Exit Leo

By being classified as emergency, the long-distance call from Cincinnati got through last week. It interrupted a strategy meeting of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Branch Rickey picked up the phone, grunted "Hello," and listened. From a lifetime's practice he managed to keep what was in his mind from showing on his face. Said he to the Dodger road secretary: "Chandler has fined you $500."

Rickey's small audience, expecting no more, said nothing. Rickey, immovable in his large office chair, went on: "He has fined the New York and Brooklyn clubs $2,000 each." Said one of his lieutenants, "Aw, let's get on with the meeting." Rickey paused a moment. Then, looking straight at Manager Leo Durocher, he said, "And he has suspended you for one year."

It came without warning, Commissioner Albert B. ("Happy") Chandler's first decisive action in two years as baseball's $50,000-a-year czar. Leo The Lip, struck almost silent, let out only two words, "For what?"

The press arrived. Sportswriters, some of whom had no love for The Lip, shook hands with him condolingly. Said one: ''Durocher must have felt like a guy attending his own funeral."

Leo's question--"For what?"--was one that a lot of other people were asking. Supposedly Happy Chandler had ruled on a spring-training squabble between Rickey and the Yankees' garrulous Boss Larry MacPhail, who had gone to Chandler with it. But since Durocher had been only a sideliner (if a noisy one) in that fight, Chandler had to convict him of more. So he dragged up the "accumulated unpleasant incidents" Durocher had been involved in (TIME, April 14). All of these had happened before the spring season began. Said the New York Times's Columnist Arthur Daley: "The Lip is in a comparable position to the chap hauled into traffic court for driving through a red light and then being sentenced to the electric chair. If this is the Chandler type of justice, then the club owners could make a good investment for themselves by buying up the remainder of his [$250,000] contract. . . ."

In one quick act, Commissioner Happy Chandler had done the seemingly impossible: he had made Leo Durocher a sympathetic figure.

There was anguish in Brooklyn; the betting odds on the Dodgers' pennant chances lengthened. The Harvard Crimson wanted Leo hired as assistant coach of Harvard's baseball team. A Brooklyn Congregational Church group petitioned Chandler to reinstate Durocher. Though there were some who thought The Lip had long been asking for trouble, sportswriters generally agreed that Durocher had been hit with a beanball. Said the New York Herald Tribune's Sports Editor Stanley Woodward: "Knowing he was under fire for timidity, Chandler took refuge in overaction . . . .the most colossal piece of injustice and bravado yet perpetrated."

Chandler, onetime pork-barreling U.S. Senator from Kentucky, had indeed done little as baseball's chief of police except to treat baseball-club presidents to ice-cream sodas to demonstrate what plain, folksy and moral people they all were. He had once summed up his job to a newspaper reporter: "As baseball commissioner I'm compelled to spend the winters in Florida and attend baseball games during the summer. If there is a better job than that, I don't know about it." That was not the way his stern old predecessor Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis regarded the job. But the baseball owners had carefully picked Happy because he was no Landis. Said Timesman Daley: "Maybe this makes Chandler tougher than Landis. But I doubt it. Landis was always tough in an intelligent fashion."

What would happen to Leo Durocher? Whether he got his job back with the Dodgers next year depended on his own behavior for the rest of the year, and how well the Dodgers did without him. Said Rickey: "We'll see." One possibility: if the Dodgers don't take Leo back he might end up next spring as manager of MacPhail's New York Yankees. Despite their squabbles, Leo and Larry were two of a kind, and understand each other.

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