King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Casey Stengel was more genius than clown, a new book argues, and his brilliance as the Yankees manager was forged through years of losing in Brooklyn and Boston.

Apr 21, 2005 | While "Three Nights in August," which peers inside the mind of a great baseball manager, hangs around on the bestseller lists, there's another, lower-profile book on the same subject.

I'm not sure whether Casey Stengel was a better manager than Tony La Russa is, but "Forging Genius: The Making of Casey Stengel" by Steven Goldman is a better book.

Stengel is best remembered by non-fans and casual ones as a character, the Ol' Perfesser, the cockeyed philosopher who had his own language, Stengelese, "only superficially resembling Sanskrit," as Red Smith put it. He was the guy who once said, "The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided," who famously lamented about his lovably woeful New York Mets, "Can't anybody here play this game?"

A bird flew out of his cap once, on the field. He told a barber to make sure not to cut his throat: "I may want to do that later myself."

Stengel had a good sense of humor and a nearly irrepressible desire to call attention to himself, but a lot of his act was just that, an act, a crazy-like-a-fox routine. Late in Stengel's life, Goldman writes, a young reporter interviewed him and noticed that he was speaking in a comprehensible way. When he observed that Stengelese was a big put-on, Stengel said, "Son, this is gonna be our little secret, isn't it?"

Fans know Stengel as the manager of the Yankees dynasty of the 1950s. He took over in 1949 and the team won five straight World Series, an unprecedented and unmatched feat. In the sixth year, 1954, the Yankees won 103 games and were the best second-place team in history. Then they won four more pennants in a row, twice winning the Series.

After a third-place finish in '59, the Yankees won the American League again in 1960, losing one of the craziest World Series ever to the Pirates, outscoring Pittsburgh 55-27 but dropping four of seven games. Yankees owners Dan Topping and Del Webb fired Stengel, saying he'd grown too old. "I'll never make the mistake of being 70 again," he said.

But even that remarkable run, 10 league championships and seven World Series rings in 12 years, doesn't get Stengel the respect he deserves. "You or I could have managed and gone away for the summer and still won those pennants," Phil Rizzuto has said, and maybe he knows, since he was the shortstop. "That's how good we were."

These, after all, were the Yankees of Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford, among lesser greats. Joe DiMaggio was still around for the first three years. Goldman quotes from the autobiography of Bill Werber, an infielder who played for Stengel in the minors in 1931: "Consistent pitching and timely hitting turned Stengel into a genius and convinced the sportswriters of the day that his nonsensical utterances were in fact the learned pontifications of a master."

Next Page: The Yankees weren't all that great when Stengel came aboard with headlines reading, "Yanks hire clown"

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