Charles Dillon "Casey" Stengel , nicknamed "The Old Professor", was an American baseball player and manager from the early 1910s into the 1960s. He was born in Kansas City, and was originally nicknamed "Dutch", a common nickname at that time for Americans of German ancestry. After his major league career started, he acquired the nickname "Casey", which originally came from the initials of his hometown , which evolved into "Casey", influenced by the wide popularity of the poem Casey at the Bat. In the 1950s, sportswriters dubbed him with yet another nickname, "The Old Perfessor", for his sharp wit and his ability to talk at length on anything baseball-related.