The Nice Guy, the Bully and the Kiss

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Hello, listeners.

Exciting news.

Today, you can enjoy a double dose of Malefactors and Meltdowns.

In honor of my new mini-series on the art of fairness, I have not just one, but two cautionary tales for you.

Straight after this episode, you'll be able to listen to another story on this feed all about an astonishing race to build a skyscraper in just 13 months.

And now, on with our first episode.

1928 and Leo DeRoscha is a new player on the feigned New York Yankees baseball team.

He's slight in build and not especially fast.

And now, rounding first base and heading as quickly as he can to second, he can see his opponent, glove ready, is about to slam his foot down on the base.

If he does that before DeRosha gets there, then DeRosha is out.

DeRosha can try diving diving headfirst at the base to get there before his opponent, but he knows he's not going to be fast enough.

So he takes a different approach.

He has sharp spikes on the bottom of his shoes, ostensibly just for grip as he runs, but they can also serve as a powerful weapon.

He leaps feet forward towards the base.

As he hits the ground and slides, he raises his feet high.

When he makes contact, the spikes gouge hard into his opponent's leg, tearing open the skin, hitting the bone.

DeRocha stands up, brushes himself off.

He's made it, but he's gained something more important than second base.

He's gained a reputation.

Next time, his opponents are going to think twice about even trying to get in his way.

Leo DeRoscha became one of the best-known baseball managers of the 20th century, famous for saying that nice guys finish last.

But is that true?

That's what I'll explore today, with help from my friend David Badanis.

He's written about this idea in his book, The Art of Fairness, The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean.

David also has some first-hand experience with DeRocher, for everything came to a test in 1969, when DeRocher was managing in Chicago and David Badanis was there.

I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to Cautionary Tales.

This is Cautionary Tales, and I'm joined in the studio by David Badanis himself.

Welcome, David.

Hello, sir.

Now, you were never formally introduced to DeRosha, but I understand you spent lots of time at games that he managed, right?

Oh, 1969 was a beautiful year.

I was in my last year of elementary school, and school was a bit boring.

So, I spent a lot of time with my friends going down to watch the Cubs games.

It was a rougher area where the stadium was.

It was a little bit scary, but we got used to it.

And before long, we weren't scared.

We were accepted.

And we'd stay late after the games to help clean the stands.

That got us free tickets for the next day.

That's not a bad gig.

So what was it like seeing DeRosha in action?

It was exciting.

It was the peak of our life to that time.

Pretty often we'd stop what we were doing, cleaning up in the stands, and we'd look down and we'd watch him do interviews after the game.

It was a beautiful, beautiful setting.

The field was empty below us.

There was just open, green space right in the middle of Chicago.

He'd be alone with the journalists or sometimes a single camera crew.

At other times, when we got there early, we'd come right to the edge of the field and we'd watch him organizing the players.

He'd comment on batting practice, stuff like that.

One of the star pitchers was from Canada.

Well, my dad had grown up in Canada.

And a couple of times I got his attention, and the pitcher would smile at me.

I kind of like to imagine that DeRoshier saw that and frowned.

He always looked ticked off if anyone interrupted what he was doing.

But honestly, that could just be a later memory.

But DeRocher hadn't begun in Chicago, had he?

No, we always thought of him as a New Yorker.

That's where he had played.

That's where he'd coached when he was younger.

Chicago had strong players, but we hadn't made it to the World Series in ages.

There was a lot of paying being a Cubs fan.

We had a beautiful field.

It was the oldest in the National League.

It dated from before World War I.

There were old red bricks.

There was ivy on the outfield wall.

The scoreboard was actually turned by hand.

And there were no big parking lots outside.

You were right next to city apartments, and they crowded in right to the edge of the stadium.

People who lived in those buildings were really lucky.

They would sometimes rent out their windows or rent out their roof space so cheapskates could get a view.

So we had all this, beautiful stadium, good players, but we never ever won.

Leo DeRocher was brought in to fix that.

So is it fair to say that he was your hero?

He really, really was.

I was 12 and Chicago was proud of being a solid blue-collar city.

And so here was this guy.

He was tough.

He was matter-of-fact.

He looked exasperated almost all the time.

But then he'd sort of ease up.

He'd almost be smiling at his own exasperation.

We thought that was kind of cool.

Sports writers really liked him, at least most of the time.

There's a feeling he might be a son of a bitch, a curmudgeon, but he was a lovable one.

And everyone knew his quote, that nice guys finish last.

It seemed pretty likely his approach would work.

In mid-summer, our cubs were way in front.

Okay, and forgive me, I'm not a baseball expert, so for people like me who might not know, just remind me how the baseball season works.

That is a totally fair question.

If you asked me about rugby or soccer, I would not know.

I would even use the wrong word for soccer.

Baseball starts in the spring.

It goes through an incredibly hot summer, especially if you live in Chicago.

And it finishes usually in September, and then there's playoffs in October.

Well, to get ahead, Chicago needed to be first in their division.

That would get us to the playoffs.

And if we won those, then we could maybe get into the World Series.

Okay.

Well, it was a good time.

We were in front, and there wasn't much competition.

The second-placed team was the New York Mets.

They were really, really far behind.

Also, the manager of the Mets was the opposite of DeRocher.

His name was Gil Hodges, and he was known as the nicest man in baseball.

We weren't worried.

But there was something else for me on the line, too.

I had a girlfriend at the time, or a young lady who went with our group to the Cubs games, and I hoped she would be a girlfriend.

And I was confident she would because she whispered to me that I was going to get a kiss, my very first kiss, if the Cubs won.

Wow.

Okay, so this is the crucial summer.

It's the test of DeRosha's maxim that nice guys finish last.

Hodges is a nice guy.

DeRosha isn't.

And it looked like Hodges would lose, and DeRosha would be proven right about nice guys.

But

with that kiss on the line, there was still time for everything to change.

David, you've got me curious about DeRosha now.

What was he like when he started out?

As a kid, I had no idea.

Later, as an adult, I looked back, I researched it.

Turned out, he grew up on the East Coast in the 1910s.

His parents were from Quebec.

So as a kid, he only spoke French.

When he went to school, he couldn't speak a word of English.

But he was good at sports.

Boy, was he good.

He was good in a particular way.

He was a small guy, but he had good reflexes and he could hustle.

He was really fast, and the thing is, the big thing, he never gave up.

Anything that would help him win, he would do.

He cheated.

He tried to intimidate umpires.

As we saw, he was famous for using his spikes to gouge opponents when he slid into base.

And did that kind of thing work?

Boy, did it work.

Even with his limited talent, he managed to get on one of the most famous teams of all time, the 1920s New York Yankees.

Babe Ruth was the star of the team, and he used to say that DeRocher couldn't hit the floor if he dropped a cigarette.

Oh, it's harsh.

It's harsh, but accurate.

He was a terrible hitter, but he kept hustling and threatening and taking shortcuts.

He used to say, I'd knock over my mother if she was rounding a base and I needed the winning run.

Later, he became manager with other teams in New York, and he led the New York Giants to two championships.

And had he mellowed?

In your dreams.

He got his players to act just like him.

It's kind of attractive when somebody's a bit of a jerk and leading your way and being a jerk wins.

You're allowed to be who you've always wanted to be.

He had his pitchers pitchers throw fastballs that would go right at the other team's heads.

At one point, this was brilliant, he set up a hidden telescope to steal the signals of his opponents right in the middle of the game.

And all the time, he kept on trying to intimidate umpires.

He'd also always have his players gouge opponents when they could.

All that was always going on.

He even liked saying that he meant it about his mother.

He would describe how when he went home, she was terribly hurt at what he said.

And, as he put it, for the rest of my my life, as long as I visited, she'd walk around with an injured air.

And I guess she had a right to.

God rest your soul, mom.

I'm afraid I would have knocked you over.

He doesn't sound like a very attractive man, so where does that lovable curmudgeon reputation come from?

Well, you have to think of it from the outside.

None of us really knew all the horrible details, certainly not in Chicago.

And to be honest, most baseball fans across America.

And someone who seems tough, it's pretty appealing if they're on your side.

When he managed the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s, the fans loved him.

He was salt of the earth, working hard.

They liked to think they were salt of the earth.

And boy, blue-collar jobs in America at the time were really hard work.

Well, it was the same thing in my Chicago in the 1960s.

They used to say that when America made half the steel in the world, Chicago made half the steel in America.

We were so proud of that.

People would go to the games, earthy fingers, sweaty, literally blue shirts.

DeRocher was one of us.

And DeRocher brought the first black player into the league, didn't he?

That's the other thing.

If you're strong-willed in one direction, you can be strong-willed in another.

In 1947, he was with Brooklyn, and he brought Jackie Robinson into the league, the very first black player in professional baseball.

There was really nasty segregation going on till then.

Black players just weren't allowed in the main leagues, but now, especially after World War II, seemed ridiculous.

And how did it go over?

Well, most of DeRocher's players were pretty decent about it, but some were from the South.

They did not like having a black man anywhere near them.

So they signed a petition, and that petition said, get rid of Jackie Robinson.

We will not play on a team with him.

DeRocher couldn't stand that.

He knew what it was like to be picked on.

He grabbed the players who signed the petition, and he yelled at them, and he screamed at them.

They could go F themselves as well as that effing petition.

If they didn't unsign it right now, they were fired.

That was going to happen.

No apology, no excuse.

Robinson stayed, and he was a great player.

DeRocher wanted to win.

Okay.

So toughness lets you get things done.

And not only winning, but forcing through these big, symbolic steps towards racial justice.

So DeRocher had a point.

It doesn't always pay to simply be nice.

If you want to get things done, you might need to be a little bit hard, even to be a bit obnoxious.

You're right, but it isn't the full story.

DeRocher loved it in New York, but something was about to happen there, something that would change everything for him.

And we'll hear all about that when Cautionary Tales returns in a moment.

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There's more to San Francisco with the Chronicle.

There's more food for thought, more thought for food.

There's more data insights to help with those day-to-day choices.

There's more to the weather than whether it's going to rain.

And with our arts and entertainment coverage, you won't just get out more, you'll get more out of it.

At the Chronicle, knowing more about San Francisco is our passion.

Discover more at sfchronicle.com.

Not all group chats are the same, just like not all atoms are the same.

Adam Brody, for example, uses WhatsApp to plan his grandma's birthday using video calls, polls to choose a gift, and HD photos to document a family moment to remember.

All in one group chat.

Makes grandma's birthday her best one yet.

But Adam Scott group messages with an app that isn't WhatsApp.

And so the photo invite came through so blurry, he never even knew about the party.

Yeah, grandma still won't talk to me.

It's time for WhatsApp.

Message privately with everyone.

We're back.

I am in the studio with David Badanis, author of The Art of Fairness.

And we're talking about whether Leo DeRocha was right that nice guys finish last.

Now, David, we've known each other a very long time, and you've been interested in these ideas for, I think, as long as I've known you, 25 years or so.

Yeah, to really write about something well, or to write deeply, at least for me, I have to really care about it.

And I think it comes from way back when I was a kid.

I really hated the idea that terrible people could succeed.

Bullies succeeding at school, dictators succeeding in politics.

I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in Chicago not long after World War II.

A huge number of people who'd survived the death camps were all around us.

They had tattoos on their forearms, my barber, people at the local store, pretty much everybody.

And they weren't old.

They were in their 30s.

Anyways, history showed that terrible people often win.

So I thought maybe I was being naive about wanting the other side to succeed.

That's what made me get into this book, The Art of Fairness.

I wanted to find out what are the actual limitations of being a jerk, of being horrible.

And then the other side, what are the strengths of, if not being merely nice, at least being fair?

What are those strengths?

And since I knew about DeRocher from first-hand experience, that's what brought me to this story.

I remember when you first told me this idea for a book, and I just idolized you then, David.

Of course, I still idolize you, but I hadn't written a book, and I just thought to write a book would be the coolest thing ever.

One of the early ideas was that you were going to have it reversible.

So one side said, nice guys finish first, and the other side said nice guys finish last and you were going to explore these different ideas.

In the end of course it ended up being called the art of fairness.

It's such a rich topic for a book.

There's so much to explore because there's just no one way to answer the question.

Well that's actually true and if we're honest about ourselves the kindest people have jerky sides underneath.

Unless somebody's a total psychopath, they'll often be kind or reasonable.

Yeah, the idea of a book that would open from different sides, they used to do that with science fiction books in the 50s and 60s and the cheap magazines.

And I got the idea from William Blake, songs of innocence, songs of experience.

Oh, yeah.

You take the same project and come in in different directions.

I was always fascinated about that.

Yeah.

But as we discussed it, at the time I was really into game theory.

So there's a mathematical way of thinking about cooperation.

And of course, there is that side to it.

You know, you can approach it as a mathematician or as a scientist, as an economist.

But you can draw in all of these other possible stories stories as well and bring the arts, bring history into this topic.

That actually threw me at the beginning.

My own background was in math, and I tried to do it very formally, this book.

I tried to go through the logic behind it, and I found that didn't really hold.

There's a subtlety of human interaction.

So in a sense, you can only learn from experience.

It's really weird.

I remember when I was a kid, I was really irritated.

I would say to people, well, tell me exactly why and what to do, and it follows.

It was like you plug numbers into a math equation and the result's automatic.

Why couldn't I plug certain principles into my own life and everything would be good?

I have some very friendly people on YouTube who will happily sell you three or five or ten principles that will sort out your life, but it never works like that, does it?

It never, never works.

To plug a good advice into what we actually do, that's what's hard.

Advice is easy to state, but really hard to carry out.

You need practical experience.

But at the risk of introducing spoilers, I am guessing, since you've written an entire book about the art of fairness, I'm guessing that DeRoche's maxim, nice guys finish last.

That's not always right, even if sometimes it works well.

My greatest pleasure was finding the exceptions.

When my oldest boy was a teenager, He asked me before going into the world, he said, Dad, all the stuff we've learned, is it true?

And I genuinely didn't know.

I've done very little in the outside world.

So I said, I'll take a look.

And he was young and naive and believed that I would find out.

Anyways, this book is part of the story.

And it turns out that when you start acting like a jerk, it can be really hard to stop.

You get used to doing whatever you want, to getting your way just by pushing, just by pushing hard against other people.

So speaking of other people, DeRocher had...

a rival.

He had this rival manager.

And this rival had a very, very different approach to DeRocher.

Ah, that was Gil Hodges.

Now, in 1969, he was the manager of the New York Mets.

That was our arch competitor.

Ooh, boo, hiss.

But he actually knew DeRocher really well.

Hodges was a little bit younger than DeRocher, and back in the 1950s, he'd been a player on one of DeRocher's teams.

But yet, he was a totally different character.

In what way?

DeRocher, I think, was born with something wrong with him.

Gil Hodges was a coal miner's son, and he'd served in World War II.

He was a decorated combat marine.

Everything he'd always done was about solidarity, about cooperation, about working together.

As a player, he'd take the time to coach others who needed it.

He was aggressive enough when he was hitting and running, he was a really good player, but he never mocked teammates who were having a bad stretch.

DeRocher always had to cheat to succeed.

Not Hodges.

He could get by on pure talent.

He never jabbed his spikes into anyone's legs.

And of course, he interrupted his playing career and lost several years of salary to serve in World War II.

That was something Mr.

DeRocher very carefully avoided.

When DeRocher was a manager, he used Hodges because Hodges was talented.

But he never understood why Hodges insisted on those soft attitudes, being helpful to others, playing a game by the rules, even being willing to serve your country.

Goodness me.

And so later on, when Hodges himself was a manager, how did he behave then?

One of the great things is, as you know, Tim, a lot of people, power goes to their head.

Hodges stayed the same guy.

He stayed the opposite to DeRocher.

Now, again, that doesn't mean he was soft.

That's what DeRocher and people like him kept getting wrong.

Coal mining families, combat Marines, these are not weak people.

The thing is, Hodges was fair.

It always meant a lot to him.

When he was managing the New York Mets in that big year of 1969, one of his star players in the outfield was slacking off.

It was near the end of a long night game.

Well, that was unfair to the other players.

Hodges knew that, so he walked all the way across the field, in front of the fans, in front of the TV cameras, and then, with that player, he walked all the way back.

A replacement was going to take his place.

Well, it was embarrassing for the player, but Hodges didn't rub it in.

That was the fair thing.

He said that from the next day on, the incident would be entirely forgotten, that he'd treat the player with as much respect as ever.

And he did.

That player, Cleon Jones, he knew he'd messed up.

He played his hard out for the team after that.

So Hodges sounds firm but fair, and he sounds like someone who could quietly earn respect rather than demanding it by screaming.

Yes, that's the contrast with DeRocher.

Hodges wouldn't pick on someone weaker than him, but DeRocher, he loved doing that.

Remember, he was terrified of finishing last in anything.

There must have been some internal weakness.

He needed to dominate.

One time, right at the end of World War II, a fan was mocking him.

DeRocher hated that sort of thing.

So he got an off-duty policeman to lead the fan to a little room behind the dugout.

It was secluded, it was out of sight, and then DeRocher gave a signal.

The policeman was going to double the fan over, so he hit him with a blackjack.

What's a blackjack?

A blackjack is like a troncheon, but much meaner and often with a big, heavy metal tip.

Well, after the policeman did that, the fan was weak.

So DeRocher got to work.

He started punching him in the face.

The fan tried to get away, but he was a a veteran actually of World War II.

He was wounded.

He had a damaged leg.

So DeRocher kept a hold with one hand, and with the other hand, he pulled his fist back and he punched him in the face, and he punched him in the face over and over, breaking his jaw.

I have had the joy and misfortune of spending a certain amount of my life around boxing rings.

It takes a lot of work to break somebody's jaw.

Even the policeman thought that was too much.

What are you doing, Leo?

he said.

That's from his testimony in court later.

He repeated it, what are you doing?

But even the policeman was too scared of DeRosher to stop him.

The fan was in hospital for weeks.

It went to court.

Which means it's all over for DeRosher, surely.

Yeah, right.

This was New York City.

Almost all the jurors were Brooklyn Dodgers fans.

They determined and thought about the case for something like 11 minutes.

DeRocher was cleared.

DeRocher was cleared.

I suppose that figures.

So he got away with it.

And his treatment of his players sounds very different to the way Hodges behaved, too.

It certainly was.

DeRosier had a lot of baseball knowledge to share.

And one of the strengths about being a jerk is that you can actually be objective.

If a famous player was weak, he'd bench him.

If an unknown player was strong, he'd let him play.

So that part of it was good.

On the other hand, he couldn't stop from bullying everyone, absolutely everyone, including players on his own team.

And since he loved spending money, and he had a tendency to get married, and then divorced, and then married, and then divorced, he did that about three or four times.

From all that, he was in debt a lot.

So he started cheating when he played cards with his own players and he'd cheat when he played craps games with them, throwing the dice.

He knew a little about how to do that already, but he liked hanging out with gangsters and he learned more.

So he learned more about how to cheat.

He certainly did.

He got really good at it.

And you know what he found?

Cheating against guys who were grown up, who had been playing ball, lived in New York or big cities for a while.

Those guys were really hard to hustle.

So he looked at sweet boys just coming in from the farms.

America was much more rural than it is now.

And he would tell these boys, you want to make it in New York City.

Here's an easy way.

There's a card game.

The rules are very simple.

But you got to bet big, kid.

You got to bet big.

So he would start cheating not on small bets, but for huge stakes.

Finally, the baseball commissioner got rumors of this, and he told him to stop.

Leo DeRocher was unimpressed when anybody told him to stop.

He kept going.

In one craps game, he rigged the dice so much that he nearly bankrupted a leading pitcher.

But that was against Hicks.

When he tried keeping up with professional gamblers, he wasn't so lucky.

He kept on losing, and he kept on losing, and it meant he needed to rig games even more than he ever had before.

And whenever the administrators tried to rein him in, well, he let sports writers know what he felt about the big wigs in the offices.

Because of that, in the the late 1940s, DeRocher got suspended for an entire season.

He was allowed back the following year, but that was his big weakness.

He'd really set up an enemy.

The powers that be had it in for him.

Because of the gambling?

Mostly, but also because of the way he kept doing whatever worked.

In 1953, for example, there was an opposing team that had a player who was very effective.

A player was Carol Farillo.

He was the best hitter in the National League, a dangerous opponent for DeRocher's team.

Well, DeRocher wanted to get him out of the game.

So he had his own pitcher hit Farillo with a pitch.

And then DeRocher wagged his finger at him, mocking what had happened.

Farrillo was furious.

He charged into the dugout.

That was exactly what De Rocher hoped.

And so, in the safety of the dugout, DeRocher, or maybe some players he'd arranged in advance, they very quickly shattered Farrillo's wrist.

The poor guy was out for the entire season.

The competition was now easier.

Wow.

So he sounds like someone who would stop at absolutely nothing to win.

He was.

But that meant winning was the only thing he had to offer.

The moment he stopped winning, nobody was going to give him a second chance.

There was no loyalty, there was no friendship.

So when the New York Giants that he was managing, when they had a poor season in 1955, he was out.

Fired.

He'd been in New York since Babe Ruth's Yankees back in the 1920s.

So what was he going to do now?

Other teams didn't want to hire him, or at least the top teams didn't.

The gambling, the violence, they knew about that.

It was too much.

And he wasn't going to let anyone see him be weak, so he wasn't going to beg.

What he said instead was, I've had enough.

I'm retiring from baseball.

But by 1969, when you are about to turn 13, DeRoche is back on the scene with the Chicago Cubs, right?

That's it.

When he was fired in New York, there wasn't a lot he could do.

He tried broadcasting, and he wasn't bad at it, but it didn't mean much to him, not after being right at the center in the stadium.

He was actually in an episode of a TV show with a talking horse.

Oh, classy.

Curiously, I remember that show, and I remember that horse.

My poor parents had to sit while we enjoyed it.

Anyways, for DeRocher, that sort of episode was enough.

Late in 1965, he was 61 years old, he signed up to manage the Chicago Cubs.

My Chicago Cubs.

So what did you make of all this at the time?

I was a kid, so I really only had the faintest hint.

He was famous.

He'd played with Babe Ruth.

He'd led New York teams to the World Series.

There was talk that he was rough, maybe too rough, but remember, this was Chicago.

We were proud of that.

And he didn't do much his first year, 1966.

The Cubs weren't that impressive a team yet.

They had one star player, Ernie Banks, but they had barely had a winning season in 20 years.

Like I said, we Cubs fans knew pain.

We were used to it.

But the thing is, he was a jerk, he was a curmudgeon, etc., etc., but he really was skilled.

He brought up promising youngsters.

He knew tactics very well.

In 1967, they did better.

1968 was also good.

And then came 1969.

That was your summer.

That it was.

I was 12.

I was about to turn 13.

The city had been through a lot.

Just the year before, there were terrible riots.

I remember on a big street just a few yards from my home watching Jeeps with barbed wire on them, National Guard troops with machine guns and a really fierce look in their face going down the street to where the riots were going to be.

Well, we were kind of a blue-collar city.

We liked the idea that we were tough, but we also liked the idea that we hung together.

This new manager, he seemed to be showing that was possible.

Being tough could unite everybody.

And you were hanging out, you were going to watch every game, although when you were supposed to be at school, school, schmool.

We thought of it more as guidelines.

The team got off to such a good start back in 1969, starting in April, it was kind of hard to resist.

And then in the summer, when we were still ahead and there was no school, we were almost living there.

And also, there was that promise of the kiss if the Cubs won the division.

Now, in mid-August, that seemed certain.

I was a very, very happy 12-year-old.

Hodges' New York Mets were well behind.

The season was just six weeks from ending.

They would have to undergo the greatest losing streak in the history of American baseball to miss out.

Hmm.

Well, there is about to be a showdown between Hodges and DeRosha, and there's a kiss on the line.

More on all of that after the break.

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Not all group chats are the same, just like not all atoms are the same.

Adam Brody, for instance, uses WhatsApp to pin messages, send events, and settle debates using polls with his friends, all in one group chat.

Makes our guys' night easier.

But Adam Scott group messages with an app that isn't WhatsApp, which means he still can't find that text from his friends about where to meet.

Hang on, still scrolling.

No, the address is here somewhere.

It's time for WhatsApp.

Message privately with everyone.

We're back.

I'm in the studio with David Badanis and David, casting your mind back to being 12 years old, that amazing summer.

The romance, the excitement, the thrill of being on a winning team.

That's how it seemed to you then.

What have you learned since then?

Well, there were a lot of things I didn't realize.

It's kind of nice being 12 years old and very, very innocent.

One of the things I didn't know was how callous DeRocher could really be.

Breaking that veteran's jaws, hanging around with gangsters, and these gangsters were pretty nasty people.

One of the men in a circle was Bugsy Siegel, a gangster famous for organizing contract killing and helping the mafia take over early Las Vegas.

Another thing I didn't realize was how much this season meant to DeRocher.

There were financial bonuses if you won, and there were even bigger bonuses if you got into the World Series.

He'd lost a lot of money in gambling, and he had his big lifestyle with all those divorces, and he needed his cash.

So what about his attitude to his players?

Is there any sign that he was starting to mellow?

Well, that's also what I had no idea about at the time.

At batting practice, he'd swear a little bit, but this was Chicago, who didn't swear.

What I missed was how vicious he was to the players.

The shortstop, Ron Santo, was Italian-American, and he also had diabetes.

In that era, he had to hide it.

Well, DeRocher kept on riding him and swearing right up to his face, calling him weak, using really vicious insults about Italian-Americans, but not in the sort of jokey way that some people might do for bonding.

It was deep, it was biting.

Santo was a calm guy, but even he cracked.

In the clubhouse one time, he grabbed DeRocher by the throat and he wanted to kill him.

His teammates had to pull him off.

So DeRocher is famous for bringing the black player Jackie Robinson on the team, but he's using these slurs against Italian Americans.

I'm trying to work out, was he a racist?

Was he not a racist?

It was probably mixed.

He was a DeRocherist.

Everyone knew about him bringing on Jackie Robinson.

That was good.

But the thing is, he didn't bring Robinson on because he was standing up for the principles of racial equality.

DeRochier never stood up for any principles.

He didn't even especially like Robinson.

He just wanted to win.

Robinson was a great player.

Turned out, a little bit later, Robinson had a problem with his weight, and DeRochier started insulting him so hard and so non-stop that even Jackie Robinson ended up hating him just as much as everyone else did.

Now, a true racist puts their race first.

DeRochier was simpler.

He just put himself first.

And above all, he wanted to win.

So did all this bullying help?

That's what gave me such pleasure when I looked into it properly for the book.

No, the bullying did not help.

He would demand too much.

He would go too far.

DeRochier kept his players going without replacement much, much longer than he should have.

Chicago is really hot in the summer, and it could be near 100% humidity.

Feels tropical.

But day after day, week after week, he wouldn't allow replacements.

That seems so counterproductive.

You're right.

I think he likes seeing his players get weaker and weaker.

It's kind of weird, but it made him feel strong.

And then there were the umpires.

Exactly.

In front of the TV cameras, he'd ham it up, he'd stand toe-to-toe, he would yell at them.

It seemed like a game.

But it was more than a game.

In quieter moments, when he was alone, away from the cameras, he'd really tried to undermine the umpires, saying the most personal things he could find find out about their private lives.

Now you've got to remember, there were barely any video reviews of calls then.

So the umpires had a lot of discretion, and making an enemy of them wasn't smart.

It certainly was not.

One sports writer wrote about it later, quote, whether or not Leo ever united the Cubs against the umpires, he certainly united the umpires against the Cubs, unquote.

And then, well, DeRocher also encouraged the most unruly of the fans, people I knew pretty well, to throw metal bolts or sometimes small stones at opposing players.

The other teams hated that.

And when they complained, DeRocher professed complete innocence.

Even so, despite all the counterproductive bullying, by mid-August, and the season's going to be over early October, by mid-August, as you said, Chicago was way ahead, I think nine games ahead.

So the only way they could lose would be if Hodges Mets had one of the greatest winning streaks in baseball history, and DeRocher's Cubs had one of the greatest losing streaks in baseball history.

You had to remind me, Tim, didn't you?

It was a mess.

It was a catastrophe.

It still, I swear to God, it still hurts.

The umpires hated DeRocher, and opposing players hated DeRocher, and his own team really, really hated him.

Because he had needed to feel strong and humiliate them, and he wouldn't give the starters a rest, they were getting exhausted.

It's not that they totally gave up.

They still had some pride.

They're professional athletes.

But by then, the constant bullying, the yelling, the unfairness, it was too much.

Everyone else was bringing their strongest game against Chicago.

Our players had to be on top.

They weren't.

When it first began to happen, the losing, we didn't realize what was going on.

Every team loses a bit.

And so that was okay.

But it kept on.

And when we hung out at the field edge during batting practice, before the games, there was this feeling that something was different.

The players were in a different zone.

There was less joking between them.

There was a kind of doggedness as they practiced.

We shared it too.

When my friends and I and the other kids from around the city, when we cleaned the stadium after the games, if anyone who was lifting the seats and sweeping down the garbage started to say, hey, they'd be okay, we'd all look at him.

You didn't talk about it.

If we were very quiet and very ordinary, maybe it would all go away.

And obviously, it did not all go away.

We'd been in first place for 155 consecutive days, and then we lost it all.

Everything fell apart.

The city was going to be united, and me and my school friends, we were getting more united.

But these players we'd look up to, the cubs who were going to make up for the past and finally, finally go all the way, they lost it.

Who could we trust?

Everything felt different at school, at home, everywhere.

The Mets won the division.

And

the kiss?

Pleased.

We were friends.

We were kids.

In a sense, it would have been nothing.

We even stayed friends.

But at the time, it just made everything worse.

And how far did Gil Hodges' team go?

Well, after beating us to take the National League East, they won the playoffs for the entire National League.

And then they were into the World Series against Baltimore.

I was listening to the series on the radio.

Now, the player that Hodges publicly reprimanded, Cleon Jones, in the fifth game, he gave his all in a spectacular catch that won the series for the New York Mets.

Mr.

DeRocher and my cubbies were nowhere to be seen.

David, my heart bleeds.

It is a tragedy, but on cautionary tales, we try to learn from tragedy.

So what is your conclusion from this story?

It's pretty simple.

Being too soft will not work.

But being too harsh, that's easily counterproductive too.

There is a path in between.

Being fair like Hodges, not a bully like DeRocher, this really can be the way to finish first.

David, it's been a joy.

Thank you so much for joining me.

A great pleasure.

David Badanis' wonderful book is The Art of Fairness.

It is available at all good bookshops, naturally, full of great stories, and every single one has a lesson about how to succeed without being a jerk.

We're going back to our usual format next episode, but we will be telling several stories inspired by the art of fairness.

So join me for stories of villains undone by their villainy, monstrous self-devouring egos, and accounts of the extraordinary power of decency.

Next time on Cautionary Tales.

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright.

This mini-series is based on David Badanis' book, The Art of Fairness, The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean, and it was written with David Badanis himself.

For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com.

The show is produced by Alice Fienes with Marilyn Rust.

The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise.

Sarah Nix edited the scripts.

Cautionary Tales features the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright.

The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Dilley, Greta Cohn, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey and Owen Miller.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.

It's recorded at Wardore Studios in London by Tom Berry.

If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review.

It does really make a difference to us.

And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at at pushkin.fm slash plus.

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