3. Versatility. Injuries and slumps were forever upsetting the smooth course of any ball club. Stengel's first Yankee season was marked by an abnormal run of them, meticulously counted by the publicity man, Red Patterson, and included the loss of DiMaggio for the whole first half of the season. The best protection was to have good players able to shift around and play different positions when needed, rather than to always be looking for suitable emergency replacements. But in this, as with platooning, why wait for emergencies? Sure, every player preferred to be settled in one position, feeling secure, learning all the fine points, "getting in a groove," playing every day. But if you could move people around in the field, you could also use different batting orders every day to get the best matchups against particular pitchers. Then, when injuries did occur, you'd have people ready and in game playing form to put where needed.

So, in those first five championship years, people like McDougald, Billy Martin, and Jerry Coleman wound up playing at all three infield positions (excluding first), and outfielders were expected to play any of the three fields when asked. In 1952, for instance (one of the years I kept track of this), Stengel used more than one hundred different batting orders, with McDougald batting in each of the eight slots at least once, Hank Bauer in the top seven, Irv Noren in seven of the eight (not cleanup), Gene Woodling in six of the top seven (not cleanup), Berra in every slot from second through seventh, and even Don Bollweg, a part-time first baseman, in every slot but leadoff.

He used pinch hitters at odd times, and sometimes let pitchers hit, and it worked. He brought in lefties to face righties (like Bob Kuzava in the 1951 and 1952 World Series) and it worked. He made established 20-game winners, Allie Reynolds and Johnny Sain, into terrific relief pitchers, but saw it wouldn't work with Vic Raschi. He bunted when others would hit-and-run, and vice versa, but that was "intuition." Moving players around and making them flexible, mentally comfortable with multiassignments as well as physically proficient, was planning ahead and maintaining the efficiency of the whole.

4. Morale and discipline. Given his own history, he certainly didn't expect his players to be celibate nondrinkers who curled up with a good book in the hotel room. But he wanted the high life to stay reasonably within bounds and could ignore it until and unless it interfered with performance. He had other concerns in this department.

"On every club," he would say, "you'll have eight or ten men who hate you. Make sure you room those kind together so they don't contaminate all the others."

And "The hotel bar is mine. Let the players go somewhere else where I won't see them."

Like McGraw, but to a lesser degree, Casey wasn't concerned about hurting a player's feelings by a sarcastic or sharp criticism in the dugout, in front of others. But he stuck to a pattern. When the club was losing, he wouldn't criticize much. When it was winning, he became almost intolerably edgy and nasty, trying to forestall a let-down. ("They know when they're losin' and feel bad enough," he'd say. "But they'd better not fall asleep on me when they think everything is going la-de-dah.") In the same way, he was hardest on the best talents (like Mickey Mantle), driven by what he saw as unrealized potential even beyond Mantle's imposing accomplishments, yet quite tolerant toward those with lesser ability (whom he would replace as soon as possible, but not demean while they were around).

5. The double talk. He was always a nonstop talker, and his mind often raced ahead of his syntax, but in the Yankee spotlight, so much brighter than any he'd had before, he cultivated the stream-of-consciousness style and brought it to new heights. I can't reproduce it on paper -- and I certainly tried often enough in writing about him through fifteen years of traveling with his clubs -- and even word-for-word transcriptions from tape can't catch the quality of his monologues because the unexpected stresses and accents, the facial expressions, the hand movements, and the body language were too integral parts of it. But it was, most of the time, an act -- an act he enjoyed so much and got so proficient at that he would begin to do it in relatively private surroundings and, I suppose, out of habit. If you listened carefully enough, long enough, you always got back to the thread of the thought and the basic point being made (well, almost always). It was, simultaneously, a defense mechanism (against outsiders), an attention getter (if you stopped listening you really got lost), a sort of secret communication (for insiders present), and a guarantee against interruption.

Players marveled at it, usually from a distance. Writers tried to capture gems of obfuscation. Strangers were fascinated. But when he had a specific message to transmit, especially to a player, there was nothing confusing or ambiguous about it, and as often as not, the clarity didn't leave the listener's ego unbruised.

Familiarity, they say, breeds contempt. In Stengel's case, it certainly bred fatigue at least. His players had heard his act too often. In his twelfth year as a Yankee, Casey passed his seventieth birthday. For all his success, he was never as popular with Topping as with Webb. Now, as Topping was taking more and more control of club operations with Weiss also in his late sixties, time was running out. As 1960 played itself out, Topping had determined that both Stengel and Weiss were "too old" and should be retired. And it was true that Stengel's outspoken and often unkind motivational methods were getting less effective with a younger generation, simultaneously more sensitive to insult and more secure about its rights.

The 1960 World Series was lost partly because Stengel made a bad decision about his pitching rotation, holding Whitey Ford out of the first game, so he was able to pitch only twice instead of three times. (He pitched two shutouts.) The details of Stengel's departure belong to the Ralph Houk story, later on. But Casey was always a realist, and proud, and wouldn't swallow the word retirement.

"I've been discharged," he said, "because there's no question I have to leave."

His career was over -- again -- but now his place in the Hall of Fame was assured.

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