Nice Guys Finish Last

0:00From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm Bob Garfield with Mike Volo, and today we, for the first time, discuss physical violence via cement mixer. Hey, Mikey. Hey, Bobby. How you doing? Splendid. Thank you. And your own self? I'm great. For now, I'm great. This is the second in a series of three bonus episodes, all inspired

0:30by our recent show on the word nice, which you can go back and listen to in the archive. Each of these bonus episodes feature a different idiom, each involving the word nice, and each one commonly associated with a specific person. We will untangle the facts from the fiction, in this case, regarding the phrase, nice guys finish last. I'm not a nice guy, so I wouldn't know anything about the truth of that assertion, but the question is, who said it?

1:04Well, I think, I think it was the famously feisty and intermittently criminal Los Angeles Dodgers manager Leo DeRocher, Leo DeLip, as they called him. Yes, yes. And that's who everybody associates that phrase with because he is believed to have coined it. In early July 1946, the Brooklyn Dodgers were playing the New York Giants at the old polo grounds in Manhattan. The Dodgers manager at the time was the infamous Leo DeRocher, who

1:40had a reputation for being fiery and argumentative. I'll put it this way, he's one of only three managers in baseball history to have been ejected a hundred times or more from a game over the course of his career. He fought with umpires, he fought with the press, he fought with everybody. So on that day in 1946, shortly before the game started, it was a night game, the Dodgers legendary announcer at the time,

2:14Red Barber, was in the dugout with some other reporters talking to DeRocher. Barber was baiting DeRocher. He was rage baiting him, we would say nowadays. Barber was trolling DeRocher. And at one point, Barber says, why don't you be a nice guy for a change? This set DeRocher off on a long screed about nice guys and how it doesn't pay to be one. Now, we have a lot of direct quotes of

2:47what exactly DeRocher said, because one of the print reporters who was there, a guy named Frank Graham, he took notes and he wrote about it the next day in his column. So here's just some of what DeRocher said that evening, as reported in the New York Journal American by Graham. He said, a nice guy, a nice guy. I've been around in baseball for a long time and I've known a lot of nice guys, but I never saw a nice guy who was any good when you needed him. He also said, I'll take the guys who

3:22aren't nice, the guys who would put you in a cement mixer if they felt like it. He also said, nice guys. I'm not a nice guy and I'm in first place. Nobody helped me to get there either, except the guys on this ball club and they ain't nice guys. He also said, the nice guys are all over there. He was pointing to the Giants dugout. The nice guys are all over there in last place. Ooh, sick burn. So DeRocher said all that and a lot more about nice guys, but noticed that he never

3:57quite said, nice guys finish last. But his diatribe, it took on a life of its own for the obvious reason that it was amazing, right? Cement mixers, I'm not a nice guy. The magazine Sporting News wrote a piece about it later that month under the headline, nice guys wind up in last place, scoffs Lippie. Again, his nickname. Baseball Digest reprinted the original column later that year and nice guys

4:30don't win pennants became a chant by Dodger fans in the ballpark that summer. In other words, this became a thing. Today we would say went viral. Yeah. Now the incredible irony to all of this is that DeRocher wrote a piece two years later for Cosmopolitan Magazine. For Cosmopolitan Magazine, eh? Yeah. Then I guess Newt Rockne was writing for Vogue. It's there, you can look in the archives. And it was under the headline, nice guys finish last. Now, whether DeRocher wrote the headline

5:09himself or more likely, I would guess, some editor at Cosmopolitan, nobody knows. But that's thought to be the first time that the phrase appears in that form. And it's attributed, whether right or wrong, true or not, to Leo DeRocher because the whole incident that took place in that dugout is what spurred that phrase eventually existing. And I guess it wasn't just the phrase, it was the truth of it, or at least the truthiness of it. It feels so right. The sentiment, yeah.

5:45So no surprise, at least in its pithiest iteration in Cosmo, you know, almost destined it to Catron. Yeah. And, you know, I should say the reason he wrote that piece was because he had a contract at the time to write a book about the Dodgers called Dem Bums. So it was a kind of preview of and publicity for the book. He never ended up writing the book, but he did write an autobiography in the mid-70s called, of course... Nice guys finish last.

6:15Yeah. So I think it's fair to attribute that one to Leo DeRocher, even though he never actually said it originally and may never have even coined it specifically himself. I think it's fair. Yeah, I agree. I mean, verbatim, no, but he certainly was the first to publicly express the sentiment, so it seems. Lexicon Valley was produced by Livia Bloom Ingram. Who has never finished last at anything in her life. Let's just put it that way.

6:50Yeah, I don't think she's nice enough for even second to last. Not even close. All right, Mikey, are we done here? Yeah, we are done. Later, Gator.