Casey Stengel spent 39 years as a professional baseball player. If he retired after he was finished playing, he probably wouldn’t have gone down in history at all, as a .284 outfielder. But he went on to manage at age 44 and ended up retiring a legend after helping the Yankees bring home 10 pennants and becoming the Mets first manager. Splendid! Casey is the only person to have worked in 5 New York ballparks! He started his career as a ‘lunatic’, that is the nickname of the team he was playing for after leaving dental college! In 1922 his team won the World Series and his share was $4,546. The book is 4 parts, the first being his early life and career, the second focuses on his time with the Yankees, the 3rd his time with the Mets and then the final part is all about Cooperstown and his retirement. Certainly an interesting book and Marty Appel is a pretty great author.
I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review, I was not otherwise compensated.
About the Book
From the New York Times bestselling author of Munson and Pinstripe Empire, Casey Stengel is the definitive biography of baseball’s greatest character.
There was nobody like Casey before him, and no one like him since. For more than fifty years, Casey Stengel lived baseball, first as a player (he was the only person in history to play for all the New York teams—the Dodgers, Giants, Yankees, and Mets), and then as a manager (for the Yankees and Mets, among others). He made his biggest mark on the game, revolutionizing the role of manager while winning an astounding ten pennants and seven World Series Championships (including FIVE STRAIGHT!) with the Yankees. Playing with and against a Who’s Who of Cooperstown—Babe Ruth, Christy Mathewson, Ty Cobb—and forming indelible, and sometimes complicated, relationships with Yogi Berra, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Billy Martin, Casey Stengel was, for an astonishing five decades, the undisputed, hilarious, and beloved face of baseball.
For a man who spent so much of his life in the limelight, he still remains an enigma. New York Times bestselling author Marty Appel paints an intimate portrait of a private man who was larger than life and remains the embodiment of the national pastime.