted him, struck him, then fired him. He announced to whoever was listening that he was quitting the team and leaving baseball. He then turned on his partner, Topping, who subdued him and led him from the room.

It is doubtful that MacPhail meant what he said; when he was with the Dodgers these sort of outbursts happened on a regular basis and never amounted to anything. The next morning the injured party or parties would hope that MacPhail had forgotten the excesses of the previous evening, or MacPhail would apologize. “Got a little drunk last night, didn’t we?” he would say to Durocher. This time no one was forgetting. First, this had been MacPhail’s most extreme outburst; second, this sort of thing did not happen to the Yankees. The next morning, though he attempted to apologize, Topping and Webb forced MacPhail to keep his promise to leave. Bought out for two million dollars, he never returned to baseball.

Harris now had to coexist with Weiss, a man as cold and sober as MacPhail was hot-tempered and inebriated, a humorless man who did not know he was humorless:

The Yankees have often been accused of being a hardheaded, hard-hearted organization of unsentimental businessmen with a bunch of talented but mechanical ballplayers carrying out their functions in the field. This isn’t so at all. We have simply always realized that modern-day baseball is a highly practical enterprise that has to be run systematically, and this includes everything from operating a good restaurant for members of the Stadium Club to two-platooning on the field when the circumstances demand it. But don’t you believe that there’s no sentiment left on the Yankees!

The Yankees ran another strong race in 1948, but Weiss felt a lack of discipline on the club had played a greater role in determining the final standings than anything the front-running Cleveland Indians had done. Weiss thought of Harris as “the four-hour manager.” He came to the park, coached his game, and then went home to his wife and an unlisted phone number that not even the Yankees had. When, in spring training, Weiss felt the players needed more practice and less time at the dog-racing track, he was chagrinned to discover that Harris was frequently at the track with them. “I have no objections to seeing them at the track,” Harris said. “At least this way I know where they are.”

When hiring managers teams inevitably, as if guided by an unseen hand, go from high-pressure to low-pressure personalities. In 1978, when George Steinbrenner of the Yankees fired Billy Martin and replaced him with Bob Lemon, he took the team away from a manager who pushed his team through anger and intimidation and gave it to a man whose basic attitude was, “Let’s all have some fun.” Joe McCarthy was always in charge. “McCarthy is the strict commander,” said outfielder Tommy Henrich. “He wants to be the absolute boss. Not much latitude for you; he likes you to do things his way, and he takes full responsibility.” Harris was more interested in maintaining a cordial relationship with his players. In his view, there were only two things a manager needed to know—”When to change pitchers and how to get along with the players.” “I really don’t care what a player does off the field,” he once said. “If he is able to do his job and give me 100 percent, that’s all I ask.” The problem with this formulation is that 100 percent is in the eye of the beholder, and when a player comes into the clubhouse with bloodshot eyes, just how close to 100 percent he really might be is open to doubt.

The price for employing this kind of manager is a laxity of discipline. Billy Johnson remembered that Harris was, “very quiet, very lenient.” He had what Tommy Henrich called a “leave them alone” style of managing. “He treated you with confidence,” he said. “He let me go my own way, and it was a pleasure to put out for him.” Once, when Henrich asked Harris if he should lay down a bunt in a situation that seemed to call for one, the manager replied that it was up to him. When he managed the Red Sox, Harris surprised his team by promulgating only one rule: No swimming. “You’re likely to get sunburned,” said Harris. When his players faced Bob Feller, the bullet-throwing “Rapid Robert” of the Indians, Harris had just one instruction: “Go on up there and hit what you see. If you can’t see it, come on back.”

“Under Bucky we were a very relaxed ballclub,” said Henrich, “too relaxed in my opinion.” In later years, the players clung to the myth of the jocks who policed themselves. Whitey Ford later said, “If a guy blew a play or a game because he came to work late after a long night of drinking or bouncing around, that’s when somebody like Hank Bauer settled it in a hurry. He’d grab you in the dugout and look you right in the eyes and growl: ‘Don’t fuck around with my money.’ And that’s maybe the main thing that kept the guys straight, the idea that you’re not only screwing yourself but you’re also taking money out of everybody else’s pocket if you screw up.” Even Stengel believed it: “They thought all you had to do at the Yankees is to be there on time, tend to your own business off the field and when they said play ball be sure you go out and play hard and play clean.”

But neither Ford, nor Bauer, nor Stengel were with the club in 1948, and it wasn’t true then, if it was ever true. Joe Page was a particular problem. After contending for the American League Most Valuable Player award in 1947, Page slumped to 7–8 with a 4.25 ERA. Hard living, and Harris’s indifference to it, were blamed. “Page burned himself out. He was drunk all the time for God’s sakes,” Jerry Coleman recalled. “He had a great year in ’47, and he couldn’t stand that. He had a terrible year in ’48. In fact, DiMaggio in spring training of ’48 said [to the pitchers], ‘You guys better finish your games this year,’ because he knew what was going on.”

In 1947, MacPhail had given Page a contract with a “good behavior” clause. On each of baseball’s eleven paydays he was to receive a different amount depending on whether Harris thought he had been behaving himself. Weiss abandoned the practice in 1948 and the team paid the price. “He couldn’t have two good years in a row,” Allie Reynolds told Dom Forker. “You can’t relax. He did.” Weiss hired a detective. Legend has it that Page seduced her, or vice-versa. Perhaps that was the whole point of the exercise.

Despite the detective’s reports that Weiss bombarded him with, Harris would not confront Page. He did fine Page at least once, but it was a half-hearted attempt at discipline. “I don’t kid myself,” said Harris. “Page’s great relief work put me back in business after I had been forgotten. I’d be an ungrateful so and so to turn on him now. This job isn’t that important to me.” He also subscribed to the conventional wisdom in baseball that alcoholism in players was something a manager sometimes had to put up with. “They told me a certain pitcher was drinking too much,” he said, possibly referring to Page. “He was. I didn’t say anything to him. I felt like Lincoln when his cabinet fussed about Grant drinking, and Lincoln said he wished some of his other generals would try Grant’s brand of whiskey.” Such was Harris’s loyalty to the reliever that at the end of the season he took Page aside and said, “Joe, whatever happens in the future, if I get let go, which is probably going to happen, it’s not on account of you.”

A manager less concerned with sparing Page’s feelings might have gone as far as to say, “not wholly on account of you.” Page was not alone in keeping late nights; there were multiple carousers including outfielder Johnny Lindell and pitcher Frank Shea. When the Yankees finished two and a half games out of first, rather than look at the finish as a noble failure, Weiss saw the glass as half-empty. More accurately, he just saw glasses. Beer glasses. Whiskey glasses. Rows of long-stemmed glasses wet with “Lindell Bombers.” These were actually extra-dry martinis, but Lindell had become so familiar with the drink that he had personalized it. “Bucky Harris is too damned easygoing,” Weiss cursed. “He’s lost control of the team.”

Control aside, there was also the issue of the club’s composition. “DiMaggio and Henrich are reaching the end of the line,” Weiss worried in July 1948, “and there’s no one in sight to replace them.” The Yankees would soon be experiencing a youth movement. Harris, who preferred to work with veterans, lacked a sure touch with young players, rushing some, unnecessarily holding others back. Throughout 1948, he and Weiss struggled over the disposition of players like pitcher Bob Porter-field and outfielder Hank Bauer. Meanwhile, Harris’s handling of Yogi Berra threatened to permanently destroy the young catcher’s confidence in the field. Because the Dodgers supposedly embarrassed Berra by stealing at will in the 1947 World Series, Harris would not commit to him as a catcher, shuttling him from the plate to the outfield throughout the season.

All of these actions were consistent with Weiss’s view of a lackadaisical manager buffeted by fate. “God gets you up in the morning in good health and guides you safely through traffic to the ballpark,” Harris said a few year later. “When your turn comes, He takes you by the hand and leads you up to the plate. Then He taps your shoulder. ‘Son,’ He says, ‘you take it from here’—and drops you flat on your puss.” Similarly, the fate of the Yankees was also out of Harris’s hands. “It all depends on the Big Fellow,” Harris would say, referring to Joe DiMaggio. Since Weiss was already envisioning a future without DiMaggio, this could hardly have been reassuring.

As soon as the Yankees’ third-place finish was interred in the history books, Harris was let go. He played the victim, saying, “It was like being socked in the head with a steel pipe.” Though he had known exactly what was coming, the idea that an assassination had taken place stuck. After the season, two sportswriters observed Del Webb approach Harris at a party. “What does Webb want with Harris now?” one of them asked. “He came back for the knife,” said the other. On the day of Stengel’s reintroduction to the New York press, John Drebinger of the New York Times hinted at the great injustice of it all.

The fifty-seven-year-old Stengel succeeds Bucky Harris who, engaged by Larry MacPhail before the 1947 campaign, won a pennant and world championship in his first year with the Yanks and this year kept what generally was regarded a badly outmatched club in the race until next to the last day, only to be dismissed for a reason as yet not explained by anyone.

In the light of this, most observers, always kindly disposed toward the engaging Stengel, were viewing his forthcoming assignment with some misgivings.

Even Bill Veeck, owner of the champion Indians and ostensibly Stengel’s friend, said publicly that Harris would return with another team and make “the Yankees executives that fired him eat their words.” All of these references to the martyr Harris were disingenuous at best. It was as true in 1948 as it is today that both executives and journalists are familiar with every player’s peccadilloes. Baseball is a small community with few secrets. The executives don’t employ that information for competitive advantage because as the Good Book says, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Every team has its malcontents and miscreants and so no one is free to speak. Besides, it doesn’t pay to be puritanical because that alcoholic wife-beater might help you win a pennant some day. As for the journalists, their silence was at first secured by perks and then by the importance of maintaining cordial relations with the teams. The stab in the back was alive in the Bronx, all because the real, more compelling story of a ball club with its head in a bottle could not be told.

Casey Stengel wandered into this carnival and then was accused of being the carnival. With the writers predisposed towards finding fault with him, that first press conference, held over a sumptuous lunch at the 21 Club, did not go well. Introduced by Dan Topping, Stengel said, “Thank you, Bob . . . uh, Dan.” Bob was Topping’s sybaritic brother, his partner in the National Football League’s Brooklyn Dodgers team (later the New York Yankees of the AAFL; such was the second-tier status of professional football in those days that an association with baseball was seen as a corrective to the pervasive lack of interest in the sport), but otherwise a man of leisure. The great Joe McCarthy had made the very same error in his first press conference when he thanked Colonel Huston, Jacob Ruppert’s unlamented former partner of nearly ten years gone by. Nonetheless, for the writers this was strike one.

He seemed indecisive when predicting the club’s future, and even acknowledged his unfamiliarity with the team. He had not seen the team play in several years, he said. “Now I must study the Yankee situation and draw my own conclusions.” In elaborating, he displayed a guilelessness that belied his reputation as a champion obfuscator. “This is a big job, fellows,” he told the writers, “and I have barely had time to study it. In fact, I scarcely know where I am at. There’ll likely be some changes, but it’s a good club and I think we’ll do alright. We’ll go slow because you can tear a club down a lot quicker than you can build it up.” Throughout his career, Stengel had always showed an uncharacteristic reticence when it came to making predictions. Strike two.

Stengel was asked to express his feelings about managing Joe DiMaggio, who was there at the press conference. In old age, DiMaggio was known as a man who clung to the title of “Baseball’s Greatest Living Baseball Player” as though he had received it by divine decree rather than fan poll, a man who would not attend baseball functions unless he were introduced last (even when sharing the bill with a fellow luminary like Mickey Mantle or Ted Williams on a day dedicated to them). This was not the eccentric pride of an old man. He had always been that way; when DiMaggio said that he always played hard because, “There is always some kid who may be seeing me for the first or last time. I owe him my best,” he was displaying his hyper-developed sense of professionalism, but not altogether selflessly. His dedication had to be acknowledged, honored, or the man was not happy. Pride of accomplishment, in a job well done, was inextricably entwined with pride of self.

Stengel could have been expected to praise his star center fielder. He did not. “I cannot tell you very much about that, being as since I have not been in the American League so I ain’t seen the gentleman play, except once in a very great while.” DiMaggio, not a loquacious man, was very good at nonverbal communication. He frowned. Insufficient genuflection resulting in team MVP getting his nose out of joint: strike three. You’re out.

Stengel was called upon to defend his relationship with George Weiss, something he would be asked to do frequently between the announcement of his hiring and the beginning of the season. Here he was very direct. “I didn’t get this job through friendship. The Yankees represent an investment of maybe two, three million dollars. They don’t hire you just because they like your company. I got the job because these people think I can produce for them.”

Stengel knew he was floundering. “Somebody asked a question about DiMaggio and I said I didn’t know DiMaggio. I could hear the hum in the background. When they asked about a pennant I could hear that hum again and I knew what they were talking about. They were saying, ‘This bum managed nine years and never got into the first division.”

“Because I can make people laugh,” he said, “some of them think I’m a damn fool. But as a player, coach, and manager I have been around baseball for some thirty-five years. I’ve watched such successful managers as John McGraw and Uncle Robbie work. I’ve learned a lot and picked up a few ideas of my own.” He was almost sixty years old, nearing retirement age. He had managed for almost twenty-five years, apparently without merit. “Let them think it’s a joke,” Stengel said, “and maybe I’ll laugh when I fool them.”

Only Red Smith of the Herald-Tribune saw through the hypocrisy inherent in holding Stengel up to a mythical conception of the Yankees:

The old Yankee tradition ceased to exist several years ago when a man named MacPhail arrived. The old owner was a wholesaler who ran a brewery. His successor was a retailer who opened a saloon in the park. There is a new Yankee tradition now, which resembles the old as a chromium and red barstool resembles Chippendale.

There is, therefore, nothing incongruous in the notion of a comedian running the Yankees. But it is erroneous and unjust to conceive of Casey Stengel merely as a clown. He is something else entirely—a competitor who has always had fun competing, a fighter with the gift of laughter.

The next day, bravado restored, Stengel and newly appointed pitching coach “Milkman” Jim Turner toured Yankee Stadium and made a cameo appearance at a press luncheon time for Topping’s Yankees football team. This time Stengel was a hit, breaking up the room by saying, “When I heard that old Pepper Martin [the former St. Louis Cardinals star] was playing football in Brooklyn, I figured that Dan Topping must have had something of that sort in mind when he brought me here.”

Steven Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible (as well as the Pinstriped Blog)
for the Yes Network. He is one of the finest baseball analysts in the country. His first book, “Forging Genius” examines the career of Casey Stengel. Anyone who enjoys Goldman’s work will love this book. For those of you who are not familar with Goldman, but are Yankee fans, or simply fans of baseball history, this book is for you too. Order it now at Amazon.com.

Chapter Two from “Forging Genius”

By Steven Goldman

(First of Two Parts)

“Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U. S. Steel.” The line is variously attributed. It might have been said by the comedian Joe E. Lewis, whose son was the general manager of the hapless Pittsburgh Pirates; the great sports columnist Red Smith; Spinoza; or Maimonedes. Whatever its provenance, it perfectly encapsulated the preferred image of the New York Yankees. New York City’s American League ball club liked to portray itself as a horsehide IBM, an organization run with the clockwork precision that generated almost constant success. While the on-field victories that fueled this image were generated by players no less earthy or hard bitten than any of their contemporaries, the Yankees, seen through the lens of that era’s sports pages, appeared to succeed through high character, superior morals, management, and discipline, all held together by the esprit de corps of an elite military unit. Though the team had ridden to incredible riches on the back of Babe Ruth’s boisterous and often-boorish exploits, the organization saw Ruth as an excess to be tolerated. It was hoped that the fans, though they loved the Babe, would prefer to identify with the quiet efficiency of Lou Gehrig, “a self-effacing star who never gave a manager a day’s trouble.”

The Yankee formula meant victories and businesslike comportment. Deviation from the formula was not long tolerated. Hence the almost palpable sense that something had gone wrong when on October 13, 1948, the New York Yankees announced that Charles Dillon “Casey” Stengel had been hired to manage the team for the next two seasons, replacing the popular incumbent, Bucky Harris. Stengel, a fifty-eight-year-old veteran of nine lackluster managerial campaigns, was widely perceived to be a clown, “A second division manager who was entirely satisfied to have a losing ball club so long as Stengel and his wit were appreciated.” The general attitude among the newspapermen who covered the team, which they then transmitted to the public, was disbelief.

There was no reason for their skepticism, and the writers knew it. At mid-century, many of the New York sportswriters had been covering baseball since the days of Cobb and Wagner. Stengel had been associated with New York baseball almost as long, having played, coached, or managed in the city for all or parts of fourteen seasons from 1912 to 1917, 1921 to 1923, and 1932 to 1936. The same writers whose mouths were agape at Stengel’s hiring had spoken with him, drunk with him, and ridden the rails with him on the long trips to baseball’s distant outposts in St. Louis and Chicago (until 1958, baseball thought the American frontier ended at the Mississippi river and that “The Lewis and Clark Expedition” referred to an evening in 1921 when Duffy Lewis and Clark Griffith stayed out all night trying to find the best speakeasy in the District of Columbia). Their coverage of him had always reflected their apprehension of his intelligence and the bonhomie of their relationship.

Stengel’s unexpected association with the Yankees changed everything. The sportswriters of 1948, as with the political journalists of today, had only a sideline in reporting the events of the day. Their primary job was to produce storylines, in the soap opera sense of the word. With over a dozen area daily newspapers, game stories were a commodity product. What sold papers were heroes and goats, complex events and personalities reduced to morality plays, fairy tales without the sophistication.

New York City had three baseball teams in those days, and each had long had an established character, unchanging, like the cardboard leading men in the boys’ adventure serials of the time; unflinching square-jawed hero in episode one, unflinching square-jawed hero in chapter twenty-five. The Dodgers were bumbling and yet lovable. The Giants were hard-bitten and driven, as exemplified by a managerial line of descent from John McGraw to Bill Terry to Leo Durocher, the momentary interruption of which by the administration of the milquetoast Mel Ott inspired Durocher to quip, “Nice guys finish last.”

With the Yankees, the primary characterization was of a methodical, emotionless precision, more suited to a watch factory than an entertainment operation. There were half-truths in this. The Yankees liked to project this image, particularly in the years of owner Jacob Ruppert, secretary (“general manager” in modern parlance) Edward Grant Barrow, and manager Joe McCarthy. It was inspired by many things: a legitimate need to instill a sense of professionalism on the club after the players got out of control in the wild early 1920s, a sincere belief in esprit de corps, and the perception that the team’s fan-base consisted of snooty types who might otherwise go to the ballet if the ball club had too many rough characters (or African-Americans, or Hispanics . . .). Babe Ruth was a paradox for the Yankee ownership. He brought people to the ballpark—but perhaps he was bringing in the wrong people. Still, management somehow endured him for as long as he was at the top of his game. As soon as he slipped, he was gone. They never doubted they could keep winning without him, and as for the Babe’s cult of personality, they didn’t want it.

After Ruth, McCarthy would drill his charges in “the Yankee way”: “You’re a Yankee,” he would say. “Act like one.” Then he would go off and get blind drunk. “Riding the white horse,” they called it around the ballpark, after the manager’s preferred poison. Perhaps he would miss a couple of games, even disappear for a week. The writers, who had their own drinks—as well as room, board, and transportation—picked up by the club, would write that Joe’s gall bladder had been troubling him or that he had the flu.

Many of the players bought into the myth that McCarthy was creating. “I hope the pride which a player has in being a Yankee does not die out,” star outfielder Tommy Henrich said in early 1949:

It is something more than a tradition. It is a mental, almost physical lift for a player to put on that Yankee uniform. I like to tell the young players new to the club about this pride in being a Yankee. I like to tell them about the days when the Yankees walked out on the field and threw terror into the ranks of the opposition simply because they were Yankees…DiMaggio, Keller, Crosetti and I sit around in the clubhouse sometimes and talk about that very thing. About the history and prestige of this organization of ours.

The players even shared the organization’s beliefs about the nature of the men and women who came through the turnstiles. Eddie Lopat, one of the team’s pitching aces in the late forties and early fifties said, “Yankee fans were refined people for the most part. You’d hear the cheering but they were kind of sedate generally…the fans were controlled and there was control in the ballpark.”

There were also many players who did not subscribe. If the player was of only minor consequence, he was made to go away, like Roy Johnson, a reserve outfielder on the 1937 club. When McCarthy groused after the Yankees lost a close game, Johnson said, “What does that guy expect to do—win every game?” Not only was he gone the next day, but he had been sent to the Boston Braves, at that moment about as far as one could go from a pennant race and still be on the major league circuit. He was replaced by the rookie Henrich, who knew the McCarthy doctrine without being told. Then there was outfielder Ben Chapman. He was bigoted, conceited, rowdy, started fights, and was a southerner, which irritated a peculiar McCarthy prejudice. McCarthy dealt him to the Washington Senators for a lesser player, one even more violent, more bigoted (though in those lilywhite days bigotry was just a character trait, not a career-breaking defect)—and another rookie, Joe DiMaggio was on hand to take up any slack.

When no Henrich or DiMaggio was on hand to take the place of a recalcitrant field hand, the bad seed was simply allowed to persist, subject to harassment by management to mend his ways. Milton Gross of the New York Post wrote, “Through the years McCarthy has been pictured as some sort of baseball Buddha before whose sacred altar all his players had to prostrate themselves. Characters, individualists, rowdies and malingerers, so the story goes, could not play for McCarthy…This is sheer nonsense. McCarthy never gave away a problem child who had talent without getting his equal in return.”

The fireballing lefty Joe Page, an escaped coal miner whose liberation was an excuse to abuse alcohol, was so resistant to coaching and curfews that in 1946 he finally broke McCarthy’s spirit (Page’s was the last blow in a campaign begun by another even more notorious alcoholic, the team’s managing partner). “He was probably the biggest dissipater in the history of baseball,” said a contemporary pitcher. “Drinker, women…They’d send detectives out to follow him and he’d up getting the detectives drunk.” In 1947 Page was a national baseball hero and McCarthy was home in Buffalo with a case of nervous exhaustion.

Essentially, management shouted “semper fidelis” for only as long as it was in its interests to do so. Ruppert and Barrow were ruthless in making their team Ruth-less. Though the aging slugger backed them into a corner by refusing to back off his demand that he replace McCarthy, they made no effort to reach an accommodation. As for Gehrig, though Barrow looked at him as a son, when the first baseman first manifested signs of the illness that would ultimately take his life the secretary was amazingly quick to suggest that “it was about time for Lou to get himself another job.” That was it—no pension, no coaching sinecure—just, thanks for the 2,130 games of dedicated service. Good luck in your future endeavors, however brief they are likely to be. It fell to New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to give Gehrig a position on the city Parole Board.

Forced to choose among printing the Page version (every man for himself) or the Henrich version (all for one and one for all), or the truth—that the roster was not homogenous, united in pursuit of a single goal, but a blend of Pages, Henrichs, and guys just doing their job—the press went with the Henrich version. The fans were on board from the start, and over the years even the writers began to believe their own corn, began to believe what they were selling.

In Stengel’s case, they were selling the story of the stumblebum comic who inherited the world’s greatest baseball team. A familiar but indistinct figure to New York baseball fans, Stengel was best known for two things: letting a bird fly out of his cap during a game that took place in the foggily remembered years before the Great War, and hitting a game-winning home run off of Yankees pitcher “Sad” Sam Jones in the 1923 World Series. This would seem to have been a heroic act rather than a comical one, but Stengel corrupted the moment by thumbing his nose at the American Leaguers as he jogged around the bases.

Not only did he act funny, but he looked funny. By the time the Yankees got hold of him, Stengel’s face looked like a topographical model, creased and furrowed from too many day games spent staring into the sun, too many cigarettes, and late hours. Even his wide, smiling mouth was creased, with a tributary running down from the lower left-hand corner, a souvenir of the time a drunken teammate tore his lip during a fist-fight. (In a 1952 Life Magazine article, Clay Felker and Ernest Havemann wrote, “At the left side of his mouth, running almost to his chin, is a line as deep as a canyon. It has been worn there through the years by the restless rumble and roar of words pouring out of the side of his mouth like an eternal waterfall,” which is more romantic, but not true.) He had a wide, plunging expanse of nose and lively eyes bracketed by two giant jug-handle ears. Talking with sportswriter Tommy Holmes, Stengel referred to them as, “this here pair of palm-leaf fans.” “Whereupon Mr. Stengel raised both of his hands,” Holmes wrote, “and his fingertips touched a pair of awesome ears of about the same size, shape, and constituency of rib lamb chops.”

All of these elements were wonderfully malleable, and working them in concert Stengel could augment any anecdote, of which he had thousands, with a variety of comically contorted expressions. When telling a story about a horse-faced catcher, it was said that he not only looked more like a horse than the catcher, but “he looked more like a horse than Man-O-War.” Joe Williams, columnist for the New York World Telegram wrote, “No typewriter has yet been invented that can record the facial gyrations of Casey as he illustrates his yarns. He’s no Clark Gable to start with and when he gets through one of his workouts children are scared for miles around.” Joe Garagiola later called it “Casey Stengel’s change of face.”

Even in repose, the face was thought-provoking. People admired it in the same way they would a well-traveled trunk or a piece of distressed furniture. Harold Rosenthal of the New York Herald-Tribune felt that, “Casey Stengel actually grew better-looking as he got older. Not that he was any beauty contest winner but . . . his face had assumed a seamy dignity.” Yankees broadcaster Mel Allen said that Stengel had the face of a “sea captain or a range rider.” Jimmy Cannon wrote, “The old man has the face of an eagle who has flown into sleet storms. The lines in Casey Stengel’s face are gullies. The left eye winks in the hook-nosed face as he discusses baseball, like a ferocious old bird sitting on the top branch of the highest tree in the world, watching all the ballgames ever played going on beneath him at the same time.”

Only when Stengel spoke was the image completed. “Stengelese” had not yet been identified as such, but Stengel had always possessed his unique blend of mangled grammar, fin de siecle Midwestern idioms, and stream of consciousness dialogue. Sportswriter Jim Murray wrote, “Casey Stengel is a white American male with a speech pattern that ranges somewhere between the sounds a porpoise makes underwater and an Abyssinian rug merchant chant.” Another, on his first meeting with the manager, exclaimed, “My god, he talks the way James Joyce writes!” A bad player was a “road apple,” a scatological reference to the horse and buggy days. Someone who displayed naivety was a “Ned in the third reader.” To do well was to have “done splendid.” One did not begin, one commenced, and a player was not good, but remarkable. To hit down on the ball was to “butcher boy,” and on and on, often in reference to something that happened years before. Stengel was both an autodidactic baseball historian and Zelig-like eyewitness to history, and he liked to illustrate a point with examples from the past. There is an oft-repeated story wherein a reporter goes looking for Stengel to find out who the next day’s starting pitcher is. The reporter is gone for several hours. When he finally returns, one of his colleagues asks him, “Did Casey tell you who’s going to pitch tomorrow?” “No,” the beleaguered reporter replies. “He started to, but he got to talking about McGraw and the time he managed in Toledo and the Pacific Coast League and God knows what else. I think tomorrow’s pitcher is Christy Mathewson.” Once, when Shirley Povich of the Washington Post grew impatient after an hour waiting for a specific answer to his question, Stengel snapped, “Don’t rush me.”

Stengel also possessed a caustic wit, a superb sense of irony, and above all else was an indefatigable talker. The combination meant that he was always entertaining to listen to, if not always easy to understand. The serious listener was ultimately rewarded for his attention, but many dismissed his words as involuntary Dadaist babbling, early senescence, or both. Perfectly clear when he wanted to be—and that was almost always behind the scenes—Stengel used obfuscation as a way of putting a distance between himself and the press. Late in Stengel’s life, a young reporter interviewed the manager and was shocked to find him speaking in a perfectly comprehensible manner. “That jargon of yours is just a joke,” the reporter exclaimed.

“Son,” Stengel said, “this is gonna be our little secret, isn’t it?”

Before and after Stengel, certain managers were given a free pass by the press despite decades of losing records and disappointing finishes. After the early 1930s, Connie Mack of the Philadelphia A’s clearly wasn’t trying—to him, a perfect season was one in which the A’s got off to a hot start, stimulating attendance, and then dropped off rapidly so players could not demand raises—but he was a beloved Philadelphia institution, so no one called him on it. Mack protégé Jimmy Dykes managed for twenty-two seasons without exceeding eighty-five wins or finishing higher than third, yet no one ever questioned his fitness for the job. Gene Mauch first gained notoriety for managing the Phillies to an astounding September collapse in 1964. His next good season came after nineteen consecutive years of mediocre finishes. Nevertheless, during that time, Mauch was frequently called a genius. (Of Mauch and Alvin Dark, Stengel said, “They’re so slick; they think they invented the game.”)

Stengel’s puckishness encouraged observers both in and out of baseball to judge his record harshly. In an era in which sporting competition was often all-too-glibly contrasted with war (and this in the interwar years, after the stubborn “battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton” mentality had been interred beneath Flanders fields), Stengel’s willingness to laugh at the bleakest times was interpreted as complacency. One contemporary, observing Stengel delivering a monologue at a party, said, “It never fails. Casey Stengel is funny to everyone except the guy who pays his salary.”

The general attitude towards Stengel on the part of baseball writers, observed Fred Lieb, their dean, was that Stengel was a highly amusing fellow, but he lacked the proper pedigree for the Yankee job. One writer asked Lieb, “Is this serious? Are they really going to put a clown in to run the Yankee operation?” Dan M. Daniel, veteran reporter for The Sporting News, told Jerome Holtzman, “When Casey Stengel got the Yankee managing job, we thought he was in there to tell jokes and while away a season or two until the club could get tightened up and reorganized.” Arthur Daily of the New York Times quoted a colleague as saying, “Ole Case had better win the pennant or else be awfully funny.” “Stengel?” said another in disbelief, “Why, he won’t even be around on June 15.” “Casey may not win the pennant,” said the Washington Post, “but you can bet he’ll leave us laughing when he says good-bye.” Red Smith summed up: “When the rumor that Stengel would be hired was going around World Series press headquarters, a good many men expressed astonishment. They just couldn’t reconcile their conception of Stengel, the court jester, with the Yankee tradition of austere and business-like efficiency.” And silence. During World War II, reporters had asked McCarthy who would play second base if his keystone star George Stirnweiss was drafted. “Let me worry about that,” McCarthy said, and then proceeded to do his best impression of a cigar-store Indian. In one close game, McCarthy decided that Lefty Gomez was providing an unseemly amount of dugout chatter and ordered him into the clubhouse. “Lefty,” McCarthy said, “you go in and stay in, and if we want you we will call you.”

Stengel’s most vociferous and vituperative critic from his days in Boston, Dave Egan (the self-styled “Colonel” of the tabloid Boston Daily Record), sought to bury the manager before he had even begun:

Well sirs and ladies, the Yankees now have been mathematically eliminated from the 1949 pennant race. They eliminated themselves when they engaged Perfessor [sic] Casey Stengel to mismanage them for the next two years, and you may be sure that the Perfessor will oblige to the best of his unique ability…[the New York writers] will love Stengel. If it’s stories and mimicry and home-spun humor they want, they’ll get it from Stengel by day and by night, each day and each night. They’ll get everything from him, indeed, with the exception of the pennants to which they have become accustomed.

On another occasion Egan speculated that Stengel must have been hired because one of the Yankee owners owed him money.

As if Stengel needed one more thing to damn him in the eyes of the public and the press, it was widely felt that he had acquired the job because Yankees general manager George Weiss had long had a hidden agenda to hire his old friend Stengel, and that Bucky Harris, who in two seasons with the club had won the World Series the first year and finished two games out of first place in the second, had been stabbed in the back as a result of it. This was barely half true. Weiss had long wanted to employ Stengel and there was nothing stealthy about it; he had first suggested Stengel to the Yankees earlier in the decade and had used him in the Yankees farm system in 1945. It was also patently unfair to say that Harris had been stabbed in the back or otherwise, unless one considered it a case of self-impalement. The exact circumstances of his dismissal were well known to the writers, but either out of the same misplaced sense of delicacy (and bribery) that had protected McCarthy or willful obtuseness, they refused to see, never mind say, that the “austere and business-like efficiency” that Red Smith referred to had long been a thing of the past. Stengel’s hiring was, paradoxically, an attempt to revive them.

In 1945, Colonel Ruppert’s heirs had sold the Yankees to a trio of investors comprised of Del Webb, a construction magnate instrumental in the creation of the modern Las Vegas; Dan Topping, heir to an aluminum fortune; and Larry MacPhail. The mercurial MacPhail would be the active partner, having already successfully run major league teams in Cincinnati and Brooklyn. In each case he had taken a second-rate franchise and transformed it. If the franchises he had left behind were not necessarily winners, he at least left them in far better shape than he found them. MacPhail did not stay long in either Cincinnati or Brooklyn due to his own erratic behavior. Christened “Lucifer Sulphurious,” by Dan Parker of the New York Mirror, MacPhail was an alcoholic given to dramatic outbursts of temper and public tantrums. As an executive he was effective only up to the moment of his inevitable self-destruction. Leo Durocher, who managed the Dodgers for MacPhail and estimated that the “Roaring Redhead” had fired him twenty-seven times between 1939 and 1942 (only to treat the termination as water on the bridge when he sobered up) wrote, “They always said this about MacPhail: Cold sober he was brilliant. One drink and he was even more brilliant. Two drinks—that’s another story.”

As befits a man with a rash temperament (at the close of the first World War he had taken part in an unauthorized attempt to abduct the Kaiser. He failed to get the monarch but did manage to kidnap his ashtray), MacPhail was an innovator. His greatest attribute was that he did not accept boundaries, clichés, old beliefs. At his direction the Cincinnati Reds became the first team to install lights, disproving the old notion that night baseball could not succeed in the majors. He repeated the trick in Brooklyn and New York. He began the regular radio broadcast of Dodger home games, shattering the myth that to do so would mean a disastrous decline in attendance. In the process, he unilaterally shattered the pact under which the three New York teams had agreed to embargo such broadcasts (MacPhail’s other contribution to baseball radio came when he inaugurated the Brooklyn career of broadcaster Red Barber). He also began Durocher’s managerial career, trusting him though many in baseball felt his was a borderline criminal personality.

MacPhail was also a great promoter, inaugurating Ladies’ Days, the stadium club, and a wide variety of pregame entertainments, and was a good judge of baseball flesh who took particular pride in foxing his former patron/perennial antagonist Branch Rickey of the St. Louis Cardinals when making a trade. As George Weiss later said, “Larry could have been the best executive in baseball if he had a little more emotional stability.” Durocher wrote, “There is not a question in my mind that Larry was a genius. There is a line between genius and insanity, and in Larry’s case it was sometimes so thin that you could see him drifting back and forth.”

There was no institution with which MacPhail did not feel free to tamper. When he transferred his flag to the Yankees he immediately began to tamper with a New York institution, Yankees manager Joe McCarthy, and rapidly left the man a twitching, quivering wreck who had to be fortified with alcohol. MacPhail, “the extra-colossal, super-spectacular, ring-tailed quintessence of everything Ed Barrow wasn’t,” questioned, doubted, second-guessed, harassed, and threatened summary dismissal. McCarthy had never had that kind of interference before; that the manager should be insulated from the dilettantes in the executive suite had been one of Barrow’s cardinal rules. MacPhail was no “sportsman” as Ruppert had been. He was, as Bill Veeck might have described him, an operator.

In late May 1946, McCarthy had one final blowup with Joe Page. As the Yankees waited for a team flight to take off, McCarthy cornered Page and began asking questions like, “What the devil’s the matter with you?” “When are you going to settle down and start pitching?” and, “How long do you think you can get away with this?” These were not questions designed to promote relaxed conversation, and when Page rose to the bait, McCarthy exploded, vowing that Page would be sent to the Yankees farm club at Newark, this time to stay.

For twenty-four hours, Page’s career hung by a thread while McCarthy stewed. In fifteen years with the team, he had never before dressed down a player in public. He apparently had an epiphany: “He shouldn’t go. I should.” He promptly resigned.

(Part Two, coming soon…)

Steven Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible (as well as the Pinstriped Blog)
for the Yes Network. He is one of the finest baseball analysts in the country. His first book, “Forging Genius” examines the career of Casey Stengel. Anyone who enjoys Goldman’s work will love this book. For those of you who are not familar with Goldman, but are Yankee fans, or simply fans of baseball history, this book is for you too. Order it now at Amazon.com.