As 1954 began, Mays was back, and a new young pitching leader had been acquired, Johnny Antonelli, from Milwaukee for -- hold your breath -- Bobby Thomson. A new young, gutsy second baseman was on hand, Davey Williams, and Dark was now the field captain. This team couldn't match the strength "on paper" of the two-time champion Dodgers or the increasingly powerful Milwaukee Braves, but it could have a chance.

In spring training, there was a flare-up between Stoneham and Durocher. The boss was ready to fire him. The players, under Dark's leadership, asked him to relent: With Leo we can win, was their message; without him, we can't. Stoneham listened. Leo promised to behave (and kept the promise). All was sweetness and light as the Giants did win, beating back the stronger teams and playing textbook "counterclockwise" baseball -- hit to right, move the runners, manufacture one run at a time, get tight pitching, and make the plays in the field. With Willie in center, of course, they not only made all the possible plays but a lot of impossible ones as well.

After every victory, Leo would lean back expansively in that center field clubhouse office once occupied by McGraw, grin at the writers, and say, "Don't praise me, praise the players. They're doing it all." His in-game decisions were never sharper, and he made two larger strategic moves that all his budding managers took to heart.

He had, since 1952, a rookie pitcher with an incredible knuckle ball, named Hoyt Wilhelm, who could not only control it but throw it with greater velocity than most. A knuckleballer's problem is that catchers can't hold it, so it backfires with men on base, especially in tight situations when a steal must be prevented. But Westrum could catch Wilhelm's, and Leo made him a relief specialist. If they couldn't hit it, you didn't have to worry about the runner. And Wilhelm had the right cool temperament to work in a crisis.

But Leo also had an old, hard-bitten, power pitcher named Marv Grissom, who had never set the world on fire, but who also had the perfect reliever's mental toughness. So Leo used him too. Sometimes the situation was better for one than the other. Sometimes both helped win the same game. The two-reliever system was fully exploited for the first time by Leo that year.

The other move was remarkable in a different way, and possible only because Mays was the superman he was. By the end of July, Willie had 36 homers and the papers were full of those "He's ahead of Babe Ruth's 1927 pace" stories. But the team hit a losing spell, and the lead was down to half a game by mid-August.

Leo told Willie to stop hitting homers. Go to right field, he said, and get on more often. You can run when you're on base. You can spread the defense. We've got other hitters who can drive you in. We'll score more runs, when we need them, with you on base more often than we will with your homers. Counterclockwise baseball.

Willie said he'd try. He did. He hit only 5 more homers the rest of the year -- 2 after the pennant was clinched, and 1 an inside-the-park job -- but he raised his average from - 316 to .345 and won the league batting title.

Here we have the whole story of brilliant managing in a nutshell: You have to figure out the thing that will win for you -- and you have to have the player who can do it. And you have to recognize that you have him, and sell him on the idea.

The Giants swept the World Series from the 111-victory Indians. For the first time in more than twenty years, since 1933, the Giants were number one in the three-team New York market.

That was Leo's peak year. In 1955, the breach with Stoneham didn't heal, the Dodgers ran away with the pennant by a huge margin, the Giants finished a distant third, and Durocher was fired. Among other things, Stoneham already knew that his position in New York was untenable and was thinking of moving the team to Minneapolis, just as Walter O'Malley, in Brooklyn, was flirting with Los Angeles and arranging to play some home games in Jersey City. Leo's identity as a celebrity was simply becoming irrelevant, his talents could not help a deteriorating team, and there was no reason to put up with his ego.

Here's an example of just how egotistical Leo really was. One of the big theatrical events of that time was the play Inherit the Wind, in which Paul Muni played Clarence Darrow as defense counsel in the famous Scopes trial in Tennessee against the teaching of evolution in the schools. The opposing lawyer is William Jennings Bryan, who quotes from the Bible. In one scene, Darrow picks up the Bible to quote from it himself, and says to Bryan and the courtroom in general:

"All right, now we'll play in your ballpark."

Leo attended the play one night in a house seat, right in the middle of the third row. "Muni looked right at me when he said it," he told me afterward, "so they must have told him I was in the theater. I think they wrote in that line that night just for me."

He really meant it.

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