The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (19 page)

Durocher didn’t like slow-moving baseball. “What are your plans?” a reporter asked as the season waned.

“I got plans,” Durocher said. “You can damn well bet on that. I’m gonna put a better ballclub in the Polo Grounds.”

“What kind of ballclub, Leo?”

“I’ll tell you what,” Durocher roared. “My kind of team.”

Some writers laughed at Leo the Loud. The laughter did not finally die down until three seasons later when Leo, helped by the young and the swift, Mays and Lockman and Thomson, passed the Little Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff.

The year 1948 was a rare triumph for out-of-towners. In St. Louis, Stan Musial slugged and poked his way to just about the best season any hitter ever had. Musial led the National League in batting (.376); slugging percentage (.702), hits (230) doubles (46), triples (18), runs scored (135), and runs batted in (131). He hit 39 home runs, one fewer than Johnny Mize and Ralph Kiner, who shared the title at 40. “Actually,” Musial says, “I hit forty-one homers in 1948, but I lost two when games got rained out. If it hadn’t been for the rain, I would have led the league in every single batting category that there was.”

Cleveland won the American League pennant and defeated the Boston Braves, four games to two, in the World Series.

No one imagined — it was beyond imagining — that nine years would pass before a ballclub not based in New York City won the Series again.

*It still is.

*Lester Rodney, the sports columnist for the Communist newspaper
The Daily Worker
, has retired to northern California.
The Daily Worker
has long since stopped publishing, but Rodney’s memories of Durocher remain vibrantly alive. The two were talking in a dugout one afternoon, Rodney recalls, when Durocher suddenly exclaimed: “For a fucking Communist, you know your baseball.”

The old Yankee tradition ceased to exist several years ago. There is, therefore, nothing incongruous in the notion of a comedian running the Yankees.

— Red Smith on Casey Stengel, October 14, 1948

T
HE LATE JOHN LARDNER
, whose sportswriting is an overlooked American treasure, knew Casey Stengel better than Casey Stengel wanted to be known. Like most, Lardner admired Stengel as a manager and, to a smaller degree, as a humorist. Uniquely among the admirers thronged in Manhattan, Lardner had known Stengel since his own childhood and even, in a sense, before.

John’s father, Ring Lardner, was Stengel’s contemporary — the two were born four years apart — and Ring was already established in sports journalism when Stengel crashed into the major leagues, with lots of line drives, some neat running catches, and, Stengel being Stengel, rivers of verbiage. “Dutch” Stengel intrigued the elder Lardner. Indeed, Ring Lardner used Stengel as a character in his final baseball novel, a touching seriocomic work called
Lose with a Smile
. (In today’s climate, such genial literary license would loose a legion of lawyers on all our heads.)

John Lardner, who grew up amid his father’s Stengel stories, was a bit put off by the sports page bouquets that at length commenced to fall at Stengel’s feet.* As we shall see, Stengel was delightful, vindictive, cordial, alcoholic, calculating, and thoroughly mean. Press portraits were sometimes tin-eared, often downright misleading.

The young Stengel broke in with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1912 and a season later became the original center fielder at Ebbets Field, a direct ancestor of the last center fielder there, Duke Snider. Stengel’s salary as a Dodger never exceeded $5,400, good for the time but not suitable for Stengel’s lifestyle. As a young player, Stengel loved dice, poker, hand-tailored suits, and whiskey. With his expenses exceeding income in 1914, Stengel cashed a number of bad checks at a bar on Flatbush Avenue, the Broadway, so to speak, of Brooklyn. As the bar owner protested, Stengel promised to cover the rubber with the proceeds of his next Dodger stipend. Meanwhile, here was another check for $100. Sure it was good. Whadaya think! Thanks a lot. Now gimme an Ol’ Overholt.

After three months of this, the saloonkeeper grew desperate. One morning he taped the bad checks — there were more than twenty — to the window of his bar. Passersby on a broad and busy Brooklyn avenue saw two items of interest in the window, each repeated many times: a genuine autograph of Charles D. Stengel; a bank stamp reading
INSUFFICIENT FUNDS.

By the time Lardner told me this story, in 1960, Stengel not only was being acclaimed as the greatest manager in modern baseball; he was also president of a bank in Glendale, California. “From bad check passer to bank president in fifty years,” Lardner said. “I think if you could get that on paper, with a little baseball, you’d have a book about Stengel and in a way about America.”

A lot was going on around us. Literary editors of the time spoke frequently about someone composing “the great American baseball novel.” Several even offered small advances. “We want,” one editor said, “the baseball novel Thomas Wolfe would have written if Thomas Wolfe had written a baseball novel. We’re willing to offer twelve hundred dollars up front.”

John Lardner felt that in
You Know Me Al
, his father had already written the great American baseball novel. He was himself a meticulous and disciplined writer, and as such no great fan of Thomas Wolfe. Finally, as a gifted essayist, John resented America’s worship of the novel, a rival form.

Why didn’t I try and see if I could write the great American
nonfiction
book, framed about Stengel’s picaresque life? Lardner’s health was failing. The project was quite beyond his energies. I was younger, stronger, promising in certain ways, prolific.

The idea was John Lardner’s final gift to me. A month later, he was dead at the age of forty-seven.

Stengel was a student of sportswriting, specifically sportswriting about himself. He could have given President Kennedy lessons in manipulating the media. He was kind to me, even when I wrote critically about the Yankees, but as far as Stengel was concerned, two things were loudly wrong with John Lardner’s idea. Stengel’s bad-check days had been forgotten by the 1950s. Stengel meant for those days to stay forgotten. He didn’t want a serious, dimensional, variegated book written about him, or even by him. He preferred something adoring and drippy, along the lines of A
Boy’s Life of Theodore Roosevelt
. So, he explained over breakfast in his suite at the Essex House one October morning, “I like ya fine, kid, but I ain’t gonna help you do no book about me and I don’t want you trying to get with my brother or my wife, neither, because they won’t talk to you, I told them not to, and it’s nothing against you personal, kid. Why ain’t you eating your eggs?”

As I say, Stengel’s first objection was directed against my bent toward adult reporting. His second was entirely impersonal. My projected book would not earn him any money.

In 1961 after Stengel collected a $150,000 advance from Random House and
The Saturday Evening Post
, there appeared a putative memoir called
Casey at the Bat: The Story of My Life in Baseball
, written with Harry T. Paxton, who was sports editor at the magazine.

Trying to change substance, look, and image in one majestic swoop, the directors of the
Post
announced that on September 16, 1961, the “new”
Saturday Evening Post
would be “like no magazine you ever read before.” Indeed, they promised that with the September 16 issue, “Suddenly reading becomes an adventure!” The centerpiece of that issue was a long excerpt from the drab and drippy Stengel-Paxton book.

Above the blaring ballyhoo for the “new” magazine, someone remarked, “Harry Paxton has achieved the impossible. He’s made Casey Stengel dull.” Criticism of the old
Saturday Evening Post
maintained that the magazine was mostly trivial and usually flat. The new
Post
offered glitzy layouts, including a full-page color photograph of Stengel sniffing a red rose. But the story — and the
Post
was a storytelling magazine — was sheer old
Post
. The Madison Avenue crowd, whose advertising dollars were lifeblood to the magazine, laughed at — not with — the memoir. “How come the ‘new’
Post
reads worse than the ‘old’
Post?”
ran the gibe.

The new-old
Saturday Evening Post
went into a tailspin from which it never recovered. Stengel went on to manage the Mets with astonishing good humor.

The old man outlived
The Saturday Evening Post
by fully six years.

Casey Stengel, circa 1948, had not yet gone cosmic. He was famous in a minor way as a quintessential old Dodger, a good but less than great ballplayer, and assuredly a bit daft. (Writers called long-ago Brooklyn teams “the daffiness boys.”) Once Stengel tipped his hat to a Brooklyn crowd and a sparrow flew out. To this day, I am not certain how he trapped the bird. When I asked, Stengel said, quite clearly, with none of his customary curlicues or detours, “I don’t want to talk about that anymore. There were funnier things when I was in Brooklyn.”

“Such as?”

“Well, one day I’m in a hurry to leave Ebbets Field and I forget my wallet. I’m on the street with a lot of stuff and there, on Bedford Avenue, is a nice-looking kid on a bicycle. I want to run back without carrying stuff so I say to the kid, ‘Here. Hold my glove. I’ll be right back.’

“I get my wallet and run back to the corner. The kid and the bike and my glove — they’re all gone. And you know the lesson I learned from that, that I never forgot to this day?”

“What’s the lesson, Case?”

“Never trust a boy on a bicycle.”

As Jimmy Durante said of his own jokes, Casey had a million of ‘em. But with all the fun and even some success in Brooklyn — the team won the pennant in 1916 — center fielder Stengel was forever running out of money. He was disinclined to change his lifestyle, cut back on the gambling and the rest. Instead he muttered and roared that Charley Ebbets, who ran the Dodgers, was a cheapskate. That was so, and all the more reason why Ebbets did not like to hear it. In 1918 Ebbets shipped Stengel to the Pittsburgh Pirates, who presently sent him to Philadelphia, a club that dealt Stengel to the New York Giants on July 1, 1921.

Stengel gave the Giants two good seasons. On October 10, 1923, in the first World Series game at Yankee Stadium, his playing career reached a climax. The Stadium was new and vast and the largest crowd in baseball history, 55,307, herded into the Bronx. The Yankees, with Babe Ruth, were brash, muscular, nouveau. The Giants, under John McGraw, were old New York.

With the game tied, 4 to 4, in the ninth inning, Stengel came to bat in an unpromising situation. Two men were out. The bases were empty. “Bullet Joe” Bush, the Yankee pitcher, threw a three and two fastball on the outside corner. “I threw it as hard as I could,” Bush said later.

Stengel, a left-handed batter, crashed the ball on a long high line into left center field. No one has described what happened more grandly than Damon Runyon in the New
York American
. Runyon wrote:

This is the way old “Casey” Stengel ran yesterday afternoon running his home run.

This is the way old “Casey” Stengel ran running his home run home in a Giant victory by a score of 5 to 4 in the first game of the world’s series of 1923.

This is the way old “Casey” ran, running his home run home, when two were out in the ninth inning and the score was tied and the ball was still bounding inside the Yankee yard.

This is the way —

His mouth wide open.

His warped old legs bending beneath him at every stride.

His arms flying back and forth like those of a man swimming with a crawl stroke.

His flanks heaving, his breath whistling, his head far back.

Such is the stuff of legend. Stengel won the third game for the Giants, 1 to 0, when he cracked a home run into the right field bleachers at Yankee Stadium. Two home runs in a single World Series was extraordinary, but in the end, magnificent though Casey was, the Yankees won, four games to two, and the Yankees’ star slugger outdid Stengel. Babe Ruth hit
three
homers. Summing up, Heywood Broun wrote in the New York
World
, “The Ruth is mighty and shall prevail.”

In 1924, when he was thirty-four years old, Stengel married Edna Lawson of Glendale, California. Edna was a tall, willowy sometime actress who came from a monied background. The family’s wedding gift to the couple was a two-story house on Grandview Avenue in Glendale, surrounded by flower gardens and citrus trees. The property included a swimming pool and a tennis court. Ring Lardner’s rascally check bouncer was poor no more. Soon Stengel was investing in oil wells, real estate, and the family bank. His brother Grant had to drive a taxi in Kansas City to survive, but by the time “Dutch” Stengel reached the age of forty, he could have settled back into the life of a California squire. Almost all the investments paid handsomely. He had become a wealthy man.

But by nature he was an anti-squire. He needed tumult. He managed at Worcester and Toledo, drinking hard, brawling, often winning. The Dodgers hired Stengel to manage in 1934 and he held the Brooklyn job for three seasons. He finished sixth, fifth, and seventh. He was fired.

The Boston Bees hired him to manage in 1938 and he held that position twice as long. Under Stengel, the Bees finished fifth once, sixth once, and seventh four times. What everyone remembered was the tough wit. The Boston right fielder, Max West, was no Carl Furillo. West could hit and that was all. In pursuit of a fly ball one afternoon, West ran head first into an outfield wall. Stretcher bearers toted West from the field. Stengel looked down at his right fielder, who was moaning in pain, and remarked, “You got a great pair of hands, Max.”

Stengel went back to the minor leagues, first with the Milwaukee Brewers and the Kansas City Blues of the American Association and then with the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League. Inside baseball, the Coast League was called “the Brother-in-Laws League.” Old ballplayers seemed to gravitate toward California, and their style of play was less than fierce. Pitchers didn’t throw at batters. No one tried to knock down a second baseman on a double play.

In 1948, when Stengel was fifty-eight years old, he flowered. His Oakland team, mostly gentle veterans with the exception of the second baseman, won 114 games, the pennant and the playoffs. (The second baseman, a loudmouthed twenty-year-old named Alfred Manuel Pesano, became famous in later years as Billy Martin.)

“The thing which is very good managing in Oakland,” Stengel said, “is there is this bridge from Oakland to San Francisco, that is a very long bridge. Now it maybe don’t matter much just how long it is, but when you’re a manager, if you get my drift, it’s a good idea to be near a bridge,
any
bridge.”

When the Yankees brought Stengel to New York and a press conference at the 21 Club on October 12, 1948, Arthur Patterson, the team publicist, tried to stress Stengel’s hard baseball background. “It’s twenty-five years to the day,” Patterson said, “since Casey hit his second homer in the 1923 World Series.”

“Yeah,” Casey said. “Arthur was trying. But I know writers and I kept hearing a hum from writers in the room. And the writers were looking at me, damn near sixty years old, and they’re saying, in this hum: ‘That old bum managed nine years before in the major leagues and he never once got out of the second division.’”

“Stengel. You were asking me about Stengel. . . . When George Weiss signed him, we had a problem. Drinking? No, it wasn’t Casey’s drinking. He could handle the stuff. It was everybody else’s drinking. Ballplayers’ drinking. That was part of it.” The speaker was Arthur E. Patterson, a bright, abrasive character from Long Island, once a sound baseball writer for the
Herald Tribune
, but by 1948 publicity director of the Yankees. Prior to the Era, ballclubs assigned a minor official, usually the traveling secretary, to shepherd and corrupt the press, as a sidebar to such other duties as booking hotel rooms and assigning Pullman berths. (Rookies had to sleep in uppers; rebels were sentenced to berths over the clattering wheels.)