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By Peter Stoler

NICE GUYS FINISH LAST by LEO DUROCHER with ED LINN 448 pages. Simon & Schuster. $9.95.

A FALSE SPRING by PAT JORDAN 277 pages. Dodd, Mead. $7.95.

Leo Durocher might be remembered as the greatest shortstop of his generation (1928-42). He could be celebrated as the manager who was to baseball what Humphrey Bogart was to movies. His wild four-decade career was marked by fights with bleacherites, tantrums with umpires and owners, marital misadventures and a one-season suspension for consorting with known gamblers. Yet if Leo the Lip is to be recalled by future generations, it may be for his signal contribution to literature. There he sits in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, sandwiched between John Betjeman and W.H. Auden: "Nice guys finish last. Leo Durocher (1906-)." As Durocher marches toward the close of the parenthesis, he recalls the flaky, competitive career that made him, for millions of fans, the man they loved to hate.

According to Durocher, that reputation, like stadium hot dogs, is highly adulterated. By his own witness, he is a man with a heart as big as the Astrodome. To be sure, Leo is of the Vince Lombardi persuasion: "Show me a good loser in professional sports," he declares, "and I'll show you an idiot." But having thumbed sportsmanship out of the game, the Lip spends the rest of his book atoning for his early excesses--by introducing some worse ones.

As he now recollects, he was a family man, an inspirational leader who could exhort his players in a style that might make Pat O'Brien misty. His enmities, claims Leo, were transient, his friendships permanent. Sidney Weil, onetime owner of the Cincinnati Reds, with whom the Lip did many a dubious battle, is "the nicest, kindest man I have ever known." Ed Barrow of the Yankees, a notorious Durocher rival, is "the best friend I had in baseball." Branch Rickey, another erstwhile enemy, is "the great man" in Leo's life.

Prose-Colored Glosses. In between such revisionist histories, Nice Guys Finish Last provides a series of fascinating and hilarious reminiscences, ranging from his locker-room wrangle with Babe Ruth to Bobby Thomson's shot heard round the world. But essentially the book is a series of prose-colored glosses aimed for fans rather than readers.

Durocher may be right: nice guys often end as also-rans--but they seem to write better baseball books. Pat Jordan, a frequent contributor to SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, is a failure by all professional baseball standards. But it is in the dissection of that failure that his book discloses the dimensions of a man and a game. The young pitcher's career was the polar opposite of Durocher's. A native of Bridgeport, Conn., Jordan was a spectacular Little Leaguer; by the time he reached high school, the Milwaukee Braves awarded him a $35,000 bonus. Sent to the Braves' farm club hi Mc-Cook, Neb., Jordan saw himself as the world's new Christy Mathewson. The world had other plans. In his first professional game, he struck out four batters --and walked five.

That debut was typical of Jordan's career, played out in the melancholy minor league towns of Davenport, Iowa; Waycross, Ga.; and Palatka, Fla. The games, Jordan notes, seemed to have a will of their own, and the will was to lose. After a long series of catastrophic starts, Jordan finally admitted that his confidence, his control and his aspirations had come to nothing. "My career was no aesthetically well-made movie," he confesses, "rising action, climax, denouement. It was a box strewn with unnumbered slides."

Among those slides are poignant glimpses of the baseball that viewers have rarely seen before. There are the .400 hitters who somehow never make the majors, and the .200 hitters who do. There is the strange case of the black athlete who could do everything--run, steal, hit, field--but who ducked from an inside pitch a microsecond too soon. His fear was his tragic flaw; beanball pitchers got the message and within a season drove the man from the game.

The most compelling slides concern Jordan himself, losing his stuff but finding himself in the seedy, rundown parks of the minors. Surrounding him are other, less hopeful cases: men disputing the evidence of the statistics, making one last effort to reach the big time. "We deliberately kept our conversations elemental," Jordan recalls in A False Spring. "We deliberately thwarted growth because we feared it would lead to the realization, not that our dream was insignificant, but just that it was not significant enough to excuse our wasting all that time." Inevitably Jordan lost not merely games but his "perpetual innocence, the dream of playing a little boy's game for the rest of my life."

The description of that loss is a met aphor for many youthful aspirations, not all of them athletic. Moreover, his loss is the reader's gain, for out of Ex-Pitcher Jordan's experience has come one of the best and truest books about baseball, and about coming to maturity hi America. Leo Durocher's book is worth reading. Pat Jordan's is worth remembering.

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