Forging Genius

Steven Goldman’s Forging Genius: The Making of Casey Stengel fills a gap in the biography of Charles Dillon Stengel—the time between the end of his playing career in the mid-1920s and his ascension to the manager’s position with the Yankees in October 1948. Stengel himself didn’t care to reminisce much about the nine years he spent managing the Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Braves before his astounding success with the Yankees. In his autobiography, Casey at the Bat, Stengel devoted just 16 pages to his first two major league managerial jobs. Robert Creamer’s biography, Stengel: His Life and Times, covers this period in just 19 pages. Stengel looked back on his early managerial experience with resignation in his autobiography.

“I used to try everything I could think of to win ball games with that Brooklyn team. Once we were leading the Giants but they were catching up to us. The weather was turning bad, and we tried to stall so that it would rain before they could beat us out. It got so dark I told the umpires, “You’d better call this game.”

But they wouldn’t do it. They were telling me to hurry up and get the game going. So I reached into the trainer’s bag and took out the little flashlight that he had to look down a player’s mouth if he had a sore throat. Then I signaled for a new pitcher to come in from the bullpen, and I used the flashlight to do it. I waved that up and down to show how dark it was.

The umpires didn’t like that. They threw me out, and the next batter hit safe, and the Giants beat us. So that was another time I got trimmed.”

Yet, Goldman argues that Stengel developed and honed his managerial chops with Brooklyn and Boston in the big leagues, as well as with Milwaukee and Kansas City in the American Association and with Oakland of the Pacific Coast League. The Baseball Prospectus and Pinstriped Bible author has written a taut, engaging book that captures the humor of Stengel without letting it obscure the real contributions that he made to the game as a manager. Goldman seasons his in-depth research and fine prose with some statistics, but not so many that he would scare away a reader who doesn’t know his VORP from his PAP. He also takes the time to explain park effects, player aging patterns and how strategies must evolve as the run-scoring environment changes, again all without weighing down the 262-page book.

Goldman traces the roots of Stengel’s managerial training to two of his managers in his 13-year playing career in the majors, Wilbert Robinson in Brooklyn and John McGraw with the New York Giants. Uncle Robbie was fun and avuncular, and Stengel famously showed that he had learned the lesson of having fun while playing when he returned to Brooklyn after being traded to the Pirates. In his first game at Ebbets Field after the trade, Stengel bowed to the crowd and doffed his cap, letting loose a sparrow, an act that would define him, for better and for worse, for the rest of his career. As Stengel wrote in his autobiography:

I played professional baseball for twenty years, of which thirteen were in the National League. I was fairly good at times—my lifetime batting average for my big league career was .284. But a lot of people seem to remember some of the stunts that I pulled more than they do the ball games I helped to win.

Now comedians aren’t really wanted in baseball. If you’re a comedian, you belong on the stage. It is never funny to a baseball owner who has a five-million-dollar investment to have a man cutting up in public. And I would like to say that I never tried anything out of the way when I was actually making a play in a regular game. It was always in an exhibition game or between plays. But I probably did too much of it. Some of it, I guess, was funny.

McGraw was the top managerial strategist at a time when managerial strategies counted for much more than they do today, Goldman writes. “A mirror image of today’s priorities: In McGraw’s day, it was the manager who was essential and the players who were replaceable.” McGraw and Stengel took a liking to each other as instructor and student, their relationship was unusually close and Goldman writes that it was this relationship that started Stengel on his managerial path. McGraw even gave Stengel the chance to manage the “B” Team as the Giants barnstormed north after spring training.

As a player, Stengel was resurgent after some down years with the second-division clubs in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, in part thanks to McGraw sitting the left-handed Stengel against lefty starters. Stengel came to understand the value of platooning by being half of one himself.

Stengel’s playing career ended early in the 1925 season with the Boston Braves so his managerial career could begin. In the minors, first with Worcester (Mass.) of the Eastern League and then Toledo (Ohio) of the American Association—the latter a job won with the help of McGraw—Stengel earned a reputation as an excellent teaching manager. He left the minors after the 1931 season and took a coaching job with the Brooklyn Dodgers under new manager Max Carey, who lasted just two years. Carey’s unwillingness to respond to a slight by cross-town rival Bill Terry of the New York Giants led to Carey’s firing before the 1934 season. During a meeting with reporters in the off-season, Terry was asked about the Dodgers. “Brooklyn?” Terry responded. “Is Brooklyn still in the league?” When Carey refused to be drawn into condemning Terry’s mocking question, Dodgers general manager Bob Quinn fired him, replacing him with Stengel.

In Brooklyn, Stengel was saddled with a barely mediocre team that didn’t have the funds either to buy good minor leaguers from independent teams or to build its own farm system as the St. Louis Cardinals were doing under Branch Rickey. Lacking talent, Stengel attempted to put a major platooning system in place to take best advantage of what he did have. Stengel not only platooned on the basis of batter handedness, but defensively and even, as he put it, mentally, shielding young players from starters who would give a young, aggressive hitter trouble. But injuries further depleted the talent on the team to the point that platooning was difficult. His three-year tenure was highlighted by the season-ending series against the Giants his first year. The Giants were tied with the Cardinals for the National League pennant heading into the final two games against the Dodgers at the Polo Grounds. The Dodgers swept the Giants and the Cardinals won their two remaining games, sending the Giants home for the winter just like the sixth-place Dodgers, who finished 71-81 but were welcomed back in Brooklyn like conquering heroes.

More typical of Stengel’s time in Brooklyn was an incident during the second game of a Fourth of July doubleheader in Philadelphia in 1934. Walter Beck started for the Dodgers that day, and the first eight Phillies batters reached base. Stengel paid a visit to Beck and suggested that the pitcher didn’t have it that day. Beck prevailed upon Stengel to stay in the game, and he continued to get rocked—no difficult feat in the tiny Baker Bowl, the Coors Field of its day. Stengel walked to the mound again. Beck argued to stay in the game, but Stengel was just as adamant that Beck was coming out. Knowing that he was done and angry at the world, Beck turned toward right field and hA HREFed the game ball toward the band box’s tin wall. Hack Wilson was playing right that brutally hot day and almost certainly feeling the effects of a throbbing hangover, Goldman writes. Wilson had taken a load off while Beck and Stengel argued. The clanging noise the ball made on the tin wall snapped Wilson out of his stupor, and he retrieved the ball and fired it into second base. “A helluva throw,” said second baseman Tony Cuccinello, “best he’s made all year.” Stengel was infuriated. Beck was demoted. Wilson was humiliated. Soon after, the Dodgers sold Wilson to the Phillies who released him shortly thereafter.

By 1936, with the losses piling up, Stengel turned to comedy. He coached third base holding an umbrella and signaled for a pitching change with a lantern, to make his point in each game for a delay because of rain and darkness, respectively. Asked about his antics years later, Stengel said, “With the clowns I had as players, that’s the only way you can survive.” Humor could only carry Stengel so far, however, and he was fired at the end of the season.

Stengel was only out of baseball for a year, during which time Bob Quinn moved from general manager of the Dodgers to the head of a new ownership group for the Boston Braves. The Braves, like the Dodgers, had precarious finances and modest at best talent. Unlike the Dodgers, they did not have a quaint, inviting neighborhood ballpark or much claim on the passions of their fans. After Quinn was rebuffed by several possible managers, Quinn hired Stengel, who immediately had to go to work to overcome his reputation as a clown.

The Braves, then going by the name Bees, led the National League in ERA in 1937, but it was largely the product of a couple of fluke seasons and the enormous dimensions and the offense-stifling prevailing winds at Braves Field (also known then as The Beehive). The Bees were lacking on offense, too, but overall, Goldman writes, the team showed more promise in its relative youth compared with the Dodgers team Stengel inherited. Elbie Fletcher, Vince DiMaggio and especially Max West were younger players who had performed well and had a chance to improve. The Bees had a hot start to the 1938 season, but injuries struck and the team’s lack of depth made its lack of offensive punch all the worse. Still, the Bees managed to finish 77-75 and in fifth place. 1938 was the only season that Stengel managed a club to a .500 finish or better in the National League in 13 seasons. The next year, the Bees faced a rash of injuries and were done by July. “With the team obviously doomed,” Goldman writes, “Stengel began acting out again,” earning ejections and a fine for, as he had done in Brooklyn, making his objections known to continuing a game in darkness by signaling for a reliever with a flashlight. The next season brought a youth movement, as Stengel vowed not to bring in any more veteran retreads, even if that was all the Bees could afford. But World War II, and the military draft that it required, halted the careers of many of those younger players, and it froze the talent available in the minors and the majors, leaving a talent-poor organization like the Boston Bees in suspended animation, unable to improve. The losing wore on Stengel, but before the 1942 season, he had invested in a syndicate headed by Quinn that bought the Braves (they returned to their historic name that year), and so he was trapped. Stengel tried ever more complicated platoon strategies, some of which, Goldman writes, seemed designed more to force the front office to improve the team than to win that particular game:

There was a recognizable aspect of escapism in this; managers who need relief from their jobs but cannot bring themselves to quit will often act in outlandish ways. A quintessential example of this was supplied by Chicago White Sox manager Eddie Stanky in May 1968 when he chose to bat pitcher Gary Peters ahead of, among others, Luis Aparicio. In Stengel’s case, he chose in one 1942 game to bench all of his outfielders and start catcher Phil Masi and infielders Sibby Sisti and Nanny Fernandez in their places. This was not experimentation but a cry for help.

Stengel was hit by a car while crossing Kenmore Square in 1942, knocking him out of commission for about 30 games. The leg hadn’t healed properly, and after another rough season in 1943 and with a new ownership group coming in, Stengel offered to resign so long as the new owners bought out his interest in the club.

Stengel was only away from managing for a short time. At the start of the 1944 season, the American Association’s Milwaukee Brewers chose Stengel to replace Charlie Grimm, who had been hired to manage the Cubs. Stengel managed the Brewers to an American Association pennant, but became offended by letters written about him by Brewers’ front office staffers to owner Bill Veeck, who was in military service in the Pacific, as well as by Veeck’s dismissive response from overseas. When he returned from the Pacific, Veeck was impressed with the work Stengel had done, not only in winning the Association’s pennant, but in selling 15 players to the major leagues at a handsome profit for the Brewers. But Stengel refused to stay on after the season. Moreover, for the first time since 1934, Goldman writes, Stengel knew he was a marketable commodity. George Weiss, Stengel’s long-time friend and a Yankee front-office executive, had a spot for him.

Weiss originally wanted to put Stengel on the bench of the big-league club as a coach so he could be “one heartbeat away” from manager Joe McCarthy, but neither Stengel nor Weiss had come quite far enough for that to happen. Weiss had more autonomy over the Yankees farm system, however, and he placed Stengel at the helm of the Kansas City Blues in the American Association. Stengel managed the moribund club for a year to ” off my obligation to Weiss,” he said, and then resigned. He hoped to buy a franchise, either in the majors or the high minors, but after his attempt to buy the Dodgers fizzled, he became the manager of the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League.

For the next three seasons, Stengel managed the Oaks and bolstered the improvement in his managerial reputation that he had gained from his stops in Milwaukee and Kansas City. Stengel’s team won a first-round playoff series in 1946, but lost in the PCL finals. The team retrenched in 1947 with many of its best players from the prior year sold to the majors, but with a team known as “the nine old men,” Stengel won the PCL pennant and then won the league championship in the two-round playoffs.  (Stengel’s time in Oakland was covered well by Steve Treder in the Hardball Times earlier this summer.) The day Stengel’s Oaks won the title, he was formally offered the job as manager of the Yankees, who were now run by Weiss.

The New York media, which included more than a dozen newspapers and a bevy of columnists and beat writers, were in disbelief about his hiring. “They were selling the story of the stumblebum comic who inherited the world’s greatest baseball team,” Goldman writes. But the press overestimated the team Stengel was handed as much as they underestimated Stengel’s abilities as a manager. Stengel’s predecessor, Bucky Harris, had presided over a World Series champion in 1947 and a third-place finish, in 1948, just two games out of first, but the team Stengel inherited was in transition on the field and in disarray from heavy drinking off it.

Looking back and seeing World Series championships in 1947 and 1949 through 1953, it is easy to assume that Stengel took over a juggernaut team, but in a position-by-position review, Goldman details big holes at first, second and third bases and left field. The more familiar names from those Yankees teams, including Phil Rizzuto, Yogi Berra and Joe DiMaggio inspired doubts, too—a poor 1948 season, an unsettled position and a right heel injury, respectively. Right field was manned by Tommy Henrich, a fine player who was believed to be 33 years old, but was actually 36. The rotation was a muddle behind Vic Raschi and Ed Lopat. Joe Page, the relief ace that Stengel predecessor Bucky Harris had relied upon so heavily in 1947, slipped the off-field leash that had kept him in line in 1947. He returned to a life of carousing, and he struggled through the 1948 season.

DiMaggio’s right-heel injury lingered well into the 1949 season, allowing him to play in just 76 games, although he played brilliantly in those 76 games, posting a .346/.459/.596 line. Many other Yankees followed their captain into the sick ward: Berra broke a hand, Jerry Coleman contracted a sinus infection, pitcher Bob Porterfield was hurt, returned to action and then got hurt again, and Henrich was hurt all over. The Yankees bought Johnny Mize from the Giants to solve their first-base problem. Mize lasted all of 13 games before he injured his shoulder diving for a ball. Only Phil Rizzuto played more than 130 games. When injuries forced Stengel to juggle his Yankee lineups, he at least had some decent talent in reserve to work with—a sharp contrast with his first two managerial stops. Even the cleverest manager needs some talent when juggling, because poor players don’t have many match-ups that they can exploit. Counting multi-position players at each position they played, Stengel used four catchers, seven first basemen, three second basemen, three third basemen, two shortstops (Coleman spelled Rizzuto for three games and part of a fourth) and nine outfielders. Stengel was able to rely on his top four starters for 128 starts and Joe Page pitched 135-1/3 innings over 60 appearances. None of the other pitchers on the staff made more than 29 appearances. This usage, coupled with Stengel’s extensive platooning, leads Goldman to a mini-rant on modern roster construction:

A note to present-day managers: the reason Stengel was able to do this was because he didn’t overstuff his bullpen at the expense of position players. Stengel was no less aware of the realities of individual pitcher-batter match-ups than Tony LaRussa is today, but unlike that manager or his many imitators, he did not carry as many pitchers as he could fit on a charter plane, failing to discriminate between quality arms and disjointed appendages so long as they threw from the requisite side of the rubber.

After edging the Red Sox in the season’s final series to clinch the pennant, the Yankees faced Brooklyn in the 1949 World Series, and Stengel continued to out-manage his opponents. In Game 3, with the Series and the game both tied at 1, starter Tommy Byrne had loaded the bases with one out and a run already in on a Pee Wee Reese home run leading off the inning. Stengel brought in Page, who pitched out of the jam and finished the game, throwing 5-2/3 innings and allowing two runs and two hits—both solo home runs—in a 4-3 Yankees win. Page also came on in the clinching Game 5, pitching 2-1/3 innings and making a four-run lead stand up in a 10-6 win. Goldman notes that even though Stengel was 60 years old, “he felt that he was just beginning to make his reputation. After a quarter century of being called a clown, one victory did not feel like a vindication.” No problem there, of course, as Stengel’s Yankees teams won 10 pennants and seven World Series, but even that wasn’t enough for Stengel to completely escape his reputation, in his own mind at least, Goldman concludes.