100 Things Dodgers Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die (21 page)

56. Larry MacPhail

Over three weeks in August 1959,
Sports Illustrated
published more than 15,000 words by writer Gerald Holland about a former major league general manager who had been out of work for a dozen years. “Warts and all” is a phrase that could have been invented for Larry MacPhail, an explosive character and front office rebel—not to mention rogue would-be kidnapper of Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm near the end of World War I—who nonetheless gave birth to the Dodgers as a competitive franchise leading into the Boys of Summer years.

MacPhail came to Brooklyn during the 1937–38 off-season after helping introduce several innovations to the major leagues while with Cincinnati, including (against fierce resistance) night baseball. His entry into the sport had been as the president of a Columbus, Ohio, minor league team that he convinced a different kind of innovator, Branch Rickey, to purchase for the St. Louis Cardinals. Together, they could have put Oscar and Felix to shame as an odd couple, and not just because of their diametrically opposed feelings about alcohol.

“Whereas Rickey viewed the baseball business from a perspective of containing costs, MacPhail embodied the consumer component of modern capitalism,” wrote Jules Tygiel in
Past Time: Baseball as History
. “Revealingly, while MacPhail frequently spoke of ‘what the consumers want' and the ‘fellow who sits out there in the bleachers,' Rickey, the most quoted man in baseball history, left no remembered adages about fans.”

 

 

Dodgers president Larry MacPhail (left) and Branch Rickey (right) are all smiles at the 125th Street train station in New York City, circa 1942. MacPhail left the Dodgers to serve in World War II after the 1942 season and the Dodgers hired Rickey to replace him.
Photo by Barney Stein. All rights reserved.

 

MacPhail's impact in Brooklyn was instant and multifaceted: immediate renovations for Ebbets Field, the import of Red Barber to the broadcast booth, the introduction of batting helmets following a frightening Joe Medwick beaning, and on the roster, transactions that shook the Dodgers out a generation of doldrums. First baseman Dolph Camilli and future Hall of Famer Leo Durocher (who didn't hit at shortstop but would become player-manager at age 33 in 1939) brought an initial dose of credibility to the team, soon complemented by a pair of 21-year-olds breaking in with Brooklyn in 1940—Pee Wee Reese and Pete Reiser. After finishing 62–91 the season before his arrival, the Dodgers improved to 69 wins in 1938, 84 in 1939, 88 in 1940, and 100 in 1941—the last season before World War II took its toll on baseball and the country.

His temper and drinking, as well as his disintegrating relationship with Rickey, who later replaced MacPhail as Dodgers GM following the '42 season, are intrinsic to MacPhail's legend. But most disheartening of all was his stance in 1945–46 against the impending promotion of Jackie Robinson and other Negro Leaguers to the major leagues.

“He condemned ‘political and social-minded drum-beaters for their efforts on behalf of integration,” Tygiel wrote. “Tellingly, MacPhail questioned the ultimate consequences of increased black attendance at the ballparks. Noting that Robinson's presence in the International League had attracted thousands of black fans, MacPhail worried that ‘a situation might be presented...in which the preponderance of Negro attendance...could conceivably threaten the value of Major League franchises.'”

Though the demerits remain on his record, MacPhail's pull on the game remains indisputable.

“If MacPhail came to me tomorrow,” former Dodgers board member James Mulvey told Holland, “with a proposition he had dreamed up, I'd be tempted to chuck everything and go in with him. I'd just like to be around him, to watch him work. MacPhail can make a success of anything he puts his mind to.”

 

 

 

57. The Head-Spinning, Allegiance-Shifting, Authority-Defying Leo Durocher

At the end of the 1938 season, Larry MacPhail named the team's 33-year-old shortstop Leo Durocher the Dodgers' new field boss. “Nobody but MacPhail would ever have thought to make Durocher a manager,” Bill James wrote.

“There were managers before Durocher who drank, swore, chased women, bet horses, and screamed at umpires—but they were, in some fundamental way, ‘responsible' men. They were men who obeyed the rules and asked the world for respect. Durocher didn't give a—what you thought of him. He didn't make any pretense to being a nice person.

“Durocher, who grew up essentially fatherless, once said that he had spent his life looking for father images. In a sense, all managers in the generation before Durocher (and most managers after) were
paternal
managers, surrogate fathers for their players. Durocher was more like an older brother, not all that much older, and certainly not much more responsible. Other managers did bed checks. Durocher, in effect, gave his players permission to hit the bars and woo the women until all hours, so long as they were ready to play ball at game time. And if you weren't ready to play ball at game time, God help you.”

Durocher was still at the job in March 1947, when a handful of Dodgers, including their most popular player Dixie Walker, two top pitchers, Kirby Higbe and Hugh Casey, and a rising young outfielder named Carl Furillo declared their objection to playing on the same team with Jackie Robinson. They had a big problem, though—more than just the will of Robinson or Branch Rickey. Durocher had just seen Robinson play, and he liked what he saw.

“The Dodgers hopped around Central America for exhibition games throughout spring training, and they were in Panama when Leo Durocher heard about the players' uprising,” wrote Jonathan Eig in
Opening Day
. “He roused the team from bed one night for a meeting in the team's dining room. The players came in various states of undress. Durocher wore a yellow bathrobe atop his pajamas. No one writing of the meeting bothered to mention the color of the pajamas, but even if they had been pink with purple bunnies Durocher's authority would have been undiminished and unquestioned. The manager had a cinderblock jaw and a piercing stare, which he likely used to full effect in this instance. ‘I don't care if a guy is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a...zebra,' he told the team, according to one eyewitness account. ‘I'm the manager of this team, and I say he plays.' Robinson was going to put money in all their pockets by helping the team get to the World Series, Durocher said, and anyone who didn't like it would be traded or released as soon as the details could be arranged.”

Robinson stayed and led the Dodgers to the World Series. But without Durocher.

Less than a month after laying down the law, Durocher was suspended for the season by major league commissioner Happy Chandler. It had nothing to do with Jackie. Durocher had been under fire on multiple fronts: from Chandler for associating with gamblers, and from the holier-than-thou contingent of the public for marrying actress Laraine Day while her divorce was barely ripe.

 

 

Dodgers player-manager Leo Durocher jumps high in the air during spring training exercises at Clearwater, Florida, circa 1940. Durocher's career with the Dodgers was volatile; however, it did help land him in the Hall of Fame.
Photo by Barney Stein. All rights reserved.

 

Pettiest of all—yet most significant—Durocher (and even more so, his current benefactor, Rickey) had gotten on the wrong side of the mercurial MacPhail, now co-owner of the Yankees. Rickey and MacPhail had been feuding for years by this point; Durocher became entangled when he and MacPhail had a public, he-said/he-said disagreement over the Yankees managerial vacancy, with Durocher either turning down MacPhail's offer or lying that it had even been made.

When a fed-up-with-it-all Durocher pointedly told the press that MacPhail had been consorting with gamblers as well, MacPhail erupted. He called in a favor with Chandler, whom he had helped win election to the commissioner's office two years earlier after Kenesaw Mountain Landis died—ironically, according to Red Barber in
1947–When All Hell Broke Loose in Baseball
(which spends more than 100 fascinating pages detailing the origins of Durocher's suspension), because MacPhail had often clashed with NL president and Chandler rival Ford C. Frick over the league's unfair treatment of Durocher.

“Commissioner Chandler released his statement in Cincinnati just before he telephoned Rickey,” Barber recalled. “From then on it was bedlam. Phones rang until…all phone lines were jammed. Radio programs were interrupted with bulletins on Durocher's suspension. Headlines screamed the suspension. I can't recall a sports story so suddenly dominating all the media. It seemed, certainly in Brooklyn, as though there was no other topic of conversation. The borough was stunned.... Manager Leo Durocher was suspended for a year!”

Burt Shotton guided the Robinson Dodgers to the Series, and by the time Durocher took back reins in 1948, even Rickey had soured on him. On July 11, Durocher's Dodgers lost to their NL archrivals the New York Giants 3–2. The next game Durocher managed was the All-Star Game, and the next one after that was for the Giants. Their owner, Horace Stoneham, had called Rickey to inquire about hiring Shotton—and came away with Durocher instead. The manager cheering Bobby Thomson's “Shot Heard ‘Round the World in '51” was the ex-Dodgers skipper.

In 1961, Durocher returned to the Dodgers as a coach under Walter Alston, and inside of two seasons was accused of plotting to take Alston's job after the Dodgers' 1962 collapse against, of course, the Giants. Instead, Durocher later found work managing the Cubs and the Astros. He won his 2,000
th
career game September 11, 1973, and helmed his final contest September 30—34 years after his first.

Talk about the volatility of the modern Dodgers all you want, but they never had anyone like this. His memoir, published in 1975, carried his defining title:
Nice Guys Finish Last
. Leo Durocher? He finished in the Hall of Fame.

 

 

 

58. Zack Wheat

For all the nostalgia that floats like gossamer from the Brooklyn Dodgers era, memories of Zack Wheat have tumbled off the currents. Yet a century after making his Dodgers debut, Wheat remains worthy of attention, not only as the franchise's all-time leader in several major categories, but as someone much more modern than the timing of his playing days would suggest.

Wheat, who played all but the final season of his career with the Dodgers, tops the team in career hits (2,804), games (2,322), at-bats (8,859), doubles (464), triples (171), and total bases (4,003). In 1916, his on-base percentage of .366 and slugging percentage of .461 (150 OPS+) helped lead Brooklyn to its first World Series.

“Wheat was far ahead of his time in many aspects of hitting, adopting strategies that wouldn't be widely accepted until decades later,” wrote baseball historian Eric Enders, whose definitive biographical sketch of Wheat can be found online with the SABR Baseball Biography Project. “He was sometimes criticized for his reluctance to bunt, but he argued that he was more valuable to the team by swinging away.”

“I was young and inexperienced [in the minors],” Wheat himself said. “The fellows that I played with encouraged me to bunt and beat the ball out. I was anxious to make good and did as I was told. When I came to Brooklyn I adopted an altogether different style of hitting. I stood flat-footed at the plate and slugged. That was my natural style.”

When baseball transitioned to the lively ball era, Wheat was readier than most to take advantage—a big-ball player waiting to emerge from a small-ball age. His performance not only remained steady well into his 30s, but in 1924, when he was one of the 10 oldest players in the game at 36, Wheat had his finest year: a .375 batting average, .428 on-base percentage, and .549 slugging percentage (163 OPS+). Even allowing for the overall growth in offense in baseball starting in the 1920s, Wheat, who also had an exceedingly high defensive reputation, only seemed to get better.

The other way Wheat presaged the modern ballplayer was in salary negotiations. Decades before players had the right to become free agents, Wheat was a perennial holdout. A farmer in his home state of Missouri, Wheat made it clear to Brooklyn's owners, according to Enders, that as much as he loved the game, he was more than willing to live off the more traditional field of dreams. Not surprisingly, his show of backbone paid off in raises.

After his retirement in 1927, the tables turned in an unfortunate way for Wheat. The Great Depression sapped the value of his farm, and in-fighting among Dodgers brass helped keep him from remaining in the organization in a managerial post. He survived and even thrived, but though he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1959, right after the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, the full dimension of Wheat's accomplishments have fought an uphill struggle with time. Though seeing his name rest undisturbed atop the Dodgers record book for so long is impressive enough, it's important we remember he was more than just a name, more than an obscurity from another epoch.