Mighty Casey

A full decade before Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, the great idols of the dead-ball era in New York baseball were Giants - Christy Mathewson, the greatest National League pitching star from the turn of the century to the 1920s, and John McGraw, the grandfather of modern baseball strategy.

"Mattie," one of the first baseball stars to graduate from college, pitched with god-like grace and dignity. In his photographs, he already seems to be posing for his plaque in the Hall of Fame. (Like Lou Gehrig, he died tragically young, in his case as a result of exposure to poison gas during World War I.) McGraw, his manager, was the prototype of the scrappy Irish immigrant.

Their difference in age and background made them unusual candidates for such a close and lasting friendship and ideal subjects for books. In fact, their story has been chronicled many times, most notably in Ray Robinson's "Mattie: An American Hero," "John McGraw" by Charles C. Alexander, and Philip Seib's biography of Mathewson, "The Player: Christy Mathewson, Baseball and the American Century."

Thus, it isn't clear exactly why Frank Deford or anyone else thought that their story needed to be rehashed, or why the magazine piece that became "The Old Ball Game" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 241 pages, $24) needed expansion. Mr. Deford seems to have relied on his reputation in the selling of this book and phoned this one in - with some of it left on the answering machine.

The writing is full of cliches - McGraw was "a male version of the whore with a heart of gold" and Mathewson was known "to be smart as a whip." Some parts of the book seem to have been translated from English to Esperanto and back again. Mattie's son, Christopher Jr., didn't die before his mother but "predeceased her."

Hazy in conception and lazy in execution, "The Old Ball Game breaks no new ground and doesn't cover the existing ground with much authority. There is no bibliography, and Mr. Deford, in his acknowledgments, cites a couple of nonfiction books and recommends a couple of novels on the subject.

As history, biography, and social commentary, "The Old Ball Game" wilts in comparison to a new book from a first-time author. "Forging Genius: The Making of Casey Stengel" (Potomac Books, 290 pages, $24.95) by Steven Goldman not only mines fresh material on Stengel, but is more incisive than "The Old Ball Game" on the subject of Casey's mentor, McGraw. "It was McGraw himself," writes Mr. Goldman, "who saw a manager in Stengel when others saw a clown."

McGraw managed "inside baseball," a game that counted not on the home run, a rarity until the 1920s, but on stealing bases, clutch pitching, and defensive excellence. "The baseball of McGraw's early years," Mr. Goldman notes, "was more dependent on the skill and attentiveness of the manager than in any succeeding era.

As games were generally low scoring, the manager was counted on to glean every possible strategic advantage for his team. "In his own time, no one was better at this than McGraw, Mr. Goldman writes. And no one understood better how the seemingly outmoded strategy and tactics of old-style baseball might be melded with those of the new power era than Stengel.

Stengel learned to bunch his big hitters in the batting order after the men whose job it was to scramble on base, thus deriving more bang for the buck than was possible in McGraw's time. Taking his lead from McGraw, he perfected "platooning" - pitting right-handed hitters against left-handed pitchers and vice versa. He used relief specialists and veteran role players to supplement youthful starters - a tactic he learned in the minors, where, as he once said, "I had three teams, one on the field, one coming, and one going."

"Forging Genius" isn't so much a biography as a study in how three quarters of a century of baseball wisdom came to be encapsulated in one of the game's classic eccentrics. The combination of Stengel's unorthodox behavior - on a tour of England, Casey, dressed in full baseball uniform, stepped right up to shake hands with King George V - and bold tactics took even veteran baseball writers by surprise.

"Is this serious? Are they really going to put a clown in to run the Yankee operation?" asked one New York sportswriter when told that Stengel had been chosen to manage the Yankees in 1948. That's how he was regarded by those who had not studied his minor-league record carefully or who hadn't paid sufficient attention to how he got the most out of a rag-tag collection of misfits with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

"Because I can make people laugh," Stengel once said, "some of them think I'm a damn fool." But as a player, coach, and manager, I have been around baseball for some 35 years - I've learned a lot and picked up a few ideas of my own."

"Forging Genius" is that rarest of baseball books: respectful toward tradition and irreverent to perceived wisdom. Mr. Goldman has looked down a well-traveled road and taken it to a new destination. The greatest of American sportswriters, Red Smith, once wrote that it was necessary to reintroduce Stengel to readers "at least once a decade." Mr. Goldman's book ought to do for at least a century.

Mr. Barra last wrote in these pages on boxing.