Word: stengel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Casey Stengel...
Under the Table. The writers loved Stengel. He could drink most of them under the table. New York fans loved him, too, as the Yankees found out when they fired him after the 1960 season. In 1962 Casey signed on as manager of the National League's fledgling New York Mets. "The amazin' Mets," he called them-and they were all of that. The Mets lost games in the longest (23 innings, 7 hrs.) and shortest (27 straight outs) ways possible. They were the only team since 1899 to lose 120 times in a single season. They finished...
...floppy ears beat the brain of a baseball genius did not occur to the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Boston Braves-whom Casey managed for nine years without ever getting out of the second division. The Dodgers finally paid him for a whole season not to manage. Then in 1949, Stengel took over the New York Yankees- and the clown became the "Old Perfesser." In twelve years he won ten American League pennants (a record) and seven World Series (another record). Critics insisted that anybody could win with the Yankees. But was that it? "I was just a kid shortstop...
...tired," Casey would growl, "I'm not tired either, so I'm gonna bring in a new man before I get tired watchin'." Batters resented being replaced by pinch hitters-sometimes before their first turn at bat. Whenever a Yankee player made a mistake, Stengel would discuss it for hours with New York sportswriters-"my writers"-in that incredible prose known as "Stengelese." "You open a paper in the morning," Third Baseman Clete Boyer once complained, "and you read how lousy...
...75th birthday in July, Stengel fell and fractured his hip. Doctors told him that he might never walk properly again, so Casey, who has been quietly salting it away for years, decided to go home to his bank (the Valley National of Glendale, Calif.), his "dozens" of oil wells, his stock portfolio, and his six-story office building in Glendale. He was still on the Mets's payroll as the club's "West Coast vice president"-or, in Stengel's words, "the highest-priced scout you've ever seen." Coach Wes Westrum would manage the team...