Stengel Was the Talk of Town in New York

Twenty-four years ago today, Casey Stengel, who in a 10-year stretch won nine American League championships and a record 37 World Series games, died at 85.

It marked the end of a baseball era. Stengel’s career spanned most of the century, from a zany, 14-season playing career--he once tipped his cap and a sparrow flew out--to his becoming one of baseball’s most successful managers.

Many jokingly called him baseball’s only non-English speaking manager. Stengel’s fractured syntax bedeviled sportswriters for years, but no baseball figure was more popular.

His playing career, spent with five National League teams, was undistinguished, except for one fall day in 1923.

In 14 years, he hit a total of 60 home runs. Yet in Game 1 of the 1923 Giant-Yankee World Series, Stengel, not Babe Ruth, hit the first World Series home run in new Yankee Stadium.

It was a ninth-inning, inside-the-park home run that gave the Giants a 5-4 victory.

His managerial career, which began in 1934 with Brooklyn, was a mediocre one, until he joined the Yankees. In nine years, he had one winning season. Then came the break that sent him to the Hall of Fame: On Oct. 12, 1948, the Yankees rescued him from the Pacific Coast League.

His Yankee teams won the World Series from 1949 through ’53. When he was fired in 1960, he’d won seven World Series. He finished his career by managing the New York Mets from 1962 through ’65.

He’d lived in Glendale since 1924, the last years in a spacious home on Grand View Avenue. In 1957, Stengel launched a bank, Glendale National.

Charles Dillon Stengel today lies in a sunny plot in The Court of Freedom section of Glendale’s Forest Lawn Memorial Park. He’s buried next to his wife Edna, to whom he was married 54 years. She died in 1978.

The grave is marked by a nearby wall plaque, which reads:

“For over 60 years one of America’s folk heroes who contributed immensely to the lore and language of our national pastime, baseball.”

Also on this date: In 1959, the Dodgers beat the Milwaukee Braves, 6-5 in 12 innings, for a two-game sweep of a National League playoff and headed for a World Series with the Chicago White Sox. . . . In 1920, in arguably the greatest sports journalism scoop of the century, the Chicago Tribune’s James Crusinberry broke the story of the fixing of the 1919 World Series by the White Sox. The fix, long-rumored in the off-season, was confirmed in Grand Jury testimony by two players, Eddie Cicotte and Shoeless Joe Jackson.

In 1914, the Boston Braves clinched the National League pennant after winning 34 of their last 44 games and were nicknamed “the Miracle Braves.” . . . In 1920, on the last day of the season, Ruth hit his record 54th home run. Only one other team in the American League hit as many as 44. . . . In 1957, the New York Giants played their final game at the Polo Grounds. . . . In 1963, in his final major league game, Stan Musial drove in the first run of the game with a sixth-inning single, then was replaced by a pinch runner.

In 1947, Clarence Maddern of the PCL’s Los Angeles Angels hit a dramatic grand slam in the eighth inning at Wrigley Field to give the Angels the PCL championship in a 5-0 playoff victory over the San Francisco Seals before 22,996.