Yogi Berra gets a lot of mileage with his seemingly innocent quips. But another baseball legend, longtime manager Casey Stengel, sometimes called the old Perfesser, surely had his moments too.
During one game he went to the mound to remove his pitcher from a game in which the hurler was getting absolutely shelled. "I ain't tired, Case," the man complained.
"Yeah, but yer outfielders are," Stengel responded.
At the start of another baseball contest, his pitcher gave up three straight hits on his first three pitches of the game. Casey strolled out to the hill, beckoning the catcher to join him. "What kind of pitches this guy been throwin?" he inquired of the backstop.
"I don't know. I ain't caught one yet," the man replied, in brutal honesty.
When he was a player for Brooklyn in 1923, Casey found himself in Pittsburgh being heckled mercilessly by the local fans. He caught a sparrow between innings and put it under his cap. As he went to bat, the crowd renewed their harassment. Stengel doffed his hat, freeing the sparrow into the skies. Immediately the crowd cheered his humor.
When he was the Yankee manager, Stengel and star player Mickey Mantle were called to testify before Congress over antitrust laws. Stengel offered a long and rambling answer to a Congressman's question; it was such nonsense that nobody could fathom what he might possibly mean. Asked at the end of his manger's monologue what he thought, Mantle answered, "I agree with Casey."
Baseball has its characters more than any other sport, I think.
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