The long and winding big-league baseball season started this week. Every year at this time we profile a baseball immortal who is equally celebrated for his unorthodox language skills. The choice this year is Charles Dillon \u201cCasey\u201d Stengel (1890-1975), who at the age of fifty-eight became manager of the mighty New York Yankees and took them to ten World Series in twelve years.<\/p>\n
Casey Stengel broke into the major leagues in 1912 and played for fourteen seasons. He later said, \u201cI had many years that I was not so successful as a ballplayer, as it is a game of skill.\u201d<\/p>\n
As player and manager, Casey was for decades baseball\u2019s class clown\u2014but a lot of snooty Yankees fans thought he was a no-class clown and opposed his hiring. They weren\u2019t alone. Boston sportswriter Dave Egan\u2019s reaction to the new manager: \u201cThe Yankees have now been mathematically eliminated from the 1949 pennant race.\u201d<\/p>\n
Instead, Stengel guided the Bronx Bombers to five straight World Series championships (1949-53), a baseball record that may never be broken.<\/p>\n
Casey spoke a dialect of English called \u201cStengelese,\u201d utterances that concealed nuggets of wisdom in a dense matrix of dizzying gibberish. \u201cStengelese was mostly a public act,\u201d said sportswriter Maury Allen. \u201cHe double-talked in part to diffuse pinpoint questions.\u201d An extreme example: \u201cHe\u2019s the perdotious quotient of the qualificatilus.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stengel seasoned his speech with trademark words and phrases, one favorite being \u201cat the present time,\u201d which he\u2019d drop in anywhere: \u201cMost people my age are dead at the present time.\u201d He also found creative ways to use \u201cfairly,\u201d as in: \u201cThis club plays better baseball now. Some of them look fairly alert.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some Stengelese could be harsh. On a player\u2019s lack of potential: \u201cHe\u2019s only twenty years old and with a good chance in ten years of being thirty.\u201d On another player\u2019s batting prowess: \u201cHe couldn\u2019t hit the ground if he fell out of an airplane.\u201d On managing twenty-five men successfully: \u201cKeep the five guys who hate you from the five who are undecided.\u201d<\/p>\n
The baseball lifestyle, with its constant travel and unsupervised free time, has ended many a promising career, but Stengel came to believe in players who could hold their liquor: \u201cI have found that ones who drink milk shakes don\u2019t win many ball games.\u201d \u201cWe are in such a slump that even the ones that are drinking aren\u2019t hitting.\u201d \u201cLook at him. He don\u2019t smoke. He don\u2019t drink. He don\u2019t chase women. And he don\u2019t win.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1958, Stengel appeared before Senator Estes Kefauver\u2019s U.S. Senate subcommittee on baseball\u2019s antitrust status. Here is one exchange:<\/p>\n
Kefauver:<\/strong>\u00a0I was asking you, sir, why it is that baseball wants this bill passed.<\/p>\n Stengel:<\/strong>\u00a0I would say I would not know, but would say the reason why they would want it passed is to keep baseball going as the highest paid ball sport that has gone into baseball and from the baseball angle. I am not going to speak of any other sport. I am not here to argue about other sports. I am in the baseball business. It has been run cleaner than any business that was ever put out in the 100 years at the present time. I am not speaking about television or I am not speaking about income that comes into the ball parks. You have to take that off. I don\u2019t know too much about it. I say the ballplayers have a better advancement at the present time.<\/p>\n That\u2019s quite an oration. Most of us would have quit talking after the first seven words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The long and winding big-league baseball season started this week. Every year at this time we profile a baseball immortal who is equally celebrated for his unorthodox language skills. The choice this year is Charles Dillon \u201cCasey\u201d Stengel (1890-1975), who at the age of fifty-eight became manager of the mighty New York Yankees and took […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-definitions","category-humor"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1854"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1854\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}