Leo Durocher

Leo Ernest Durocher grew up in West Springfield, Massachusetts, the youngest of four sons born to French-Canadian immigrants who spoke French at home, learned to play baseball from his neighbor Rabbit Maranville, and spent the next 50 years in professional baseball making enemies, winning pennants, and producing the most famous sentence in the history of the sport. Durocher managed 2,008 games to victory across 24 seasons with the Dodgers, Giants, Cubs, and Astros, won the 1954 World Series, stood in the third-base coaching box when Bobby Thomson hit the Shot Heard Round the World in 1951, defended Jackie Robinson's right to play with a midnight speech that silenced a clubhouse petition, and was suspended for the entire 1947 season by a commissioner who never explained why. Babe Ruth called him "The All-American Out" for his batting and accused him of stealing his watch. What Durocher lacked at the plate he compensated for everywhere else. The Veterans Committee elected him posthumously to the Hall of Fame in 1994, three years after he died.

West Springfield

Durocher was born on July 27, 1905. His father George worked on the railroad, his mother Clarinda cleaned hotel rooms, and the boy who would become the loudest man in baseball was suspended from Springfield Technical High School for fighting with a teacher. He played shortstop for 17 major league seasons, batted .247, captained the 1934 Gas House Gang Cardinals that won the World Series, made three All-Star teams, and was good enough with a glove that the Dodgers hired him as player-manager after the 1938 season. On June 15, 1938, Durocher made the final out of Johnny Vander Meer's second consecutive no-hitter, a feat that remains unique in baseball.

Branch Rickey brought Durocher into the Dodgers' front-office orbit, and in 1941 Durocher managed Brooklyn to its first pennant in 21 years with a 100-54 record. During spring training in Panama in 1947, when Southern players circulated a petition refusing to play alongside Robinson, Durocher called a midnight team meeting and delivered the speech that killed the petition. "I do not care if the guy is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a zebra," Durocher said. "I'm the manager, and I say he plays." Weeks later, on April 9, Commissioner Happy Chandler suspended Durocher for the entire 1947 season, citing "an accumulation of unpleasant incidents" tied to gambling associations and personal conduct. Chandler never released a transcript. Durocher said, "To this day, if you ask me why I was suspended, I could not tell you."

Nice Guys

On July 6, 1946, before a game against the seventh-place Giants and their mild-mannered manager Mel Ott, Durocher was talking to a group of reporters and gestured toward the opposing dugout. "The nice guys are all over there, in seventh place," he said. A newspaper headline rendered it as "'Nice Guys' Wind Up in Last Place," and over the years the phrase compressed into five words that outlasted everything else Durocher accomplished. "Nice guys finish last." He spent the rest of his life explaining that he was talking about combativeness, not morality, and nobody listened.

In July 1948, while the Dodgers were treading water, Rickey brokered Durocher's move to the rival Giants, a midseason defection that shocked both boroughs. The payoff came in 1951, when the Giants trailed the Dodgers by 13 and a half games on August 11, won 37 of their final 44, and forced a three-game playoff. On October 3, Durocher stood in the coaching box when Thomson's three-run homer off Ralph Branca won the pennant. In 1954, the Giants swept the heavily favored Cleveland Indians (who won 111 regular season games) in the World Series for Durocher's only championship as a manager.

Palm Springs

Durocher managed the Cubs from 1966 through 1972, ending the franchise's rotating "College of Coaches" experiment on his first day. "I'm the manager," he said at his introductory press conference. "I'm not a head coach. I'm the manager." The Cubs held first place for 105 days in 1969 and carried a nine-game lead into mid-August before losing 25 of their last 40 and finishing eight games behind the Miracle Mets, one of baseball's most painful collapses. Durocher finished with the Astros in 1973, retired to Palm Springs, and played golf until his health gave out.

Durocher married four times (his third wife was actress Laraine Day, and Willie Mays babysat their adopted son Chris during Giants road trips), ran a card school in the clubhouse, kept company with George Raft and Bugsy Siegel, and was ejected from games 100 times across his career, second only to John McGraw at the time. He died on October 7, 1991, in Palm Springs, at 86. Laraine Day accepted his Hall of Fame plaque three years later. "As long as I've got a chance to beat you," Durocher once said, "I'm going to take it."