Sport: Casey of the Yanks

Charles Dillon (“Casey”) Stengel has a deeply lined, hawklike face that is hard to forget. He has wiry, bowed legs, a workaday wit, and an air of mock modesty. “I’m an apple-knocker,” he likes to say, “and I’m against all city slickers.” He was also quite a ballplayer in his day. Under the late great John J. McGraw of the Giants, he smashed a crucial home run in the 1923 World Series, and vigorously thumbed his nose at the Yankees all the way round the bases. The mantle of dignity is one article of clothing that Casey Stengel, 58, has never donned.

Last week, when the New York Yankees asked Casey if he would like to be manager, he said he’d be right there.

The Yankee management had timed things cagily. A week before, while everybody was watching the American League pennant playoff, they had fired popular Bucky Harris. Their complaint: Bucky hadn’t been strict enough with playboys. Then, before the press could get around to objecting, the Yankees hired Casey, whom sportwriters all like.

Casey might have a hard time doing better than Bucky (who won the World Series in his first year as Yankee manager, and finished a close third in his second). As to keeping his charges away from bars, Casey is no governess.

In Oakland, where he managed “nine old men” into winning the Pacific Coast League championship this year, he had two cases of beer sent to the clubhouse after every game the team won. A graduate of the roughhouse school of baseball, he still gets thrown out of ball games for baiting umpires.

Casey is reportedly one of the models for Ring Lardner’s Alibi Ike characters, and when he got the job last week, Manhattan columnists all rushed to their typewriters to tell what a funny man he was. They obviously couldn’t do him justice: his kind of deadpan, spun-out comedy was hard to describe. Grinning with happy memories, the columnists tried to tell how funny it was the time Casey purposely disappeared into a manhole in centerfield, or the time Casey tipped his cap to an umpire, and out flew a sparrow.

Cutup that he was, Casey never allowed practical joking to interfere with business. As manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Bees, he got all the mileage there was to get out of poor material.

One spring, when he was boss in Brooklyn, he told his players he didn’t want any handshaking out on the field. “I don’t want any talking either … A ball game isn’t a junior prom. Do you get what I mean?” One of the players didn’t. “What is a junior prom?” he asked. “You don’t know what a junior prom is?” thundered Casey. “A junior prom is a prom that ain’t old enough to be senior prom. Haw!”

A smart man with a dollar, Casey is well-to-do, but after 38 years in organized baseball, he still likes the game and the company, and his reputation with the fans as a shrewd buffoon. Said he last week: “I’ve done everything now—played for McGraw, managed the Toledo Mudhens, been farmed out to Kankakee by the Kansas City Blues, played for the Brooklyn Bums. This completes the cycle.”