Sport: Exit Casey

In the United States of America exist some 50 million citizens who can properly be described as baseball fans. Of these, perhaps 48 million have long had in common a hatred and resentment of the long triumphant New York Yankees. As of last week, the Yankee haters could move over: they were being joined by a considerable segment of that beleaguered U.S. minority, the Yankee buffs.

Cold and colorless as a block of ice, the Yankee organization for years had not only a way of achieving success but of accepting it as its due. In 1947 Manager Bucky Harris won the American League pennant and the World Series; the next year the Yankees were squeezed out in the season’s last week—and Harris was swiftly fired. At that point, to the utter astonishment of all, the Yankees made a move that seemed as though General Motors had been delivered into the hands of a Keystone Cop. As their new manager, the Yankees chose baseball’s buffoon: Charles Dillon (“Casey”) Stengel.

A New Warmth. Casey Stengel became the most successful manager in baseball history. More than that, he gave the Yankees a warmth they had never had before. Until he signed with the Yankees, Stengel had been the funniest failure in the game. In 1910 Casey was playing the outfield in Maysville, Ky. and delighting inmates in an adjacent insane asylum by practicing his slides on the way to his position. At the time, Casey had hopes of becoming a lefthanded dentist, but soon realized he would need special equipment and, weighing the percentages, chose baseball for life. In time, Casey became a pretty fair outfielder in the National League (lifetime batting average: .284), hit a pair of key home runs for the Giants in the 1923 World Series. But he was at his best when he played the game for laughs: popping out of a manhole in a bush-league outfield to catch a flyball, giving the bird to jeering Dodger fans by raising his cap in salute and releasing a sparrow. In nine National League seasons as manager of Brooklyn and Boston, Stengel never finished higher than fifth; Brooklyn even paid him not to manage by buying up his contract.

With the Yankees, Casey still played the clown. He outraged syntax and entranced sportswriters by spieling nonstop, serpentine sentences that turned the dullest subject into quotably confused copy: “The fella I got on third is hitting pretty good, and I know he can make that throw, and if he don’t make it that other fella I got coming up has shown me a lot, and if he can’t I have my guy and I know what he can do.”

An Old Fighter. Only Casey could follow Casey’s reasoning as he wildly juggled his batting order, but his convoluted maneuvers usually worked. The funny— man had the best-stocked memory about players—friend and foe alike—in all baseball. “He’s a genius,” said Leo Durocher. “It’s unfair to compare other managers with him.” Casey was a fighter. Punching at the air, he would poise in defiance on the top step of the dugout and bellow angry encouragement at his team. Lifted by Casey, the Yankees won ten pennants in twelve years, took seven World Series. Not until Pittsburgh’s Bill Mazeroski hit a home run in the last of the ninth of the seventh game did Casey’s Yankees lose the 1960 World Series.

The World Series was hardly out of the headlines when Yankee President Dan Topping called in the press and announced that Casey was leaving, but left unclear the reasons why. Up stepped Casey to set the record straight: he was being fired, pure and simple. Casey’s explanation: he would not go along with Topping’s plans to meddle with players in the future. To get him out of the way, charged Casey, the Yankees were claiming that his age of 70 made him too old to manage. Snapped Casey: “That’s the best excuse they’ve got.”

Along Traditional Lines. But the Yankees needed no excuses in letting Casey go. After all, as they pointed out, he was going home with $160,000 in severance pay. And in their eyes, the Yankees were acting no more harshly than Casey himself when he unceremoniously yanked a pitcher in order to win. Someone eventually would have had to succeed Casey, and the Yankees wanted to make sure it was rugged Ralph Houk, 41, a Yankee coach who learned to command men during the Battle of the Bulge and the crossing of the Rhine, emerged from World War II as a major with the Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart. As a Yankee player, Houk had been only a bench-warming catcher behind Yogi Berra, but he learned his baseball. From 1955 to 1957. Houk successfully managed the Yankees’ farm team in Denver.

The Yankees knew that Houk was getting offers to manage other teams. To keep him, the Yankees decided they had to let Casey go, no matter how much it hurt the old man or outraged some of the team’s fans. In the Yankee tradition, the decision was coldly made and coldly carried out.