Casey Stengel: Baseball’s Greatest Character by Marty Appel (review)

Everybody loves Casey Stengel. That’s a fact. You need not be an aficionado of New York pinstripe lore to adore him. (The same holds true for fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants, and New York Mets.) Casey is as much a staple of New York baseball history as Mugsy, Uncle Robbie, The Mick, and, lest we forget, Marvelous Marv, and the Old Perfessor’s life and career are lovingly, knowingly celebrated in Casey Stengel: Baseball’s Greatest Character, Marty Appel’s full- bodied, appropriately- titled biography.

The Stengel stereotype that emerged from his years as a New York icon is that of a likable, comical character and a wrecker of the English language who, despite his less than stellar pre- and post- New York Yankees managerial career, was a smart- enough baseball man to lead the Bronx Bombers to baseball’s zenith. Yet there was more to Casey— much more— and Appel does a fine job of capturing the life of the man behind the myth. Those who know little or nothing of Casey Stengel will glean much from Appel’s tome, while those who are familiar with his life and legend will smile throughout this pleasurable read.

So much is covered here; at its best, Appel offers a recollection of several epochs of baseball’s past. Granted, Casey’s lifespan is dutifully covered off the field, from his birth and youth in Kansas City and his ever- so- brief career in dentistry to his relationship with his beloved wife Edna and the oil well investments which, starting in the late 1930s, “provided a fine income for the Stengels for the rest of their lives” (118). However, at its center is Casey’s lifetime connection to baseball: his early years as a minor league player, starting out in Kankakee, Illinois, in the Northern Association, and his decades as a big- league player and coach and minor and major league skipper. Early on, a picture of the future Old Perfessor emerges. As a player, he was “feisty and competitive” as well as “a bench jockey and provocateur in on- field scrapes” (63– 64). Upon being traded to the New York Giants, he got “a heavy dose of platoon baseball” by “observing [John] McGraw’s tactics, learning about moving players in and out of the lineup. What he learned would one day come to define his own managing style” (68). Certainly, Appel provides an adoring portrait of his subject. But Casey was not without flaws; Appel notes that “with good players he was a good manager, and with bad players, not” (326). And he was far from superhuman. Most intriguingly, during the 1915 season, Casey for a range of reasons allegedly contemplated suicide.

Countless anecdotes cram the pages, as do characteristic Casey quotes. A typical example: Just prior to the opening of Shea Stadium, Casey quipped: “It has 57 bathrooms, and I need one now” (313). Plus, what would a Stengel tome be without referencing his shrewdly rambling July 9, 1958, testimony before Estes Kefauver’s US Senate Anti- Trust and Monopoly Subcommittee, an abridged version of which appears in one of the book’s appendixes? Casey’s relationships with his players and other baseball folk also are dutifully charted, and not all were gracious. Tension existed between Casey and Phil Rizzuto, for example, and he “didn’t like [Jackie] Robinson, and it was mutual. A lot of it was competitive, a Yankees- Dodgers thing, when that rivalry was very strong. But some of it was surely subtle racism” (202). The personality and habits of the Old Perfessor are not confined to the ballfield, as Appel observes: “Indeed, Casey’s capacity to drink a lot without showing any more effect than prolonged talking was legendary . . . Most people simply marveled at his capacity for drink and his ability to go on till the early morning, continuing to hold his own while closing up bars around the country” (41).

While reading Casey Stengel: Baseball’s Greatest Character, one...