Making Losing Bearable

Casey Stengel got hired at 71 years old to manage a team that could not play baseball, and he understood the assignment immediately. He was not there to win. He was there to make losing bearable.

The 1962 Mets went 40 and 120. Stengel's four full seasons produced four last-place finishes and not one winning month worth remembering. Most managers would have gone quiet and waited for the firing. Casey did the opposite. He talked. He talked to writers for forty-five minutes at a stretch, in loops and tangents that somehow always landed, and he let the joke be on his own ballclub. "Can't anybody here play this game?" was not a complaint. It was a marketing campaign.

And it worked. New York fell for that team precisely because Stengel gave the city permission to laugh at it. The Polo Grounds filled up with people who came to see how the Mets would lose next, and the answer was always something new.

He went into the Hall of Fame in 1966, one year after walking away. Both the Yankees and the Mets retired number 37. Nobody else has ever turned 120 losses into a legacy.