Word: stengel
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...bird was not the only thing to take wing from the head of Charles Dillon Stengel. By the time he died last week of cancer at 85, Casey had become past master of baseball's two toughest positions-jester and genius...
...generations of Americans, Casey Stengel was an essential part of the national pastime-the canny, clownish manager of New York City's worst and best teams, the brand-new Mets and the old-gold Yankees. Hardly a man is now alive who remembers Casey at the bat. For the record, Stengel was a hitter who had a knack for connecting in the clutch. To use his own phrase, he treated the ball as if he hated it-and he sometimes fielded that...
...Kansas City-K.C. was the source of his nickname-to support himself while attending dental college. But he was a southpaw, Casey explained later, and the equipment of the period was geared for righthanded drillers. Like such other leftist talents as Leonardo da Vinci and Sandy Koufax, Stengel adjusted. He signed on at $75 a month with the Kankakee, Ill., club and immediately became the clown prince of the bush leagues. Running to his position, the outfielder liked to practice sliding into home plate en route. "There was a lunatic asylum across from the centerfield fence," he remembered...
Maury Allen doesn't get any deeper than a surface recount of DiMaggio's career. He describes the 1941 batting streak in vivid and exciting detail, offers some insight into DiMaggio's longstanding feud with the late Casey Stengel, and shares a few until now unreported tidbits about Marilyn Monroe and Joe. But mostly he allows old ex-Yankees to do the talking and many of them, particularly Lefty Gomez whose monologue goes on for pages, have a propensity for talking more about themselves than about DiMaggio...
...astonishing that in a sport whose devoted followers can recall such trivia as Fenton Mole's lifetime batting average, the name Moe Berg seems all but forgotten. Casey Stengel called him "the strangest fellah who ever put on a uniform." The strange thing was that Berg played major league baseball at all. Unlike Stengel, who it is said became a ballplayer after discovering that he was a lefthanded dentistry student in a world of righthanded dental equipment, Berg was suited to do just about anything. He had an IQ that could not have been too far behind his career...