Casey Stengel’s career in baseball covered a lot of the game’s 20th-century history. He patrolled the outfielder for five different National League teams from 1912 to 1925, went on to manage Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle in leading the Yankees to seven World Series titles, and capped things off by managing the New York Mets. He has the distinction of being the only person to ever wear the uniforms of all four New York baseball teams: the Dodgers, Giants, Yankees, and Mets. Stengel is a rich baseball subject, especially when profiled by New York Yankees historian Marty Appel, who has penned many baseball books and is ideally qualified to peel back the layers of the quirky, beloved, amusing, and enigmatic Casey.
Here’s an excerpt from Casey Stengel:
“Molding [Mickey] Mantle as an outfielder was a wonderful pet project for Stengel, a former right fielder himself. ‘The first thing I had to teach was to run in the outfield, looking back over his shoulder, which DiMaggio was so great at, and not run looking down at the ground. “They have no plowed fields up here, boy,” I tell him, “and you don’t have to run and watch out for furrows at the same time because this is the big leagues and the fields are all level and they have groundskeepers and everything.”
