Leo Durocher’s Nice Guys Finish Last
The book doesn’t have much of a narrative structure, working more as a collection of anecdotes presented in a vague chronological order, although more identification of the year(s) under discussion would have helped. The bulk of the book focuses on his time playing with the Cardinals and managing the Dodgers and Giants, with a pretty good balance of straight baseball stories and Durocher’s own antics, mostly involving umpires, like this exchange between him and a frequent sparring partner of his:
And, sure enough, he said it again. “I’ll reach down and bite your head off.”
“If you do,” I said, “you’ll have more brains in your stomach than you’ve got in your head.”
And I’m in the clubhouse.
In addition to being a great baseball book, Nice Guys Finish Last is a bloodletting, as Durocher gets every grudge and bit of dirt off his chest, with many famous names from baseball history ending up the worse for it. Ernie Banks, Milt Pappas, Joe Pepitone, Leland MacPhail (Andy’s grandfather), Happy Chandler, Bowie Kuhn, Branch Rickey, Red Smith, and Cesar Cedeno all show up to play roles in Durocher’s stories and leave with egg on their faces and stains on their reputations. Even Jackie Robinson takes some criticism for showing up to spring training out of shape, while Durocher blames Banks for protecting his own reputation while undermining Durocher’s authority. Of course, I’m not sure how seriously to take some of the accusations, since most are first-person recollections of events that took place five to forty years before the book’s publication, but they made for good reading.
In addition to the unclear writing around certain dates and the question of the accuracy of Mr. Durocher’s memory, his baseball thinking reads today as very old school. He describes hitters by their average, homers, and RBI – although that could just as easily have been the work of his co-author, Ed Linn – and goes on a long rant near the end of the book about, in essence, why he liked scrappy players more than raw-talent players, even though he offers pages of effusive praise of Willie Mays, who was all raw talent but emotionally fragile. Durocher worked for Branch Rickey, one of the most progressive thinkers in baseball’s first century, but many of Rickey’s prized ideas, like working the count, either made no impression on the Lip or didn’t register enough to show up in his memoirs.
Apropos of nothing, one other passage struck a bit of a personal chord with me:
I thought, in fact, of something Laraine had said to me the first time she met Mr. Rickey. Because they were both such religious people I had been confident they would get along marvelously. Instead of the instant rapport I was expecting, there was instant non-rapport. “This man isn’t your friend, Leo,” she told me after he had gone. “I know you think the sun rises and sets on him, but he isn’t what you think he is.”
That’s precisely the sentiment my wife expressed on meeting my (former) boss in Toronto. She always has been a good judge of people.
Next up: William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Ironweed
Klaw, since it’s a baseball-related book, I’m hoping you’ll allow me to ask a baseball quesiton. Is a guy like Franklin Gutierrez worth having as your starting CF’er despite the poor plate discipline because of his defense (22.5 UZR, strong arm? Maybe a pltoon split vs LH’ers?
Keith
Not sure if you read Deadspin anymore, but the guys from FJM will be guest editors for the day tomorrow. They’ve had 10 months to compile their gripes against the world of sports journalism. Should be interesting.
Bob – Gutierrez has the third-highest WAR value among center fielders this season. That is based almost completely on his outstanding defense. So yes, he is certainly worthy of being a team’s starting CF. Dave Cameron has covered Gutierrez’s value pretty extensively over at USSMariner.com this season.
Thanks Marcel, I am aware of his defense. I guess the question is one of philosophy. I’ve read sabermetricians guesstimates that defense is worth approx. 1/2 of the value of offense, so the question really is: in looking at the overall value of the player, offensively and defensively, can you support a CF’er with a poor OBP (and thus, low offensive value) because the .5 value of his defense makes him an above average player? (Not sure I’ve articulated this very well)
the issue is really just that: a guesstimate at best. Run prevention is valuable to a point. Having run prevention players is worth while at certain positions (SS, 2b, cf) but at a certain point that offensive hole in the lineup becomes a liability. the idea is to balance the two types of skills to find a player one is happy with.
A lot of fielding metrics are flawed but they do give us an accurate sense of the level of skill a particular player has. Matt Holliday for instance is rated as a good fielder but the eye ball test of Holliday suggests he isn’t. There has to be a balance when using UZR or Dewan knowing it is not a be all end all stat.
Finally, I think the most interesting portion of the philosophical debate is that ball players aren’t static beings. The scale isn’t either a good hitter/bad fielder or reverse, but some are okay at both hitting and fielding. It is about finding the best mix for your team to win. The Rangers/Colorado seem to have done a great job mixing in run prevention with okay hitting. Seemed to work well for them.
This seems to be the new “OPS” in baseball. Take a quick peak at what Beane has assembled recently and then see their record post ASB. interesting debate indeed.
The Range portion of his UZR is +24.8. The next highest Range number for a center fielder in baseball this year? Mike Cameron, +12.9. No one else is over +10. So you really have to wonder if he can maintain this level of play? I suppose just like players have career years with the bat, they can have career years with the glove.
It is always hard to trust stuff written from memory long after the fact. For example, as I recall, early in the book Durocher reminisces about ice-skating on the Connecticut River from his home in Springfield, MA, to the Harvard Boat House in Cambridge. However, 1) The Connecticut runs north-south, not east-west, and it doesn’t come within eighty miles of Cambridge; 2) there is no possible way to ice-skate from Springfield to Cambridge; 3) the Harvard Boat House isn’t in Cambridge.
“This seems to be the new “OPS” in baseball.”
Not to be (more) pedantic (than usual), but you mean OBP. OPS is a mess (poorly weighted, assigns hits too much value versus walks and utilizes two different denominators) and I believe it was Depodesta who determined something like OBP*3+SLG is far more accurate.
Dave: You are right that OPS is not accurate as it weights one of the measures too much, but the last paragraph was a poor attempt to reference the early 00’s A’s where OPS was suddenly vogue and those style of players became hot commodities (see: moneyball).
That’s sort of the genesis of todays modern focus on statistical analysis and discovering undervalued commodities – in this case F. Gut./run prevention metrics. It likely was out there before but schmucks like myself pretended to understood a whole new world when that came out and baseball’s baseball card stats suddenly had a new relevance.
OPS isn’t perfect, but I think people overstate how much better the newfangled metrics are. The HBT ran an article a few years back where they showed OPS to have a .955 correlation with runs scored.
Brian: What I was saying is that the A’s focus was on OBP, not OPS, atleast in Moneyball (SLG/power was what they found to be too pricey to buy on the open market). Useless correction, probably, and I agree with a lot of what you were saying above. The mainstream defensive stats are definitely lacking though I’d imagine there are some internal ones that can estimate defensive runs saved (minus variable opportunities, I guess) just about as well as teams can estimate offensive runs created. That would definitely be the one thing I’d focus on if given 30 minutes to pick a GM’s brain.
Marco: This year its 0.86 for OBP, 0.91 for SLG and 0.96 for OPS. However, if you mess with the numbers a bit, OBP*1.4+SLG ups the correlation a little more. (Also, I think its possible OPS is a more telling stat at the team level than at the individual player level.)
Keith,
Are there any other out of print sports books you think deserve to be re-released?
Keith: Minor question. Would you really go Hamels then Lee in the playoffs?
(Assuming your reasoning isn’t trying to project out home/road starts.)
Keith – you really thought The Road was hard to get through, for me it was a breeze compared to Blood Meridian.
Oh – and the real story behind the Sox win last night is Green’s development as a hitter. He didn’t really do a great job selling the check swing but got away with it somehow. When it came time to sell the ball in the middle of the zone, he did great! (Sox fan here, but admittedly a pretty awful call) Oh, and that OF should be benched for the foreseeable future, totally dogged it.
Dave-
I agree that OPS seems to be a better indicator at a team level than an individual level. My problem with OPS, in addition to what everyone else has said here, is it gives no indication of what type of player a guy is. I suppose this could be said of all these new-fangled, one-number-fits-all stats. They certainly are valuable metrics but, in many ways, they are inherently without context. If I know a guy has a 900 OPS, I don’t really know anything about him, except that hes likely a good-to-very-good offensive player. It doesn’t tell me what he’s specifically good at or what his style of place is.
Looking at more “raw” numbers, we can derive a little bit of a better sense of what a guy has done and, thus, what a guy’s talent level might be. I’m not talking RBIs/Runs and that nonsense. But if I see a guy as a 9:1 K/BB ratio, I can probably guess that he’s a free-swinger. If I see a guy has 50 HRs and 50 2Bs, I can assume he’s got power. When someone says a guy has a WARP3 of X, I can put that in relation to other guys and figure out who he’s better/worse than, but I don’t learn anything beyond that about him as a player. So, it certainly has value in comparing guys straight up and assessing who you want on your team and who you don’t. But they are limited beyond this. I pick on OPS because of it’s simplicity and the errors this causes. A guy with a .300/.500 split has the same OPS has a guy with a .400/.400 split or a guy with a .200/.600 split, but all those guys are vastly different players with vastly different values.
I was shocked that Keith underplayed the heinous suppression of the Vikings in his chat.
I mean Ok they were never repressed by the US or anyone really and have not been around for nearly a 1000 years. No one alive would be considered a Viking but they have virtual feelings I am sure. Not to mention glossing over the plight of Cowboys.
Jon, I LMAO when I read that. Talk about guys who just don’t get it (the poster, not Klaw…).
BTW, back to metrics for a sec: I know there is much debate over the value of UZR, mainly because it ranks Texeira and especially Ellsbury so low. I recognize that no metric is perfect, and defensive stats, in particular, have limitations. But just because a player with a reputation as a great defender (especially ones who live in Boston and NY) doesn’t have good stats, that is not a valid reason to say that the stat is fatally flawed, right?
Bob-
Maybe if you watched MORE BASEBALL you’d realize that most stats are flawed. Except victories. And World Series victories. And clutch hits.
That’s $5 BSK.