Casey Stengel, Where Are You?

The best testimony before Congress from Major League Baseball was supplied by Charles (Casey) Stengel on July, 9, 1958. Casey, like his Yankee catcher — Lawrence (Yogi) Berra — did things with the English language that defy analysis. Yesterday, Mark McGwire took the 5th Amendment. So did Jose Conseco — despite writing the tell-all book that triggered this farce before the House Government Reform Committee. The world is going to hell in a handbasket and these congressmen have nothing better to investigate than the antics of some juicers? If this is a (fair & balanced) trivial pursuit, so be it.

[x Slate]
This Is Your Congress on Steroids: A Bash Brother gets bashed—and it's not the one who wrote Juiced
By Josh Levin

A washed-out anti-drug poster propped against a side wall of the House Government Reform Committee hearing room warns, "Steroids: Know Your Opponent." The opponents, as symbolized by track-and-field hurdles: "stunted growth," "baldness," and "acne."

None of the five players in attendance at Thursday's hearing looks stunted or acne-scarred, though Mark McGwire is losing his hair. As McGwire, Jose Canseco, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, and Curt Schilling take their seats a bit after 2 p.m., the already-jammed room gets a lot smaller and a lot quieter. When senator and baseball Hall of Famer Jim Bunning described baseball's "puny" testing policy earlier in the day, reporters thumbed through their notebooks and read the newspaper. But once Canseco's jet-black ducktail emerges from a doorway in the back of the room, everyone looks up and quiets down. Despite their girth, the ballplayers look like little boys in church—uncomfortable in their tight suits, fidgeting in their chairs, in a hurry to get this whole thing over with so they can run outside and play.

The 30 or so committee members are surprisingly gentle on the players. Today's whipping boys will be Elliot J. Pellman, the inarticulate medical advisor to the commissioner of baseball who appeared on an earlier panel, and Rob Manfred, Bud Selig's confrontational right-hand man. The conversation from the dais often turns into a debate about who's the biggest baseball fan. Indiana Republican Mark Souder said that as a kid he "saved money for months to buy a Nellie Fox baseball glove." Rep. José E. Serrano, D-NY, announces proudly that be bought Major League Baseball's Gameday Audio package for his computer and 25 packs of baseball cards.

Chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., an inveterate baseball metaphor abuser, begins the hearings by announcing that when it comes to Major League Baseball's testing policy, "we're not at first base, we're just out of the batter's box." Later, he apologizes for a "rain delay" and tells a representative who's been waiting a long time to ask questions that he's "the cleanup batter."

In 1998, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa bashed forearms and exchanged bear hugs as they raced to topple Roger Maris' home run record. Now, they sit in chairs three feet apart for more than three hours without acknowledging each other's existence. If we're going to put an asterisk next to all of those home run records, we should probably save one for Big Mac and Slammin' Sammy's friendship.

Sosa's strategy as a witness: Speak softly and deny carrying the stick. The Dominican slugger talks about his hard-luck childhood—"We sold oranges and shined shoes to get by"—before saying that he hasn't taken performance-enhancing drugs: "I have never injected myself or had anyone inject me with anything." For the rest of the hearing, reporters pretzel themselves forward to hear his inaudible whispers.

McGwire loudly and clearly incinerates his hard-won reputation as a lovable lug by weaving, dodging, avoiding, and buck-passing. In his opening statement, McGwire, looking scholarly in his tiny glasses, presents himself as a team guy who doesn't want to turn stoolie—"I do not sit in judgment of other players, whether it deals with their sexual preference, their marital problems, or their personal habits." Since every other non-Canseco ballplayer on the panel denies taking drugs, McGwire's adopting the tone of a member of the Hollywood Ten sounds like an admission of guilt. His circuitous answers don't impress—or convince—his interrogators. On baseball's current testing policy: "I don't know, I'm a retired player." On andro: "I'm not here to talk about the past. I want to talk about the positive, not the negative about this issue." (The crowd giggles.) McGwire on his message to the kids: "My message is that steroids is bad." (He neglects to add "Mmmkay.") On how he knows that steroids are bad: "Pardon me?"

All the while, Jose Canseco sits alone on the far right side of the table. In Juiced, Canseco wrote that "[s]teroids, used correctly, will not only make you stronger and sexier, they will also make you healthier." Today, he congratulates himself for removing the 'roids scourge from the game. "Hopefully, this book I wrote educates people," he announces. He says that his book may seem like it advocates steroids because it took a really long time to write. "I think we have to put it in context," he says, "that may have been my opinion two years ago."

The strangest moment of the day comes when Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski, D-Penn., asks Canseco what he would do if scientists invented a "smart pill" that would make you a genius but take five or ten years off your life. "The Chemist" pauses for five seconds, pondering this hypothetical pharmacological advancement. "You know," he says, "that's a very tough question."

Josh Levin is a Slate assistant editor.
Copyright © 2005 Slate Magazine

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[x Congressional Record — July 1958 — Casey Stengel et. al.]
Casey Stengel's 1958 Congressional Testimony (Mid-Season Baseball Vanity)

On July 9, 1958, hearings were held in Washington by the Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly of the Committee of the Judiciary of the United States Senate. The Subcommittee was considering H.R. 10378 and S. 4070 to limit anti-trust laws so as to exempt professional baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. Before them as an expert witness came Casey Stengel, whose verbal cuneiform has added the word "Stengelese" to our language. They say there was nothing like it, in all the history of Congressional hearings.


TESTIMONY


Senator Kefauver: Mr. Stengel, you are the manager of the New York Yankees. Will you give us very briefly your background and your views about this legislation?

Mr. Stengel: Well, I started in professional ball in 1910. I have been in professional ball, I would say, for forty-eight years. I have been employed by numerous ball clubs in the majors and in the minor leagues. I started in the minor leagues with Kansas City. I played as low as Class D ball, which was at Shelbyville, Kentucky, and also Class C ball and Class A ball, and I have advanced in baseball as a ball player. I had many years I was not so successful as a ball player, as it is a game of skill. And then I was no doubt discharged by baseball in which I had to go back to the minor leagues as a manager, and after being in the minor leagues as a manager, I became a major league manager in several cities and was discharged, we call it discharged because there was no question I had to leave. And I returned to the minor leagues at Milwaukee, Kansas City and Oakland, California, and then returned to the major leagues.

In the last ten years, naturally, in major-league baseball with the New York Yankees; the New York Yankees have had tremendous success, and while I am not a ballplayer who does the work, I have no doubt worked for a ball club that is very capable in the office. I have been up and down the ladder. I know there are some things in baseball thirty-five to fifty years ago that are better now than they were in those days.

In those days, my goodness, you could not transfer a ball club in the minor leagues, Class D, Class C ball, Class A ball. How could you transfer a ball club when you did not have a highway? How could you transfer a ball club when the railroad then would take you to a town, you got off and then you had to wait and sit up five hours to go to another ball club? How could you run baseball then without night ball? You had to have night ball to improve the proceeds, to pay larger salaries, and I went to work, the first year I received $135 a month. I thought that was amazing. I had to put away enough money to go to dental college. I found out it was not better in dentistry. I stayed in baseball. Any other question you would like to ask me?

Senator Kefauver: Mr. Stengel, are you prepared to answer particularly why baseball wants this bill passed?

Mr. Stengel: Well, I would have to say at the present time, I think that baseball has advanced in this respect for the player help. That is an amazing statement for me to make, because you can retire with an annuity at fifty and what organization in America allows you to retire at fifty and receive money? I want to further state that I am not a ballplayer, that is, put into that pension fund committee. At my age, and I have been in baseball, well, I will say I am possibly the oldest man who is working in baseball. I would say that when they start an annuity for the ballplayers to better their conditions,, it should have been done, and I think it has been done. I think it should be the way they have done it, which is a very good thing.

The reason they possibly did not take the managers in at that time was because radio and television or the income to ball clubs was not large enough that you could have put in a pension plan. Now, I am not a member of the pension plan. You have young men here who are, who represent the ball clubs. They represent the players and since I am not a member and don't receive pension from a fund which you think, my goodness, he ought to be declared that, too, but I would say that is a great thing for the ballplayers. That is one thing I will say for ballplayers, they have an advanced pension fund. I should think it was gained by radio and television or you could not have enough money to pay anything of that type.

Now the second thing about baseball that I think is very interesting to the public or to all of us that it is the owner's own fault if he does not improve his club, along with the officials in the ball club and the players. Now what causes that? If I am going to go on the road and we are a traveling ball club and you know the cost of transportation now-we travel sometimes with three Pullman coaches, the New York Yankees and remember I am just a salaried man, and do not own stock in the New York Yankees. I found out that in traveling with the New York Yankees on the road and all, that is the best, and we have broken records in Washington this year, we have broken them in every city but New York and we have lost two clubs that have gone out of the city of New York. Of course, we have had some bad weather, I would say that they are mad at us in Chicago, we fill the parks. They have come out to see good material. I will say they are mad at us in Kansas City, but we broke their attendance record.

Now on the road we only get possibly 27 cents. I am not positive of these figures, as I am not an official. If you go back fifteen years or so if I owned stock in the club I would give them to you.

Senator Kefauver: Mr. Stengel, I am not sure that I made my question clear.

Mr. Stengel: Yes, sir. Well, that is all right. I am not sure if I am going to answer yours perfectly, either.

Senator O'Mahoney: How many minor leagues were there in baseball when you began?

Mr. Stengel: Well, there were not so many at that time because of this fact: Anybody to go into baseball at that time with the educational schools that we had were small, while you were probably thoroughly educated at school, you had to be-we only had small cities that you could put a team in and they would go defunct.

Why, I remember the first year I was at Kankakee, Illinois and a bank offered me $550 if I would let them have a little notice. I left there and took a uniform because they owed me two weeks' pay. But I either had to quit but I did not have enough money to go to dental college so I had to go with the manager down to Kentucky. What happened there was if you got by July, that was the big date. You did not play night ball and you did not play Sundays in half of the cities on account of a Sunday observance, so in those days when things were tough, and all of it was, I mean to say, why they just closed up July 4 and there you were sitting in the depot. You could go to work someplace else, but that was it. So I got out of Kankakee, Illinois, and I just go there for a visit now.

Senator Carroll: The question Senator Kefauver asked you was what, in your honest opinion, with your forty-eight years of experience, is the need for this legislation in view of the fact that baseball has not been subject to antitrust laws?

Mr. Stengel: No.

Senator Langer: Mr. Chairman, my final question. This is the Antimonopoly Committee that is sitting here.

Mr. Stengel: Yes, sir.

Senator Langer: I want to know whether you intend to keep on monopolizing the world's championship in New York City.

Mr. Stengel: Well, I will tell you. I got a little concern yesterday in the first three innings when I saw the three players I had gotten rid of. I said when I lost nine what am I going to do and when I had a couple of my players I thought so great of that did not do so good up to the sixth inning I was more confused but I finally had to go and call on a young man in Baltimore that we don't own and the Yankees don't own him, and he is doing pretty good, and I would actually have to tell you that I think we are more the Greta Garbo type now from success.

We are being hated, I mean, from the ownership and all, we are being hated. Every sport that gets too great or one individual-but if we made 27 cents and it pays to have a winner at home, why would not you have a good winner in your own park if you were an owner? That is the result of baseball. An owner gets most of the money at home and it is up to him and his staff to do better or they ought to be discharged.

Senator Kefauver: Thank you very much, Mr. Stengel. We appreciate your presence here. Mr. Mickey Mantle, will you come around? ...Mr. Mantle, do you have any observations with reference to the applicability of the antitrust laws to baseball?

Mr. Mantle: My views are about the same as Casey's.