Success Quote by Casey Stengel

Stengel lands the punchline with the casual authority of someone who’s seen too many games go sideways and too many “good times” turn into cautionary tales. By lumping “oldtimers” (old-timers’ games, nostalgia tours, the ceremonial return of legends) with weekends and airplane landings, he collapses three different American rituals into the same brutally practical metric: survival. Not excellence, not beauty, not even satisfaction. Just: did you make it out intact?

The intent is comic, but the subtext is a manager’s worldview forged in long seasons and longer road trips. Oldtimers’ games are supposed to be harmless celebration, yet they’re also where aging bodies get exposed and pride can take a hit. Weekends are marketed as respite, but Stengel hints at how easily leisure becomes overindulgence, regret, or Monday-morning damage control. Airplane landings are the clearest version of the principle: nobody applauds a technically elegant touchdown unless disaster was on the table. Success becomes defined by avoiding catastrophe.

That’s why it works: Stengel smuggles cynicism inside a folksy one-liner, making the audience laugh before they realize he’s offering a philosophy of lowered expectations that feels oddly grown-up. Coming from a baseball lifer in mid-century America, it also reads like a rebuttal to the myth of constant triumph. Sometimes the win is simply getting to the next day with your dignity and limbs still attached.