A fantastic book about a wonderful baseball character. This book will fill you into Casey Stengel’s life from Kansas City where he grew up to Glendale California where he lived with his wife Edna when not playing or managing a baseball team. He started in pro ball minor leagues in 1910 and would stay around the game until 1974. He not only traveled the country but also went to the Far East twice on good will baseball tours. He also had one time in front of a senate hearing committee which is in the back of the book, and it has his answers to the questions. You think Yogi was bad I think Yogi learned from Casey because even the senators did not understand his answers which I thought were very funny but also very Casey. The book opens with Casey deciding whether or not about returning to Yankee stadium for a day of honor for him. He has not been back since they fired him after the loss in the 1960 World Series to the Pirates. You are then taken on a journey through his career. First as a ball player who makes the majors in 1912 with Brooklyn and would stay in the majors until 1925. He would play with Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, N Y GIANTS, and then Boston Bean eaters. All national league teams. Part of 25 he would be with Boston’s minor league team Toledo, and the from 26 thru 1931 he was player manager for Toledo. He was a good player and it was when he was with the giants and McGraw was the manager was when he really was taught the game by him. He would manage Brooklyn for three years, then Boston for five always with the same problems of the owners not wanting to pay for good players or trading them away. Back in the minors it would be years later after coaching Oakland for three years and winning the championship finally in 1948 after two losses. He is hired as the manager of the Yankees in 1949 where he would become famous and is still the only manager to have five straight World Series wins. He would win seven and lose three from 1949 thru 1960, then he went to the Mets for four years. This book is more than just about baseball, but about all of the people he came into contact with and also his loving relationship with his wife which I thought was a great part of this book. Too much information to put in a review, but a very good book. Worth the read.

A great in depth book on one of the most memorable people in baseball history. Mr Appel does a great job of bringing us the real Casey Stengel who was loved and admired by many around the game. He also shone a light on the other side of Casey that many of his players saw. The best book written about the man to date.

It’s easy to forget in the era of sports as big business, but there was a time when the ranks of professional sports were home to all manner of weirdos and rogues. Quirky characters with idiosyncratic ideas and strange speech were household names – particularly those involved in baseball, whose status as the national pastime was ironclad until just a few year ago.

And perhaps the most famous of them all was Casey Stengel.

Stengel’s lifelong affiliation with baseball – and his ever-present eccentricity – is documented by Marty Appel in his new book “Casey Stengel: Baseball’s Greatest Character” (Doubleday, $27.95). It’s a story that covers most of the 20th century, examining the life of times of one of baseball’s most beloved figures.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1890, Charles Dillon “Casey” Stengel was a gifted athlete who made the most of his abilities. He wound up signing a contract to play professional baseball while still a teenager; he would go on to play parts of 14 seasons in the major leagues (though he did hedge his bets in the early years by going to dental school in the offseason), playing for the Brooklyn Superbas (before they became known as the Dodgers), the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Philadelphia Phillies, the New York Giants and the Boston Braves.

It was a solid career – he batted .284 and accumulated over 1,200 hits over a period that spanned from the deadball era to the arrival of Babe Ruth and the home run explosion. However, it would be his exploits from the managerial seat that would eventually land him in the Hall of Fame.

It didn’t start out that way. His early stints with the Dodgers (1934-36) and the Braves (1938-43) saw him fail to even make it to the first division, finishing no higher than fifth. But some subsequent success with minor league outfits like the American Association’s Milwaukee Brewers and the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League led to Stengel getting the opportunity of a lifetime – manager of the New York Yankees.

What followed was an unprecedented run of on-field success – from 1949 through 1960, Stengel’s Yankees teams won 10 American League pennants and seven World Series. What’s more, his folksy mien and occasionally garbled syntax made him wildly popular with the writers of the day, who even had a term for Stengel’s speech – they called it Stengelese. Winning and aw-shucks charisma proved a potent combination; in many way, Stengel was THE face of Major League Baseball in the 1950s.

And it somehow got even better when Stengel – now in his 70s – took over at the helm of the expansion New York Mets in 1962. Despite the historic futility of those early Mets teams, Stengel made them interesting - even as they were losing over 100 games a year. In many ways, one could argue that the Mets were only able to make it through the lean years thanks to him.

He’d go on to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, with over 1,900 managerial wins to his credit over the course of his quarter-century stint on the bench. He’s the only man to wear the uniform of all four New York teams – the Yankees, Dodgers, Giants and Mets. And he is still considered by most to be the most unique character ever produced by a game that has seen plenty of them over the years.

This guy gave some four decades of his life to the game of baseball. And in many ways, baseball WAS his life. But Appel also finds ways to offer glimpses of the man behind the myth. There’s liberal use of more intimate correspondence – letters from Casey to his loved ones, excerpts from the unpublished memoir of his wife Edna – that allows the reader to experience Stengel as more than just a goofball or caricature.

This humanization of Stengel only serves to accentuate just how beloved he truly was. He was not some sort of media creation – the rambling-yet-brilliant Old Perfesser might have been a bit of a put-on, but ultimately, that was Casey Stengel.

Appel brings an easy prose style and a meticulous eye for detail to the table – an ideal combination for any biography, but a baseball biography in particular. He strikes a lovely balance between the nuts-and-bolts thoughtful manager and the court-holding, colloquialism-spouting character, uniting the two aspects of Stengel into one compelling narrative. And while there’s not a lot from outside the baseball realm – the man did spend 40 years in uniform, after all – there’s enough to remind us that in the end, Casey Stengel was simply a man who loved what he did.

“Casey Stengel: Baseball’s Greatest Character” serves as both an exceptional introduction to one of baseball’s greats and a wonderful reminder of the game’s bygone era. Major League Baseball has seen a lot of characters come and go over the years – and will likely see more in the year to come – but it will never see another Casey Stengel.

Great book! Thoroughly researched and fascinating!

I chose to read this book because I am a lifelong fan of the New York Yankees, but this is the biography of Casey Stengel that I have read. I have read a few other books related to New York Yankee players by the author (Munson and Pinstripe Empire).

I have read about Stengel as a part of several other books about the Yankees and Yankee players, but they only touched on the surface of this amazing character. Many of the facts revealed in the book I was already aware of through other books and watching numerous Yankee games. But this book put it all in chronological order and revealed a number of facts and stories that I was not aware of or had heard.

The debate as to how good his managerial skills were will go on forever. This is due to his mananging teams with little or no real talent and teams that were the most talented in baseball at that time giving the appearance that almost anyone could have guided them to pennants and world series victories. But there is no doubt that he is one of the great characters in the history of the game. Partly due to his courting of "his writers" along with antics on the field as a player and a manager.

I heartily recommend this book to fans of the baseball and in particular the New York Yankees especially if you have not read any other biographies on Casey Stenge.

I received a free Kindle copy of this book from Net Galley and Doubleday, the publisher. It was with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon and my history book review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus pages.

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.

Extremely detailed, excellent narrative of the life one of the true legends of the game. in addition to filling in the gaps left by other Stengel biographers, there are many interesting general historical baseball details as well

As a life long baseball fan I jumped at the chance to read and review Marty Appel’s book Casey Stengel: Baseball’s Greatest Character. Casey’s playing and managing days were before my time (I started following the game as a kid in the late 60’s). Yet I found interesting the stories of Casey’s playing career and his many years of managing, including winning 10 pennants and seven World Championships with the New York Yankees.

The book is full of colorful stories – stories which make Casey Stengel come to life for those like me who only had a passing knowledge of Stengel’s accomplishments. I learned that Casey went to dental school in three off seasons while he was an active player. When he decided to make a career of baseball he quit dental school within a few weeks of graduating. “‘My quitting with just a month to go was the greatest thing that ever happened to dentistry,’ he often said, with his famous wink,” writes Appel.

Did you know Casey Stengel hit the first home run in Ebbets Field history (an inside the park job)? Or that he had four hits in four at bats in his major league debut? “Through 2015, only twelve players have gone 4-for-4 in their debut since Casey did it, including Willie McCovey and Kirby Puckett,” Appel relates. I only knew of Stengel as a great manager, and didn’t know he was a pretty good ball player in his own right, too.

The bulk of the book covers Stengel’s years managing the Yankees and the hapless New York Mets. I learned that Stengel was in baseball for 39 years before managing the Yankees, none of which were in the American League. I found interesting the accounts of Casey’s interactions with the New York stars. He became a father figure to Mickey Mantle, for example, after Mantle’s dad died at a young age. Before a World Series game one at Ebbets Field, Appel relates, Stengel took Mantle out for a tutorial on how to play Ebbett’s concrete outfield wall. “I told him I played that wall myself for eight years,” said Stengel. Casey continued, “Know what he said when I told him that? ‘The hell ya say?’ and looked at me as if I was screwy. Guess he thinks I was born at age 50 and started managing immediately.” Humorous stories like this makes the book a fun read, too.

If you were fortunate to live through Stengel’s Yankee heydays, or if you are a younger fan like myself, I think you will enjoy Appel’s book relating stories of “baseball’s greatest character.”

Casey Stengel: Baseball’s Greatest Character will be available for sale in late March, just before the 2017 baseball season.