Darkness Falls

Alvin Dark, who won World Series as a player and as a manager but got fired for playing Ozzie Smith, has died at the age of 92. Dark was around the game so long he was the National League Rookie of the Year in 1948 for the Boston Braves, hitting .322 as the team won its first pennant in 34 years. His 9th inning single set up Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” in 1951, and Leo Durocher called him the “cement that holds the ball club together,” on the 1954 World Series champion New York Giants. In 1961, Dark was named manager of the Giants, and won the pennant the following year. The year after that, he made one of the most startlingly prescient comments in baseball history. Noting his weak-hitting pitcher Gaylord Perry, he said "They'll put a man on the moon before he hits a home run." On July 20, 1969, an hour after Neil and Buzz and Apollo 11 landed on the moon, Perry hit the first HR of his major league career. On the down side, in 1964, he said that the “Negro and Spanish-speaking players” on the team were not able to “perform up to the white players when it comes to mental alertness.” Hall of Fame voters disagreed and sent Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal and Orlando Cepeda from that team to Cooperstown. For what it’s worth, he claimed to have been misquoted, and both Jackie Robinson and Mays, who Dark had previously named team captain, came to his defense. He later got hired to manage the Kansas City A’s, got fired by Charles Finley for not defending the owner when players revolted against his capricious whims, got hired again by Finley and the A’s, now in Oakland, and led them to a third straight World Series championship in 1974, then got fired again 2 years later when the somewhat devout Finley was quoted as saying that “if (Finley) doesn’t accept Jesus Christ as his savior, he’s going to hell.” He managed the San Diego Padres in 1977, then got fired in spring training 1978, in part for insisting on playing a shortstop who had spent the previous year at lowly Walla Walla.