Leo Durocher once boasted that he never lied to Branch Rickey, the stern, churchgoing president of the Brooklyn Dodgers—but that wasn't out of respect. He always told Rickey the truth, Durocher explained, because he figured that "Mr. Rickey never asked a question he didn't already know the answer to."
If so, Rickey may have been the only person Leo Durocher never lied to. The only person he never cheated. Never drunkenly belittled. Never raged at, the spittle spraying from his lips. Never tried to do down, just for spite. Leo the Lip wasn't the worst person ever to work in professional baseball. There's a long list of people who would have wrecked the sport if they could, beginning with the game-fixers Hal Chase and Chick Gandil, back in the 1910s, and running through to the steroid dopers of the 1990s and 2000s. But as a genuinely awful person, a discredit to the ordinary decencies of life, Durocher is enough to be going on with. As an immoral exemplar, Durocher is good enough to do.
He knew baseball, though. There's no getting around that. Durocher won only a single World Series as a team manager, leading the underdog New York Giants to victory over the Cleveland Indians in 1954. But in a career that stretched from 1939 to 1973, he managed the Dodgers, Giants, Cubs, and Astros to 2,009 career wins and a spot in the Hall of Fame. Along the way, he showed his greatest talent: the ability to put himself at the center of every story, the power to focus attention.
As Paul Dickson understands in his new biography, Leo Durocher: Baseball's Prodigal Son, that's not a useless talent: Baseball invented the strange merging of athletics and public theater in which all American sports now participate, and Durocher figured out the technique for making himself a star. Dickson is an impossibly productive author, producing 67 books since 1971. He also coined the phrase "word word" for grammatical replication to indicate the essence of something, and in that sense not all of his works are book books: Dickson's Joke Treasury (1992), for example, and Drunk: The Definitive Drinker's Dictionary (2009). Still, with such real books as The Joy of Keeping Score (1996) and The Hidden Language of Baseball (2003), he demonstrated his love of the game, and with Bill Veeck: Baseball's Greatest Maverick (2012), he wrote an excellent biography of one of the game's best executives.
Part of the problem with his latest biography is that Dickson just doesn't seem to like Leo Durocher all that much. Of course, that's part of the success of the book, too, for Durocher didn't build his career on being likeable. Born in 1905 to a French Canadian family in Massachusetts, Durocher moved up through the minor leagues to become a regular for the New York Yankees in 1928. A regular benchwarmer, that is, and though he was a pretty good fielder at shortstop, his lifetime batting average of .247, with 24 homeruns in his career, shows pretty much what he was worth as a batter: the "All-American Out," Babe Ruth dubbed him.
As a benchwarmer, however, he proved more valuable. Durocher was an excitable cheerleader, a sparkplug for his team, and he quickly figured out how to frazzle opponents with jeers and insults. The Yankees' manager Miller Huggins loved his competitive spirit, encouraging the young player to study the game and aim toward being a manager. The Yankees' other executives were less pleased. Durocher would ask to be traded in 1930, finding New York too expensive, but he also wrote bad checks, became acquainted with the police, befriended gamblers, and lived as high a life in the nightclubs of Manhattan as a Depression-era utility infielder could manage.
His most successful years as a player were with the rough-edged St. Louis Cardinals, Dizzy Dean's Gashouse Gang, in the mid-1930s, where he fit in well with the grungy, foul-mouthed team. But Durocher's great chance came in 1939, when the Brooklyn Dodgers, after six straight losing seasons, offered to make him the team's manager. He quickly built the nucleus of a good team, purchasing the young Pee Wee Reese to replace himself at shortstop, grabbing such fading stars as Dixie Walker off the American League's waivers, finding the likes of Dolph Camilli and Kirby Higbe, and stealing the rookie sensation Pete Reiser from the Cardinals. In 1941, Durocher's third season as manager, the Dodgers had a hundred-win season and captured the National League pennant for the first time in in 21 years.
Though he did better with the Giants, managing them to the pennant in 1951 and World Series victory in 1954, his first years as a manager with the Dodgers may have been his most creative and impressive. They also set in place the pattern of the bully, loudmouth, gambler, and lightning rod he remained for the rest of his career. He fought with fans, punching one of them in the jaw. Watching the league-leading Carl Furillo bat for the Dodgers in 1953, he yelled out his demand that the Giant's pitcher "stick it in his ear," and Furillo was injured in the brawl after being hit by the pitch. Durocher shouted down team owners, league presidents, his own players, and especially umpires—the cause of his 95 career ejections from games.
In 1947, baseball commissioner Happy Chandler suspended the Dodger manager for the season, in part (as Dickson shows) as a favor to Yankees owner Larry MacPhail, who was feuding with Durocher. But Chandler had other reasons, too. Durocher really was consorting with "known gamblers," a serious offense in baseball, even if he wasn't gambling himself. But, of course, he was gambling himself. Durocher helped rig a crap game that stole more than a month's salary from a Tiger pitcher (probably Dizzy Trout), and he bet on everything that moved.
His career in the 1960s and 1970s consisted more of stunts than competitive managing (although he did reasonably well with the Cubs). Still, the focus was always on Durocher. A Dodgers' defeat in the 1940s would be announced as "Leo the Lip Angry at Team for Loss," and a Giants victory in the 1950s would be headlined as "Durocher Predicted Yesterday's Win." Despite his Catholic upbringing, he was much married and divorced, including to the actress Laraine Day, and all the gossipy details were reported in the newspapers, as well.
That was the key. Durocher was a good manager, if not quite a truly great one. As each job dissolved into acrimony, he would eventually find another job—and it wasn't because baseball found his talents irreplaceable. What the teams wanted from him was his celebrity and his newsworthiness. Baseball has always been a sport posing as mass entertainment—and say what you will about the man, he was entertaining, in a black-hat sort of way. In terms of the sport, Durocher was competent. In terms of the entertainment, he led the league.
The line "Nice guys finish last" is often attributed to Durocher. Paul Dickson shows in his new biography that the manager never quite said it, but we remember the line because it captures something about how Leo Durocher forced himself into the public eye in the 1930s. He made a career of nastiness, and if the inverse of his famous line doesn't follow—if mean guys don't necessarily finish first—at least Durocher wouldn't risk it. He sure as hell wasn't going to finish last.