Thank you, Easy!
It just figures the Yankees. Such a great team back then. Dang!
Casey Stengel. I have not heard his name in a long time!
@Slip18 @Cyber Liberty Required reading for anyone who wants to see debunked once and for all the canard that those Yankees could have won with just a uniformed mannequin installed as manager:
A favourite Stengel story: When Mickey Mantle was a rookie, the Yankees broke spring training camp and went to Ebbets Field to play an exhibition with the Dodgers. Before the game, Stengel took Mantle towards right center field to show him the once-infamous Ebbets right field wall, the concrete wall bisected by a wall-height main scoreboard, which had a break across its middle with the lower section angling toward the field itself. (The angle and outward incline were a challenge for outfielders: Dodger right fielder Carl Furillo once said, "Where's the ball gonna hit? If it hits below the break you run like hell to the infield because it's gonna come shooting out. If it hits above the break, you run like hell to the wall because it's gonna drop dead.")
Stengel said to Mantle, "Now, when I played here . . . " (Which he had, in his playing career, as a Dodger.)
Mantle busted his gut laughing. "
You played here?" he managed to ask through his laughing.
A sportswriter happened to overhear the exchange, and Stengel tried to explain while holding his own laughter. "The boy never saw concrete before," the Ol' Perfesser said. "He thinks I was born sixty and started managin' right away."
But it might shock some of today's fans who complain about some of today's game trends to realise Stengel was using those
very things to win with the Yankees, including platoon splitting and even Moneyball-style baseball: Stengel was a big believer in and talker about on-base percentage decades before Billy Beane made a team-building science out of it; he thought nothing of going to his bullpen earlier than normal if he thought the situation called for it; he even paid attention to reverse platoon splits. (One of his most famous moves was based on just that: the purists screamed bloody murder when he brought in a non-descript righthander named Bob Kuzava to set down a rally in the final game of the 1952 World Series despite a group of lefthanded hitters due up for the Dodgers, but Stengel knew something the purists didn't: Kuzava at the time was better against lefthanded pitchers. And Kuzava saved the game and the Series, the fourth of the five straight Series Stengel won with the Yankees.) His basic managing philosophy: when you have an opening, shove with your shoulder.
Stengel was a sabermetric kind of manager decades before anyone even thought of the term sabermetrics. And when he had the kind of players who could
execute (his own favourite word) his kind of baseball, he won.
