The Giants Get Happy

If the San Francisco Giants manage to win the National League pennant this year (not a remote possibility), it will be due for the most part to the presence of a teetotaling, nonsmoking, non-cursing, tithe-paying churchgoer. It will be due to a lesser degree to a tobacco-chewing gentleman with a penchant for four-letter words, earthy humor and locker-room high jinks.

The teetotaler is Alvin Ralph Dark, the Giants rookie manager; the other man is Harvey Kuenn, a spray-hitting third-baseman-outfielder who usually hits over .300. So far this season he has not done so, but he has helped the Giants in other, perhaps more important, ways.

To wit: the other day in the Giant dressing room at Candlestick Park Kuenn sat hunched peacefully on a stool in his dressing stall, his cheek, with its customary load of chewing tobacco, plumped out like a chipmunk's. He was carrying on a desultory conversation with a sportswriter, but his attention was on Willie Mays's dressing stall next to his. When Mays finally came in, Kuenn watched him closely out of the corner of his eye. Willie looked in surprise at an elaborately wrapped candy box on his stool. A note on the top read "From an admirer." Willie unwrapped the box, unfolded the paper covering the contents and suddenly broke up in happy, boisterous laughter.

"Who done 'at?" he hollered. "Looky here! Who done 'at?"

He held out the box as most of the Giant players gathered (except for Kuenn, who was laughing helplessly around the chew of tobacco). The box contained neatly wrapped spheres of horse manure, and the Giant players whooped with glee. "You done it," Willie said to Kuenn. "Ah know you done it." Then he chuckled and began dressing. Most ballplayers find this kind of humor irresistible, and Harvey Kuenn is a tireless purveyor of it. His great contribution to the Giants has been to entertain them, and thus relax them, and thus, finally, to help unite them.

For several reasons Kuenn's efficacious treatment could not have been applied last year, when the Giants were a disgruntled, unhappy baseball team. First, Kuenn was not with the club, and if he had been his locker would not have been next to Willie's. The first thing Dark, a southerner from Louisiana, did when he took over as manager was to rearrange the dressing cubicles. All of the Negroes on the team had dressed in one row of cubicles; Dark split them up so that now Mays is next to Kuenn, Willie McCovey's neighbor is Tom Haller, Sam Jones is sandwiched between Charlie Hiller and Jim Duffalo. "We'll all get to know each other better this way," Dark said.

This ploy seems to have worked; the Giants are no longer a conglomerate of stars, divided roughly along color lines, with no sense of being a team. Mays, who went his own way last year, disliking Bill Rigney until Rigney was fired and disliking Tom Sheehan even more, has a warm regard for Dark, carried over from Willie's rookie year when Dark was the Giant team captain. Dark and Eddie Stanky kidded Willie, kept him happy; years later Willie still mourned their loss.

Dark has handled Mays much as Leo Durocher did—with unstinting, continuous praise. When he took over the Giants he said, " Mays's job is the only one that is certain." Mays, who blossoms under praise and is apt to sulk under criticism, is hustling, and his example has inspired some of the other Giants.

One criticism of the team last year was that it lacked a leader on the field. It still does. Mays has never assumed that role; Kuenn may eventually, but he hasn't yet. "A field leader in baseball is not important," says Dark, who was Durocher's team captain and one of the best field leaders in baseball. "It's not like football, where the quarterback has to be the inspiration of the team, too. Here everything is a matter of individual effort, and if you can get leadership from the dugout, it's just as effective."

Dark provides this leadership in good measure. He is a quiet-spoken man, with mild brown eyes and a deep southern accent. He was an All-America halfback at LSU, good enough to move Steve Van Buren to blocking back. He is probably the best golfer in baseball circles, with the possible exception of another manager, Baltimore's Paul Richards. (Asked if he ever regretted passing up pro football for baseball, he said, "No, but if I had it to do over, I might have taken up golf.")