Leo’s Lip

Six Degrees of Separation is a concept I quite enjoy. It’s one of those exercises that shows just how connected we are to each other. It also puts into perspective how little time we have spent on this planet as a civilization. I once put that concept forward in baseball and called it Six Degrees of Satchel Paige, but that’s a tale for a different time. The concept of Six Degrees of Separation was brought to my mind courtesy of the 1973 Topps Leo Durocher manager card.

The card itself isn’t what caught my attention, although it’s a nice representation of The Lip. It’s a horizontal card with the left half taken up by a smiling bust of Durocher in his Houston Astros hat. It’s a bright color shot and the tanned Durocher is looking like a kindly gentleman who was spending his retirement working as a crossing guard.

It was a good move by Topps getting the Hall of Famer into their 1973 set after just 30 games, but they jettisoned him like a waste dump by United Airlines over the Pacific Ocean once he retired, shunning him in their ’74 edition. Instead, new Astros manager Preston Gomez was pictured along with the severed heads of four coaches in ‘74. 1973 Topps was Durocher’s last appearance on cardboard.

Durocher was only 67 years old on the card, but he might as well have been walking the Earth with Stegosauruses, as Durocher’s debut came with the 1925 Yankees. He was teammates with Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth and some dude named Pee-Wee Wanninger.

He was also teammates with Fred Merkle, of “Merkle’s Boner” fame. Durocher was in the league at the same time as Chief Bender, who debuted in 1903. Some of his other contemporaries in 1925 were Walter Johnson, Tris Speaker and Pete Alexander. Those guys were born in the 1880s! The oldest player in the league when Durocher debuted was a fellow named Jimmy Austin, who born in 1879 when there were only 38 states. So, to see a Durocher card sitting in the same set as Dusty Baker, a guy who is ripping through the postseason as we speak, warps the space-time continuum.

That got me wondering which player survived on cardboard the longest as an active player who was also set-mates with Durocher in 1973. The answer is really not surprising; it’s the knuckleballing mummy, Charlie Hough. Hough made it all the way to the 1995 Topps set and from the looks of things, it was a rough 22 years.

The card pictures Grandpa Hough with the Florida Marlins tossing what I hope is a warmup pitch. It’s clearly not a knuckleball and the blurry umpire in the background has his back turned. Hough’s jersey number 49 is prominent and I was disappointed to learn that was not his age at the time. He was 46, but looked every second of 146.

Durocher’s 1973 Topps card was the capstone for one of the legendary figures in the game. He was supposed to be the manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers when Jackie Robinson broke the color line but got himself suspended a few days before the season started for associating with known gamblers. He was the manager of the Giants when Bobby Thomson hit the Shot Heard ‘Round the World and was the guy who said, “Nice guys finish last,” or at least some variation of that. He was awed by Herman Munster’s raw power and tried to sign him to the Dodgers. He’s probably the only guy to have seen both Babe Ruth and J.R. Richard naked. Probably.

The bridge created by Durocher and Hough strands a full 70 years and that 1973 Topps set is where two completely different eras came to meet. It’s the point in time where the baseball equivalent of Cro-Magnon Man shook hands with his modern brethren. Charlie Hough played in the same season as Manny Ramirez. Durocher played in the same season as Ty Cobb. Yet somehow, they found themselves in the same 1973 Topps set, distorting time and making us all realize how insignificant human existence is in the history of our great planet.