They May Have Been A Headache But They Never Were A Bore

Now, how can all this possibly look to the Dodger ball club? Doesn't it have to look like Maury is challenging us? All he had to do was fly home, see Doc Kerlan, our team physician, and everything's fine. Nobody is going to raise hell with a ballplayer who turns up lame and goes to a doctor to be treated, even if the player does leave the ball club a little abruptly. But Maury goes out of his way to take his own sweet time about it, stops off to play guitar in a nightclub and finally wanders into the doctor's office two weeks after he jumps ship.

I don't mind telling you that Walter O'Malley was highly annoyed, and I don't mind telling you I was, too. "Buzzie," Walter said on the transpacific phone, "it looks to me as though the boy's asking for it, and I think we'll have to give it to him." We talked it over again before the winter meetings in Columbus, Ohio , and we decided that, as much as we would like to have Maury stay with the Dodgers , the breach was too wide to be healed. So we made the best deal we could make. Pittsburgh knew about his bad leg, but they took him "as is." It was all out in the open.

I've seen Maury a few times since we traded him, and he has no animosity at all. Why should he? We paid him the highest salary of any shortstop in history, and how could he be mad at anybody in Los Angeles for that? I hope Maury has a great year with the Pirates—against everybody but the Dodgers .

And then there's Leo Durocher . Newspapermen have gone to great lengths to say there's a feud between me and Leo, and although I don't ordinarily get all hot and bothered about feud stories—they're good box office—I have to take exception to this one. I consider Leo a friend, and if he hasn't taken some of the newspaper stuff too seriously I'm sure he thinks the same of me.

To tell you the truth, Leo isn't that much older than I am, but he was sort of a childhood hero to me, first as a player and then as manager of the Dodgers and then as manager of the Giants. By the time I took over the big club Leo was out of the picture, but I didn't need anybody to draw me pictures to show what the name Leo Durocher meant. So I was amazed one day, after Leo had left the Giants, to pick up a Los Angeles newspaper and read that Leo had missed out on a couple of managing jobs he thought he had locked up, and that now he was convinced he was being blackballed. He felt that Fred Haney of the Angels and Horace Stoneham of the Giants were spreading the word that Leo didn't want to manage anymore, and he popped off about how unfair this was, because he did want to manage, he was not independently wealthy, and he needed a job.

On top of all that, the baseball pension fund was just getting off the ground in those days, and it looked like Leo wasn't going to get a nickel for all his years of service as a manager. Under the rule, a former manager who was out of baseball got no pension-fund credit for his years as manager. If he came back into baseball, as a manager or as a coach, he immediately got retroactive credit for all his years. In other words, if Leo got back into baseball he would automatically be in line for about $500 a month in his old age, and if he stayed out of baseball he would be in line for zip, nothing.

We talked all this over in the front office, and we considered the fact that Leo meant a lot to the Dodger image, and we threw in the fact that Leo is a fine baseball man. When we added everything up, I got on the phone. "Leo," I said, "in the first place, I don't agree with you that you're being blackballed. And all this popping off about it is doing you no good. I want to see you right away."

In Leo's apartment I said: "Leo, maybe you think it's beneath your dignity, but we'd like you to come to work for the Dodgers as a coach."

Now, you don't ordinarily think of crusty Leo Durocher as an emotional man, but you'd have thought I just offered him the French Legion of Honor or something. The poor guy had been so upset over this screwy idea that he was being blackballed that the offer of an honest job on a major league ball club really touched him. He didn't even mull it over in his mind. He asked me when we wanted him to start. I said right away. I said, "One thing, Leo. We won't be able to pay you the kind of money you've been getting."

Leo was so touched that he didn't even want to negotiate. He said, "You and Mr. O'Malley figure out the salary, and it'll be good enough for me."