SHOCKING DEED

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Last May the United States was rocked by the U-2 incident, this summer Richard Nixon was accorded the Republican Presidential nomination, and less than a week ago Dean Bundy announced the possibility of another rise in Harvard's tuition.... And yet none of these dismaying events is more than a prosaic prelude to the shocking deed perpetrated the day before yesterday in New York.

I was amazed--and in so saying I believe I am speaking for baseball fans, sports lovers, scholars, humanists, and freethinkers everywhere--by the ignominious treatment suffered by Charles Dillon (Casey) Stengel at the hands of his employers, the New York Yankees.

It is hardly necessary to chronicle Casey's twelve years as Yankee manager, years in which he guided the New Yorkers to ten pennants and seven world series championships. The sagacity and boldness of his diamond judgments have been unanimously lauded by players, managers, and fans; and his creation of "Stengelese" has endeared him to reporters and semanticists.

His dismissal rests on the specious pretext of a new Yankee policy on retirement, but baseball fans across the country have not been taken in by it. From volatile Bill Veeck, Chicago White Sox president, to a Brooklyn tattooist to a Broadway astrologer, they have voiced their indignation at this injustice.

Perhaps Cleveland Amory '39 has best summed up the feelings of all of us who admire Casey and deplore the Yankees' treatment of him, when he declared in Wednesday's New York Times, "I think that the Yankee bosses are for the birds. I think they're about all the American public can take. I was not surprised; isn't it the way they've behaved for ten years? You can take the whole bunch--Topping, Webb, and Weiss--and dump them in the East River." James S. Gordon '62