For He's A Jolly Good Fellow

As owner of the Giants, Stoneham has always been unusually loyal to his managers. He has given the manager's job, with the exception of Durocher and Clancy Sheehan, to old Giants: Terry, Ott, Rigney, Dark and Herman Franks. Horace made Sheehan his manager after he let Rigney go in midseason, although the only logical grounds seemed to be that Sheehan was second-guessing Rigney so much that Horace felt he deserved a chance to manage himself. (The only other possible explanation is that maybe Horace didn't know what he was doing; maybe he was sober at the time.) Sheehan, who had no more chance of managing a club successfully than your little boy, took a club Rigney had kept in contention and guided it right into the second division.

Even after Sheehan made a laughingstock of himself, Horace kept him in his old position as boon companion and chief watering scout. Nobody would have expected anything else. Sheehan had performed, Stoneham would reflect, no differently than anyone should have expected Sheehan to perform. He had remained in character. His call upon Stoneham's friendship and support would therefore remain undimmed and undiminished.

His breaks with Leo Durocher and Alvin Dark, two entirely different loaves of bread, are perfect illustrations of the rockbound code by which Stoneham lives.

There has always been the story that the beginning of the end for Durocher came at a Hollywood-type banquet when Leo laughed at a Danny Kaye burlesque of a drunken Stoneham slobbering all over himself while trying to make a speech.

Now, it is true enough that Horace would be sorely wounded to hear that Leo would be so disloyal, and he would be even more hurt that Danny Kaye, another close friend, would stoop to making fun of him. But Horace's anger at that sort of thing wouldn't last. Horace knows that Leo is a show-biz type, so if Leo travels with show-biz people and goes the show-biz route, that is to be expected. He would also know that if he himself wanted to hang around comedians he had to expect to become a foil for their humor, and that the humor would not necessarily be kind. After the original indignation had subsided, Horace would even accept the fact that he had opened himself up to that kind of ridicule by getting up at an occasional baseball banquet to make a slobbering speech.

Durocher was fired, in all probability, for reasons having to do with nothing more extraordinary than his well-known habit of losing interest in a ball club once the club has dropped out of the pennant race.

Horace and Leo were still on good enough terms in 1961 so that Horace sought out Leo to inquire about his availability to take on the job again. And that's what brought on what now seems to be an unbridgeable gap between them. When Horace made the announcement that he had hired Alvin Dark, without bothering to inform Durocher, Leo felt he had been kept on the hook and dangled, an attitude he made abundantly clear by blasting Stoneham in the press. By Stoneham's code, that's unforgivable. You have a beef, come on up, I'll pour you a drink and we'll talk it over. You don't go shooting off your mouth for the whole world to hear.

Stoneham is not by nature a feuder. He has never, to my knowledge, attacked anyone in the press. On the other hand, he is not a man to forget. Horace just sits and waits. Sooner or later everybody in baseball figures to wander into the little corner of the baseball world he rules. An owner will come walking into his lair one night to try to outbubbly him, and Horace will send him home no wiser but considerably poorer. With everybody else...well, just by virtue of his ownership of the San Francisco franchise, he has the patronage rights, with all the attendant power, of a district leader. He controls his share of those few precious major league jobs, and, over the years, he has been able to use them to reward his friends and punish his enemies. He finally achieved that gratifying end with Leo Durocher last fall when he refused his current manager, Herman Franks, permission to hire Leo as a coach. Let us all hope that revenge is its own reward, because Stoneham could very well be hurting himself far more than he's hurting Durocher.

Now we come to Alvin Dark. Let us begin by eliminating any lingering notion that Dark was fired because of anything arising out of that New York story in which Alvin either did or did not say that Spanish players were lazy and Negro players were dumb. The break between the owner and the manager had come well before that. It had come for reasons that would be incomprehensible or, at best, comic if you were not completely aware by now of the Stoneham code of acceptable behavior. In baseball, let me say again, you are dealing with human beings, and human beings are, as we all know, unpredictable, inconsistent and downright infuriating. Stoneham alone is consistent and predictable (possibly because there's nobody sitting up nights keeping score on him), and that makes him the most infuriating human being of all.

Horace Stoneham's relationship with Alvin Dark was altogether different than it had ever been with any other manager. Normally, Stoneham insists that his manager drink with him. It goes with the job. Horace is generous to a fault. When he drinks, everybody drinks. Especially if he is paying their salaries.