Leo Durocher, a leading and controverial baseball figure for more than a half-century, a man who enriched the American lexicon with his dictum, ”Nice guys finish last,” died of natural causes Monday at age 86. Death came at Desert Hospital in Palm Springs, Calif.
Durocher`s big-league career officially began in 1928 when he was among Babe Ruth`s teammates with the Yankees. A slick-fielding but light-hitting shortstop, he had only modest success as a player but gained prominence during his 25-year managerial career, which included 6 1/2 seasons with the Cubs. Three of his teams won pennants, one a world championship.
Durocher was as brassy as the trombone section in a swing era band. He was loud, profane and, when he wanted to be, charming. He was the first of the celebrity managers, and he traveled with other celebrities.
”Leo was my idol,” Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tom Lasorda said. ”I took his number (2) because of the love, admiration, and respect I had for him. We lost a wonderful man.”
Durocher roomed with George Raft, was married three times, including once to actress Laraine Day, and ran around with Frank Sinatra. His relationship with Raft, a onetime vaudeville hoofer turned Hollywood tough guy, was a factor in Durocher`s one-year suspension from baseball in 1947. Durocher always claimed that Commissioner Happy Chandler banished him without cause, and there was no evidence to indicate otherwise.
”Benefactor or blackguard, genius or jerk, paragon or prodigal, Leo Durocher was one of the most beguiling figures to walk through baseball,”
wrote Edwin Pope in his book, ”Baseball`s Greatest Managers.”
What often is forgotten is that Durocher played 12 full seasons and parts of four others in the major leagues, was a superior defensive shortstop and, by today`s standards, was a tough out with a .247 lifetime batting average.
Sportswriters and others loved him for his quick lip but hated his cantankerousness. Whitey Lockman, who played for Durocher for 7 1/2 years and replaced him as Cubs manager in 1972, summed up what many who knew him felt about Leo the Lip:
”When Leo Durocher became manager of the Giants in 1948, he scared me to death,” said Lockman. ”I stayed scared of him the rest of the season. But then I got used to him and he didn`t frighten me any more.”
When angered, no one was spared Durocher`s wrath. But he was also quick to apologize when wrong. Once, while managing Houston in 1973, he fined the Astros` bat boy $2 for not picking up two baseballs in the dugout. He later had a change of heart and rescinded the fine.
His years in Chicago were filled with laughter, joy, anger, turmoil and finally disappointment.
When he took over as manager of the Cubs before the 1966 season, Durocher said, ”This is not an eighth-place ball club.” The Cubs finished 10th. The next thing Durocher said was, ”We`re going to back up the truck.” The housecleaning already had been accomplished, however, in that first year. Two of the best trades in Cub history had brought pitcher Bill Hands and catcher Randy Hundley from San Francisco and pitcher Ferguson Jenkins from Philadelphia. And in 1967, the man who had been Manager of the Year three times worked his last and possibly greatest miracle. A team that had not been a pennant contender in 22 years was in first place by July and finally finished third. The next year the Cubs never really were in the race but again finished third to set the stage for the climactic act of Durocher`s baseball life.
The 1969 Cubs took off on Opening Day, led the league by eight games in August, still had a five-game lead by Sept. 1 and then died. The miracle Mets swept past them as if they were standing still, and the best Cub team since World War II finished second. Everyone looked for excuses, and Durocher was the handiest target.
Jenkins, in his book ”Like Nobody Else: The Fergie Jenkins Story,” said of Durocher: ”If a man had a slight injury or was just plan tired, Leo didn`t want to hear about it. He just rubbed the man`s nose in the dirt and sent him back out there. You played until you dropped.”
But those who overlooked Durocher`s faults saw a man who had the courage to say what he thought; a man who refused to taking losing in stride.
”He`s like a turkey in a tobacco patch that sees a worm,” Branch Rickey told Sports Illustrated, ”and knocks down every stalk to get it . . .”
The Cubs actually came closer to winning in 1970 than they had in 1969, but again finished second. When Durocher finally was dismissed (”I stepped aside,” said Leo) and replaced by Lockman halfway through the 1972 season, they were barely above the .500 level.
Leo Ernest Durocher was born July 27, 1905, to a railroad family in West Springfield, Mass. In high school, he hustled pool-a vocation that was to color his reputation the rest of his life.
His formal schooling ended after he and a 9th-grade teacher got into a scuffle. Thereafter, he worked for an electric company and played shortstop on the company team.
At 20, Durocher was a top defensive shortstop for Hartford of the Eastern League. The Yankees signed him for $7,500 in 1925 and he spent 1926 in Atlanta and 1927 in St. Paul before being called up to the big leagues.
He played more or less regularly for the 1928 New York Yankees and was the regular shortstop for the St. Louis Cardinals` Gashouse Gang when they won the pennant and World Series in 1934. In 1936 played in the first of his two All-Star Games.
He played 116 games at shortstop in 1939, his first year as player-manager with the Brooklyn Dodgers. And he still played occasionally in 1941, when he won his first pennant. The next year the Dodgers won 104 games and still finished second to the Cardinals.
It was while managing the Dodgers that Durocher coined the phrase that became his credo: ”Nice guys finish last.” He said it of Mel Ott and the New York Giants, never dreaming that someday he would replace Ott as Giant manager and guide them to two World Series. That happened midway through the 1948 season.
It was a traumatic change for Durocher and the fans of the Dodgers and Giants, who hated each other with a passion. In New York he inherited a team that had set a major league record with 221 home runs and finished out of the money. He quickly changed that by trading for Alvin Dark and Eddie Stanky, the double-play combination that had led the Boston Braves to the 1948 pennant.
In 1951 the two were to play key roles in what is still regarded as the most dramatic comeback in baseball history. It was the year the Giants overhauled the Dodgers after being 13 1/2 games behind in August. It was the year of Bobby Thomson`s playoff homer, the ”shot heard `round the world.”
Three years later the Giants repeated as National League champions and dismantled the Cleveland Indians in the World Series in a four-game sweep. This was no mediocre club Durocher`s Giants demolished. The Indians had won a league record 111 games in a 154-game season. This was the World Series of Willie Mays` great catch and Dusty Rhodes` clutch pinch-hitting. It was the series that established Durocher`s reputation as the master at finding the hot hand and riding it to victory.
A year later, Durocher abruptly quit the Giants and joined NBC. He remained out of baseball for five years, returning in 1961 as a coach with the Los Angeles Dodgers. That lasted through the 1964 season. At the end of that year Durocher was ready to sign as manager of the St. Louis Cardinals.
But Johnny Keane brought the Cardinals from nowhere to a pennant in the final two weeks of the season and then jumped to the New York Yankees, whom he had vanquished in the World Series. Faced with a public relations fiasco, owner Gussie Busch withdrew his offer to Durocher and hired Red Schoendienst. In 1966, after an 11-year absence from managing, Durocher returned to manage the Cubs. Although he was to finish out his career with year and a half at Houston, Chicago was, for all practical purposes, his last hurrah.
Houston was an anticlimax. Durocher thought he saw something in the young Astros that wasn`t there, and in his one full season they finished with a lackluster 82-80 record. Claiming he couldn`t relate to the modern player, Durocher retired after the 1973 season.
Durocher underwent open-heart surgery in December of 1975, but felt fit enough the next month to sign a six-figure contract to manage the Taiheiyo Lions in the Japanese Pacific League. But he contracted hepatitis in March of that year and his contract was canceled.
Durocher was never again connected with baseball in any official capacity, and he spent his remaining years playing a lot of golf in Palm Springs, his brassy voice muted but never quite stilled.
In his 1975 autobiography, ”Nice Guys Finish Last,” Durocher summed up his life this way:
”Well, I`m a guy who has to do it my way,” he wrote. ”Whether you like it or not.”
Funeral arrangements were being made at Forest Lawn Mortuary in Los Angeles.
