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Casey Stengle/Stengel when I think he was the skipper of the Mets. Talking to a player in the dugout after a game. "Funny thing happened today. One of us got traded."

The actual quote was from Stengel's latter years managing the Yankees. Outfielder Bob Cerv was sitting at the end of the dugout before a game when Stengel came up from the clubhouse and sat beside him, saying, "Nobody knows this, but one of us has just been traded to Kansas City." (This was in 1957; Cerv returned to the Yankees in 1960.) Some other Stengel gems:

I got the smartest pitcher in the world until he goes out to pitch. - About Jay Hook, the pitcher who won the first game the Mets ever won, but who frustrated Stengel because he didn't like to back hitters off the plate.

Now, just go out and make like you're pitching against Harvard. - To another early Met, Ken McKenzie - a Yale graduate.

I'm the manager. I'm the fella in charge. It's kinda like being the Mother Superior. - To a nun related to his wife, trying to explain what he did with the Yankees.

Blanchard! Do you see them white lines? Do you know what they are for? They are there to hit the ball on. An' them fellas in the middle are called fielders. - To Met first baseman Jim Marshall, whom Stengel often confused with reserve Yankee catcher Johnny Blanchard.

If I'm gonna be buggered I don't want an amateur holding the Vaseline pot. - Trying to back a second umpire off an argument he was having with the first umpire.

It ain't the getting it that's gonna hurt them, it's the staying up all night looking for it. They gotta learn that if you don't get it by midnight, you ain't gonna get it; and if you do, it ain't worth it. - On some of his night-crawling Yankees, especially those crawling for sex.

No. Leave me alone. I want to stay in the room with this guy for one hour without him busting up a ball game on me. - Shooing members of the Mets' party away while he was transfixed, at a traveling version of Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, in front of a wax likeness of Stan Musial.

Get your runs now - Father Time is coming! - To his Yankee hitters whenever he saw Satchel Paige warming up in the Cleveland Indians or St. Louis Browns bullpen.

They examined all my organs. Some of them are quite remarkable and others are not so good. A lot of museums are bidding on them. - After a physical exam provoked when he experienced chest pains in early 1960.

Do you see those stands out there? Do you know they are going to tear down this ball park after next year when our new one is ready? Well, you keep pitching like that to that fella and you're gonna give them a head start on the right field seats! - To pitcher Roger Craig, after Craig surrendered a second homer in the same game to San Francisco Giants slugger Willie McCovey.

And in left field, we have a splendid man and he knows how to do it. He's been around and he swings the bat there in left field and he knows what to do, and he's got a big family and he wants to provide for them, and he's a fine, outstanding player, that fella in left field, and you can be sure he'll be ready when the bell rings and that's his name - Bell! - Said while giving a reporter his first-ever home game starting lineup for the Mets, as he struggled to remember the name of outfielder Gus Bell.

Viva le France! - Whooping it up after a walkoff hit by Met rookie Danny Napoleon (about whom Curt Flood has said, memorably enough, He'd be ugly even if he was white.)

Boy never saw concrete before. I told him not to worry about it, I never had no trouble with it and I played that wall for six years. He don't believe what I'm telling him. I guess he thinks I was born sixty years old. They never believe we done anything before they did. - Explaining to a reporter why Mickey Mantle broke out laughing in Ebbets Field, before Mantle's first-ever World Series game against the Brooklyn Dodgers there, while showing Mantle how to play Ebbets Field's famous right-to-right center field wall with the beveled bottom: When Stengel came to, "Now, when I played here," Mantle cracked up laughing, gasping out, "You played here?" (Stengel, in fact, began his playing career with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1916.)