Replies

Met Fan? &$%#^$%$%#^ ! Tommy Agee STILL hasn't touched home plate ! :)

And it wouldn't matter if he did. It wasn't Tommie Agee at the plate who cost the 1969 Cubs the National League East, it was their own manager. Next time, tell Leo Durocher to behave his bloody self with the umps and stop using them to try to reunite a team that was already becoming ground up somewhere between Durocher-inspired clubhouse greed and Durocher-inspired nervous wreckage.

He tried to use umpires as a tension target. One day he got umpire Shag Crawford so mad, by dancing around him yelling "Dummy! Dummy! that Crawford offered to fight him right there. But in the end, his umpire baiting worked against the Cubs. They were the victims of some outrageously bad calls (Tommie Agee should have been out at the plate that night, by the way. - BD), and there was no place to turn; the league had become polarised against Durocher and the Cubs. Once, Leo was overruled by the league president, Warren Giles, on a protest involving a play that cost the Cubs a run and conceivably a ball game. (It was a judgment call on how many bases a runner could advance on a ball thrown into the stands.) Less than two weeks later, exactly the same play developed again, but with the team situation reversed, so that the Cubs - on the basis on the previous precedent - would save a run and perhaps a game. "They can't have it both ways," Durocher crowed of the umpires' decision. He was wrong. They could and they did. Not only that, the league office upheld them when Durocher protested. Whether or not Durocher united the Cubs against the umpires, he certainly united the umpires against the Cubs...

- William Barry Furlong, "How Durocher Blew The Pennant", Look, 1970.

Not to mention, Durocher all but overworked his regulars, refused to use his bench, depended almost entirely on one relief pitcher [Phil (The Vulture) Regan], and by the time they went down the stretch a very good infield was losing balls they used to vacuum up, an already questionable leadoff hitter (Don Kessinger) was exhausted to the point where he couldn't bribe his way on base (a .332 on base percentage isn't exactly what you want in a leadoff man), a pitching staff was demoralised with Leo's continuous little bait-and-switch games, and Durocher was so polarising even in his own clubhouse that when he decided at last to rest one of his overridden regulars - when the National League East race was all but over - said regular, according to Mr. Furlong, played anyway...because he was in no mood to be hung as a "quitter" by Leo Durocher, who basically mismanaged a Cub team that could and probably should have won that division and, when the team began collapsing (as just about anyone who knew Durocher's style could have predicted, it seems in hindsight), charged that his team were the "quitters." Put it this way: Durocher so antagonised the league and turned his players into nervous wrecks that opposing pitchers were begging their managers to pitch them out of turn if it meant getting a crack at the Cubs, including and especially Bob Gibson.

Meanwhile, allow me to remind you that, in the end, the Mets won the National League East by eight games. Anyone who still clings to the Agee-at-the-plate game as the destruction of the 1969 Cubs is clinging to a pleasant illusion...but an illusion nevertheless. It was classic mismanagement and not Tommie Agee at the plate which did the 1969 Cubs in. Blaming one blown call for losing a pennant is like blaming Fred Merkle for the 1908 Giants losing that pennant. (As it happens, Giant manager John McGraw would have agreed: he long maintained that the Giants had lost at least twelve games they could have won just as easily excluding the Merkle game.)

Furlong's article was republished in Jim Bouton's splendid anthology, I Managed Good But Boy Did They Play Bad. Further recommended reading: David Claerbaut, Durocher's Cubs: The Greatest Team That Didn't Win. Personally, I think Leo Durocher did not and does not belong in the Hall of Fame...