Two articles on a Cubs website,   https://www.bleedcubbieblue.com/2016/12/30/14123992/10-best-managers-cubs-history, ranking the ten best (and the five worst: https://www.bleedcubbieblue.com/2017/1/2/14144986/5-worst-managers-chicago-cubs-history ) Cubs’ managers came to my attention by coincidence a day or so after I’d railing about what a horror Leo Durocher had been as a Cubs’ manager.  Not very surprisingly, Durocher appeared on the list of best Cubs’ managers—unsurprising because I am a very biased viewer of the Cubs in general, and also because of Durocher’s general high reputation as a field general.

Even on the Cubs website, though, Durocher appeared in the final slot of the Cubbies’ ten best managers, suggesting that maybe even Cubs’ fans don’t think that much of him, considering the woefulness of the team over the past century or so. The website acknowledges that he didn’t produce squat for the Cubs—no pennants, no division titles, no nothing. His credit is all for turning a cellar-dweller into a contender.

The counter-argument, traditionally, is not why the Cubs dwelt in the cellar for so long as much as it is "How did a club with four Hall-of-Famers fail to at least contend for much of the 1960s?" Santo, Williams, Banks, and Jenkins (and plenty of other strong players) should have been the core of at least a .500 club, right? I mean, how does a team with that level of stardom not win half its games for much of a decade? Seems to me management has to take some of the hit for that failure.

Now, I dislike the Cubs of that era because I rooted—very hard!—against them. As a young Mets’ fan, I detested those Cubs so deeply that when the son of one of my closest friends became the President of the Cubs, and my friend invited me to shift my rooting loyalty to the Cubbies for the sake of his son (whom I‘ve been fond of ever since he was an astute four-year-old playing on the floor of his parents’ apartment in Brookline), with all the perks that shift in loyalty entails, I. COULD. NOT. DO. IT.

Couldn’t mouth the words "Go, Cubs!" (except straight to Hell), couldn’t accept tickets to Citifield (walking distance from my older home) or Marlins Park (an hour’s drive from my newer home) to visitors’ box seats, couldn’t partake of the pleasure when the Cubs won their first pennant since Man disobediently ate a piece of fruit that God wanted thrown in the garbage. Most of all, I think, I couldn’t help but bruise my friend’s feelings in turning down his gracious invitation.

I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t say a nice word about the Cubs. I even short-changed them one HoFer in the paragraph above where I said they had four HoFers. They had five. (And just for those who want to argue that the woeful Cubbies of the early 1960s had "only" Banks, Williams, and Santo, since Ferguson Jenkins hadn’t yet arrived, I’ll point out that they did have Dick Ellsworth throughout the early 1960s, a first-rate pitcher whom Jenkins replaced in the rotation. They were teammates on the 1966 Cubs.) It still rankles my ankles that Leo Durocher was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1994. (At least the Veterans’ Committee  showed the sense to wait until he, like Ron Santo, had died before electing him, a small—you might say "petty"-- satisfaction on my part.) The rankling is worsened by the HoF’s failure to elect Durocher’s counterpart, the manager of the 1969 World Champions, Gil Hodges.

I’ve written, probably too much, about Hodges’ HoF candidacy, so I’ll spare you this time around, except to note that this election/rejection of Durocher/Hodges makes it a little more painful for me: if Durocher hadn’t been elected, I could be a bit more peaceful about Hodges being out.

Perhaps the strongest point in the Durocher/Hodges argument is the contrast in temperaments. The range of how Hodges’ former players speak of him, from the greatest respect (Tom Seaver) to a kind of grudging acknowledgment (Nolan Ryan), is overwhelmingly positive.  Durocher’s former players on the other hand are, let us say, more moderate in their praise for him. (Except Santo, which is another reason I’m not a fan of his. That, and the heel-clicking in 1969, which I still find unsporting and obnoxious. From his Wikipedia entry: 

Durocher asked him to keep clicking his heels whenever the Cubs won at Wrigley Field  to motivate the team. Santo continued this after every home win. The stunt antagonized opponents and served to make the team a target for payback in the final weeks of the season.... His final "click" was performed on September 2, the last Cub home victory while still in first place. During and after the epic collapse, Santo never again performed the heel click, as critics decried the routine for its arrogance and overconfidence, which many believe was at the root of the late fade.

Durocher was an abrasive asshole, whose character alone, in my view, should disqualify him from the Hall of Fame. Mais qu'est ce que je sais? (Durocher might have known how to ask  « But what do I know ? » in French. Like Mark Belanger and Rabbit Maranville, he was a skinny, light-hitting defensive wizard at shortstop from western Massachusetts of French heritage. Du-roe-SHAY, Buh-lange-ZHAY, and Mah-ron-VEE.)

One of the earliest additions to my unwieldy collection of baseball books was the hardcover edition of Durocher’s The Dodgers and Me. (I defaced it at the age of 11 with a sticker of Don Drysdale, but otherwise this volume has held up very well over the past 70 years. It’s copyrighted 1948, and is not "as told to" or "co-authored by" anyone, though it’s so lively, it’s almost impossible to believe that Leo’s literary gifts are on this level of readability. If they are, maybe he chose the wrong line of work.)  He managed "my" team (in a hereditary sense, my dad being a Bums fan) throughout the 1940s, right up until his suspension for gambling, hanging around with gangsters, and generally being a bully and a thug-wannabee in 1947.  He was long gone from the Brooklyn scene by the time I arrived on it, but he rejoined the early 1960s team in L.A. as a coach, which is where I first experienced his methods. I liked those Dodgers (hence the Drysdale sticker) but not Leo so much.

Where I first truly learned about Leo’s Dodger-coaching days, though, was in Jim Bouton’s excellent anthology I Managed Good, But Boy Did They Play Bad, easily the best historical look at managers until The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers from 1870 to Today came out in 1997. I was able to date Bouton’s book, or at least his writing of the Introduction, very precisely to September 8, 1973 or shortly thereafter, since his Introduction first refers to "Detroit’s Billy Martin" in the present tense but then at the tail end of that paragraph notes that "Maybe Martin will listen to Rangers’ boss, Bob Short, more than he did to …Detroit’s Jim Caldwell," anticipating Martin’s future problems listening to a future Boss.  Martin managed the Rangers’ last 23 games of the 1973 season, having been fired by the Tigers a few days earlier.

Bouton’s anthology doesn’t try to give a synoptic or philosophical approach to managers, as Guide to Managers did so well, but it does give surprising insight into systematic differences, styles, pitfalls, approaches, strategies, tactics, and tictacs of various schools of managers. The book’s approach is to present classic contemporary profiles of managers dating back to John McGraw, typically well-written profiles, but the best parts of the book are those written by Bouton himself—aside from the Introduction, Bouton appends prefatory notes to each account, and sometimes epilogues, plus he writes a few articles himself, which is above-and-beyond. The publishers mostly wanted him for his then-hot name on the cover, but Bouton did much more than lend his name—his writings are among the most thoughtful in the book, and made me consider managers in a whole different light. (Of Bouton’s name, incidentally, as long as we’re looking into French nomenclature, it means "pimple" in French, a fact that I’m mildly surprised didn’t arise in the early hostile reviews of Ball Four: "he is a gigantic pimple on baseball’s heretofore unblemished face," and so on. And if you Google "enorme bouton youtube" you will see one of the grossest youtube videos of all time. Fair warning.)

Occasionally, Bouton presents two contrasting views of certain managers, which is what he did with Leo Durocher: one by Roger Kahn, which is fairly gentle, and one by William Barry Furlong, which is fairly savage. Even Kahn’s "sweetly nostalgic" article, as Bouton puts it, reveals him to be vain, cruel, self-important and deeply flawed, but as Bouton memorably observes, both writers use

the same statistic to make opposite points. Kahn says Durocher "is one of the very best of all baseball managers. In 16 seasons…Durocher teams have won three pennants, one World Series and had an overall percentage of .560." Meanwhile Furlong says Durocher "began managing in the big leagues over 30 years ago and he did win one world championship. But only one."

That stuck with me, the observation that you could take a stat, the number of Durocher’s championships, and use it both for and against his case for excellence.

So much of what I know about Durocher derives from Bouton’s book, I realized upon re-reading it. I tell (and tell) several anecdotes I first came across in Kahn’s profile and in Furlong’s: "I tip more than that in the shithouse,"  "But mother don’t make it to third," "When they hatchet me they ain’t getting no maiden," "Some damned famous broads say okay quick," "If you’re scared, go home," and  "This is not an eighth-place ballclub" are the nut quotes (full anecdotes upon request) but the big picture is that I got a real feel for his toxic personality from these brief profiles that I was able to augment over the years with readings of Nice Guys Finish Last (his autobiography, written with Ed Linn), the Guide to Managers, some of Rob Neyer’s Big Books and the 1948 book with the Drysdale sticker on it.  A fan of Leo’s may come away from all this reading with a positive impression, but mine is that the guy was very close to being a dangerous sociopath, alienating everyone he ever knew, and many he never met. How to Make Enemies and Alienate Everybody would be a good alternative title, or sub-title, to Nice Guys Finish Last.

Maybe that’s what it takes to be a successful big-league manager –the willingness to alienate people towards the single-minded aim of winning baseball games (though Hodges had a lot more friends, had a much better playing career, and also had the one world’s championship in a much shorter managerial career.)  Personally, I’d suppose Cubs fans would be furious with him, more so than Red Sox fans, for example, are pissed at Don Zimmer or Grady Little or Bobby Valentine. He’s responsible for some of their sadder memories, the late 1960s Cubs having such a formidable lineup and nothing to show for it. But since they’re some of my gladder memories, I should be kinder to Leo—we couldna done 1969 without ya.

This article is reminding me of something I should be doing instead of writing it—namely, packing up my baseball library. (I’m briefly the owner of both my old house and my new one, paying at least one mortgage on a place I’m a thousand miles away from at any point in time.)  It’s by no means the biggest baseball library on this website, I’m quite sure.  But as someone once wrote,  "…'tis not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church-door, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve."  If anyone is looking for something that’s out-of-print, however, drop me a comment here or a note to stevengoldleaf@gmail, and if I’ve got it, I’ll be glad to mail it to you.  (Some, like my 1981 Abstract—in fact ALL my Abstracts—I’ll be taking with me.  But I’ll be glad to divest myself of several hundred others. And HOLY COW!—I just noticed for the first time that my Dodgers and Me is potentially a valuable keeper: it’s inscribed "To Lawrence Sincerely Leo Durocher" in genuine ink. I didn’t even know my Uncle Larry had been a baseball fan. Leo had a very elegant handwriting, btw.) Anyways, I’ve got too many books to ship cheerfully to Florida, and I’m trying to divest ruthlessly—I’ll probably have to donate a few thousand general-interest books to a library in the next few months, so do LMK if you’re looking for something specific (baseball, fiction, litcrit, poetry, mysteries, history) --I’ll see if I’ve got it. I’d list them all, but that would be much more work than packing them into boxes and lugging them to a library.

It’s a shame— I bought a lot of these books and have never cracked  them open, but my rule of thumb will be: if you ain’t read it yet, you’re not all that interested in reading it. And some of them aren’t making the trip south because I’ve read them too much: the paperback Bouton anthology, for example, is falling apart, cover off, first few pages barely hanging on, spine broken. Most of them are in better shape than that, which is both more than I can say for myself and nothing to brag about.