The Little Shepherd of Coogan's Bluff

With the Dodgers, Durocher had been essentially a "game" manager. For all his success and notoriety, his seasoned cast didn't need "direction" except during the game itself. Talent procurement and policy decision making were entirely in the hands of MacPhail and Rickey. Leo's job was to win games with the people they provided.

The situation with the Giants was different. The owner was Horace Stoneham, Charles's son, who had grown up in the Polo Grounds, around McGraw, from childhood. He had succeeded his father as president in 1936, when Terry was in the middle of winning three pennants in five years, and began only then to build a farm system his father had disdained.

Stoneham was only a few years older than Ott, whom he knew from the day Ottie had arrived in New York, and had made him manager when Terry stepped out in 1941. But the war held back the growth of the farm system, and the backbone of the 1930 greatness -- Terry, Ott, Carl Hubbell, Hal Schumacher -- was irreplaceable. Under Ott, the postwar Giants weren't doing well, sinking into a fatally distant third behind the Yankees and Dodgers in New York's pecking order. Ott and Stoneham, naturally enough from their experience, thought you could win with power, and collected a team that hit a record 221 homers in 1947 -- yet finished fourth. Ott, the nice guy, wasn't finishing last but wasn't the one to stir things up, either.

In getting Durocher, Stoneham was admitting to himself, as well as to the rest of the world, that a different approach was needed.

And Leo, for the first time, was in a position to tell the owner -- a receptive owner -- that be wanted to be able to play winning baseball the way he saw it: the McGraw way, ironically enough, from which the home run oriented Ott had strayed. At Leo's instigation, the Giants were torn apart in 1948 and 1949 and put back together along entirely different lines. Now Leo was a builder and a commander beyond individual ball games, a managerial presence not overshadowed by a larger-than-life owner.

That's why, ultimately, the managerial stream that flowed from his Giant teams was so strongly marked by Durocherism, while those who played for him in Brooklyn were and remained Rickey system products.

What Durocher found in the Polo Grounds, in the middle of 1948, was a team of big bats, no speed, and shaky pitching. What he wanted was pitching, speed, and defense. Discarded were John Mize, Walker Cooper, Sid Gordon, and Willard Marshall, who had accounted for 135 of those 221 homers. Acquired were shortstop Alvin Dark and second baseman Eddie Stanky, who had anchored the pennant-winning Braves in 1948, when Dark was rookie of the year. (Stanky had been Leo's second baseman in Brooklyn, dealt off after 1947 to let Jackie Robinson move back to second from first.) Also added were Sal Maglie, a pitcher who had been exiled for a while for playing in the Mexican League, and Monte Irvin and Henry Thompson from the Negro leagues. On hand, products of the Giants' own system, were outfielders Bobby Thomson and Whitey Lockman, catcher Wes Westrum, and some pitchers. The one quality pitcher available all along, since 1946, was Larry Jansen. Another turned out to be Jim Hearn, abandoned after years of trial by the Cardinal chain.

Here was a team that could hit and run and stay alive in low-scoring games. To outwit the opposition, you have to be close, inning after inning, so that when you do get an edge it decides the game. Only then could Leo's intuition and alertness pay off. By 1950, closing strong, his Giants placed third, only 5 games out as the Phillies beat back the Dodgers on the final day.

And 1951 brought him Willie Mays.

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