Sport: MacPhail’s Man

For seven weeks, the hottest spot in baseball—managing the New York Yankees—was empty. Manhattan sportswriters, who abhor a vacuum, rushed in to fill it. They bandied such names as Leo (“The Lip”) Durocher, Frank Frisch and Jimmy Dykes. In one week, three sports pages, each professing to be closest to the horse’s mouth, named three different men for the job.

Publicity-wise Yankee President Larry MacPhail, who knew better, let the talk grow. He had picked his manager two weeks ago. This week, with great ado, he let the world in on his little secret. Shrewd Stanley (“Bucky”) Harris, 49, known in the trade as a gentleman and a base-hit scholar, will run the Yankees in 1947.

Ever since he was the “boy wonder” second baseman and manager of the champion Washington Senators at 27, Bucky has been down more than up. He left Washington, had misery in Detroit. He lasted one season as manager of the Boston Red Sox. He was daring, aggressive, and understanding of his men. But he also let himself be second-guessed too often from the front office. He got philosophical about it: “God gets you up in the morning in good health and guides you safely through traffic to the ballpark. When your turn comes, He takes you by the hand and leads you up to the plate. Then He taps your shoulder. ‘Son,’ He says, ‘you take it from here’—and drops you flat on your puss.” When the lowly Philadelphia Phillies fired him three years ago, the greying boy wonder shuffled off to Buffalo to manage the minor-league Bison team.

Two months ago, MacPhail hired him as “special assistant” and it looked as if Bucky at last could put his feet on a desk in the Yankees’ plush, Fifth Avenue offices and relax. Then he got the manager’s job.

To most fans, sportswriters, and perhaps to Bucky himself, he hardly seemed MacPhail’s type of manager (the Boss is an old admirer of blustery Leo Durocher). The answer may be that the 1947 Yankees will be run by a triumvirate: MacPhail handing down orders from his ivory tower; Harris passing them on in the dugout. The man on the coaching lines (at third base) will be Coach Chuck Dressen, recently hired away from the Dodgers, and one of the best detail men in baseball.