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Durocher, to everyone's surprise, named Shortstop Dark as the Giant captain. Stanky, his broad face set in an expression of sadness, pounded into Durocher's office and said: "Leo, that's fine for Al, but don't you think I had it coming? After all ... I'm your kind of ballplayer. You've always said so." Durocher told Stanky to cool off. Then he carefully explained that he was trying to instill some of Eddie's aggressiveness into Dark by giving him added responsibility. Stanky was flattered and placated.
"You Gotta Win." The Giants soon lost a tough game, io. As Durocher, a lover of the historical present tense, recalls the clubhouse scene: "Stanky comes into the clubhouse after the game and starts throwing things, taking it out on the furniture about those lucky bastards winning that one. He finally takes a kick at the water cooler and the bottle falls and breaks and the ice goes all over the floor and there's a hell of a ruckus. Now Al Dark has a good day that day. As I remember it, we get six hits and he got three or four. But nobody could score him. Well, one of those newspaper guys comes in and stops by Dark and says, 'Anyhow, Al, you did all right with that stick today.' Dark whirls around and hollers, 'What the hell do you mean all right? We didn't win, did we?' I knew right then I didn't make any mistake making him the captain." Stanky, a team player first and still Durocher's guy, agrees.
Last year, this time in Stanky's second season with a new club, the Giants won the pennant in one of the most dramatic finishes baseball has ever produced. Bobby Thomson's home run clinched the pennant, but 156 games had already been played, and Stanky had worked mightily in 145 of them. Durocher tells of Stanky's role: "To win a pennant you gotta win the tight ball games. And to win those tight ones, those one-run games, you gotta have guys who won't quit till they've won. And you've always gotta have one guy to lead those other guys. Eddie Stanky was my guy and their guy. He hated to lose. Eddie Stanky was the big difference in tight ball games . . . We wouldn't have won the pennant without him."
Stanky turned down the offer of a relatively secure job with the Giants for the new dubious job as Cardinal manager, a position that has seen more hiring & fir ing (nine changes in the past 26 years) than any other club in baseball. Eddie, who has been "preparing for this kind of job for five years," talked it over with Dickie. Said she: "Let's take it on."