A most improbable sage

He was the most improbable and entertaining of sages, but Casey Stengel’s life and the man’s boundless love of it still holds up — even in an era in which baseball, the thinking man’s game, has been replaced by brutish football as the national pastime. For ours is an era that may drown us in soulless data while ignoring the zest, the beauty and sheer joy of life.

First, just the facts, ma’am, as Sgt. Joe Friday used to say on a television series back in the long-ago: Yes, there was a time when Casey Stengel, the old professor, was young Casey — a 19-year-old outfielder and clean-up batter, traditionally fourth in the lineup. He played his first game of pro ball for the Kankakee (Ill.) Kays in the Northern Association even though the team soon got to be known by another name, the Kankakee Lunatics, which is a story in itself. That strange honorific honored the sprawling 119-acre Kankakee State Hospital, formerly the Illinois Eastern Hospital for the Insane, just across the street from the ballpark. Its occupants could watch the game from their windows while the fans in the bleachers could watch the occupants watching the game. Was this a great country or not?

In professional sports, it doesn’t make an athlete’s reputation to be known as daffy (remember Daffy Dean?) but it certainly helps.

If there is a single term that sums up Casey Stengel in the annals of sport, it is showman. His presence in the lineup could fill a stadium while his wit and wisdom filled more than one book. Long before there was a Yogi Berra, he could knock the hide off a baseball and the socks off the American language.

Yet there was a wisdom to ol’ Casey’s misnomers that not only entertained but enlightened, as in:

Connoisseurs of this art couldn’t wait to hear what in the world he’d come up with next, as in these gems:

And so mysteriously, laughably, interminably on, for ol’ Casey, like the young one, always left ‘em laughing. Or at least completely mystified. On balance, the man was unbalanced — and it was a delightful thing.

Paul Greenberg is a columnist for the Arkansas DemocratGazette. Contact him at pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com.