Rizzuto, Durocher Join Hall : Baseball: One ex-Yankee shortstop overjoyed, but mystery surrounds whether ‘the Lip’ will be represented at induction.

Two shortstops, one who wanted in so badly that the entire borough of the Bronx campaigned for him and the other so bitter about his exclusion that he said he didn’t want the honor, were elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame by the Veterans’ Committee Friday.

Phil Rizzuto and Leo Durocher will be inducted on July 31 in Cooperstown, N.Y., along with pitcher Steve Carlton, who was elected in January by the Baseball Writers Assn. of America.

Whether anyone will represent Durocher, who died in 1991 in Palm Springs at 86, is uncertain. “If they don’t think I belong there, so be it,” he said in 1986.

His bitterness grew with each mention of his name in connection with the Hall, and shortly before his death, he said he was going to put in his will that no one should pick up his award, should the voters have a change of heart.

There will be no problem getting Rizzuto, 76, to Cooperstown.

“Holy cow!” he said when teammate Yogi Berra, a member of the committee, telephoned with the news. Berra then handed the phone to Pee Wee Reese, Rizzuto’s former Dodger rival, and former Yankee announcing partner, Bill White, now president of the National League.

Reese and White are also members of the 16-member committee.

“I almost fell to the floor,” Rizzuto said from his home in Hillside, N.J. “Way back, I told you huckleberries I never expected to get in. . . . I never really felt like I belonged and that’s not a nice feeling. I played all those years, and then as a broadcaster I felt I was on the outside looking in.”

Others thought he belonged, including most of the Bronx, which was incensed when Reese was elected by the committee in 1984, his first year of eligibility.

Yankee officials, players and fans campaigned for Rizzuto through 15 years of eligibility in the writers’ voting and 11 years of consideration by the Veterans’ Committee.

Reese and Rizzuto, slightly built with similar offensive characteristics, ruled New York infields in the 1940s and into the ‘50s, with a seemingly annual rivalry in the World Series. Rizzuto, who had a career batting average of .273, usually won, a fact often mentioned when Reese, who batted .269, was elected to the Hall.

“I thought maybe he should have gotten in sooner,” Reese said. “A lot of young bucks will just look at his (statistics), but you have to look at his overall value to his team. He was a great shortstop.”

Durocher did not carry Hall of Fame credentials as a player. He was a good-field, no-hit shortstop who broke in with the Yankees, playing for a while with Babe Ruth before moving on to the Cincinnati Reds, St. Louis Cardinals and Brooklyn Dodgers. He batted .247.

The stature of Leo “the Lip” was built as a manager in 24 seasons with the Dodgers, New York Giants, Chicago Cubs and Houston Astros, with whom he won 2,008 games. He made countless enemies with his abrasive nature and fiery approach to the game.

His last job in uniform was as a coach with the Dodgers under then-manager Walter Alston. Durocher was fired when he mentioned to a reporter that he would have managed things differently after a Dodger loss.

Durocher is perhaps best known for a misquote that ended up in Bartlett’s Quotations: “Nice guys finish last.”

It came from an interview in New York while he managed the Dodgers and was asked about Mel Ott’s Giants. “Nice guy,” Durocher said of Ott. “He’ll finish last.”

His approach to baseball was perhaps best illustrated in a 1951 story.

“Look, I’m playing third base,” Durocher said. “My mother’s on second. The ball’s hit out to short center. As my mother goes by me on the way to third, I’ll accidentally trip her up. I’ll help her up, brush her off and tell her I’m sorry, but she doesn’t get to third. . . .

“I want to win all the time. If we’re spitting at a crack in the wall in my office for pennies, I want to beat you at it. Anybody can finish second. I want to finish first if I can. After that, I’ve done my job. Otherwise I haven’t.”

He did his job three times in those 24 managerial seasons, winning pennants with the 1941 Brooklyn Dodgers and with the 1951 and ’54 New York Giants. The ’51 club overcame a 13 1/2-game deficit in the last two months of the season and won a three-game playoff series from the Dodgers on Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard ‘round the world” home run in the Polo Grounds with Durocher coaching at third base.

Durocher won his only World Series in 1954 with the Giants, sweeping the Cleveland Indians in four games.

Durocher, who married actress Laraine Day, was Hollywood’s darling, with a circle of friends ranging from Frank Sinatra to Bugsy Siegel. His association with gangsters and gamblers got him suspended from baseball for a season by then-commissioner A.B. (Happy) Chandler, whom Durocher blamed for his exclusion from the Hall of Fame.