Amazin'

One epochal day in 1918, a flaky Pittsburgh Pirate stepped up to bat against the Brooklyn Dodgers. As the home crowd razzed him, the outfielder doffed his cap--and released a sparrow.

The bird was not the only thing to take wing from the head of Charles Dillon Stengel. By the time he died last week of cancer at 85, Casey had become past master of baseball's two toughest positions--jester and genius.

For two generations of Americans, Casey Stengel was an essential part of the national pastime--the canny, clownish manager of New York City's worst and best teams, the brand-new Mets and the old-gold Yankees. Hardly a man is now alive who remembers Casey at the bat. For the record, Stengel was a hitter who had a knack for connecting in the clutch. To use his own phrase, he treated the ball as if he hated it--and he sometimes fielded that way.

Clown Prince. Casey started playing summer ball in Kansas City--K.C. was the source of his nickname--to support himself while attending dental college. But he was a southpaw, Casey explained later, and the equipment of the period was geared for righthanded drillers. Like such other leftist talents as Leonardo da Vinci and Sandy Koufax, Stengel adjusted. He signed on at $75 a month with the Kankakee, Ill., club and immediately became the clown prince of the bush leagues. Running to his position, the outfielder liked to practice sliding into home plate en route. "There was a lunatic asylum across from the centerfield fence," he remembered. "My manager used to point there and say, 'It's only a matter of time, Stengel.' " But Casey had a farther destination:

Cooperstown, N.Y. From the start Stengel had the gift that Merlin enjoyed in The Once and Future King: he began decrepit and grew younger. The man who was too stiff to play at 35 was loose enough to manage in the majors and minors, learning, listening, coining the tortured syntax that would soon be labeled Stengelese. He perpetually refused to recognize players by name, only as "my big guy" or "that fella on first"; he told nonstop, outrageous stories and then claimed, "You could look it up."

His initial triumphs were negative.

The seventh-place Brooklyn Dodgers once paid him not to manage for a year.

Later, when Casey was managing the Boston Braves to a nothing season, he was struck by a taxi and incapacitated.

Fans hailed the cabbie as "the man who did more for baseball than Babe Ruth."

The label adhered to the victim, not the driver. Before the 1949 season, the Yankees summoned Failure Stengel from the minors. At the time, the slipping team seemed to need a smokescreen of lunacy; no one took Casey seriously--but Casey.

He rewrote the rules of man aging: he platooned his infielders, played by hunches, gambled on percentages. The Yankees suffered 72 injuries that year. They also won the pennant and World Series. The clown abruptly became "the Old Perfesser."

Casey and Edna, his wife of 51 years, were never par ents; as the Yankee skipper, Stengel found a league of sons among his players. Casey liked to point at Billy Mar tin and say, "Look at that little fella--he can do any thing." Recalls the present Yankee manager: "I'd break my fool neck trying to live up to it." So did Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle.

Inept Mets. Ten pennants and seven world championships the Yankees announced that Casey was 'retiring."

The never Old make the Perfesser had mistake better of words: bein' "I'll 70 again." Long before, Stengel's investments had literally struck oil; he was a bank director and a millionaire. The or dinary mastermind would have settled for a few more sedentary seasons in the sun. Instead, two years later Casey for sook his Glendale, Calif., mansion for New expansion York City team to he direct called a the "amazin'" subbasement Mets. The team was the most inept in the annals of baseball--and drew over 2 million cash customers in its first two years. Loyalties were built; as the Mets rose, the de-Stengeled Yanks declined.

At 75, after a painful hip fracture, Casey regretfully concluded, "Most people are dead at my age. You could look it up." The following year he limped into the Hall of Fame.

The face of the old man who took his bow that day was as seamed and folded as an out fielder's mitt; the jokes and gestures had become wonder fully impenetrable. Casey Stengel had at last become his own creation, the fugitive from Old Timers' Day who once said, "I couldn'ta done it without my players."

It is not the only way to remember the man who averaged .284 over 14 big-league seasons and outhit Babe Ruth (.417) in the 1923 World Series, or the manager who holds the record for consecutive pennants (five) and most World Series games won (37). Last week Yankee President Gabe Paul reflected, "Of the Yankee players he managed, six became big-league managers, eleven became coaches, six became scouts, three became broadcasters, six became college coaches and two became baseball executives. There's a great deal of Casey Stengel left in baseball."

There always will be. You could look it up.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.