The Guy They Didn’t Want in Hall

Leo Durocher, who deserved to be there, never made the Hall of Fame.

Leo didn’t bat .400, field .999, hit 50 home runs, steal 100 bases. Leo just beat you.

Sportsmanship bored Leo. Everyone knows the quote that will always be associated with him, the one they said should be on his tombstone, the one that got him into Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations.” Leo pointed over at his rival manager, Mel Ott of the Giants, one day after the 100th person had come up to tell him what a nice guy Ott was and Leo unburdened himself of his lifetime philosophy. “Yeah, he’s a nice guy. Nice guys finish last.”

Leo wasn’t a nice guy. In the sense of a guy who could accept defeat gracefully, who could comfort a loser, who could philosophize a rivalry. Leo may or may not have said, “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.” But he thought it.

Leo did popularize another familiar baseball phrase. He may have invented it. “Stick it in his ear!” And Leo did say he would tag his grandmother in the teeth with the ball if she slid into him at second.

Leo, in short, was a scrapper. He figured the world was against him. Branch Rickey, a Bible-spouting teetotaler, always deplored Leo’s philosophy of life.

“Leo is a mental hoodlum with the infinite capacity for taking a bad situation and making it infinitely worse,” Rickey once said. But Rickey kept hiring him.

Leo and trouble were synonymous. Leo didn’t spend his off-hours visiting museums and cathedrals. Leo’s off-hours were spent in card games or at crap tables--trying to beat you. Leo never got out of a Springfield pool hall, figuratively speaking.

His pals were not stock-brokers, brain surgeons, poets. Leo’s pals wore white ties and black suits and talked out of the side of their mouth. They were bookmakers, fast-buck artists--and worse. Leo got sat out of baseball one year by Commissioner Happy Chandler because a couple of known mobsters and gamblers were reportedly his guests in his box at an exhibition game in Cuba. Leo said it was a bum rap. The characters in question were actually the guests of the Yankees’ Larry MacPhail, Leo insisted. But the suspension stuck.

Leo batted .247 lifetime. But it was his glove that kept him in the big leagues. And his snarling spirit. They claim he was the only rookie in history who ever tried to spike Ty Cobb. That was like biting a lion.

He gave no respect to Babe Ruth when they were teammates on the Yankees. Leo was a rookie and Ruth was a legend but Leo was not only not in awe of him, the rumor was he stole Ruth’s watch once. It wasn’t true. Leo always said you didn’t have to steal anything from Ruth. If you liked it, he gave it to you.

Leo gave no quarter. But he expected none. He expected the worst of his fellow man--probably because he suspected everyone wanted to win as badly as he did.

Few did. When they dubbed the 1934 St. Louis Cardinals the “Gashouse Gang,” the only two on it who were bona fide gashouse urchin types were Leo and Pepper Martin.

Leo brought bench-jockeying to its highest, unholiest art. He had a voice that sounded like a cross between a crashing train and a booming bell. It could be heard for counties. And he was merciless. No subject was taboo from your personal life to your professional life.

But he also had humor. He once called time when an overweight player--Fatty Fothergill--was at bat for the other team and told the umpire to get out the rule book.

“It says right there only one batter at the plate at a time,” Leo insisted.

Fothergill chased him with the bat.

Umpires were his natural enemies. He kicked dirt on them, he questioned their ancestry, their eyesight, their integrity.

He put on a show. He made the manager a star. Walter O’Malley, who understood that baseball needed headlines more than any other owner did, always hankered to hire Durocher, but his manager, Walt Alston, dull, honest, un-headlining Walt, full of probity, kept winning. So Walter hired Leo as a coach.

Then one night, when the Dodgers blew the pennant in a playoff game where they went into the ninth inning with a 4-2 lead, Leo delivered himself of the typically impolitic opinion that things would have been different if he had been managing that day.

He would have put star pitcher Don Drysdale in there, he boasted. When he found Drysdale in his shirt sleeves in the locker room in that inning, Leo said he exploded, “What are you doing here, you should be out there warming up!”

O’Malley had no choice but to fire Leo for this bit of insubordination.

Leo took it a little bit hard because he had become the darling of the Hollywood set by this time. He was admitted to membership at the posh Hillcrest Country Club, where he blew another job once by participating in a satirical skit, poking fun at the drinking habits of his other owner, Horace Stoneham. Horace didn’t think it was funny and fired Leo.

Leo went out to meet trouble all his life, even though it would have got to him in its own good time.

Was he a good manager? You bet he was. He could take a good team and make it better. But he couldn’t take a bad team and do anything with it. It bored Leo. He got a reputation for being comfortable only with a front-runner, but his 1951 Giants made up a 13 1/2-game deficit in mid-August to overtake the Dodgers and win the pennant in a playoff.

Leo was the manager when Bobby Thomson hit his baseball “shot heard ‘round the world.”

Was Leo gracious in victory? Hah! He crowed to the press that he would never have brought Ralph Branca in to replace Don Newcombe in that situation.

“No way do I take out a Newk for a right-handed fastball pitcher there,” he trumpeted.

Charlie Dressen, Dodger manager, was, of course, forever thrilled for that vote of confidence.

Leo came up in a different world. There were no PR men, agents, lawyers. Ballplayers made slightly more money than plumbers, not enough so they didn’t have to have winter jobs. Leo felt he had to have an edge and his edge was combativeness, ferocity. The phrase holler guy probably originated with Leo.

He was feisty to the last. He bitterly blamed the former commissioner, Chandler, for keeping a vendetta alive and marshaling the votes to keep him out of Cooperstown. He won 2,008 major league games as a manager, sixth on the all-time list. The Hall of Fame is poorer without him.

The last time I saw him, he said he didn’t want the Hall of Fame anymore and would decline it if finally offered.

I doubted that. But if they do put him in posthumously, don’t be surprised if Leo comes down and kicks dirt all over it.