McGraw and Durocher were fundamentally different, however, in significant ways. McGraw's driving impulse was for dominance: He wanted dictatorial control of everything and everyone he dealt with. Leo didn't care about control, he just wanted the result favorable to Leo. McGraw wanted it done his way; Leo didn't care how you did it, as long as it got done. McGraw had social aspirations and yearned to be a club owner, i.e., a successful capitalist. Leo didn't have either ambition, the first having become fairly irrelevant in the culture of his time, and the second so unquestionably out of reach that he just didn't bother about it.

They also had a different effect on the men they influenced. McGraw generated tremendous loyalty and affection among many, especially in the first half of his career, and was venerated by his disciples (among the writers as well as baseball people). He was also hated passionately by many others, of course. Leo also wound up being hated by a lot of people, but never venerated. His disciples admired his ability, imitated his methods, appreciated his help, learned lessons from him, and understood what made him exceptional; but no one ever spoke of him in awesome terms, or seemed to "love" him. They could be deeply grateful, like Willie Mays, and feel perpetually indebted to his guidance and teaching, like Alvin Dark and Bill Rigney; but few felt any sense of personal loss when he moved on to another venue, or would talk of him affectionately until he and they were into their sixties and seventies.

Nor did Leo give any indication that he sought, wanted, or missed that sort of emotion from them. He wanted to be respected and feared, acknowledged for his "brilliance," treated as he wished, aided toward his purposes (which might well coincide with yours in certain circumstances), but if you didn't like him -- well, that was your problem, not his.

Finally, McGraw was an inventor, a tinkerer, and a worker for perfection in technique. Leo didn't invent anything and left mechanical work to others. He mastered, completely and with insight, the McGraw principles of play and tactics, and applied them with hunch and instinct, both grounded in solid baseball reasoning. But he was applying -- or reversing for his own reasons -- what had become standard knowledge, not adding to it.

And that's the part where we see Leo as the first hybrid of McGraw and Rickey.

In his approach to playing the game, he was pure McGraw, filtered through Frisch and his own observations.

In preparation and talent procurement, he was content to be the recipient of the Rickey system in which he worked, accepting the product of its methods as well as its personnel.

All his managerial descendants would contain both strains.

» NEXT