Kick Down the Door, This Guy Should Be in the Hall of Fame

This report might properly be titled, with apologies to the playwright, “The Lion in Winter.”

Nobody ever loved a bright light, a face card, a pretty ankle, a natural seven or an 8-ball in a corner pocket any more than Leo Ernest Durocher.

Nobody liked noise, turmoil, confusion, dissension any better. No one liked the bottom of the ninth, the bases loaded, a capacity crowd standing and the World Series or the pennant on the line any more than Leo.

It was his life’s blood. It was, as the cliche has it, what Leo was all about.

Leo couldn’t stand quiet. He couldn’t stand to be bored. Where none existed, he invented a feud. Leo had the outlook of a guy with his own deck, boiled dice or two aces down. He considered the world a sucker.

He was a wise guy before the term came into common coinage. He was the original Broadway Joe. He got his shoes shined and his hair cut every day, he was immaculately groomed. He never bought a suit off a rack or a hat out of a window in his life. He wore so many jewels, he came into a room like a train into a tunnel. He always looked as if he were leading a parade.

He had a voice that was a cross between a ship’s whistle and an air horn on an 18-wheel rig. Leo never whispered in his life. He always talked as if he were announcing the room was on fire.

He was a brash rookie when he broke into the game--and he remained one till he left it. He had no patience with losers. And not much with winners, either, for that matter. Patience was a vice to Leo.

Leo wanted action. Leo was a “Shut up and deal!” guy from the go.

Nothing awed him. He yelled at Babe Ruth the first day he ever showed up in the big leagues. He cursed at three generations of umpires or commissioners of baseball. When all the world, including his wife, referred to Branch Rickey as Mr. Rickey--even years after his death--Leo always called him Branch.

He considered world famous movie stars his equals and once almost forcibly kept Spencer Tracy from a European trip because the actor’s arrival coincided with the team’s winning streak. Someone once said if Leo went to heaven, the first thing he would do would be to try to get God in a gin game.

Leo didn’t have a shy bone in his body. Modesty was not his long suit. His style was to attack. Leo went out to meet trouble. He wanted to get the first punch in.

Rickey, in exasperation, once explained that Leo was “a mental hoodlum with the infinite capacity for taking a bad situation and making it infinitely worse.”

But the owners, the press and the sporting public loved Durocher. He got the game in the papers. He was no 9-to-5 guy. He was a .247 hitter who swaggered like a triple crowner.

Pitchers loved him. That was because, when they threw a ground ball, Leo went out and got it. Leo was a marvelous fielder. There isn’t a pitcher in baseball who wouldn’t rather have a great shortstop than a great hitter in the lineup, and Leo was one of the greatest who ever went after a double-play ball. He stayed in the big leagues 17 years with his glove and brains.

Leo was part of the most raucous, romantic, rowdy bunch of ballplayers ever in one lineup. The St. Louis Cardinals’ Gas House Gang of the 1930s was a packet of underpaid superstars who were the best team in baseball during that gaudy period, when they could keep themselves from self-destructing. Leo led the merry-making.

Whatever the secret of top managing in the big leagues is, Leo had it in abundance. He won more than 2,000 games as a manager for four different teams. He piloted three of them into World Series.

There was never a dull moment on a Durocher team. He was the skipper of the out-manned Giant team that won on the Little-Miracle-of-Coogan’s-Bluff home run by Bobby Thomson in 1951. He was the manager of the Dodger World Series team that lost when Mickey Owen dropped the third strike and final out in 1941. His ’54 New York Giants crushed the Cleveland team that won 111 games, more than any other team in the history of the major leagues.

And what he is doing outside the Hall of Fame is something for the shamans of baseball to explain, not me. It’s a historical injustice of the first magnitude.

If Leo Durocher doesn’t belong in the baseball Hall of Fame, neither does Ty Cobb. If Leo Durocher doesn’t belong in the Hall of Fame, what are Joe McCarthy, Bill McKechnie, Bucky Harris and Larry McPhail doing there?

They’re giving a dinner for Leo at the Beverly Hilton Wednesday. The Westwood Shrine Club is honoring him for “lifetime achievement in sport.” Bobby Thomson, Willie Mays, Tommy Lasorda and all the greats who touched his life will on hand for the festivities.

I visited the old lion in winter at his lair in Palm Springs the other morning. He’s 81, the hair is gone and the eyes are fading but the voice is still piercing, the dugout growl intact. Leo still yells into a phone as if it were an umpire who just missed an easy call at second. The stomach is still flat, the tone firm. Leo doesn’t need any shots from life. He still plays it from the back tees.

A huge picture of Babe Ruth with his arm around him festoons Leo’s den. There are pictures of Herbert Hoover, Will Rogers, Ernest Hemingway, Judge Landis.

There are no pictures of former commissioner Albert B. (Happy) Chandler. Happy Chandler, you will recall, is the commissioner who once barred Leo from baseball for a year. The circumstances were the least bit blurry.

In 1947, a pair of notorious gamblers showed up at a Dodger-Yankee exhibition game in Havana. Subsequent investigation showed that they were the guests of Yankee management but their appearance set off a chain of bewildering reactions that led, somehow, to Durocher’s being suspended from baseball for a year.

Any storefront lawyer could have broken the judgment and maybe recovered damages today. But in 1947, baseball was a law unto itself.

Maybe it still is. Friends of Leo Durocher in the councils of baseball have suggested that former commissioner Chandler, now on the veterans’ committee handling the admission of old-time baseball players into the Hall of Fame, may be settling old scores by blocking Leo’s accession.

It makes Leo feel young again. Like old times. One more ninth inning. One more row with the nabobs of the game. One more shouting match with an arbiter. One more “Where was the pitch, ya (bleep)?”

Leo belongs in the Hall of Fame. But you wouldn’t expect Leo the Lip to go in there quietly and with dignity like a Pope getting elected, or like Stan Musial or Lou Gehrig or Joe DiMaggio now, would you?

That’s not Leo’s style. He’s got to go in there arguing and spitting and kicking dirt and yelling, “Stick it in his ear!”

That Hall of Fame looks as if it could use a little shaking up. And now you’re talking Leo’s game.