Durocher was born in 1905, in West Springfield, Massachusetts, and grew up poor. He was small (five feet nine inches), fairly quick and strong for a ballplayer, but never much of a hitter. His brain, however, made him an outstanding fielder by enabling him to excel at proper positioning and fast release as a shortstop.

In 1925, when he was turning twenty, Durocher played a full season at Hartford, hitting .220. (That year, Weiss was running the New Haven team and Stengel was at Worcester, in the same Eastern League.) The Yankees liked his fielding well enough to buy his contract, and sent him to Atlanta in 1926 and St. Paul, at the Triple-A level, in 1927. His aggressive approach to fielding is shown by the fact that he led the league in putouts, assists, and errors. He also hit .253, and the Yankees promoted him to the big club for 1928.

He was not a hit. The nonstop talking of this brash rookie promptly earned him the name of Lippy Leo, supposedly pinned on him by Will Wedge of the New York Sun. The proud and self-assured members of Murderers Row -- Ruth, Gehrig, Lazzeri, Meusel -- were annoyed, not intimidated, by a loudmouth busher. What's more, he was filling in for two of the most popular members of the team, Lazzeri at second, Mark Koenig at short. A shoulder injury kept Lazzeri out for almost a third of the season, so Leo played mostly second, getting into 102 games. He hit .270, which was less than any of the eight regulars and the other utility infielder, Gene Robertson. In the World Series sweep, he got into every game as a late-inning replacement.

In 1929, he started to win the shortstop job from Koenig, who was slowing down. But many of the older Yankees openly despised him, and an ugly story circulated about him stealing something out of Babe Ruth's locker. That's the year Huggins died, the A's dethroned the Yankees, and Barrow bought a hotshot shortstop named Lyn Lary from the Pacific Coast for big bucks. At the end of the season, the Yankees waived Leo and Cincinnati claimed him.

He was the shortstop for a seventh-place Cincinnati team in 1930 and started a long association with Charley Dressen, no longer the regular third baseman. In 1932, the Reds under manager Dan Howley finished last. In 1933, they did it again. But Leo had escaped less than a month into that season: On May 7, he was part of a three-for-three trade that brought Paul Derringer from St. Louis to Cincinnati.

Rickey, as always, knew the abilities of every player everywhere. The Cardinals had won pennants in 1930 and 1931 with Charley Gelbert, an outstanding shortstop. But after the 1931 season, a hunting accident ruined Gelbert's career (nearly destroying one of his legs) and Rickey needed an immediate replacement. He got Durocher to play between Frisch at second and Pepper Martin at third, and never mind the hitting; the rest of the team would take care of that.

In midseason, Frisch replaced Gabby Street as manager, and the Cardinals came in fifth but only 9 1/2 games behind Bill Terry's champion Giants. They had pitching, led by Dizzy Dean, power, led by Joe Medwick, and balance.

They also had a collection of uninhibited nuts, led by Dean and Martin, and not much reined in by Frisch. Here Leo's personality fit perfectly. What became known as the Gas House Gang stormed to a World Series triumph in 1934, and Leo was an integral part of it. Frisch's managerial tactics were pure McGraw, and Durocher absorbed them into what he had already learned. They lost close pennant races in 1935 and 1936, as Rickey's farm system kept turning up new stars (like Johnny Mize and Terry Moore), and in 1937 slipped to fourth (partly because Dean got hurt in the All-Star Game). More changes were on the way.

MacPhail had just taken over Brooklyn and needed a colorful player -- among other things -- to revive the franchise. The manager he had inherited, Burleigh Grimes, had left the Cardinals before Durocher got there, but liked his play as an opponent. MacPhail, of course, had Rickey's ear. The Dodgers sent four players to St. Louis for Leo, but what Rickey knew was that he had a young shortstop down in Rochester who wasn't quite ready but would be far better than Durocher in every way, a tall skinny guy named Marty Marion.

So Durocher came to Brooklyn in 1938, and it was a marriage made in heaven, or maybe someplace else.

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