Stan Musial

by George Vecsey

  Not everybody was impressed. Among the spectators in those dwindling days of 1941 was Boris “Babe” Martin (real name Martinovich), a St. Louis–based catcher who had just led his league in hitting with .353 at Paragould, Arkansas, while Musial was slugging at nearby Springfield. Martin was sitting in the stands at Sportsman’s Park with a couple of scouts as they scrutinized Musial’s semi-defensive crouch.

  “When I saw him up there with that batting stance of his, I said, ‘He’ll never make it,’ ” recalled Martin, who would have a modest career of 69 major-league games.

  With all the injuries, manager Southworth kept using Musial. The proud franchise had not won a pennant since 1934, and the team was desperate to catch up with the Dodgers.

  On September 20, the Globe-Democrat praised Musial in a subhead, “Terry Moore and Musial Star at Bat,” after Musial went three for three with a walk.

  In a doubleheader on September 21, Musial batted ten times, made six hits and scored six runs, and also made three excellent catches, but his chief contribution was an alert romp on the bases. With two outs, Musial was on second base when Coaker Triplett beat out a feeble swinging roller equidistant from the pitcher, catcher, and third baseman.

  James P. Dawson of the New York Times, in town covering the race, referred to Musial as “the 20-year-old rookie sensation” who was “racing madly from second, rounded third on high, thundering right on over the plate before the Cubs woke up.” Dawson noted that “the amazing rookie from Rochester” had scored the winning run.

  The Cardinals were off the next day, which gave Robert L. Burnes some space to address this phenomenon in the Globe-Democrat. “Musial is really the answer to someone’s prayer. His terrific hitting since joining the club last week has insured at least two triumphs. He can just about do everything.” Burnes added: “The only thing that one could still want to know is whether or not he can cook. And Southworth is willing to wait to find out about that.”

  In the manic days of late September, the Cardinals were delighted to get help from a stranger. There was no all-sports television or radio in those days, no Internet, no glut of information, no great maw to be filled. More than sixty years later, when the Cardinals’ Rick Ankiel morphed from a wild failed pitcher into a powerful center fielder, he was a national sensation. In 1941, people hardly knew who Musial was.

  As the team embarked by train on its final road trip of the season, Terry Moore, one of the most respected captains of any era, chatted with the young player in the parlor car, just to get to know him.

  Musial politely noted they had actually met in Georgia in March, from a distance of sixty feet six inches.

  “It can’t be,” Moore blurted. “You’re not that kid left-hander.”

  Moore called to Mize, the big soft-spoken Georgian known as the “Big Cat,” and said, “Hey, John, you won’t believe this! Musial is the left-hander who threw up those long home-run balls at Columbus this spring.”

  Looking back at Musial’s debut, Moore would say: “Well, when I saw him in a Cardinal uniform, I just couldn’t believe it. At the start of the season, he is a humpty-dumpty, bum-armed kid pitcher who I tag for a home run, a guy who is almost as low in the pro leagues as you can get. And at the end of the same year, he is a big-league outfielder!”

  The first opponent on the road was the Pirates, Musial’s hometown team, which had ignored him until after he had signed. On September 23, he hit his first major-league home run in Forbes Field, and after the game he brought his father into the clubhouse. Lukasz and his son had grown close again, and Musial joyously introduced him to his new teammates.

  “Pop and I may have been shy, but we were two happy, proud Poles that evening,” Musial wrote in his autobiography. Two nights later, neighbors from Donora gave him gifts before the Cardinals-Pirates game.

  The Cardinals did not catch the Dodgers. When Southworth rested his regulars in the meaningless final game, Bob Burnes led off his story by writing: “A group of unidentified citizens, vaguely resembling in makeup and uniform the Cardinals of 1941 …” One of those “unidentified citizens” had just hit .426 in twelve games.

  Think about it, Broeg bubbled years later: if Rochester had been knocked out earlier, Stanley might have had time to help the Cardinals win the pennant.

  14

  MEET ME AT THE FAIR

  ST. LOUIS was the perfect place for Musial—a grand old American city with status, with history, with shoe factories and breweries and railroads and river traffic, and with two baseball teams, the Cardinals and the Browns. It was a baseball town that would appreciate his talents. Fans knew how to idolize their heroes in St. Louis, did not drive them away with expectations and disillusionment.

  “It’s where he played, where he moved, where he lived, and he’s still there,” said William O. DeWitt Jr., the principal owner of the Cardinals since 1996, whose father was involved in St. Louis baseball as an official and owner going back to 1916.

  DeWitt is a Yale graduate with an MBA from Harvard, just like his former oil partner, George W. Bush. He knew the town; he chose to buy the Cardinals, to invest in St. Louis.

  “It has that that midwestern culture, family orientation, general respect for people,” DeWitt said, adding that it has culture, art, medicine, schools—and “the feel of a smaller city, the perfect size.”

  The Cardinals were a major force in the city, DeWitt added, because of their “generational continuity” from the 1920s into the twenty-first century. And, DeWitt said, Musial was the great icon of perhaps the most visible institution of the city.

  “As I travel around, people from New York tell me they are Cardinal fans because their father was a Stan Musial fan,” DeWitt said. He told of baseball fans who visited the Cardinals’ spring base in Jupiter, Florida, and flocked around the aging Musial, the symbol of the sport and the city.

  As he did throughout his life, Musial recognized when he was well off and resisted trade opportunities later in his career.

  “I was able to make my home, educate my kids, good schools, nice city. Got involved in civic duties, charities. Great people. Great fans. My wife and I love St. Louis.”

  THE CITY still had an air of entitlement when Musial arrived. The area had been explored by the French in the seventeenth century, shunted from the Spanish Empire to Napoleon Bonaparte, then sold to the United States in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase. Known as the “Gateway to the West,” St. Louis was the starting point for wagon trains, the link for river trade near the confluence of the Missouri and the Mississippi.

  At the start of the twentieth century, St. Louis was the fourth-largest city in the United States, with 575,238 residents, behind New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, just ahead of Boston. In succeeding decades, it would be fourth, sixth, and in 1940, just before Musial arrived, seventh.

  By 2000, St. Louis would be fifty-third among American cities, with a population of 348,189, and by 2010 its population would fall to 319,294, a drop of 8 percent.

  But in Musial’s early seasons, the city still had an aura of glamour, the outer edge of eastern civilization. In 1944, Americans would be charmed by the movie Meet Me in St. Louis, with Judy Garland and other elegantly clad passengers riding the handsome trolley out to the 1904 World’s Fair. Everybody knew this song:

  Meet me in St. Louis, Louis,

  Meet me at the fair,

  Don’t tell me the lights are shining

  Any place but there;

  We will dance the Hoochee Koochee,

  I will be your tootsie wootsie.

  If you will meet me in St. Louis, Louis,

  Meet me at the fair.

  The 1904 fair was still vivid when Musial came along. It had commemorated the one hundredth anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase—with an added attraction. Chicago had been picked to hold the third version of the modern Summer Olympic Games in 1904, but the deal fell through, so the Games were moved to St. Louis. The Games were a makeshift event, with athletes just showing up an
d competing, nothing like today’s highly professional extravaganza, but they were the Olympics, all the same, on the fairgrounds in St. Louis. To this day, St. Louis is one of three American cities to have held the Summer Games, with Los Angeles having hosted them twice, in 1932 and 1984, and Atlanta in 1996.

  The fair created an image for St. Louis that would last half a century and longer. Musial was in the right place at the right time, as he often was.

  If the Pirates had discovered him ahead of the Cardinals, or if he had been able to renege on Lukasz’s hard-gained signature, he would always have been the kid from the Mon Valley. The fate of the Pirate franchise—the fate of the entire steel industry, the entire region—would have somehow rested on his shoulders.

  Or suppose Musial had played for one of the New York teams—three of them back then. He would have been celebrated at first for his smile and his base hits, but I know my hometown, and eventually the crowd would have demanded something more from him—more power, more championships, more quotes, more public visibility, some scandal, some controversy, something extra.

  He would have been scorned for not having Willie Mays’s perceived glee (one of the great misconceptions of the sport), Joe DiMaggio’s inscrutable hauteur, Mickey Mantle’s self-destructiveness (the red rising on Mantle’s neck when he struck out), or Duke Snider’s brash sizzle. New York would have wanted more out of Musial. Not sure what—just more.

  Sometimes athletes find their proper karma in their first city. Joe Namath, from the Pittsburgh area, was destined to become Broadway Joe in New York. Earvin Johnson from Michigan was born to perform showtime magic in Los Angeles. Ted Williams, from San Diego, probably needed Boston’s biting damp wind—and its biting damp “knights of the keyboard” as Williams called the city’s sportswriters—to heighten his inner churl.

  When Musial arrived at the end of the 1941 season, St. Louis was a crossroads, a jumping-off point, the Last Chance Saloon. The population was resting momentarily, not even halfway across the continent, ready to rip, like the mighty Mississippi about to go over the levees. The city was a worthy subject for American writers.

  Thomas Wolfe almost surely never heard of Stan Musial, inasmuch as Wolfe died at the age of thirty-seven, of pneumonia and tuberculosis of the brain, on September 15, 1938, when Musial was still a wild and anonymous left-hander in Class D ball. But in his autobiographical novel, Look Homeward Angel, whose title still resounds in the American soul, Wolfe captured the essence of Musial’s sport and Musial’s adopted home.

  St. Louis had a pull on Wolfe, a weight of sorrow, a tinge of glamour. One of his brothers, Grover Cleveland Wolfe, had died in an epidemic during the 1904 World’s Fair and Olympics, while the Wolfe family was running a boardinghouse there. Wolfe would always remember the bustle and clang of St. Louis.

  In his novel, Wolfe depicted a young writer named George Webber—known as “Monk,” for his simian appearance—returning from New York to his home in the hills of North Carolina for the funeral of his aunt Maw. On the train he runs into a boyhood friend, Nebraska Crane, part Cherokee, who now plays baseball for an unnamed team in the Bronx. Crane tells his friend he is beginning to feel old at thirty-one, and when Webber expresses incredulity, Crane goes into a soliloquy about the brutal competition of baseball, the ravages of time, and the draining climate of St. Louis:

  “Monkus,” he said quietly, turning to his companion, and now his face was serious and he had his black Indian look—“you ever been in St. Looie in July?”

  “No.”

  “All right, then,” he said very softly and scornfully. “An’ you ain’t played ball there in July. You come up to bat with sweat bustin’ from your ears. You step up an’ look out there to where the pitcher ought to be, an’ you see four of him. The crowd in the bleachers is out there roastin’ in their shirt-sleeves, an’ when the pitcher throws the ball it comes from nowheres—it comes right out of all them shirt-sleeves in the bleachers. It’s on top of you before you know it. Well, anyway, you dig in an’ git a toehold, take your cut, an’ maybe you connect. You straighten out a fast one. It’s good fer two bases if you hustle. In the old days you could’ve made it standin’ up. But now—boy!” He shook his head slowly. “You can’t tell me nothin’ about that ballpark in St. Looie in July! They got it all growed out in grass in April, but after July first”—he gave a short laugh—“hell!—it’s paved with concrete! An’ when you git to first, them dogs is sayin’, ‘Boy, let’s stay here!’ But you gotta keep on goin’—you know the manager is watchin’ you—you’re gonna ketch hell if you don’t take that extra base, it may mean the game. And the boys in the press box, they got their eyes glued on you, too—they’ve begun to say old Crane is playin’ on a dime—an’ you’re thinkin’ about next year an’ maybe gittin’ in another Serious—an’ you hope to God you don’t git traded to St. Looie. So you take it on the lam, you slide into second like the Twentieth Century comin’ into the Chicago yards—an’ when you git up an’ feel yourself all over to see if any of your parts is missin’, you gotta listen to one of their second baseman’s wisecracks: ‘What’s the hurry, Bras? Afraid you’ll be late for the Veterans’ Reunion?’ ”

  “I begin to see what you mean, all right,” said George.

  Other writers took their measure of St. Louis, but from a distance. Kate Chopin, T. S. Eliot, Tennessee Williams, and William S. Burroughs had all lived in the Central West End, but as writers will do, they departed, putting their youthful grievances in print.

  Asked why he did not remain in his hometown, Eliot said: “I didn’t like being dead that much.”

  Williams wrote the play The Glass Menagerie from the viewpoint of a man who writes poems on boxes at the shoe factory, dreaming of leaving the family tenement and his beloved, wounded sister:

  I left St. Louis. I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.

  Williams put himself in motion, but he did come back, to be buried in Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis.

  Josephine Baker left. She was celebrated in Paris and given a state funeral there, buried in Monaco.

  Maya Angelou left. She won a Pulitzer Prize and split her time between Harlem and North Carolina.

  Chuck Berry traveled far and wide but he always came back, and once in a while he would give a late-night concert in his hometown.

  Musial arrived with no expectations. He was a Donora boy who at first went home every winter, but he understood right away that St. Louis loved him, accepted him, adopted him, reassured him, defended him, protected him. St. Louis was loyal and highly undemanding psychologically. He did not have to fulfill everybody’s psychic needs. All he had to do was just hit the ball. Run out of the batter’s box. Smile when he slid into second. Sign autographs. Just say whaddayasay-whaddayasay and the people were charmed.

  15

  THE MAHATMA OF THE MIDWEST

  THE CITY was also associated with one of the great builders of that sport, or any sport: Branch Rickey. If not an American original, Rickey was an American prototype—a Bible-quoting, money-loving lawyer and teacher and lay preacher. But most of all he was a baseball man—athlete, coach, manager, builder, intellectual inventor at the peak of his career.

  Nineteen hundred and forty-two would turn out to be the only full season in which Rickey and Musial would overlap as general manager and player. (Rickey would return twenty years later in a highly divisive role as advisor.)

  In 1942, Rickey was already acknowledged as one of a kind. He had started with the Browns in 1913 when they were the top team in St. Louis, but then he switched to the Cardinals and turned them into champions.

  One of Rickey’s most famous sayings was “Luck is the residue of design.” Musial was, in his own Stanley way, the epitome of Rickey’s design.

  Rickey’s take over the years was that he had always been there for Musial, a cigar-chomping fairy godfather, shepherding the lad th
rough the less imaginative dunderheads in the organization.

  “I went down to see him two different times,” Rickey recounted years later. “He went to Rochester in the International League. He had led the Springfield league. Now he led the International League. I was so intrigued with his kaleidoscopic advance—extra-base hits galore—I brought him into St. Louis at the end of the season, and he led that league, too.”

  Actually, Stanley had stood in the batter’s box all by himself. Rickey would give him that. But that was the point of the Rickey farm system: put an infinite number of lads (hungry) in an infinite number of uniforms (frayed) and, Judas Priest (Rickey’s favorite declaration), you get Stan Musial.

  By coming along when he did, Musial got to size up Rickey in his prime.

  “He was very diplomatic in a way, and then he had a … terminology of his words that was very impressive,” Musial once said with a laugh. “He was a pretty impressive guy.”

  Asked to elaborate, Musial added, “Well, he was very nice, knowledgeable baseball man, and he was a hard worker and he was always involved in baseball. Loved baseball. He worked hard at it.

  “I would say that he could have probably gone ahead in any profession because he was a brilliant man.”

  Could have been a senator. Could have been a corporate founder. Could have been a college president. Rickey did better. First he built the St. Louis Cardinals. Then, he would have you believe, he flicked his magic cigar in the air, and presto—he produced Stan Musial.

  WESLEY BRANCH Rickey was a farm boy raised in rural southeast Ohio, whose family dressed up and drove buggies to church in town every Sunday morning, singing hymns above the clatter of the hooves. The Rickeys were settlers, farmers, pioneers, but hardly primitives: they made sure their son went to college at Ohio Wesleyan.