Words of Wisdom: Casey Stengel

Guiding any team to 10 league pennants and seven World Series title in a 12-year span is enough to make a baseball manager legendary and that is what Casey Stengel did as Yankees' skipper from 1949-60. But Stengel was much more than that. He also had a unique way of verbalizing his thoughts -- a confusing form of double-talk that was eventually coined "Stengelese."

· "All right, everybody line up alphabetically according to your height."

· "Lefthanders have more enthusiasm for life. They sleep on the wrong side of the bed and their head gets more stagnant on that side."

· "Most ball games are won, not lost."

· "Nah, I'm just the fellow who plays him on TV." -- When asked by a fan in a hotel lobby, "Are you Casey Stengel?" as quoted by Murray Allen in You Could Look It Up.

· "I'll never make the mistake of being seventy again." -- On being "retired" by the Yankees in 1960 as quoted by Norman McLean in Casey Stengel: A Biography. When the Yankees made the announcement after they lost to the 1960 World Series to Pittsburgh, Stengel made it clear he had not retired. "I was fired," said Stengel. When a club gets to discharging a man of my age, they can if they want to."

· "Good pitching will always stop good hitting and vice-versa."

· "I don't like them fellas who drive in two runs and let in three."

· "The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided."

· "There comes a time in every man's life and I've had plenty of them." -- One of Stengel's most famous quotes. This quote also serves as his epitaph.

· "You have to have a catcher because if you don't you're likely to have a lot of passed balls."

· "The trouble is not that players have sex the night before a game. It's that they stay out all night looking for it."

· "They say some of my stars drink whiskey. But I have found that the ones who drink milkshakes don't win many ballgames."

· "The Yankees don't pay me to win every day -- just two out of three."

· "It's wonderful to meet so many friends that I didn't used to like." -- At an old-timers game at Cincinnati in 1971 as quoted in Baseball

Digest (September, 1971).

· "Old-timers weekends and airplane landings are alike. If you can walk away from them, they're successful."

Stengel, also known as "The Old Professor," has uttered some of baseball's most famous quotes with some of his best material coming when he managed the hapless Mets from 1962-65. Here are some of Stengel's best quotes as Mets manager.

· "The only thing worse than a Mets game is a Mets double header."

· "I've been in this game a hundred years, but I see new ways to lose 'em I never knew existed before."

· "I now will say this for him, whether he can talk for himself or not, I had 15 pitchers who said they couldn't pitch to him, and it turned out they couldn't pitch to nobody." -- On Choo-Choo Coleman as quoted in Sport (April, 1966)

· "If everybody on this team commenced breaking up furniture every time we did bad, there would be no place to sit." -- After Ron Swoboda tore up the Mets' dugout

· "The way our luck has been going, our fellows have been getting hurt on their days off."

· "We've got to learn to stay out of triple plays." -- Stengel's response on what the Mets needed to do next season after the Mets ended the 1962 season by hitting into a triple play.

· "You look there into the Cincinnati dugout and what do you see? All mahogany. Then you look at our bench and all you see is driftwood."

· "Jerry Lumpe looks like the best hitter in the world until you put him in the lineup."

· "He calls for the curveball too much. He don't hit it . . . and he don't think anybody else can." -- On Mets catcher Chris Cannizzaro

· "He's a remarkable catch, that Canzoneri. He's the only defensive catcher in baseball who can't catch." -- On Cannizzaro

· "I got one that can throw but can't catch, and one that can catch but can't throw, and one who can hit but can't do either." -- On three Mets catchers in 1962

· "Well, we've got Johnny Lewis in the outfield. They hit a ball to him yesterday, and he turned left, then he turned right, then he went straight back and caught the ball. He made three good plays in one. And Greg Goosen, he's only 20 and with a good chance in 10 years of being 30." -- On his Mets in appearance on NBC's Today Show

· "Can't anybody here play this game."

In the book Baseball's Greatest Quotations, Paul Dickson presents a list of terms and phrases that were an integral part of Stengelese.

Butcher boy: A chopped ground ball

Embalmed: sleeping

Fairly amazin': good

Green pea: a rookie

Hold the gun: I want to change pitchers

Plumber: A good fielder

Road apple: a bum

Whiskey slick: a playboy

Worm killers: low balls