(4 of 7)
"This Yankee team hasn't been my idea of a solid ball club so I had to play the percentages." A Matter of Time. Playing the percentages, of course, can be a pastime for men without imagination, who get all their answers by adding a column of figures. Casey gets results by using some weird arithmetic of his own, by grappling with private statistics in a man ner that barely makes sense to ordinary mortals.
As an awkward, left-handed student in a Kansas City dental college, Charles Dillon Stengel put in three grinding years and then discovered that dental-equipment colleges of those days catered to right-handed drill-pushers. Casey figured it would cost him $150 for special gear, played ,the percentages and quit dentistry.
That summer of 1910, at the age of 20, he signed on at $75 a month as an out fielder for a bush-league club in Kankakee. Ill. In July the league folded. Not Casey. He moved to Maysville, Ky., in the Blue Grass League. He was in base ball for life.
As a busher, he was already a clown.
He wore loud ties with his baseball uni form and he insisted on practicing sliding while he trotted to his position in the outfield. "There was a lunatic asylum across from the centerfield fence," he remembers happily. "Them guys in the loony bin always cheered when they saw me slide. But my manager used to tap his forehead and point at the asylum and say, 'It's only a matter of time. Stengel.' "
"Somebody Help Me!" By 1912, gags and all, Stengel had made it to the majors. He stayed on as a cocky, combative outfielder for Uncle Wilbert Robinson's Dodgers. He was still overburdened with brash Middle Western corn. He carried his home-town manners around with him, and his teammates quickly tagged him "K.C." The nickname stuck.
He was a baseball player after Uncle Robbie's happy heart. In spring training at Daytona Beach. Fla. in 1916. Casey helped talk the Dodger manager into trying to catch a baseball dropped from one of those new-fangled flying machines. Robbie waited confidently on the beach, mitt poised, unaware that Casey had substituted a grapefruit for the ball.
The plane passed overhead at 400 ft.
Uncle Robbie settled under the diving speck that dropped toward his hands. But the big sphere whipped through his hands and burst in a fine mess against his chest. He dropped, covered with pulp and grapefruit juice. "Jesus!" he moaned, sitting on the sand, his eyes squeezed shut.
"I'm killed! I'm blind! It's broke open my chest! I'm covered with blood! somebody help me!" The only help he got was a horse laugh. Only Casey could have pulled the stunt and gotten away with it.
Brooklyn Gets the Bird. Two years later, Casey was traded to Pittsburgh.
Brooklyn fans, who had learned to love him, cheerfully razzed him the first time he turned up at Ebbets Field in an enemy uniform. Casey understood, but he saw a chance to get even. Out in the field in the first inning, he watched a Dodger in the bullpen catch a sparrow. He borrowed the stunned bird and slipped it under his cap.