Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The (25 page)

It has been casually asserted by many baseball writers that Casey Stengel’s greatest value to his teams was in attendance, or in publicity which could result in attendance.

How many fans a year was Casey Stengel worth? Let’s say that a team was going to draw a million fans a year without Casey Stengel. How many would they draw with him?

There’s no way of knowing
exactly
, but I thought maybe it wouldn’t hurt to look. The obvious way to look at the issue is to compare the attendance of Stengel’s teams in the years Stengel was the manager with the attendance of the same teams in the years just before and just after Stengel was the manager.

Casey’s first major league team was the Brooklyn Dodgers, whom he managed from 1934 to 1936. In the three years that Stengel was the manager, the Dodgers drew an average of 464,774 fans—in fact, they were near that figure all three years. This figure was 5% above the National League average for the time:

Both of these figures were markedly higher in the period just before Stengel was hired, the three years 1931–1933:

After Stengel was let go, Dodger attendance went back up:

Charts such as this leave out many details, of course, so let’s fill in a little bit. The Dodgers from 1914 to 1931 were managed by Wilbert Robinson, and their attendance was generally very good. In 1930, with a contending team, they drew a million-plus fans. From 1931 to 1933 the depression was settling in, and baseball attendance was declining everywhere. The Dodgers remained a pretty good team in 1931–1932, over .500 both seasons, but fell near to the basement in 1933, the year before they hired Stengel. Their attendance was in a sharp decline before Stengel was hired, and it hit rock-bottom under Stengel. Thus, such comparisons may be unfair to Casey.

By 1938 the depression was easing. In 1939 Leo Durocher took over, the team improved dramatically, and attendance jumped back near the million level. Again, this is not necessarily a fair basis for comparison to Stengel.

Stengel’s second major league job was in Boston, where he managed the Braves for six seasons, 1938–1943. In the three seasons prior to Stengel’s arrival (1935–1937), the Braves averaged 319,559 fans per seasons, which was 35% below the league norm:

This period includes the 1935 season, when the Braves won only 38 games in a full season.

Stengel was hired in 1938. The Braves’ attendance declined by 44,000 in 1938, despite the fact that the performance of the team was essentially the same as in 1937, and despite gains in attendance throughout most of the baseball world. It continued down from there—down another 55,000 in 1939, down another 44,000 in 1940. For the six years that Stengel was in Boston, the Braves averaged 281,510 fans per season:

Boston attendance dropped even lower in 1944, the first year post-Stengel, but recovered strongly in 1945 and 1946:

Of course, there was a tremendous boom in baseball attendance after the war, so it is hardly fair to compare 1946 attendance figures to those from 1942. But on the other hand, that’s why we look at both figures—the team’s attendance, and their attendance compared to league norms. In 1946, Billy Southworth’s first year in Boston, the Braves attendance was 87% of the league norm. In Stengel’s years, it was consistently near 50% of the league norm.

In 1949, of course, Stengel was hired to manage the Yankees. By now the attendance boom had passed its peak, which was 1948.

In the last three years pre-Stengel, the Yankees drew an average of 2,272,783 fans—81% above the league norm:

In 1949 their raw attendance figure was almost exactly the same—2,281,676. This was 70% above the league norm.

In the following years, attendance both for the Yankees and for the American League went into a sharp decline. This decline is usually blamed on television, which came to dominate the nation’s attention for a few years. For the twelve years that Stengel managed the Yankees, the team averaged 1,670,223 fans per season:

Attendance in New York declined somewhat more rapidly than throughout the rest of baseball. This continued to be true, however, after Stengel left the team:

The famous ’61 Yankees drew 1.75 million fans, 72% above the American League average, but the team drew poorly in ’62 and ’63, when they were competing for attendance with the new New York Mets.

Which brings us to the final Casey Stengel experience, the Mets from 1962 through 1965, actually the first half of 1965. The Mets attendance started slowly, but exploded into a kind of phenomenon in 1964, when 1.7 million fans turned out to watch the lovable losers. There is, of course, no “before” data in this case:

Attendance continued to increase after Stengel had departed:

As I’ve said, there are innumerable factors which explain movements in attendance, and we should be cautious in rushing to any conclusions. I’m sure there are other ways you could arrange the data, which might create very different results.

In the case of the Yankees, for example … the relationship between the Yankees attendance and the league norms has flattened out constantly since about 1920. In the early 1920s the Yankees drew twice as many fans as the average American League team; now, they’re about average. Each era, judged by the standards of the previous era, might tend to look flat.

Nonetheless, the data
is
curious. Just looking at the numbers, one would swear that Casey Stengel was working twenty-four hours a day to scare away the customers:

It is, in retrospect, not at all apparent that the Mets attendance in 1962 was especially good. The Mets drew 922,350 fans in their first season—fewer than the Seattle Mariners (1.3 million), the Toronto Blue Jays (1.7 million), or the Montreal Expos (1.2 million). They drew fewer than their expansion mates, the Houston Astros (924,456).

Those cities, of course, were new to baseball, and were excited to have a team. The Mets, on the other hand, came into a city accustomed to major league baseball. Like the Kansas City Royals, who drew 902,414 in their first season. In Kansas City.

The Mets attendance edged over the million mark in 1963 (1.08 million), and exploded toward two million in 1964, when

a) Shea Stadium opened, and

b) there was a World’s Fair going on across the street.

At the time, New York sportswriters
thought
that the Mets were drawing huge crowds, and that Casey Stengel was the cause of this. Neither of these perceptions is self-evidently accurate. The crowds
weren’t
all that large, and Casey Stengel probably wasn’t responsible for their being as large as they were. Taking the whole package, the New York Mets in their first four seasons drew fewer fans than the Blue Jays in their first four seasons (1977–1980), and fewer than the Braves in their first four years in Milwaukee (1953–1956)
or
their first four years in Atlanta (1966–1969). Is 5.5 million fans in four seasons a good total, for a New York City expansion team with a new park, or a bad total? I don’t know the answer, but it is at best a debatable proposition.

Could
Casey Stengel in fact have had a negative impact on attendance, as the data seems to demonstrate? Let me throw out an argument, strictly on a for-what-it’s-worth basis. Nobody goes to a ballpark to watch the manager. What does the manager do? He hides in the dugout. Hell, you can’t even see him most of the time. Even when you can see him, you’re not
watching
him. You’re there to watch the players.

It wasn’t the
fans
who loved Casey Stengel, it was the
writers
. The writers loved him because him because he was the greatest day-in, day-out baseball story since Babe Ruth. There was
always
something to say about him.

But if you focus on the slightly bigger picture, how does this change the publicity of the team? Does it result in more newspaper coverage? Is the sports editor going to say, “Oh, Casey Stengel’s in town; we’d better add another reporter to cover the team.” Is the publisher going to say, “Oh, we’ve got Casey Stengel to write about; we’d better add two pages to the sports section.”

Of course not; that’s not the way the world works. What happens is, Casey Stengel gets written about,
rather than the players
.

From the standpoint of the player, this may be a good thing. Many teams, and in particular many New York teams, have allowed the newspaper coverage to become an obstacle to the success of the team. The pressure for immediate success which can be generated by the New York media is enormous and has led directly to midcareer crises for many athletes. Stengel brought all that pressure upon himself.

But from the standpoint of selling tickets, it might not be a good thing, at all. If one buys the proposition that the fans pay to watch the players, not the manager, then it isn’t a long reach to argue that any publicity which flows away from the players and toward the manager will be counterproductive in terms of attendance. The fact is, in any case, that all of Stengel’s teams did poorly at the box office, with the arguable exception of the New York Mets.