LEO DUROCHER: INSIDE STORY OF LOCKMAN SHIFT
Durocher Gambled Job on Move that Keyed Flag
"This is the story of Leo Durocher's greatest gamble. It is the story of how the New York Giants won their 'miracle' pennant. It is the story of Whitey Lockman and how he was shifted from the outfield to first base over the heated protests of Leo's employer, Horace Stoneham. It is the story of how Durocher staked his job on Lockman and won.
In the official analysis of the Giants' incredible climb to the top, there are three milestones: Lockman's shift to the infield with Monte Irvin moving to the outfield, the promotion of Willie Mays and the conversion of Bobby Thomson to third base. But the first was Lockman's, on May 21 in St. Louis, and Durocher gambled his future on the shift.
The inside story started last winter when the Giants, seemingly more for publicity purposes than any other, announced that Lockman had been sent a first baseman's glove and was asked to accustom himself to its feel. It could have been little more than publicity then because Lockman was used only briefly at first in spring training.
Strange at a new position, Whitey showed little feeling for the base. Irvin, at least, had familiarity with the post, even though observers at the Giants' St. Petersburg training camp could not classify him as a big league first sacker defensively, much less a pennant-winning one.
After a few days, Durocher announced the experiment ended.
'I know now Lockman can play the base if I need him, maybe even better than Irvin can,' Durocher said cryptically. 'But we'll be a better team with Whitey out and Monte in.'
What Leo did not say at the time was that he had proposed the exchange of positions to Stoneham but Horace, after taking a few looks at Whitey, was against it despite Lockman's poor outfield throwing.
So the Giants went into the season and into the start of their eleven-game losing streak that all but killed them off at the beginning with two men playing positions at which they could not do their best.
Several times Leo attempted to reopen a conversation with Stoneham concerning Lockman and Irvin. Monte, Stoneham conceded, could play the outfield, but Lockman would be lost at first base.
'Lockman's no first baseman,' Horace said adamantly. 'Maybe he'll be able to adapt himself after a while, but with what's happened to us so far we can't take the chance. I'm against the shift.'
Durocher was aware of what the downward trend of the Giants' season was doing to Stoneham. Pennantless since 1937, the Giant president, who as a boy had reveled in the pennant-winning teams John McGraw had led for his father, had caught the contagious enthusiasm of the Giants' training camp last spring.
But as April turned into May and the Giants trailed Brooklyn by a seemingly irretrievable margin of games, particularly in the losing column, Stoneham's spirits fell with his club. Leo later was to be rehired for 1952, but at that point he could not possibly know what was ahead.
Leo wanted to keep his job, but even more, he wanted to win the 1951 pennant. The collapse of the Giants had to reflect on him. After so many years of being one of baseball's focal figures, he still could not point to more than one winning year as a manager. In making him the manager of the Giants, Stoneham had risked alienating many of his old customers, who had patiently waited for The Year. This was to be it, but the Giants stumbled in the race, seemingly beaten by their bad start and unable to untrack themselves.
At few times in his life was Durocher required to make a more vital decision. He enlisted the aid of Chub Feeney, the capable and likeable vice president of the Giants, who is Stoneham's nephew.
Chub agreed to be Leo's courier to the boss. He pleaded Durocher's case for shifting Lockman to first and Irvin to the outfield.
Stoneham listened and then he said: 'Okay, tell Leo he can make it. I don't think it will work but tell him okay. Tell him if it doesn't work out, it's his neck.'
That was Feeney's message to Leo as the Giants were in the West and Durocher said: 'That's fair enough. It'll work out.'
On May 21 in St. Louis, Lockman played his first game of the season at first base. On October 3 the Giants won the flag in the most dramatic finish baseball has ever experienced. It was a complete vindication for Durocher. The first to tell him so was Horace Stoneham."
-Milton Gross, New York Post (Baseball Digest, January 1952)
PRESSURE? GIANTS DIDN'T, WON'T FEEL IT, SAYS DUROCHER
"The New York Giants, history-making champions of the National League, did not have a clubhouse meeting for over two months as they careened in victory madness down the stretch of the 1951's hysterical pennant race.
Leo Durocher, the boss himself, disclosed that fact in Minneapolis on one of his last banquet stops before spring training.
I had asked Leo if he thought there would any pressure attendant upon the champs this season as they stepped out, realizing they were champions, that not too many hostiles were fond of them and that the boom was ready to be lowered.
'Pressure?' Leo laughed. 'Let me tell you something. We were way behind last year. Remember? Then we started to go. I said to myself, what the heck, if we get close I've got only two men who ever played on a recent championship before- Eddie Stanky and Alvin Dark (both with the Boston Braves in 1948). They'll steady the boys.
'So we're going along knocking people off and the boys are singing in the clubhouse every day before the game. I see they're relaxed and I leave'em alone. Pressure? Nobody felt any. They just seemed to realize they were going to catch Brooklyn and, if they caught the Dodgers, they'd beat'em. Not a man felt the pressure.
'It was a miracle, I tell you. I've been on four championship clubs myself. I know when the race got tight and we caught somebody or somebody caught us, we felt it. How you feel it then. You're all tight and your hands are wet and you perspire and you give it all you got. But this gang? They were singing before games, I tell you.
'So how in the world is 1952, and whatever it may contain, going to affect them, make them tight? No sir, not this gang!' "
-Halsey Hall, Minneapolis Tribune (Baseball Digest, April 1952)
LEO DUROCHER- AN ALL-YEAR MANAGER NOW?
"The scene was the press room in one of the big league parks. Around the table were some of the nation's best informed baseball writers. The discussion of the moment centered on Leo Durocher and his managerial ability.
'The trouble with Leo,' spoke up one scribe, 'is that he's too much of a get-ready-quick guy. He's great whipping a team into shape- there's nobody better. By Opening Day he usually has his men, especially his pitchers, in midseason form. But no player can stay at his midseason peak from April through September. He burns out. Check the records and you'll see what I mean. You'll find that a Durocher team always starts strong- and finishes weak.'
In the same press room late last summer a similar group of writers again was weighing Durocher's managing acumen.
'He's strictly a second-half manager,' was the thread of this discourse this time. 'He experiments so much at the beginning of the season he messes up the ball club and it takes him half a year to straighten it out. You'd think spring training would give him a line on his club for the rest of the year, but no, he changes every time a guy goes into a slump.'
Conflicting though they might seem, both observations apparently were correct. The Early Durocher liked to lay up for a fast start. That was the non-wavering pattern of his entire managerial career through 1949, with the sole exception of his freshman year at the helm in 1939. Starting in 1940 and continuing through 1949 (you'll recall he sat out 1947 under suspension from Commissioner Chandler and divided 1948 between Brooklyn and the New York Giants), every one of his eight seasons showed a pronounced margin in favor of the first half.
His teams (Brooklyn, 1940-46; the New York Giants, 1949) usually played from forty and seventy-eight percentage points better ball during the first half of the season than they did from mid-July on. And one year, 1940, the difference was as much as 123 points! Measured by another yardstick, Durocher's 1940-49 teams averaged four more victories during the first half of the season than in the second half and once (1940) won ten more games before the halfway mark than they did afterwards.
Even in 1941, the first of his two championship seasons, Durocher was hardly an all-year manager. He had his Dodgers playing .675 ball in the first half of the season, but they tailed off to .623 in the second half- and .623 in itself wouldn't have been sufficient to win the National League pennant that year. If they had played all year the way they did in the second half, the Dodgers, instead of winning the flag, would have finished eleven percentage points behind the St. Louis Cardinals, who wound up with a .634 percentage.
It was in 1950 that Durocher suddenly reversed his field. When the Giants lost a double-header to the St. Louis Cardinals July 19, they were twelve games below .500 and twelve and a half games behind the Cards. Breaking the season exactly down the middle, after the seventy-seventh game as was done for all other seasons, the Giants had a 35-42-.455 first half and a 51-26-.662 second half. Breaking the season where Durocher and his men did, between the night of July 19 and the morning of July 20, they finished up with 50-20-.714 as against a 36-48-.429 start.
This, then, is the blueprint that carried over from 1950 for last year's whamdinger. Although the Giants didn't start cutting down Brooklyn's New York-to-California lead of thirteen and one-half games until well into August last year, the season can be bisected as were the others at the seventy-seven game point with noticeable results. The Giants played 42-35-.545 ball in the first half of the season, 56-24-.700 ball the second half.
Now, in 1952, Durocher has reverted to the Old Formula- for the break-from-the tape, at least. There certainly was nothing experimental about the Giants' lineups the first part of this season. He started with a pat batting order and, except for a mild revision of dropping Al Dark down a few notches in late April, kept playing that lineup day after day, injury substitutions excepted, of course.
What about the second half of 1952? Did Durocher bring along his team too fast this spring, allegedly his big shortcoming in his earlier years of managing, or did he pace them well and is thus destined to get a good second half out of it as he did the last two seasons?
If he does combine two good halves, Durocher then and only then will reach managerial maturity as an all-year manager."
-Fred Fichonne (Baseball Digest, July 1952)
HOW A 'BRAIN' DOES IT
HERE'S DUROCHER'S "INSIDE" ON THOMSON
"Last season the New York Giants succeeded in wiping out what appeared to be in August an ineradicable deficit. They won the National League pennant and Leo Durocher was hailed as a miracle manager. This year the Giants started off on a brisk pace. You heard from a rival pilot like Eddie Sawyer of the Philadelphia Phillies that from the start of the current campaign, he considered the Giants stronger than the Brooklyn Dodgers. So if Durocher finishes in front again he will be doing 'the expected.'
'So I was a genius last year,' Durocher was telling a small group of friends the other night. 'Well, let me tell you exactly what makes a genius. We were in St. Louis in midseason and the ball club was going bad. The batters weren't hitting and the pitching was erratic. We had lost two games to the St. Louis Cardinals and I was desperate.
'Only three of us were left in the clubhouse, Larry Jansen, myself and the trainer. I got to thinking out loud and I remarked that I'd trade any name on the club, especially Bobby Thomson. Everybody had been telling me that Thomson was great in 1947. Well, I was out of baseball in 1947 and I hadn't seen him. This was 1951 and up to now I had never seen him do anything great. How long was I supposed to wait for him to come back with another season like 1947?
'I turned to Jansen. 'Say, you were with the Giants in 1947. Can you tell me what made Thomson so good in 1947 and so bad now?' Larry acted as if he had been waiting for me to ask the question.
' 'Sure, I can tell what's wrong with Thomson,' he said. 'He stands differently. I wouldn't think of saying anything to Bobby because he might think it's none of my business, but I can tell you.'
'I jumped out of my chair and asked Jansen to show me the difference. We spread a piece of newspaper on the floor and used that for home plate. I handed Jansen a bat and told him to stand over the newspaper and demonstrate Thompson's batting stance- then and now. Bobby was standing up straight. In fact, he was almost leaning back. But in 1947, according to Jansen, he used to lean forward in a crouch that made him look like a right-handed Stan Musial.
'That was all I wanted to know. In the ball park the next day, the first time Thomson stepped up to the plate in batting practice, I asked him how he used to hit. He leaned forward. 'Why don't you hit that way now?' It seems that some one had been advising him to stand up straight. His friend was a fireman, or some one equally inexperienced from a baseball standpoint. 'Well, you try hitting from that crouch,' I told him.
'Henry Thompson had been playing third base for us and he had failed to get a hit in something like thirty times at bat. I had to get him out of the lineup, but I also had to have someone to take his place. Almost any man would have been an improvement at the plate, but not everyone would have been able to play third base.
'So I turned to Thomson again. He had played some in the infield and I asked him if he would care to try it again. He didn't mind. He had played third base in Jersey City before the Giants called him up to the National League. On the same day he was going to change positions and change his batting stance. What could he or the entire ball club lose? Things were pretty bad.
'I guess you all know what happened, although you may not remember that particular game. Thomson hit a home run that tied it up in the late innings and he hit another one to win it for us in extra innings. We went on from there and I was a genius.
'Go back to 1950 and consider the case of Sal Maglie. Our troubles in the spring were almost as numerous as they were the following year, although we didn't have an eleven-game losing streak. I used up all the pitching I had in a double-header during a Western trip and I was scraping the bottom of the barrel. Maglie hadn't started a ball game, but I had no one else left, so I told him to go out there and see what he could do. He won the ball game. What would you do if you were the manager? You'd pitch him again. That's what I did. I had discovered that Maglie was a winning pitcher and I was a genius.'
The 1952 decision on Mr. Durocher as a genius is being held in abeyance pending the printing of the National League standings late in September."
-Hy Goldberg, condensed from the Newark News (Baseball Digest, July 1952)
"On August 13, 1951, Durocher's Dandies were 13 1/2 games out of first, yet they won the pennant in an exciting finish, beating the Dodgers in the third game of a playoff. The stretch drive included a 16-game winning streak. The Giants' skipper was hailed as the manager of the year."
-1952 Bowman No. 146
"Leo's long and exciting career as a player and manager reached its peak as 'Lippy' led his Giants to a never-to-be-forgotten pennant triumph over the Dodgers in 1951.
In 12 seasons as a manager he has won two pennants, finished second three times and third four times. In 1941 he led the Dodgers to their first pennant in 21 years.
He was a shortstop on the Yankees of the Ruthian era and was a famed member of the Cardinal Gas House Gang before coming to the Dodgers as a player-manager."
-1952 Topps No. 315
"Leo managed the Giants into the most exciting pennant won in the National League in 1951. One of the most knowledgeable of baseball men, Leo has been a manager since 1939.
Before coming to the Giants in 1948, Leo was the Brooklyn leader. As a player, he appeared in the majors with the Yankees, Reds, Cardinals and Dodgers.
A colorful personality."
-1952 Red Man No. NL-1
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