I MET LARRY MACPHAIL for the first time five years after certain episodes that followed the 1947 World Series. “The wildest, rowdiest and most sensational affair ever staged,” J. G. Taylor Spink, the publisher of The Sporting News , wrote of these events in a front-page story that mixed hyperbole, hyperventilation, and — surprise! — tough, honest reporting.
The postbellum MacPhail I encountered on a cold March afternoon in 1952 was subdued, hoarse, sober, and so determined to avoid controversy that the Once Roarin’ Redhead struck some as being dull.
Not I. As a child in Brooklyn I had seen from a distance how MacPhail created the modern Dodgers and I brought to our meeting profound respect. MacPhail responded warmly. He spoke softly and kindly of his Brooklyn days. “The franchise was dying,” he said. “Remember when I put lights into Ebbets Field?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The lights were a pulmotor. They kept the Brooklyn franchise alive.”
“Is it true you actually tried to kidnap the Kaiser, Mr. MacPhail?”
“Sure is. We wanted the bastard brought to justice as a war criminal. Right after the Armistice in ‘18, a few of us drove into Holland, which was neutral territory, in our army uniforms, and we got right up to Kaiser Wilhelm’s citadel in a town called Doom. But before we got the bastard, a neutral Dutch infantry company opened up with machine guns. Some neutrals! We had to back off.”
MacPhail mentioned in an uncomplaining way the battle he was waging against throat cancer. He even forgave me for being, as I was at the time, a member of the New York press. But when I tried to lead him into a discussion of a controversy rocking baseball — a controversy that really was wild, rowdy, and sensational — he withdrew. “No comment.” Then, “Can I trust you, if I go off the record?”
I was twenty-three years old. “You can trust me, Mr. MacPhail.”
“Well, son, let me tell you this. Ty Cobb may have been the best player in the history of the game. That’s a possibility.
“But here’s a certainty. Ty Cobb is the craziest son of a bitch on earth.”
“I can’t write that?”
“You can’t write that,” MacPhail said.
“I’d like to write that, Mr. MacPhail.”
“I’m sure you would, son. But you gave your word.”
Across twenty-four major league seasons, almost a quarter century, Ty Cobb batted .367. That is a lifetime average beyond approach and just about beyond belief. Indeed, Cobb’s lifetime average is the major league record that will endure from here to eternity.
Cobb was also the best base runner of his time, some say of any time. He stole 892 bases, and ploughing the basepaths he intimidated infielders as no one before or since. Often, during pregame warm-up, Cobb sat in the dugout, ostentatiously sharpening his spikes. Although no such record is kept, Ty Cobb must have spiked more infielders than anyone in the annals. To tag out Cobb was also to yelp in pain.
His salary never exceeded $30,000, but beyond the ballfield Cobb invested his way to a fortune. For years, he played down his financial skills, but in 1947, when Cobb’s wife, the former Charlie Marion Lombard of Augusta, Georgia, sued for divorce, court papers established Cobb’s wealth as “in excess of $7,000,000.” His two prime winners, selected generations ago, were a soda pop company down in his home country, known as Coca-Cola, and a vehicular growth stock in the town where he played ball, called General Motors. “In many ways,” the late Vincent X. Flaherty wrote, “Ty Cobb, the greatest of the Tigers, became symbolic of Detroit itself. He came along at a time when a lot of struggling mechanics were founding an industrial empire — mechanics who in after years became fabulous millionaires and grand dukes of industry.”
In the spring of 1952, Ty Cobb, perhaps the greatest player of all time, surely the richest ex-player anywhere, lent his name to two unusual articles published in Life magazine. “They don’t play baseball anymore,” Cobb said. “They’ve ruined the game.” Life promoted the stories with strident full-page newspaper advertisements. The magazine published photographs of Bob Feller, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio, Ralph Kiner, Phil Rizzuto, and Eddie Stanky. Then the advertising copy asked:
“According to Ty Cobb, which two are the only great ball players?”
It was a rousing two-part piece, written or rather typed by Marshall Smith, the sports editor of Life, but fueled, generated, and thought out by Mr. Cobb. Hype aside, much of what Cobb had to say was applicable then and may be even more applicable today.
Cobb came charging off the pages like a famished lion charging a well-fed lamb. Today’s ballplayers (today being 1952)? Growl. Sniff. Roar. Why, the blokes don’t bother to learn fundamentals.
What’s that, Ty? Big league ballplayers don’t know fundamentals? Roar. Growl. They don’t even practice, or anyway not enough, or anyway not in the right manner. Most of them don’t even train seriously.
But, Ty, the big leaguers want to make money, don’t they, and training pays off. Maybe they did, Cobb admitted, but all they really cared about was cashing in on home runs. Cobb himself led the major leagues in homers across the season of 1909. He hit nine. Now, in 1952, Cobb argued, the home run had become so commonplace it had “lost its thrill.”
What about the pantheon stars Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio? They “limp along on one cylinder,” Cobb wrote. He amplified in interesting but debatable ways.
When Williams came to bat, most ballclubs shifted hard to the right, the better to collar the hard drives that Williams pulled. Usually only one man, the third baseman, covered the entire left side of the infield. Against a shift of this sort, Cobb claimed, Babe Ruth would have hit the ball to left or bunted, defeating both his opponents and the shift. Williams neither bunted nor hit to left. He was not a great hitter, according to Cobb, because he had not mastered the fundamental of slapping singles to the opposite field.
DiMaggio? A lazy layabout. Cobb wrote that DiMaggio was perhaps the greatest natural player who ever lived, possessed of speed and grace, agility, a good eye, and long, strong muscles. But, Cobb commented, DiMaggio “hated exertion” and never took “a lick of exercise” all winter. As a result, DiMaggio went to spring training with muscles “weakened and soft,” which, Cobb said, led to his frequent injuries.
When Cobb was a ballplayer, he played with his mind as well as his body and he stayed in condition all year. In the winter he claimed to have walked twenty to thirty miles a day, every day, tramping the snows of Canada in heavy boots or marching over the red-clay fields of Georgia in shoes weighted down by lead.
The champion Yankees seemed particularly to enrage Cobb. After one World Series, he wrote, Yogi Berra took a job as a greeter in a restaurant; Phil Rizzuto sold men’s clothing, and DiMaggio just sat around. “Ribbon clerk” jobs, Cobb stormed. The men should “go deliver ice.”
In fairness, some refutation of Cobb’s charges is in order. Williams could have hit to left field; he knew how to do that. His argument was — and is — that pulling the ball to right, even against the shift, was what he did best. As stubborn as Cobb, Williams was damned if he was going to change or let others dictate how he should swing.
DiMaggio was never Spartan, but his worst physical problems probably proceeded not from indolence but from arthritis. If exercise cured arthritis, the world would be full of bankrupt aspirin companies.
It is the theory of Jon Miller, as astute broadcaster who reports on the Baltimore Orioles, that each generation produces at least one harsh attack on contemporary baseball players and a concomitant glorifying of those who went before. As Cobb in the 1950s lionized players of the 1920s, so today we lionize the very 1950s players Cobb derided. In twenty-five years, according to Miller, people will exalt the players of today, who are currently regarded as overpaid and undercommitted. “ It’s the nature of things,” Miller says.
While I’m inclined to agree, the Cobb articles in Life remain unique, not for his exalted reasoning but for the sulfurous heat that was Ty Cobb.
Despite Rizzuto’s soft job as a suit salesman, Cobb named him as one of the two genuinely great ballplayers of the Era. Rizzuto and Musial were the men Cobb had in mind when he said “only two players” could stand comparison with those from earlier times.
Not Pee Wee Reese, not Enos Slaughter, not George Kell, not Jackie Robinson — pointedly not Jackie Robinson — just to mention a few players Cobb spurned who have since been chosen for the Hall of Fame.
What did Cobb have to say about these worthies?
Here is his copyrighted opinion;
“Throw them a bag of peanuts.”
For several days, everyone talked Cobb. Columnists wrote Cobb. Editorial writers deplored Cobb. And, of course, Life magazine sold out throughout the country.
Eisenhower won the New Hampshire Republican primary, defeating Robert Taft by 12,000 votes. On the Democratic side, Senator Estes Kefauver defeated Harry Truman by 3,000. Backed by machine gunners and tanks, Fulgencio Batista took over Cuba in a bloody coup that lasted seventy-seven minutes.
Fine, fine. Eisenhower was probably better than Taft or Dewey.
Kefauver was preachy, but we were tired of Harry Truman and his self-righteous Korean war.
Batista? Dictators came and went in Havana, but the whorehouses never closed.
Such was the stuff of chatter. Getting serious, people said, “Wait a minute here, let’s talk something important. Can you really believe Ty Cobb?”
That week Bob Cooke, the sports editor of the Herald Tribune, assigned me to interview Larry MacPhail, who had emerged from a sort of self-imposed obscurity as the new president of Bowie Racetrack. I’d covered horse racing a bit and enjoyed some horsemen, but to me in those years racing was a sport, or maybe a business. Baseball was something else. In Prospero’s term, baseball was “rough magic.”*
“Could be a nice little story,” Cookie said, “MacPhail moving into another world. Don’t try to get him mad. Don’t try to drink with him. Don’t press. Just write what you see.”
I nodded and the boss and I talked about softball prospects for the Herald Tribune team. Cookie played shortstop. I played third. Cooke was a patrician gentleman. He couldn’t hit.
As I mounted my honeydew Chevrolet convertible — the pale green car was $200 cheaper than the red one — I began working out numbers of questions to trap MacPhail away from racetrack talk.
Was the great DiMaggio really a lazy layabout? (Here comes the Jersey Turnpike.)
Was the great Williams just a free-swinging bum? (Look at these trucks. Every truck in New Jersey wants to crush my little green car and me.)
There’s no arguing about Musial, but is Rizzuto really that good? What about Reese? It was MacPhail who brought Reese to Brooklyn in 1940. (Watch that damn trailer. Where the hell is Maryland? Why didn’t I take the Pennsylvania Railroad?)
With all the Cobb furor, MacPhail anticipated what I planned to do. He blocked my moves by putting our interview on a personal basis and, manipulating with great skill, played the off-the-record game to a fare-thee-well. It is almost always a bad idea to let an interview subject take you off record; at twenty-three I was learning my trade.
On the record MacPhail said that he was a novice at running racetracks. Yes, he had brought night ball to the major leagues, but he didn’t like the idea of night horse racing. He went on in a mildly interesting way and then helped out in the dedication of a statue to a horse called Billy Barton, a steeplechase jumper who lived thirty-five years. My story began:
Larry MacPhail made his debut as a racing executive this afternoon at a party where he shared top billing with a horse.
I dealt with his subdued manner indirectly:
He guarantees no more racing improvements than increased park space. He refuses to rap anybody famous. As a new member of Maryland’s gentry, Larry seems to feel that loud talk and bickering are not seemly.
The quiet of countrylife may have had its effects.
“Nice piece,” Cooke told me.
“I blew Cobb,” I said. “I couldn’t get MacPhail to talk Cobb on the record.”
“I’m tired of Cobb,” Cooke said. “You wrote a nice piece and you didn’t press.”
“I let him take me off record and then I felt I had to honor that.”
“You did right,” Cooke said. “No one story, none, ever, is worth losing a source like Larry MacPhail.”
Cooke liked my work considerably more than I did. Exactly three days after the MacPhail piece appeared, he pulled me out of a drab Manhattan March and sent me to Florida — or was it Eden? — to cover the Brooklyn Dodgers.
The MacPhail we are about to meet, back in October 1947, is not someone I knew personally. He does not seem well. Some of his conduct traces to whiskey but some clearly goes beyond that. I don’t think it is reaching to assert this: After the 1947 World Series, when the Yankees of Larry MacPhail won the World Series from a Dodger team significantly shaped by Larry MacPhail, the creator, MacPhail himself, underwent a nervous breakdown.
By tradition, World Series winning teams threw victory parties. The players and the manager and coaches were invited, of course, along with wives and selected, which is to say non-confrontational, writers and sports announcers and hangerson. By tradition the parties were off record. The mood was manic — the host team had just won the Series — and the abundance of good whiskey and attractive women on top of a manic mood, encouraged excessive behavior. “When I go to one of those things,” said Rud Rennie of the Tribune, whom MacPhail twice tried to have fired, “my understanding is that I’m a guest, not a reporter. A guest who doesn’t tattle, if he is a gentleman.” Which Rud Rennie was.
A full complement of reporters attended the Yankee victory party in 1947, held in the Grand Ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel on the night of October 6. Neither MacPhail nor the old gentlemanly press code really survived the evening.
As the Yankees moved toward their final victory, MacPhail began serious drinking. He left his box during the seventh inning and began to mix Scotch and beer, with speed and gusto.
A minute after Dodger catcher Bruce Edwards bounced into the double play that ended the Series, MacPhail was standing in front of the Yankee dressing room, ignoring his players, making a speech to sportswriters.
“You fellows have been wonderful to me,” he shouted, waving a bottle of beer. “Aw, hell. Just wonderful.” He began to sob. “I’m out of the picture now. I got what I wanted. We won the World Series. I can’t take anymore. My health. My health . . .”
Writers came running down the corridors far below the three-tiered stands at Yankee Stadium. MacPhail pushed his way through them, tears running down his face, and threw an arm around dour, chipmunk-cheeked George Weiss, his farm director.
“Here, you guys,” MacPhail shouted at the reporters. “I want you to say this in your stories. I’m the guy that built up the losers, the Brooklyn club. Here’s the man who really built the Yankees.” He raised George Weiss’s right arm.
“Now I gotta talk to my players . . .”
The Yankees were drinking champagne and peeling off uniforms. MacPhail climbed on a trunk.
“I want to congratulate you fellows. Nobody beat you three in a row all season. That’s something. Isn’t that something!
“The two Joes [DiMaggio and Page]. Just wonderful. You’re all just wonderful.
“I wanted to leave at the top. You’ve made it possible. I’m through, fellows. I’m quitting right now.”
He started crying again. Then he went looking for Branch Rickey and found him amid another swarm of reporters. “You’ve got a fine team,” MacPhail said. “I want to congratulate you.”
Rickey leaned in very close. His whisper was ice. “I’ll shake your hand because I have to with these people watching. But I don’t like you, sir. Don’t care for you at all.” MacPhail wheeled away. He needed another drink.
Toward eight P.M. he came staggering into the press room at the Biltmore Hotel.
“I got some things to tell you writers,” he said. “Stay away from me or get punched.
“I’m not a Happy Chandler man. I’m charged by him with saying something detrimental to baseball. Never. I gave New York another championship, didn’t I?
“And what do you writers say?
“I’m nothing but a pop-off. Maybe I am but I deliver the goods. Who won the Series?”
Sid Keener, the sports editor of the St. Louis Star-Times, had known MacPhail for thirty years. “Larry,” he said mildly, “everyone gets criticized in your business even when they win. Branch Rickey won in St. Louis and . . .”
“Rickey?” MacPhail shouted. “Bible-quoting, hypocritical, tightwad son of a bitch. He’s worse than Chandler, worse than that goddamn hayseed we have as commissioner.”
MacPhail was shouting all this at reporters from every major newspaper in the country.
“Gotta have a victory celebration,” he said. “Have one for myself. Don’t want to have my private celebration in the Grand Ballroom where everybody’s dancing and eating roast beef.” He paused for breath. “I don’t want to have my celebration party with the damned press.” Then, doing what he said he would not do, he lurched toward the elevator to join the Yankee victory crowd, which included writers. There he came apart.
MacPhail stumbled into the party and dropped into a chair beside John McDonald, who had worked for him in Brooklyn. He began a fresh assault on Rickey.
“I got no complaints with him,” McDonald said. “Rickey looks after people he likes.”
“You’re defending Rickey here?” MacPhail said. “Here where you’re my guest, the Yankees’ guest? You Judas. Stand up.”
As McDonald rose, MacPhail swung a right hand into McDonald’s left eye. The two were separated.
MacPhail lurched about and spotted George Weiss, the man he had praised generously a few hours before. “You gonna do what I tell you from now on,” MacPhail said, “or are you gonna quit?”
Weiss blinked in confusion.
“Look, you son of a bitch. You got forty-eight hours to make up your mind. What are you going to do?”
“We’ve all been drinking, Larry,” Weiss said. “Why can’t we talk tomorrow?”
“You’re going to talk with me now, or you’re fired. Wait. I just changed my mind about that. You’re fired now, Weiss. Tomorrow? I’ll give you tomorrow. Stop by my office for your final check tomorrow, Weiss. You’re through.”
“Oh, dear,” said Weiss’s wife, Hazel. “Larry. Please. We need the job.”
“Stay away from me,” MacPhail said. Hazel Weiss began to weep. MacPhail continued to lurch around the room. He spotted Dan Topping, big, Anaconda Copper–rich Dan Topping, who owned one-third of the Yankees.
“Hey, Topping,” MacPhail said. “You know what you are? A guy born with a silver spoon in his mouth who never made a dollar in his life.”
Topping seized MacPhail’s left arm. “Listen, you,” Topping said. “We’ve taken everything from you we’re going to take.” Topping wrestled MacPhail into the hotel kitchen. He was bigger than MacPhail, younger by twenty years, physically stronger, and considerably more sober. He shook MacPhail roughly in the kitchen, punched him with a few body blows, and ordered MacPhail to behave. “If you act up again, Larry,” Topping said, “I’m gonna knock your head off. Now go into the washroom and clean yourself up and for Christ sakes, comb your hair.”
About half an hour later — ten P.M. — a subdued MacPhail returned, properly groomed. But the whiskey and the mindless rage still burned within him.
He walked up to Joe Page, who was sitting with his wife. “What were you, Joe, before I picked you up? A bum. You and this broad here, you were nothing. I bought a home for you. You’re wearing nice clothes now. You’re drinking champagne. But without me, the two of you would be starving.”
Topping was approaching with a murderous look. Mrs. Page burst into tears.
MacPhail weaved away from the couple. Then this wondrous, bizarre, driven character staggered out of the room and out of the victory party and out of baseball.
“My dad made a lot of money,” Lee MacPhail said recently, “and he spent a lot of money, too. Don’t take this in the wrong way. Nobody has more appreciation for my dad’s brilliance than I. But in a sense he lived too long. He insisted on managing his own financial affairs, even when it was clear that age was taking its toll. By the time my father died in 1975, he’d gone through every cent he had.
“Dad died broke.”
The gentleman’s agreement on not reporting victory parties was dead by the morning of October 7, 1947. An extraordinary New York newspaper called PM , which accepted no advertising, had hired an acerbic Brooklyn Irishman named Tom Meany to write its baseball. Meany recounted some of MacPhail’s behavior and concluded his column:
Larry retains his title as headline champ. MacPhail is more emotional, without needing a warm-up, than Sarah Bernhardt. Larry always said he wanted to quit while on top. It should be recorded that Joe Page, with his winning performance, drove Larry out of baseball. Through the first six games, it looked as though it might have been vice versa.
The World Series and MacPhail finished simultaneously. Larry was sobbing when he announced that he was through. He set a record for sobbing in a seven-game series.
It took hard digging to ascertain what had been happening fundamentally in the Yankee front office. Behind an episode of apparent alcohol-induced psychosis lay very rugged fiscal stuff.
Some weeks earlier MacPhail had begun private talks with several Wall Street firms — Bear, Stearns and John J. Bergen & Co. — with an eye toward selling Yankee stock to the public. He produced books indicating that the Yankees of 1946 earned a profit of $1.35 per share. Since shares had a par value of $10, the team was returning better than thirteen percent. And 1947, with the pennant and the World Series, was going to be even better.
MacPhail and the brokers proposed to sell to the public 300,000 shares of new stock at $10 or possibly $15 a share. In restructuring the franchise, this would represent half of all Yankee stock, minus 100 shares. MacPhail, Topping, and Webb would retain operational control, and the public, getting not quite fifty percent, would pump $3,000,000 or possibly $4,500,000 worth of new money into the Yankees. MacPhail could then put a third of that, at least a million dollars, into his pocket or into a horse farm he had purchased in Bel Air, Maryland. “What Larry wanted most,” Tom Meany remembered, “was not just to be a winner. He wanted to be a squire, like Thomas Jefferson, only richer.”
In 1947, as today, organized baseball discouraged public ownership. Almost every major league club is privately held. In essence, baseball’s books are closed. Profit figures are kept secret — if anything, more so today than in the 1940s.
But even in 1947 various owners did not want to see baseball’s flagship franchise go public. MacPhail’s partners, Dan Topping and Del Webb, had personal fortunes. They didn’t need to raise cash as MacPhail felt he did. After furious exchanges, Topping and Webb agreed to purchase MacPhail’s third interest in the Yankees for an even $2,000,000. (Remember, MacPhail had come in with a million dollars two seasons before.) MacPhail would have pretax profit of a cool million. The Yankees would sell zero stock, none at all, to the public. Their books would remain closed.
Before the weeping and the punching, the assault on George Weiss, the humiliation of Mr. and Mrs. Joe Page, MacPhail had accepted the Topping-Webb offer. He had his million. But that was not all he wanted.
Larry MacPhail wanted to have his million and he wanted to keep running the Yankees. He wanted to live like Jefferson from Monday to Friday and weekend like Louis XIV. He wanted to breed horses and win pennants and bend people to his will. He wanted a coterie of vassals, a bowing press, and, oh yes, he wanted very much to be loved.
As I say, the MacPhail I met in 1952 seemed recovered and resigned to a life outside of baseball. By that time the Yankees had evolved into a different kind of organization: cold, efficient, impersonal, openly bigoted against blacks, perpetually triumphant.
In a weak moment at the Players Club during the summer of ‘52 Red Smith admitted that he did, as a matter of fact, root for those antiseptic Yankees.
An unemployed actor was Smith’s bar companion.
“But Red,” the actor said. “How can you root for the Yankees? That’s like rooting for U.S. Steel.”
What happened to the Yankees in 1948, immediately after MacPhail’s departure? What became of them?
Nothing happened to the Yankees in 1948. They didn’t become. DiMaggio had a fine year, with thirty-nine home runs, but Page drank his way to a mediocre season. Discipline faded under Bucky Harris, who could not control his team or get along with George Weiss. The Yankees finished third behind the Cleveland Indians and the Red Sox.
Joe McCarthy, the famous old Yankee manager, now was managing the Red Sox. Casey Stengel, fifty-eight years old, was managing the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League.
The Yankee future was in doubt.
LEO ERNEST DUROCHER, of West Springfield, Massachusetts; Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Beverly Hills, seldom drank spiritous liquids. Durocher’s vocabulary would make a longshoreman wince.* He gambled incessantly, unscrupulously fleecing innocents. His pursuit of women was relentless. Leo was one foul-mouthed pool hall hustler of a rake. But unlike Larry MacPhail, he seldom drank. Durocher never, ever, wanted to lose control.
My first extended exposure to Durocher came in February and March of 1954, when I was sent to Phoenix to cover a spring training. Durocher dominated the Giant press corps with a combination of charm and threats. He supplied bourbon to the alcoholic man from the New York Post. He lent money to the reporter from the Daily News. (“But if you ever knock me in the paper, Jim, I’m calling in my fucking note.”) He promised me a variety of exclusive stories, if I wrote them from his point of view. Providing only that I compose the gospel according to St. Leo, I could scoop all of New York, at least once a week.
He fascinated me. He was a fascinating character. He told baseball stories beautifully and Hollywood stories just about as well. He knew Sinatra, Hope, Crosby. He knew everybody. That spring, Paramount was shooting a comic circus movie near Phoenix, with a cast that included Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, then still speaking, and a radiantly bleached blonde actress of wide repute.
One day I stared after the actress, who was passing through a hotel lobby, and Durocher said, “Like that?”
“Umm.”
“I’m fucking her, you know,” Durocher told me.
“Who?”
He said her name. “That’s why you don’t see me around the lobby in the nighttime.”
I could not believe what I was hearing.
“You,” I said, very slowly. “You and that movie star?”
“Sure, kid,” Durocher said, “but I gotta stop fucking her Wednesday.”
“Why?”
“Because my wife is flying in.”
Leo Durocher had to stop sleeping with one gorgeous actress because his wife, gorgeous Laraine Day, was coming to town. My face showed amazement. “Stick with me, kid,” Durocher said. “Write what I tell you, good positive stuff.
“Do that and I’ll teach you how to get movie stars to go to bed with you.”
Durocher’s season in exile, 1947, was troubled. Branch Rickey told reporters as background — material to use, but without specific attribution — that Chandler’s decree suspending Durocher was unfair. The Brooklyn franchise was putatively bound by the rulings of the commissioner, including his order of silence. But for his part, Rickey said, he intended to see that, suspended or not, Durocher received his full salary as manager — approximately $30,000.
To hold Durocher’s interest, Rickey had an assistant send a daily telegram to California reporting on the progress of the Dodgers. The telegrams arrived regularly at Durocher’s home. The paychecks did not. Durocher did some card table hustling and made a little money, but not enough.
Rickey ducked urgent calls. “I got that message,” Durocher said. He then telephoned George V. McLaughlin, a banker who was in essence the Dodgers’ chief financial officer.
“Send me a wire right now,” McLaughlin said. “Make it read ‘Please send $10,000 advance on my salary.’ Phrase it like that and I’ll personally make sure your check goes right out.”
To his dying day, Durocher maintained: “I sent the wire. I got the check. I never got another.”
Rickey could forgive Durocher most of the sins of Satan. But he would not forgive Durocher for dunning him. The friendship between the two began rapidly to fade.
Durocher told the author Ed Linn, “You know, if you asked me to explain mixed feelings, I could give you the old joke. It’s watching your mother-in-law go over a cliff in your new car. Actually I liked Laraine’s mother. Mixed feelings for me was sitting in California in the summer of 1947 and watching my team — the team I had worked like a dog to put together — win the pennant without me.”
In Nice Guys Finish Last , an entertaining book written with Linn, Durocher boasts that he pursued other Dodger trustees until finally his 1947 salary was paid in full. On page269, he swears he was never paid in full. Then on page270 he gets his money. I do not suggest that Nice Guys Finish Last is coherent or accurate, only that it is entertaining (and as accurate as Linn could make it, given his collaborator).
Durocher next describes Laraine sensing Rickey as a false friend. He quotes his wife: “ ‘Rickey speaks with a forked tongue. I know the type. We have them in the Mormon Church, too.’”
He is setting up a story of betrayal. Leo, the wronged knight, forced out of Brooklyn by the evil parson, Wesley Branch Rickey. That version is rather less than the whole story.
Jackie Robinson was the future in Brooklyn. You didn’t have to be a superscout to realize that. The Dodgers set up a spring base in Santo Domingo in 1948, specifically to avoid racial explosions in the South. Robinson had finished the 1947 season at a lean, hard 185 pounds. He showed up in the Dominican Republic at 210, a full 25 pounds over good playing weight.
The Dodgers paid Robinson $5,000 for 1947. With success came invitations to speak, to put on batting exhibitions, to appear onstage. Robinson needed money; he accepted every offer. As the black journalist Carl Rowan observed, “Jackie’s admirers fed him until he was fat and futile.”
Robinson loved to eat; rich meals abrim with sugars, starches, cholesterol. His attack on a wedge of apple pie, topped with two scoops of vanilla ice cream, was an exercise in passion. His discipline had been saintly across the season of 1947. After the World Series, it collapsed.
Rickey was disappointed, a fact he registered by putting Robinson on the waiver list. Any National League team could purchase Robinson’s contract for $10,000 in 1948 unless Rickey withdrew his name from the waiver list within twenty-four hours of the claim. Nobody, not one of the seven other ballclubs in the league, bothered to claim the great Jackie Robinson.
For his part, Durocher raged. “That colored son of a bitch stayed in shape for Shotton, who meant nothing. I’m the guy who knocked down the petition. I’m the guy who fought for Robinson. And when he shows up to play for me, he looks like a black tub of lard.”
Durocher ordered Robinson to put on a tan rubber shirt that covered the entire upper body and arms. He stationed Robinson between first and second base and hit ground balls to Robinson’s right and left. The temperature on the Caribbean field approached 90 degrees. Durocher ran Robinson back and forth, barking constantly: “Move, Robinson. Move. There’s plenty of fat left back in the States. Leave some of your fat in Santo Domingo.”
Whoosh. A grass-cutting hopper to Robinson’s left.
Whoosh. A grass cutter to the right.
Overall, Durocher’s ringing voice kept bawling. “Move it, fat boy. Move it.”
After hours of this daily routine, Durocher turned to the press. “That’s enough for the fat boy today, fellers. Stick a fork in him. He’s done.”
By the time the Dodgers broke camp at Santo Domingo, Robinson had lost fifteen pounds. He remained ten pounds overweight. And he and Durocher were locked into a blood feud that lasted for six years.
“I was wrong to report overweight,” Robinson said long afterwards, “but Durocher was wrong to humiliate me, every day, in front of the other ballplayers, in front of the rookies, in front of the sportswriters. To tell the truth, I hated the loudmouthed bastard.”
With manager and star not speaking, the Dodgers started miserably in 1948. In July, with the best talent in the league, the team was tied for fourth, eight and a half games behind the first-place Boston Braves. The Dodgers were tied with the New York Giants, by far the best home-run-hitting team in baseball and just about the slowest.
Manager Mel Ott had joined the Giants in 1926, as a teenager. At the age of twenty Ott, a solid right fielder, hit forty-two home runs and batted in 152 runs. Across his career, he hit 511 homers. The Giants appointed him manager in 1942 and he brought the team home third. After that Ott’s Giants finished last on two occasions. They usually lost more ballgames than they won.
By 1948, with a powerful and expensive Giant ballclub going sideways, Horace Stoneham decided he had to make a change. He had known Ott since childhood. Ott was one of the most pleasant people on earth, but he wasn’t what Stoneham needed: a winning manager.
Burt Shotton was a winning manager. Or so he appeared. He’d brought the Dodgers home first in ‘47. One day early in July of 1948, Stoneham telephoned Branch Rickey: “I want permission to negotiate with Shotton. I’d like to bring him to the Polo Grounds.”
“Shotton is under contract to the Brooklyn club,” Rickey said. “At the moment, he’s working as my chief scout.”
“I want him to manage,” Stoneham said.
“He’s not available.”
“Damn,” Stoneham said.
After a pause, Rickey said, “If you’re interested in somebody else, we might come to an agreement.”
“Who?” Stoneham said.
“Leo Durocher.”
Rickey’s idea was for Durocher to resign. On July 4, he sent that request to his manager through Harold Parrott, the Dodgers’ traveling secretary. “I hate to tell you this,” Parrott said in Durocher’s office under the first base stands at Ebbets Field. “But I gotta. Mr. Rickey wants you to quit. He says don’t worry. He’s got something else for you that you’ll like.”
“Harold, tell the old bastard that if he wants me to resign, damn it, I will, but he’s gotta have the guts to come down here and tell me himself.”
“Mr. Rickey is away for a few days. He’s on the farm he bought in Maryland.”
“Wait a minute,” Durocher shouted. “I won’t resign. He’s gonna have to fire me and he’s gonna have to do it man to man.”
Fencing went on for several days.
“What is Leo going to do?” Rickey said. “Give me both barrels? Tell him I need more time to work out a special deal. Tell him I say to win ballgames. Win and keep on winning.”
“Keep winning?” Durocher bawled at Parrott. “Nobody knows better than that old bastard, that if I knew he was gonna fire me in the third inning — Poof! Out of work and on the street in the third! — I’d still be trying to score ten runs for him in the second!”
Durocher flew off to St. Louis on July 13 to manage the National League team in the All-Star Game. Stan Musial hit a two-run homer for Durocher, but the American Leaguers under Bucky Harris won, 5 to 2. Writers second-guessed Durocher’s lineup. They wondered why in the sixth inning, with the bases loaded and two out, he had not used Ralph Kiner or Sid Gordon to pinch hit for Richie Ashburn. Kiner and Gordon were long-ball hitters. Ashburn struck out.
Durocher’s mood was foul. When he returned to Brooklyn, Rickey ordered him into the Dodger office at 215 Montague Street. He offered Durocher Horace Stoneham’s unlisted number. “If you’re interested in managing the Giants, you have only to call him,” Rickey said.
“Gimme the number,” Durocher said. He telephoned the president of the Giants from the office of the president of the Dodgers. “Sure, I’ll manage for ya,” Durocher said.
“We have to meet,” Stoneham said. “Someplace quiet. We don’t need press here yet.”
“My place,” Durocher said. “I live at 46 East 61st Street. See ya there in half an hour.”
The Dodgers were playing in Cincinnati. (Rickey had told reporters that Durocher was “off on a special scouting trip to find the right young players to help the Dodgers get back into first place.”)
Horace Stoneham beat Durocher to the East 61st Street apartment. He introduced himself to Laraine Day Durocher and asked for a drink. “I’m waiting for Leo to get here,” Stoneham said. “I expect he’ll be managing the Giants tomorrow.”
The radio console was tuned to WHN, 1050, which carried Red Barber’s broadcast of the Dodgers’ game at Cincinnati. Laraine walked briskly to the set. “Then why am I listening to this?” She clicked off the radio and said easily, “Scotch, Mr. Stoneham, or bourbon?”
On Saturday, July 17, 1948, the front page of the Daily News cried out:
LIP REPLACES OTT!
BURT BACK WITH FLOCK!!
The Herald Tribune also played the story on the front page, but more sedately:
DUROCHER REPLACES OTT AS MANAGER OF GIANTS RICKEY BRINGS SHOTTON BACK TO PILOT DODGERS
Horace Stoneham was so upset at dismissing Mel Ott that he announced, even as he introduced Durocher, that the Giants were retiring Ott’s uniform number “in tribute,” Stoneham said, “by golly, to a swonnerful guy.”
Some Dodgers, notably Jackie Robinson, felt relieved. “I loved playing for Shotton,” Robinson said. “It’s gonna be a lot different. When Shotton bawls out a player, he takes him aside and does it in private. If Leo has something on his mind, you hear about it in front of everybody.”
Gene Hermanski, the outfielder, said, “It makes no difference, none at all. All I want to know is who’s pitching.”
Ralph Branca said, a little glumly, “You have to play as hard for one as you do for the other.”
Carl Furillo, who five years later would assault Durocher at the Polo Grounds, sounded philosophical. “Hell, may the best man win.”
The Giant players truly were shaken. Everybody liked Mel Ott. The team was in Pittsburgh, staying at the Hotel Schenley, a block and a half from Forbes Field. Al Laney wrote: “It was as though a wake were being held in the lobby. Men sat around or wandered around, saying nothing. Ott was through. The players had an air of bereavement, as though a well-loved member of the family had died suddenly and unexpectedly. Most appeared stunned.”
As soon as Durocher flew into Pittsburgh, he called a team meeting. “You’re a good ballclub,” he said, “but from now on I want more life out on the field. I want more spark.”
“Cooper.” This to Walker Cooper, the mighty catcher. “You’re a good ballplayer, Coop, but from now on when a pitcher throws up a lazy pitch, I want you to fire that baseball back at him. Wake him up.
“Mize.” To Johnny Mize, the huge first baseman. “You’re no Hal Chase [a legendary great fielder] out there, but you’re a good ballplayer and a wonderful hitter. I want you to show some life out there.”
One by one Durocher went down the Giant lineup, mixing criticism with controlled praise.
“And tonight,” he said, “we’re really gonna show the people something. Winning baseball. Winning baseball, gentlemen.” That night it rained and the game had to be postponed.
Later in a suite at the Schenley, Durocher sat soberly with Stoneham and a few friendly, hard-drinking writers. “Pally,” Stoneham said. “Tell me the truth. What do you really think of this team?”
“The truth?”
“Sure, pally. The truth is what I want.”
Durocher issued a withering critique. “Back up the truck.”
“Whas that, pally?”
“He means a moving van, Horace,” the columnist Bill Corum said. “He wants some changes. He wants to ship some people out.”
“Back up the truck,” Leo Durocher repeated.
Harry Truman said the state of the nation worried him. The Republicans and a number of southern democrats were trying “to fool the people with poppycock.” Truman urged Congress to reconvene, in the heat of midsummer, and pass legislation “that deals with eight critical areas.”
1. Control skyrocketing prices. Sirloin steak had reached $1. 10 a pound.
2. Provide housing to ease the present shortage. Home construction had stopped during World War II. Now, three years after the war, couples were crammed in with parents and grandparents.
3. Increase federal aid to education.
4. Provide a national health insurance program. Doctors were charging more and more; surgical fees were getting ridiculous. The medical monopoly hooted at national health insurance as “creeping socialism.”
5. Guarantee civil rights. The Jackie Robinson experience was echoing through America.
6. Increase minimum wages. How else could you afford $1.10 a pound for sirloin steak?
7. Broaden social security coverage. Large numbers of small businessmen and independent contractors were unprotected.
8. Fight the utility monopolies by providing more low-cost public power “through quasi-government agencies like the Tennessee Valley Authority.”
“The Democrats clearly are desperate,” began a statement from the Republican National Committee. “They know that this President is sure to be voted out of office in November” [when the Republicans would run mustached Tom Dewey].
The next day the Daily News skipped the political debate. But the News ran an editorial on the Durocher-Shotton switch. The headline announced:
REALLY MOMENTOUS NEWS!
The Dodgers played better baseball for Shotton than they had for Durocher, but they could catch neither the Braves, who won the pennant, nor the St. Louis Cardinals. Incredibly, a superb Brooklyn team finished no better than third.
The Giants played better baseball for Durocher than they had for Mel Ott, but only slightly. The team finished one game above .500, in fifth place. With such mighty musclemen as Cooper and Mize, the Giants hit 164 home runs, better than 50 homers more than any other team in the league. (The winning Braves hit 95.) But the mighty musclemen couldn’t run much. The wisecrack said that Mize and Cooper could score only when they homered. Their top speed was a walk around the bases.
Durocher didn’t like slow-moving baseball. “What are your plans?” a reporter asked as the season waned.
“I got plans,” Durocher said. “You can damn well bet on that. I’m gonna put a better ballclub in the Polo Grounds.”
“What kind of ballclub, Leo?”
“I’ll tell you what,” Durocher roared. “My kind of team.”
Some writers laughed at Leo the Loud. The laughter did not finally die down until three seasons later when Leo, helped by the young and the swift, Mays and Lockman and Thomson, passed the Little Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff.
The year 1948 was a rare triumph for out-of-towners. In St. Louis, Stan Musial slugged and poked his way to just about the best season any hitter ever had. Musial led the National League in batting (.376); slugging percentage (.702), hits (230) doubles (46), triples (18), runs scored (135), and runs batted in (131). He hit 39 home runs, one fewer than Johnny Mize and Ralph Kiner, who shared the title at 40. “Actually,” Musial says, “I hit forty-one homers in 1948, but I lost two when games got rained out. If it hadn’t been for the rain, I would have led the league in every single batting category that there was.”
Cleveland won the American League pennant and defeated the Boston Braves, four games to two, in the World Series.
No one imagined — it was beyond imagining — that nine years would pass before a ballclub not based in New York City won the Series again.
*It still is.
*Lester Rodney, the sports columnist for the Communist newspaper The Daily Worker, has retired to northern California. The Daily Worker has long since stopped publishing, but Rodney’s memories of Durocher remain vibrantly alive. The two were talking in a dugout one afternoon, Rodney recalls, when Durocher suddenly exclaimed: “For a fucking Communist, you know your baseball.”