For He's A Jolly Good Fellow

Unfortunately, he does his drinking at night, which can make life difficult for a manager who requires at least a minimum amount of sleep.

Horace's familiar fraternal cry is "sitsee." Always "sitsee." He has been known to sit on the overcoat of a reluctant guest to hold him through the early-morning hours. He once locked three weary writers into a hotel room with him, only to have them climb out through the transom when he thoughtlessly dozed off.

Fortunately for Stoneham, his employees seem to find his early-morning dissertations far more stimulating than do those who are not tied to him by the healing bonds of a contract. Nowhere in the record book, at any rate, is there any indication that any Giant manager ever made a break for the door. This is well for Horace, and even better for the manager. When Horace drinks with his manager they can talk baseball, and when they talk baseball Horace can second-guess him. The more Horace drinks, the more he second-guesses. The more he second-guesses, the happier he becomes. If he drinks enough—and the odds are that he will—he will become so overjoyed with it all that he will fire the manager for not knowing as much baseball as the owner. This is known as voting your stock. It also tends to be very unsettling to a manager until he learns that Horace understands himself well enough not to hold himself accountable to anything he says when he is drunk.

Alvin Dark is a rigid Baptist, who lives by a code even more demanding than Stoneham's. Alvin does not drink or smoke or curse. He lives by the Bible. He tithes to the church, speaks at religious gatherings, evangelizes among the heathen.

When Horace hired him he was well aware that, for once, he was not getting a drinking partner in the bargain, that he was forgoing those long and pleasurable second-guessing sessions, that he was, to some extent, surrendering a certain amount of his normal control.

He hired him anyway, because Alvin was one of his old boys, and Horace believes in giving his old boys their chance. There was something else involved, too. Alvin apparently had reason to believe he was going to be hired to manage the Giants when Durocher was through. Durocher left ahead of schedule, though. Dark was still playing, and Bill Rigney, having just won the Junior World Series in Minneapolis, was entitled to his chance. Still, if Horace felt that he had sidestepped a promise to Alvin, however vague that promise may have been, Horace would want to make it up to him.

So the two men are not as far apart as they seem to be at first glance. Stoneham, like Dark, has his own highly moral precepts. It is only on definitions and values that they are at such odds.

Stoneham, as always, was willing to allow Alvin to be what he was, to accept him as he was and, I think we can say with some certainty, to even admire him for what he was. It may even have pleased him to have such a paragon working for him. The sensual man may not understand what makes the spiritual man tick, but he is usually quite willing to concede him the right to live his life as he sees fit.

Not to make Stoneham out to be a man of untoward tolerance, it should be added that he was willing to put up with all these spiritual values only because Dark also possessed the full complement of competitive virtues so admired in baseball. Alvin was always a rough, tough competitor and a red-necked loser.

When Jackie Robinson, angered that several of his teammates had been brushed back by Sal Maglie, bowled over little Davey Williams at first base, it was Dark who gathered his teammates together in the dugout and informed them that somebody was to get Jackie. By coincidence, it was Alvin himself who immediately hit a routine double, kept right on running, and with Jackie dug in at third base threw a jarring football block that not only flattened Robinson but knocked the ball clean out of his hand.