Growing up as the son of a butcher in New York, Jerry Casale appeared destined to follow in his father’s footsteps.
His older brother, Louis, however, believed young Jerry was destined for something else.
“My whole family went into the butcher store. One passed it on to the other. But my brother Lou said, ‘That’s no good. When this kid gets [older], he does not go in the butcher store. This kid gets a chance to play baseball, to do the thing he loves the most.’”
One of six children in a tight-knit Italian family in south Brooklyn, Casale, who now lives in Secaucus, said “there was a lot of tragedy for us.”
His father died when Casale was six years old. Months later, his older brother, Dominic, died after a butcher’s blade accidentally slipped and fatally injured him. His mother also died young, leaving Casale to be raised by one of his sisters.
But baseball, he said, “got me off the streets and kept me out of the meat shop. Back then, there was no Little League,” and aspiring players in Casale’s “rough” neighborhood played for Catholic Youth Organization teams run through their churches.
“The field was like velvet.” – Jerry Casale
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‘It’s like I had died and gone to heaven’
In 1951, the year Casale graduated from high school, he worked out with several MLB organizations to audition for a place on a team roster.
“But I signed up with the Red Sox because they gave me a good offer, $40,000 [paid out over several years]. We had never seen money like that in my family,” Casale recalled.
He and another 40 or so prospects were shipped out to Sarasota, Fla., for an early spring training where Casale got his first glimpse of life in the majors.
“The balls were brand new white ones. No more tape like I was used to back in Brooklyn. The bats didn’t have any nails in them,” he remembered. “They were beautiful. The field was like velvet. It’s like I had died and gone to heaven. And after the workouts, we used to jump in the car and go off to Lido Beach, which is about 15 miles away. It was like putting kids in a candy factory.”
Future Boston Red Sox star Jimmy Piersall was among Casale’s teammates during this rookie training camp, which was offered to young prospects to help them get adjusted to the professional demands of major league baseball.
After a month in Sarasota, Casale knew he’d be signed to a Red Sox minor league team.
“See, the minor leagues were strong back in those days. Not like today. Today they treat the colleges like the minor leagues. So, at the end of a month they came to me and said, ‘Casale, we’re sending you to San Jose.’ I said, ‘bulls___! I ain’t leaving this country!’ I didn’t even know where San Jose was. I thought it was in the islands or something.”
The Army comes calling
Casale quickly found himself signed to a Class C Red Sox team near San Francisco, where both he and his pitching ability took a couple of years to mature.
“I said, ‘Jerry Casale is Class C?’ I was pretty cocky then. I thought no one could beat me when I was at my best. I thought I was better than Class C. But, you know what, those first couple years, I was not good,” he admitted. “After a while I started bearing down and it came to me what I would have to do to get up to the big team.”
He learned to concentrate, take the advice of more experienced players, and put his ego aside.
In 1955, when he became one of the leading pitchers in the country, he was moved up to the Louisville Colonels, a Red Sox AAA level team. “That’s where I started to blossom,” he said, adding that he won 19 games that season.
The next year, he was tapped to play for the flagship team in Boston. However, fate, in the form of the U.S. military, would force him to again delay his MLB dream.
“I go to spring training. I’m not there a day or two and I get a letter from the army,” he remembered. He was told to report for duty in 30 days. The team asked the military to give Casale a deferment until the end of the year, just enough time for him to complete spring training and play the regular season with the team. The deferment was granted.
As with the Colonels, Casale proved to be a strong pitcher, again winning games against strong line-ups from the New York Yankees, the Dodgers, and the Washington Senators. The word around the Sox clubhouse was that he would be the team’s second or third starter.
So, he was stunned when the team abruptly sent him back to Louisville.
Managers Joe Cronin, a Hall of Famer, and “Pinky Higgins tell me, ‘Casale, we’re sending you back to the minors.’ I told them where they could go.”
Casale, now 22 years old, said, “My heart was broke.”
But he returned to the AAA team where he played until he entered the military at the end of the year.
40 days short
After fulfilling his military requirement in Germany, Casale finally had a career in the majors, a career that was brief and filled with some bitterness.
He would ultimately become the Red Sox’s Rookie of the Year in 1959, a season in which he won 13 games, pitched three shut-outs, and pitched three three-hitters. He also hit three home runs.
“There’s only one other pitcher that hit more home runs in his rookie season than me,” Casale said. “And his name was Babe Ruth.”
An injury in his second year to his pitching arm cut short his blooming career. The Sox eventually traded him to the Los Angeles Angels, and he finished his career with the Detroit Tigers at age 29.
Ironically, when Casale, now 77, was released from Detroit, he was 40 days shy of qualifying for MLB’s pension for players. (To qualify for a pension, a player must work at least four years for a MLB team.)
He blames the loss of his pension on the time he missed away from the Boston Red Sox before he went into the military.
“I played six or seven years in the minors. All I got was just fond memories,” he said “So, yeah, I got some bitterness there towards baseball.”
‘The minors help you grow’
Despite his many years in the minors, Casale, actually believes many players in MLB today would have benefitted from some time there.
“A lot of these kids now, they’re not ready for major league baseball,” he said. “They go right from college to the majors and they’re not ready. The minors help you grow. A lot of these players need some growing.”
Performance-enhancing drugs and money have also sullied the game he loves, he said.
“Teams like the Yankees that got all the money buy up all the talent. But that’s not a league. It’s not a league with real competition and good baseball if that talent isn’t spread out.”
E-mail E. Assata Wright at awright@hudsonreporter.com.