When In Doubt, Fire The Manager – Alvin Dark & John Underwood, 1980 ★★★

Winning on a Prayer

Most celebrity autobiographies follow a common format: here are the great things I did, here’s how and why I did them, and here’s how people misinterpreted me, especially the press.

Alvin Dark was different. When he put pen to paper at the end of a long and distinguished career, his mission was telling you just where he messed up.

“When it comes to getting the ax in baseball, Alvin Dark consistently broke new ground,” he explains in When In Doubt, Fire The Manager. “For sheer novelty in kicking a job, for finding ingenious ways to bring unemployment on yourself, come see what Dark did in San Francisco, Kansas City, Cleveland, Oakland, and San Diego.”

Co-written with John Underwood, When In Doubt is as much a journal of faith as of a life in baseball. For Dark, a lifelong Baptist, baseball certainly mattered but God mattered more. Others could tell you about Dark’s mistakes and blind spots; Dark himself wants you to know it all went wrong when he lost touch with that faith.

A speedy shortstop in his playing days, with over 2,000 hits, Dark is one of those players that shows up in Hall of Fame discussions as an almost case. But Dark the manager overshadows the player, both in how he is remembered today and how he appears in When In Doubt.

As a manager, he was one of the few in the history of Major League Baseball to lead a team to the World Series in both leagues. But his obituaries in 2015 read pretty much as he predicted they would in 1980: He was the manager who, back in 1964, was quoted claiming his black and Latino players lacked the same work ethic and team spirit of his white players. Dark said his comments were “deformed” by the writer, but the ensuing outcry contributed to his ouster as San Francisco Giants skipper, and followed him through the rest of his career.

“I may be stupid, but I’m not that stupid,” Dark told the press when his comments were first printed. “And I want to stay in baseball.”

Dark, at right, poses at the Polo Grounds in 1963 with star outfielder Willie Mays when Dark managed the San Francisco Giants. In his memoir, Dark said Mays felt "used" by Dark's effort to lean on their friendship for support after Dark was quoted speaking negatively of his black and Latino players. Image from http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Alvin-Dark-All-Star-shortstop-and-Giants-A-s-5891185.php#photo-7138978

He did stay, if never comfortably. Underneath the wins and the losses, the racial issue he never shed, the fights with meddlesome owners, there was another struggle, one within himself.

When In Doubt presents Dark as a fundamentally flawed individual, a self-confessed “hypocrite” who talked up the Christian life while carrying on a longtime affair with a flight attendant, Jackie Troy, later his second wife. After marrying Jackie, Dark remained a man adrift, failing to live up to his own stern code. He was a poor father, a distant husband, a gambler on the golf course. He even caught himself using profanity, something he firmly eschewed in younger days.

There is a story in the Old Testament, in the second book of Chronicles, about a king named Uzziah who got too big for his britches. He had done everything, had everything; then he began to act like he knew everything, and suddenly he had nothing and was a leper.

Alvin Dark’s Uzziah period was 1968-1971.

This is the most striking thing about When In Doubt; more than the insights on baseball, engaging if not deep; more than the pungent portraits of its assorted characters like Leo Durocher and Charlie Finley; more than the triumphs on the field. It’s a book about humility, about expressing wholesale devotion to one’s Creator. Whatever one’s own views on life and the hereafter, Dark’s no-holds-barred approach in laying himself bare makes riveting reading.

When he was hired by the Cleveland Indians in 1968, Dark explains how he set to work undermining the man who hired him, general manager Gabe Paul, because he wanted Paul’s job himself. “I was…itching to make a team in my own image, the way Leo Durocher had the Giants in 1951,” Dark writes. Durocher was a manager Dark played for and admired without accepting his adage about nice guys finishing last. Yet now here was Dark stabbing his friend and benefactor in the back.

Add to this the fact he quickly discovered how impossible the jobs of field manager and general manager were for one person alone. For example, there were no “buffers” between dealing with the players on the field and handling their contracts. When one player pressed Dark for a raise, and Dark the general manager said no, Dark the field manager had to convince the player it wasn’t personal. It was an ego trip, he readily admits, and it took him losing both his Cleveland jobs before he began to come around:

As it developed, I doubt if I could have created more resentment in Cleveland if I hired a public relations firm and told it to go out and wreck my reputation. By the time I got through alienating everybody I was hard put to find a single supporter.

How did Dark get it together? According to When In Doubt, it was mostly thanks to Jackie. After he was dismissed from the Indians with two years to go on his contract, he and Jackie moved to Florida with her two young children, whom Dark adopted. By now, he was spending most of his time on the golf course, eating too much, and disciplining his adopted son and daughter with a zeal he admits was more ego-inspired than rational.

Then, one day, Dark finally accepted Jackie’s invitation to attend a Bible class: I wore my golf clothes to the class. I had scheduled a game immediately after, so I sat in the back in case I needed to make a quick getaway. Baptists are notoriously long-winded.

The result was “a voyage of discovery,” one that drew Dark closer to his wife, his children, and ultimately as he saw it, to his God. For all Dark writes about handling pitchers or the virtues of aggressive managing, it’s here he wants to make his strongest impression. I think he does.

Dark decided then that he was in God’s hands, and whatever He wanted would be fine. This was severely challenged by what happened next: Dark got a call from Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley.

Dark had worked for Finley before, and it had been quite an experience. One night he was fired, rehired with a raise, and then fired. That was fast, even for Finley, but not uncharacteristic. The mercurial owner went through managers like potato chips; even with a two-time World Championship team he couldn’t resist rocking the boat.

Dark’s dilemma as the guy coming into all this was more than most. He not only had to appease Finley, but as a Christian, he had to love the guy, too.

I found Dark’s memoir engaging in whole, But the part that really pulled me in was this, his account of helming the Oakland Athletics in 1974-75. He had to deal with angry players, rebellious coaches, and a nasty owner. And he had to be Mr. Nice Guy if he was going to adhere to his rediscovered faith. You could almost make a sitcom out of it.

Dark, at left, arm-in-arm with Oakland Athletics outfielder Reggie Jackson. Dark admits to problems with other A's players but describes Jackson as someone who responded both to Dark's patient management style and his Christian faith. Image from https://whitecleatbeat.com/2014/11/13/manager-74-75-alvin-dark-passes-away/.

Not that Dark didn’t produce. At the beginning of the season, he convinced second-baseman Dick Green to stick around another year, keeping together an excellent infield unit. He also built a good relationship with Catfish Hunter, the pitching ace who won 25 games that season. Dark worked hard to make connections to his black and Latino players, overlooked transgressions he had fined in prior stints, and managed to smooth Finley’s prickly feathers.

The result was something no team other than the New York Yankees ever accomplished: A third consecutive World Championship.

This was to be the capstone in Dark’s baseball career. He did manage the Athletics to another first-place finish in 1975 (without Hunter), but Finley had had enough of his Bible-thumping and sent Dark packing after the team lost the American League Championship Series to the Boston Red Sox in three games. There would be another season managing after that, in San Diego, but Dark was fired there, too, in the middle of spring training. He died in 2014, at the age of 92.

When In Doubt, Fire The Manager is a breezy read, helped immeasurably by Dark’s amiable tone and self-deprecation. It dwells more on the religion aspect than I would have liked, but you can hardly describe the book as preachy. As it continues into the Oakland phase of his career, having Dark’s faith in the forefront gives the book a sense of purpose. Earlier chapters tend to meander somewhat from topic to topic and you get a sense of Dark dictating this to Underwood with little editing.

The end result, while a tad too loose and conversational, adds to the easy-going quality that kept me reading even when the focus meandered from where I wanted it. I can’t say When In Doubt, Fire The Manager is a standout baseball memoir, but as a testimony of a man living his faith through trials both self-made and otherwise, it passed the time quite well.