(SPORTS BASEBALL) Stengel Charles Dillon Casey Manuscript n

Sale 2455 - Lot 253

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Estimate: $ 1,200 - $ 1,800

(SPORTS--BASEBALL.) Stengel, Charles Dillon "Casey." Manuscript notes for his Hall of Fame induction speech. Autograph Manuscript, 3 pages on 3 sheets, 13 1/2 x 8 1/2 and slightly smaller; one-inch cello tape repair on one sheet, otherwise only light folds. Np, 25 July 1966

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Casey Stengel was best known as the manager of the brilliant New York Yankees teams throughout the 1950s and then as the first manager of the spectacularly awful New York Mets in the early 1960s. He was famous for his unique syntax and stream-of-consciousness storytelling, both in evidence in these notes made for his Hall of Fame induction speech, found among his personal papers. Each sheet is headed "Hall of Fame & Museum," and one has the full date of the induction ceremony. In these notes, Stengel apparently set out to provide a not-so-short history of baseball, dating back to before his 1910 professional debut: "Abner Doubleday, game of base-ball, one cat, two cat or rounders (English game played in England) . . . girl's teams 1890-1, dresses with bloomers . . . old bats, gloves, shoes, uniforms and shape of shirts with collars, mustashes, sliding pads, woolen shirts." He also inserted a cryptic story involving Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and a horse which could throw baseballs. He prepared to name-drop dozens of previous Hall of Fame inductees, and included a short tribute to that year's fellow inductee Ted Williams: "Greatest batter hitting L handed in my experience in the American League."
We don't know how much Stengel relied on these notes; he wasn't the sort to follow a script. His actual speech clocked in at 21 minutes, the longest ever given at the Hall to that date. One reporter called it "an assault on rhetoric as he brought gales of laughter from the fans by conducting a nonstop ungrammatical reminiscence of baseball going back a half a century." See Corcoran, "Induction Day at Cooperstown: A History of the Baseball Hall of Fame Ceremony," page 88. Provenance: Heritage auction, 29 October 2005, lot 19668.