Mr. Baseball

"The manager of the Brooklyn baseball club for 1944 will be Leo Durocher." Taylor Spink was right again.

Thirteen days before Dodger President Branch Rickey made last week's pronouncement, the editor & publisher of The Sporting News had gingerly suggested that behavior problems, not salary bickering, were separating Brooklyn's president and manager. Durocher's five-year record was good: one pennant, two seconds, two thirds. But last season the Dodgers had a player revolt, barely finished third. Lippy Leo was as flashy a figure along high-living Broadway as in Ebbets Field. Knowing Rickey's puritanism, many a sportswriter flatly forecast the lumps for Leo.

But The Sporting News thought that Durocher would promise to behave, that Rickey would offer a new contract at the same old pay ($25,000). As so often occurs in baseball, it turned out just as the News predicted. Again Taylor Spink had justified his nickname: "Mr. Baseball."

Smoke and Gloom. A stubby, stocky man of 54, with a bullet head and a grinding klaxon voice, John George Taylor Spink works seven days, six nights a week (Sunday nights off) fiercely turning out the weekly paper that is baseball's bible. In gloomy, smoke-stained offices on St. Louis' Tenth and Olive Streets, he explodes with ideas, runs up $1,400 monthly phone and telegraph bills and blasts forth the illimitable enthusiasm that makes The Sporting News so accurate and complete that even traditionally tight-fisted ballplayers buy it (15-c-) with their own money.

Spink's Uncle Al founded the News, in 1886. His father nursed it into the black. In 1914 Taylor Spink took over.

The Federal League was just starting. Spink was sure a third league meant baseball's ruin, and he was out in front in the fight that licked it. Then subscribers went off to World War I, and circulation dived to 5,000 until the American League bought 150,000 subscriptions for troops overseas. Three years later Spink was fighting so bitterly in exposing the White ("Black") Sox World Series scandals that the New York Life Insurance Company refused to insure his life.

Japs and Jumps. Spink worked like a souped-up bulldozer to make his paper the international gospel of the national game. (Before the war, the News had a sizable circulation in Japan.) He ran complete box scores from 18 leagues, coverage of 21 others, weekly resumes and statistics on every team down through class D. He developed a string of 250 correspondents (the outstanding sportswriter in every city that had a team) and kept them jumping with 1,000-word telegrams and phone calls at 4 a.m.

The News swamped all competition, became the oldest sport publication in the U.S. It also became a little gold mine.

Spink met World War II by changing his paper to a tabloid and introducing news of other sports, too. Circulation dipped only onefourth, to 125,000. Then Spink hit his homer: an eight-page edition for servicemen.

They Satisfy. Keen to cries for news of sport at home, the War Department each week buys 41,000 copies for overseas. Chesterfield cigarets distributes another 50,000 at camps in the U.S., and the American and National Leagues (and others) chip in for 58,000 more.

How the Army rates sport news as a morale builder was shown last month. In pre-and post-World Series issues, Taylor Spink and The Sporting News spread themselves on coverage. So did the War Department. They shipped 500,000 extra copies overseas.

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