"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
This is the way old Casey Stengel ran running his home run home to a Giant victory by a score of 5 to 4 in the first game of the World's Series of 1923.
This is the way old Casey Stengel ran, running his home run home when two were out in the ninth inning and the score was tied and the ball was bounding inside the Yankee yard.
This is the way—His mouth wide open.
His warped old legs bending beneath him at every stride.
His arms flying back and forth like those of a man swimming with a crawl stroke.
His flanks heaving, his breath whistling, his head far back . . .
The warped old legs, twisted and bent by many a year of baseball campaigning, just barely held out under Casey Stengel until he reached the plate running his home run home.
—Damon Runyon in the New York American, Oct. 11, 1923; cited in "That Fella,"Time Magazine, Oct. 3, 1955.
Even in repose, the face was thought-provoking. People admired it in the same way they would a well-traveled trunk or a piece of distressed furniture...Jimmy Cannon wrote, "The old man has the face of an eagle who has flown into sleet storms. The lines in Casey Stengel's face are gullies. The left eye winks in the hook-nosed face as he discusses baseball, like a ferocious old bird sitting on the top branch of the highest tree in the world, watching all the ballgames ever played going on beneath him at the same time."
Only when Stengel spoke was the image completed...Sportswriter Jim Murray wrote, "Casey Stengel is a white American male with a speech pattern that ranges somewhere between the sounds a porpoise makes underwater and an Abyssinian rug merchant chant." Another, on first meeting with the manager, exclaimed, "My God, he talks the way James Joyce writes!"...Stengel was both an autodidactic baseball historian and Zelig-like witness to history, and he liked to illustrate a point with examples from the past. There is an oft-repeated story wherein a reporter goes looking for Stengel to find out who the next day's starting pitcher is. The reporter is gone for several hours. When he finally returns, one of his colleagues asks him, "Did Casey tell you who's going to pitch tomorrow?" "No," the beleaguered reporter replies. "He started to, but he got to talking about McGraw and the time he managed in Toledo and the Pacific Coast League and God knows what else. I think tomorrow's pitcher is Christy Mathewson."
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