Comments on: Gene Mauch

By: Josh Wilker

Josh Wilker — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:59:18 +0000

sb1902:
That suspension gets a looong chapter in the book. Leo claims he wasn’t in the apartment when the craps game was going on.

By: sb1902

sb1902 — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:37:27 +0000

Leo the Lip was also famously suspended for the 1947 for his assocation with “known gamblers,” actor George Raft among them (Raft was friends with notorious mobster Bugsy Siegel). Apparently Durocher and Raft rigged a game and took a bunch of money off of Dizzy Trout.

Gosh, what a character Durocher was. Roommates with Babe Ruth (apparently he stole Ruth’s watch). I suspect Durocher was somebody most normal people would not like a bit, but if I come across a biography, I’d pick it up, that’s for sure.

By: Josh Wilker

Josh Wilker — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 19:29:45 +0000

Thanks for that info about Hendrick’s take on Mauch, Bob. Very interesting.

thunderfan24: It’s amazing how many things he was on the scene for. He’s baseball’s Zelig, except instead of blending into the background he was usually right in the middle of it all.

By: thunderfan24

thunderfan24 — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 19:14:24 +0000

Leo Durocher made the last out in the second of Johnny Vander Meer’s back-to-back no-hitters.

By: Bob Timmermann

Bob Timmermann — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 18:45:52 +0000

I went to a SABR event in Lake Elsinore a few years back. At the time, George Hendrick was managing Lake Elsinore. Hendrick came out to speak. More precisely, he came out to whisper. The man probably didn’t speak to the press because he couldn’t enunciate. So, we literally hung on his every word.

When he was asked about the 1986 ALCS, he spared nothing in giving his disdain for Mauch. He thought Mauch was a micromanage to the point of obsessiveness. He thought that Mauch ruined Kirk McCaskill’s arm down the stretch by making him throw too many curve balls.

He was out of the fateful Game 5 when the Red Sox rallied. Hendrick believed that Mike Witt should have finished up the game. The Angels players knew that Donnie Moore had very little left in his arm. But, Hendrick claimed, Mauch wanted to show everybody he knew better. So, he brought in Gary Lucas, who hit Rich Gedman, and then in came Moore…

Hendrick found Mauch to be unfriendly and uncommunicative. And when George Hendrick thinks you don’t communicate well, that says a lot.