Casey Stengel-The "Old Perfessor"

Casey Stengel was better known as a manager than as a player, but his playing days were not without excitement and accomplishment. It is just that Casey Stengel's sarcastic wit, sharp enough for the sportswriters of his day to nickname him the "Old Perfessor", overshadowed almost everything he did. Casey Stengel managed perhaps the best team in baseball ever, the Yankees from 1949-1960, and undoubtedly the worst of all time in the New York Mets of 1962-1964. Along the way, Casey Stengel gave so many useable and amusing quotes that you would swear he had comedy writers churning them out for him in the locker room.

Born in 1890 in Kansas City, Missouri, Charles Dillon Stengel hit .284 over 14 Major League Baseball seasons and .393 in three World Series. The only two games that the Giants won in the 1923 World Series were won by Casey Stengal home runs. When manager John McGraw traded him to the lowly Braves after the season anyway, Casey Stengel remarked, "It's lucky I didn't hit three home runs in three games, or McGraw would have traded me to the 3-I League." Known for his goofy antics, Casey Stengel once caught a bird before a game and put it under his cap. When he took the hat off in a gesture to the crowd, out flew the bird.

After his playing days ended, Casey Stengel managed in the minor leagues until he was able to land a job piloting the Brooklyn Dodgers. The only high point of his tenure there came when his Dodgers beat the rival Giants twice late in the 1934 season to cost them the NL pennant. In 1938, the Boston Braves hired Casey Stengel as their skipper, but in his six years in Boston he had but one winning campaign. He was managing the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League when the Yankees, now being run by Casey Stengal's old friend George Weiss, gave him their managerial reins. The move was not a popular one in New York, which had finished third the previous year, but Casey Stengel, who once claimed that "the key to managing was to keep the guys who hated you away from those that were undecided", was about to make history.