Stengel Was Rewarded for Hunch on Martin

In a sense, it was Casey Stengel’s greatest triumph.

When his New York Yankees won their fifth consecutive World Series 46 years ago today, that feat alone was enough to put him in the Hall of Fame. After all, the Yankees won those championships in his first five years in the American League.

In a 41-year baseball career as a player, coach and manager, he had never spent one day in the American League until the Yankees hired him in October 1948.

And a personnel move he made in 1950 resulted in the 1953 championship.

Shortly after taking over the Yankees in 1949, he sought to bring up a second baseman named Billy Martin, who had played for Stengel in the Pacific Coast League. Yankee brass resisted acquiring the ill-tempered Martin, who had an anemic batting average.

Stengel insisted. “He’s a winner,” he told them.

The 25-year-old Martin not only drove in the winning run in the last of the ninth inning in the deciding Game 6, it was his 12th hit of the 1953 Series--a record for a six-game Series at the time and one he shares to this day with Paul Molitor, Roberto Alomar and Marquis Grissom.

In fact, at the time, Martin tied the record for a seven-game series, broken in 1964 by the Yankees’ Bobby Richardson, who had 13 hits.

Martin’s slap-shot single against reliever Clem Labine sailed softly over second base and scored Hank Bauer with the winner in a 4-3 Yankee victory before 62,370 at Yankee Stadium.

Martin, later a successful manager himself, played 11 seasons and finished with a career batting average of .257. But in the first week of October 1953, he did more than a passable imitation of Ty Cobb.

Also on this date: In 1941, the best defensive catcher in the National League, the Dodgers’ Mickey Owen, let a third-strike pitch get by him with two out in the ninth inning of Game 4 of the World Series. Brooklyn led at the time, 4-3. The next four hitters reached base and the Dodgers lost to the Yankees, 7-4. The muff put the Dodgers down, three games to one, and they lost the Series the next day.