A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (39 page)

After the departure of DiMaggio, the Yankees were not
as talent-laden as in the “Murderer’s Row” years, but they won just
as consistently. Weiss was a big reason. The roster turned over
quite a bit. He was a trader, a “wheeler-dealer” and a farm system
developer. Weiss always stocked the club with key players who could
replace others just as they were going downhill just a little bit.
It was ruthless but that was the Yankee way.

Branch Rickey developed the first farm system in St.
Louis and later brought his organization to Brooklyn. Weiss
perfected it, mainly because the Yankees had the economic ability
to do what other teams could not. The club did not pay players high
salaries, preferring to tout their World Series shares, New York
connections and endorsements. They developed young players, sold
them for profit, then bought them back for less. He bought Joe
DiMaggio, Tommy Henrich and a handful of others for a total of
$100,000, but sold players for $2 million. He bamboozled other
general managers the way Billy Beane of the A’s is said to have
done in the 2000s. Weiss’s conscience never bothered him. He would
have made a great Roman Caesar, more Octavian than Julius.

Arthur Richman, after having worked for William
Randolph Hearst, was hired as the Mets’ director of promotions. A
first class organization was in place. They would play at the Polo
Grounds for a year then move into Shea Stadium in 1963 (a bog was
discovered while building, pushing back the opening to 1964). They
had solid ownership and a top-notch front office. All they needed
was a field manager.

Charles Dillon “Casey” Stengel was the perfect
choice. He
was
New York baseball. He had played in the World
Series with both Brooklyn and the New York Giants. An outfielder
for John McGraw, he batted .400 in the 1922 World Series victory
over Babe Ruth’s Yankees. He was a fan favorite and showman, with
sparrows flying from his hat, always a practical joker.

Stengel managed the Dodgers from 1934 to 1936 and
the Boston Braves from 1938-43, but failure at both led him to the
minor leagues. He managed at Kansas City, part of the Yankees’
chain, then led Oakland to the Pacific Coast League title in
1948.

In 1949 the Yankees hired him, causing howls of
protest. Casey Stengel was antithetical to the Yankee image,
although Babe Ruth had never been a Wall Street type himself. But
after Ruth the players, managers, even their fans, became “company
men.” Manager Joe McCarthy instilled in the team a “Yankee way” of
doing things; of carrying themselves, that covered the way they
dressed, the approach to practices and games, the conducting of
interviews and inter-action with the public. A Yankee was like a
Republican political candidate. Players like Lou Gehrig and Joe
DiMaggio performed majestic feats on the field, showing little in
the way of emotion. It was expected. Their fans cheered in polite
arrogance.

Now a “clown,” a Dodger reject, a minor league
outcast, was brought in to manage the
Yankees
. It was a
tough year to make a good showing, too. The 1949 Boston Red Sox
were a powerhouse led by the great Ted Williams at the height of
his career. The Yankees had faltered down the stretch the previous
season, losing out in a tight three-team race won by Cleveland over
the Red Sox and New York. Joe DiMaggio suffered a painful bone spur
in his heel and was out indefinitely. It was a transition period;
the great stars being replaced by untested youth. The New York
catcher was a St. Louis rube named
Yogi Berra
, of all
things.

The Red Sox got out of the gate fast. But New York
hung tough. In June, DiMaggio returned in a four-game series at
Fenway Park that will be lauded over as long as men speak of
baseball. The Bronx Bombers beat out Williams and the Bosox for the
1949 league pennant, then knocked off Jackie Robinson’s Dodgers for
the World title. They repeated in 1950. Stengel’s teams won nine
World Series between 1949 and 1960. It was the most dominant run in
baseball history, even greater than the Ruth-Gehrig or
Gehrig-DiMaggio Yankees of the 1920s and ‘30s.

The Yankees of the 1950s were certainly talented,
featuring superstar pitcher Whitey Ford and mega-superstar center
fielder Mantle, but the dominance they displayed was beyond their
abilities. It must be attributed to Stengel. Stengel and Weiss did
not play a pat hand. The line-up changed. Kansas City became their
de facto
“triple-A club.” Young players replaced old with
little regard for a veteran’s prior service. When the National
League was integrating wholesale, the Yankees did so in small steps
and with a particular “kind” of player. Read: Elston Howard.

Stengel revolutionized the platoon system, using
righties against southpaw pitchers, lefties against right-handed
hurlers; late-inning defensive replacements, pinch-runners,
pinch-hitters, double-switches. The old “starter goes nine”
mentality made way for a functional bullpen of middle relievers,
set-up men and closers. As great as the New York Yankees were, they
won more than they should have. A comparison of the Dodgers’ and
Yankees’ line-ups and pitching staffs in that decade very well may
favor the Dodgers in terms of talent, but Casey’s Yankees beat them
over and over again. Weiss kept costs down. The platoon system
reduced players’ statistics, which was used against them in
contract negotiations.

“You didn’t hit 30 homers.”

“You didn’t drive in 100 runs.”

Looking at Stengel’s career as a player, failed
manager in Brooklyn and Boston, then his Mets years, there seem to
be two Caseys. When he came to the Mets, he reverted back to the
“clown” he had been before his Yankee tenure. In truth, Casey was
always the same. The imprimatur of Yankee pinstripes and glory,
however, made him an elder statesman; his “double talk” words of
wisdom, his rubbery on-field antics suddenly works of genius as he
led the “corporation” to record profits. He loved to drink,
regaling writers with wild stories well into the evening. He may
have been the most colorful, quotable figure the game has ever
known. Eventually, his age, his “un-Yankee”
persona
, and
maybe even his popularity, made him vulnerable.

He personally admitted mistakes that cost New York
the 1960 World Series in seven games to Pittsburgh; mainly a
failure to have Ford available in the final game because of the way
he used Whitey. Casey was unceremoniously let go. The success of
the Yankees continued for several more years, with new manager
Ralph Houk using Ford in a manner that allowed him to enjoy his
best years ever. This casts some doubt on Stengel, but Houk was
unable to sustain the run as Stengel had. In the end, credit for
such a long showing of dominance must be given to the “Ol’
Perfessor.”

No sooner was Stengel fired than Weiss, also fired
by the same team, decided he would manage the New York
Metropolitans. Stengel’s wife, Edna urged him not to do it. He had
other offers, including a lucrative memoir in the
Saturday
Evening Post
and a cushy banking position out in California.
The allure of baseball and maybe even proving the Yankees’ wrong in
New York was too great. His hiring made the Mets’ “good guys” and
the Yankees’ villains.

Stengel had no pretense whatsoever. He loved
everybody and gave his time to fans and old acquaintances. Once the
team arrived at two in the morning to their hotel in San Francisco
where the Women's Republican Club of California was holding a
convention.

“. . . These old dowagers had waited up for him,”
recalled beat writer Jack Lang. “They were standing in the lobby,
and he stood there regaling them with stories for another hour. He
was a charmer with everybody. He really was.”

“All the kids in New York are growing up, and they
want to see the Metsies, the Metsies, the Metsies,” he told
interviewers. He put out an “invitation” to the “youth of America”
to come “try out” for the Mets, an unprecedented approach that
seemed to say that the club was so bad they would accept scrubs,
walk-ons, unknowns, since few players ever really “try out.”

That term is a misnomer, at least in the modern era
and especially since the institution of the draft in 1965. People
who said they had “a try-out” with some team or another use the
term loosely. It is a sure indication the “player” knows not what
he speaks of and never was a prospect. “Try-outs” are occasionally
held for all comers, but these events are jokes, PR stunts in which
500 hopefuls show up and one or two is signed, if any. Half the
time a player signed from one of these events is the guy who ran
the fastest 40-yard dash. If a legitimate player is signed out of
such a try-out, he is not a guy “discovered” there. Rather, he is
probably a known quantity, recently released by another
organization perhaps; or a local college player of some recognized
ability who for various reasons (injury, grades, quit the team?)
was not drafted or signed. Modern scouting is a sophisticated
process in which few players go “under the radar.” Some clubs
sponsor “winter league” teams called the “Phillies rookies,”
“Dodgers rookies” or some such thing, but many scrubs exaggerate
their claims to professional or “prospect” status based on nebulous
“semi-pro” affiliations. But Stengel seemed to indicate that all
comers were welcome and actually had a shot. He knew better but the
PR value was terrific.

“The Mets is a very good thing,” said former
Brooklyn pitcher Billy Loes. His statement seemed to reflect the
comedy of those early Mets in a way that nobody talks anymore.
“They give everybody a job. Just like the WPA.” The WPA was the
Works Projects Administration, a New Deal construction outfit
started by President Franklin Roosevelt (which as the Venona
Project later revealed was rife with Communist espionage).

Hobie Landrith was made the first Met ever picked in
the 1961 National League expansion draft. “You gotta start with a
catcher or you’ll have all passed balls,” Stengel explained. This
of course is true, but somehow Stengel had a way of talking as if
to a six-year old child.

“Stengel was a comedian, and he was bright, and he
had total recall so there wasn’t anything that didn’t happen that
Stengel couldn’t refer to, one way or another,” said sportswriter
Stan Isaacs.

Stengel could see through phonies. He immediately
determined that Howard Cosell was just that, but if a reporter was
honest Stengel liked them and gave young writers attention, feeding
egos. According to Robert Lipsyte of the
New York Times
, one
of the reasons so many of the early Mets’ stories had a comic angle
was because the
Times
de-valued sports. They decided to make
the Mets more of a feature than a legitimate sports story, and
nobody wanted to miss a thing the “Ol’ Perfessor” said.

“I couldn’t drink along with him, obviously, but I
didn’t want to leave early, just in case he said something,”
Lipsyte said of Stengel.

Weiss and Stengel decided to go for veteran talent
instead of youth, for several reasons. In 1961, the Los Angeles
Angels used veterans with some success, which carried over to
actual pennant contention in 1962. The Mets wanted to satisfy the
old Dodgers’ and Giants’ fans by bringing back some of the names
from the past, in the hopes that they might have a little magic
left and would sell tickets. The magic was gone but they did sell
tickets. The other National League expansion franchise, the Houston
Colt .45s, went for youth.

Among players selected after Landrith in the
original draft were Don Zimmer, Roger Craig, and Gil Hodges. Others
included Jay Hook, Bob Miller, Lee Walls, Gus Bell, Ed Bouchee,
Chris Cannizzaro, Elio Chacon, Choo Coleman, Ray Daviault, John
DeMerit, Sammy Drake, Al Jackson, Felix Mantilla, Bobby Gene Smith,
Jim Hickman and Sherman Jones. Richie Ashburn, Frank Thomas, Clem
Labine and Charlie Neal, all talents, were also included. Ashburn
and Thomas still had some juice left.

The 1962 Mets were a force of nature. If there is any
possible truth to George Burns’s statement in
Oh, God!
that
the1969 Mets were his
Last Miracle
, then the ’62 version was
somehow struck by supernatural forces, too. It was a comedy of
errors, of flukes, of crazy plays, players and situations, almost
defying logic, therefore lending credence to the notion that the
deity got involved. Never has a team played so badly, and never has
failure been so loved.

Certainly the “Daffiness Boys” were popular, but
Dazzy Vance was a Hall of Famer, Babe Herman a line drive
impresario. It seems completely improbable that a bad team could be
received so well in New York City. Today it would not happen. This
is a town built on excellence. The George Steinbrenner mentality,
the Donald Trump way of thinking, has completely overshadowed the
old concepts. But with the Dodgers and Giants gone, with the
Yankees resembling a shark in a tank full of minnows, somehow the
whole thing played.

That spring, Stengel’s explanations of his team were
classics of baseball humor, even though it seems the “Ol’
Perfessor” was deadly serious in his analysis. After announcing
that “Chacon” was batting second, he got into this
tete a
tete
with
New York Post
columnist Leonard Schecter and a
few others:

“Chacon?” asked Schecter.

“Mantilla,” said Stengel. It sounded liked like
scintilla
. “I mean Chacon. I mean I said Chacon, but I meant
Mantilla . . . I don’t know who to hit third. If it’s a
right-handed pitcher, which it is, I might go with Bell in right
field . . . You asked me for a line-up and I can’t give it to you .
. . I got two center fielders. Christopher and Smith.”

Christopher was in the minors.

“Christopher?” inquired Schecter.

“Ashburn,” said Casey. “Smith and Ashburn. Whichever
one I play I’ll put leading off.”