The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World by Roger Kahn Read Free Book Online

out of the park.
    “I don’t want to see your petition. I don’t want to hear anything about it. Fuck your petition.
    “The meeting is over. Go back to bed.”
    A few days later, the precise March date in 1947 is unknown, Frank Murphy of Michigan, an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, telephoned Albert Benjamin “Happy” Chandler, the commissioner of baseball. Murphy left no record of the conversation. He died in 1949, after nine years on the bench. Chandler, who died in 1991 at age ninety-two, offered a brief account. “Murphy was an honorable and honored man,” Chandler told the sports journalist John Underwood. Chandler reported this conversation:
MURPHY:
Commissioner, you are a man of character. You must do something to stop this fellow Durocher.
CHANDLER:
I will.
MURPHY:
If you don’t I’m going to advise the [national] Catholic Youth Organization to prohibit its youngsters from going to ballgames this year.
    Murphy was a pro-labor Democratic senator until President Roosevelt appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1940, moving toward a liberal, some said New Deal, Court. On the bench Murphy wrote few interesting opinions but he did assume a position newspapermen described as “the leading lay Catholic in the United States.” When Murphy spoke to Chandler, he brought to his words the full authority of a militant Church.
    Unless Durocher were punished severely, twenty million Catholic children would be forbidden to go to ballgames during 1947. After Frank Murphy’s phone call, Happy Chandler had one thing he had to do. Find an excuse to throw Durocher out of baseball.
    Morals? Perhaps. Business? Certainly. The business of the commissioner of baseball is business.
    Articles, chapters, entire books have been written about Chandler v. Durocher, 1947. (Chandler’s own contribution is a book entitled
Heroes, Plain Folks and Skunks
.) The focus centers on specific episodes of that spring, which is naive. After the warning from the Catholic Church, Chandler was going to throw Durocher out of baseball. If the worst infraction Chandler found was jaywalking, so be it. Durocher was gone.
    Chandler, himself a former senator, was country-slick. He knew that if he gave Durocher a chance, just a little time, Leo would walk into trouble, jaywalk into trouble along a road that now led nowhere.
    Durocher lent his name to a column in the
Brooklyn Eagle
written by a smallish, rabbit-toothed newspaperman, Harold Parrott. “Shoulda been Harold Rabbitt,” everybody said. Parrott liked to whisper, giving what he said a suggestion of confidentiality and importance.*
    The
Eagle
column was called “Durocher Says.” Durocher claimed that he had nothing to do with writing the material and “I didn’t always read it either.”
    Larry MacPhail may or may not have asked Durocher to leave Brooklyn and manage the Yankees as the Era began. Durocher claims that MacPhail made the offer in 1946 and he turned it down. MacPhail did hire a gabby little coach, Charlie Dressen, who had been Durocher’s chief assistant. (As a Yankee, Dressen antagonized Joe DiMaggio with record speed.)
    Durocher stayed in Brooklyn for 1947, but MacPhail had “stolen” a Dodger coach. Under the heading “Durocher Says,” Harold Parrott wrote:
    This is a declaration of war. I want to beat the Yankees because of MacPhail and Dressen. MacPhail tried to drive a wedge between myself and all these things I hold dear. When MacPhail found I couldn’t be induced to manage the Yankees . . . he resolved to knock me and make life as hard as possible for me. . . . Surely people recognize it is the same old MacPhail.
    “Just a little friendly controversy,” Durocher maintained later. “Just stirring some stuff up to sell some tickets.”
    MacPhail disagreed. He wrote Commissioner Chandler in rage. “The New York Yankees request a hearing to determine responsibility for these statements.”
    Then, just before a Dodger-Yankee exhibition game in Havana, an odd