A TALE OF TWO DIAMOND LEGENDS

By H. N. Burdett

My two favorite baseball managers were featured in major sports page articles on the same day this week. One capped a 33-year career the right way: leaving his job three days after capturing his third World Series title. The other, though a year older than his retiring colleague, had signed a contract to manage the 2012 Washington Nationals, commenting that he did not plan to hang on for just one season but was in it "for the long haul."

Departing St. Louis Cardinal Manager Tony La Russa, 67, told the press it was time for him to do other things. After this past storybook season, there is indeed little else for Tony Terrific to prove. His Cards battled from 10 1/2 games behind Atlanta for a playoff spot as late as August 25. Saint Louis squeezed into the playoffs on the last day of the National League season. The club then proceeded to upset both Philadelphia and Milwaukee and, in one of the more thrilling comebacks in baseball annals, got up from the mat and vanquished the explosive Texas Rangers in the World Series.

Washington National Manager Davey Johnson, 68, will never even come close to La Russa's 2,728 major league victories, which place him third on the all-time list behind legendary skippers Connie Mack (3,731 wins) and John McGraw (2,763). In fact, Johnson has managed 607 fewer games than La Russa's teams won.

Nor is Johnson likely to match La Russa's record of six league titles - three each with the Oakland A's and the Cardinals. But, considering that La Russa has managed for three decades plus three years and Johnson for only 15 years, the Nationals' manager has a .561 winning percentage to attest to his ability. And Davey does have one World Series title to his credit, with the 1986 New York Mets that won 103 games.

Johnson also guided the Baltimore Orioles into the American League playoffs in 1996 and l997. Contrary to his cozy relationship with the Washington front office, Johnson could not stand Oriole owner Peter Angelos. The two stopped talking with one another. And, in the most preposterous blunder of Angelos's turbulent ownership of the Baltimore team, he fired Johnson on the very day he was named 1997 American League Manager of the Year.

There are many stories about Johnson, who may be one of baseball's last truly colorful characters. My own favorite DeeJay anecdote harkens back to when he was an Oriole second baseman and the team was managed by the redoubtable Earl Weaver. A computer nut, Johnson had put together a litany of statistics to prove that Weaver's lineup was all wrong. Davey brashly took his computations into Weaver's office, dropped them on the desk and informed his manager that the numbers proved conclusively that he should be batting clean-up. Without favoring the stats with as much as a glance, Weaver gathered them together in both of his hands, crumbled and tossed them into his wastebasket. Johnson said he then left Earl's office, but he was confident that once the door between them was shut that Weaver went straight to the basket to have a closer look at the numbers.

The gods of baseball are a vengeful lot. Where boneheaded decisions by team owners are concerned, their vengeance is especially cruel. There's no need to remind the Boston Red Sox faithful of this fact. The day after Christmas 1919 is one that will live in infamy in the land of the bean and the cod. For on December 26 of that year, the Sox, sold pitcher George Herman Ruth to the New York Yankees.

During the eight years Ruth toiled on the mound and began hitting baseballs to distances denied mere mortals, the Red Sox racked up four World Series titles. Ruth's most significant contributions to those years of glory were with his arm rather than his bat. Wearing the Boston uniform, he had won 94 games against a mere 46 losses. In the 1918 World Series, Ruth's string of 29 1/3 innings without relinquishing a single run set a Series record thought to be unbeakable. And it held up for a full 43 years before it was eclipsed by Whitey Ford, who posted 29 2/3 scoreless innings in the 1961 Series. Had the Babe, who finished his career with 714home runs, not hit a single ball out of the park, he was a lock to have entered the Hall of Fame as a pitcher.

After Boston discarded him, Ruth, of course, went on to become the greatest baseball player ever. Conversely, the Red Sox toiled a full 85 years without winning another World Series until 2004 when they swept the Cardinals in four games.

But if Peter Angelos had even heard of the Curse of the Bambo, his outsized ego blinded him to its cautionary message. Not only have the O's not won a World Series since 1983, they have not had a winning season in the 14 years since Davey Johnson was sent packing. Call it the Curse of DeeJay.

But Angelos did have a chance to redeem himself from the notorious Johnson debacle. There were reports that the Oriole owner attempted to hire none other than Tony La Russa to manage his team.

Angelos, a celebrated class action litigator who readily admits to not knowing much about baseball, was said to have felt he would be more comfortable with another lawyer guiding his team on the field. La Russa, who has never practiced law but does have a law degree from Florida State University, sensibly and politely declined Angelos's offer.

While Davey Johnson is convinced he has a 2012 National League pennant contender in the nation's capital, as well as a front office that both understands baseball and tolerates his myriad idiosyncrasies, some 30 miles to the east of Washington the Orioles continue to struggle under the Curse of DeeJay. And the gods of baseball are doubling over with laughter at what they hath wrought.
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