Stan Musial

by George Vecsey

  Rickey played ball well enough to work his way up to the major leagues early in the century. A sore-armed catcher with the Highlanders, the predecessors of the Yankees, he had eleven bases stolen against him in one game, still a record. Then he became a lawyer and coached baseball at the University of Michigan, where he developed a young player named George Sisler, who would move on to the Browns and become their greatest star. Rickey soon followed, as Sisler’s manager.

  Sisler was baseball’s perfect knight before Commissioner Ford Frick laid that term on Musial. In fact, if Musial had not come along, St. Louis would still be celebrating the dignified Sisler, who could pitch as well as hit.

  Rickey was never much of a manager, perhaps because his mind was usually a step beyond the immediate action, but the Browns were a better franchise than the Cardinals, the other team in town.

  Often insolvent, with few prospects for relocation, the Cardinals did have the first female owner of a major-league team, Helen Robison Britton, who had inherited the team from her uncle in 1911. Known as “Lady Bee,” she was hamstrung by financial problems and a failing marriage, and the Cardinals stagnated. In 1917, the Cardinals’ new ownership persuaded the Browns’ owner, Philip Ball, to allow Rickey to move a few feet from the Browns’ office to the Cardinals’ office.

  After serving in World War I, Rickey began developing a farm system that would control players, an idea that nineteenth-century pioneers like Harry Wright and Albert Spalding had tried. In 1926, the Cardinals won their first pennant, with Rogers Hornsby and Grover Cleveland Alexander beating the Yankees.

  Sam Breadon, the Cards’ new owner, persuaded the Browns that it would be to their advantage if the Cardinals were tenants in shabby Sportsman’s Park, the last major-league stadium to get a public-address system. (Until it did, a man with a megaphone announced the starting lineups and subsequent changes.) While many fans remained loyal to the Browns, the Cardinals won five pennants and three world championships from 1926 through 1934, but their best attendance was only 778,000 in 1928, just before the Depression.

  “You know he was a man who never took a drink. And he never came to the office on Sunday, and when he managed the Browns, later the Cardinals, he never managed on a Sunday,” said William O. DeWitt, who began his career selling soda in the ballpark and later became general manager under Rickey.

  (In the St. Louis flow of things, DeWitt moved to the Browns and eventually bought them. His son, William O. DeWitt Jr., would later own the Cardinals in the age of Pujols.)

  Rickey had promised his mother never to work on the Sabbath, and he kept his word via a classic Rickey stratagem: by taking a room at the YMCA across the street from Sportsman’s Park and no doubt counting the crowds flowing through the turnstiles.

  Despite close monitoring by Judge Landis, Rickey managed to stockpile hungry players from the Depression. Dizzy Dean, the great pitcher who broke down too soon, knew the alternative for uneducated southerners was to bend in the hot Delta sun, picking cotton. Pepper Martin and Leo Durocher had come from other hard corners of the country and would raise their spikes into anybody’s knees to avoid having to go home.

  Martin and Joe Medwick provoked the Detroit Tigers during the World Series of 1934, with Medwick’s hard slides causing fans to heave fruit at his head. With the Cardinals far ahead, Landis persuaded Medwick to leave the game to calm the fans, as the Cardinals wrapped up the Series.

  The Gashouse Gang was known for pranks like disrupting ladies’ luncheons in a hotel dining room by arriving with scaffolding and painters’ costumes. Some of them were masters at throwing water balloons out hotel windows. In an age before headsets and clubhouse boom boxes, they made their own music.

  “Pepper played the banjo-guitar,” Terry Moore recalled in 1957. “And Lonny Warneke played the guitar. Fiddler Bill McGee played the fiddle. He held it down low, in the crook of his arm. I never did see him put it under his chin. He’d sit there straight as a board, real serious holding the fiddle down low and sawing away on it. Bob Weiland played the jug. Boomp, boomp. Boomp, boomp. And Frenchy Bordagaray played the washboard. You know, running a stick up and down on it. Damn, they practiced all the time. They drove Frank Frisch crazy. Their favorite song was ‘Buffalo Gal.’ I heard ‘Buffalo Gal’ so often I used to dream it at night: ‘Buffalo Gal, ain’t you comin’ out tonight, comin’ out tonight, comin’ out tonight.’ ”

  Moore recalled the anger of Frisch, the playing manager who had never seen a clubhouse band on his first team, John McGraw’s more conservative Giants.

  “Frisch couldn’t stand it,” Moore chortled to sportswriter Robert Creamer. “He used to say he was going to trade McGee and send Weiland down to the minors just to break up the Mudcats. We sure had a lot of fun.”

  That Gashouse Gang had pretty well dissipated when Musial arrived. The mainstays were Moore; Cooper; Enos Slaughter, the hard-driving right fielder; and Marty Marion, the elegant and lanky shortstop. Medwick, the scowling son of New Jersey, was helpful to Musial, perhaps because Medwick saw him as a fellow easterner.

  Musial caught the tail end of Mize’s time with the Cardinals in 1941. Rickey had a theory, often expressed, that it was better to unload a player a year too soon than a year too late. That theory was reinforced by the little detail of Rickey’s receiving a percentage of the profit every time he unloaded a player. After the 1941 season, Rickey traded Mize, still only twenty-eight, to the Giants.

  “That one really got to him,” Tom Ashley, Musial’s ex–son-in-law, said. “He thought they were shortsighted. He would talk about all the games they would have won if they had Mize in the lineup.”

  Musial did not seem to be under extreme pressure to replace the output of Mize, who had led the league with .349 in 1939 and hit 43 homers in 1940 before getting hurt in 1941. The Cardinals really did not know what they had in Musial, who seemed to spring straight out of Branch Rickey’s fevered prayers.

  THE 1942 season began on a somber note with the world at war following Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Williams, Feller, and Hank Greenberg had either enlisted or been drafted, but Musial was deferred because he was a father and the main support of his own parents, and also because the Donora area had enough eligible men to fill the quota. So he headed for spring training, unsure he actually belonged.

  The breezy Stanley-hits persona had not yet emerged. For all he knew, Walker Cooper would still run him out of the batting cage. But the good side was that on this veteran team, Musial did not have to take responsibility for anybody but himself. He could be the kid, let the veterans show him how it was done.

  Half convinced he would be back in Donora by opening day, Musial started out slowly in Florida, possibly because his roommate, Ray Sanders, a rookie first baseman, was keeping late hours. Also, this was the first time Musial had ever trained with the big club, and he had trouble seeing the ball with the bright sun shining on the water and the wind fluttering in the palm trees of St. Pete.

  “I didn’t do well. In my low crouch, I was always looking up at the palm trees. We had a terrible background. I never did well in spring training.”

  If Musial had come along as an untested rookie in March of 1942, the club might have been seen him flailing and been tempted to send him back for more seasoning. With the war coming on, he could have gotten lost in the minors, been called up sooner by his draft board, who knows? But we are talking here about Stanley, always in the right place at the right time. Rickey and the rest had seen him for two weeks at the end of 1941. Musial changed roommates, started to get more sleep, and manager Southworth reassured him he had the job.

  When the Cardinals reached St. Louis for opening day, Rickey summoned Musial into his office, known years later in Brooklyn as the “Cave of the Winds.”

  The cigar-chewing preacher could quote Scripture or the Bill of Rights with equal fervor, making baseball seem like the finest way to serve God and country, preferably at minimal pay. Joe Garagiola once described a similar visit to the man eve
rybody called Mr. Rickey: “He was big. I noticed his eyebrows first because they were so thick, almost as if they need a haircut as they drooped over his horn-rimmed glasses. His hair was just as thick and might have been combed that morning, but looked like he had been running his hands through it all day.”

  Musial had never spent much time around Rickey until this moment in April 1942. Rickey told him he had been monitoring the lad’s progress from stop to stop in the minors. He then alluded to the prorated salary of $400 a month he had paid Musial for his two weeks with the Cards at the end of 1941.

  “I’m tearing it up, my boy,” Rickey said. (Players sensed it was dangerous when Rickey referred to them as “my boy.” That paternal affection usually came at a price.) “We’re going to pay you $700 a month,” he announced, meaning Musial would make a total of $4,250 for 1942. “We expect you to be our regular left fielder,” Rickey added.

  Stanley promptly called Lil in Donora and told her to come to St. Louis.

  Not everybody was convinced Musial was here to stay. Harry Walker, who was competing with Musial for the left-field job, remembered how Don Padgett, one of the Cardinals’ spare catchers, had questioned Musial’s odd stance in 1941. Musial turned to his left, wiggled his hips, and waited on the pitch rather defensively.

  “Don Padgett told me I had nothing to worry about,” Walker said in 1957, recalling Padgett saying, “This guy has a real crazy stance. The league’s pitchers will get on to him the second time around because there is one pitch that bothers him.” That pitch, Walker said, was the changeup.

  Marty Marion also observed the odd posture. “Everybody started laughing when they saw him walk into the batting cage, you know, and take a few swings with that unique stance, I’d call it. We said, ‘Kid, you’ll never make it to the big leagues with that kind of stance.’ ” The lanky shortstop added that until Musial retired after the 1963 season, “I’ll bet they was still talking about that funny stance.”

  The older players figured out that Musial was going to be around a while, and they began teaching him how to play left field. Musial was well aware of his one weakness, and would refer to it long after his playing days were over: “I didn’t have my good arm,” he once said. Without that shoulder injury? “I’d have been a good complete ballplayer,” he said. He had fine instincts as an outfielder, kept strengthening his arm, and listened to everything Terry Moore said.

  “Whenever the center fielder would say ‘I got a ball,’ we’d say ‘Take it,’ ” Enos Slaughter recalled, adding: “We listened to Terry Moore, Musial and I both. I know in St. Louis, myself, every time a ball was hit up against a screen, I’d go to the wall and when I heard ‘careful,’ I knew I was close and when I heard ‘plenty room,’ I knew I could go all out. And that’s one thing about Terry Moore. To me I think he’s one of the greatest defensive center fielders I ever played with, bar none. And I think Musial listened to him a lot in playing left field.”

  Musial missed a week early in the season with an ankle injury, and the Cards fell ten games behind the Dodgers, the defending league champions, a cocky bunch managed by the old Gashouse Gang shortstop Leo Durocher. The hard feelings had begun in 1940, when Bob Bowman of the Dodgers beaned Medwick, and by now there was a long list of grievances on both sides.

  Leo would put one foot up on the top dugout step, point to his own ear, and shout “Stick it in his ear” so loudly he could be heard over any crowd. Les Webber, a nondescript right-hander who did Durocher’s dirty work, threw at Musial in 1942, and Musial tried to charge the mound, but the catcher and umpire got in the way. Tellingly, he was not ejected from the game, an indication the umpires knew Durocher had instigated it. This was the only time in his career that Musial would go after a pitcher; from then on he held an open contempt for Durocher, one of the few people in the game he did not like.

  After the quiet young man went after Leo’s pitcher, Cardinal fans understood: Musial could have played for the Gashouse Gang.

  In August, Harry Walker became enamored with a Spike Jones recording of “Pass the Biscuits, Mirandy”—a goofus ditty about obstinate hillbillies. The Cardinals played “Mirandy” after every victory, punctuating it with music of their own. Trainer Harrison “Doc” Weaver, a big man who had played tackle for Rickey at Ohio Wesleyan, could strum the mandolin between stints of ankle taping. Walker and Musial beat time with coat hangers; Johnny Beazley thought he could sing a bit.

  The Cardinals were hot, and Southworth could do no wrong. Musial was hitting well over .300, but one day the manager replaced him with the right-handed Coaker Triplett, who drove in the winning run. They won the pennant on the final day, beating the Cubs twice, with Musial finishing third in batting at .315 with 10 homers and 72 runs batted in.

  Now they would play the Yankees in the World Series, the Cardinals’ first since the fruit bombardment in Detroit in 1934.

  THE YANKEES won the first game of the 1942 Series in St. Louis, with Musial going hitless, but the Cards won the second as he made a hit. Now he and Lil had to decide if she would come to New York for the next three games. With money tight and wartime travel difficult, they reasoned she could go home to Donora and then catch the final game or two in St. Louis.

  Instead, Lukasz and Mary came to New York. Emaciated and shy, all dressed up, Lukasz could not stop beaming as his son took him around the clubhouse in Yankee Stadium.

  This was probably the only World Series ever influenced by a trainer. Doc Weaver came up with a hex gesture called the double whammy—“crossed wrists, hands back to back, then closed the second and third fingers of each hand so that the first and fourth fingers protruded like horns,” Musial recalled.

  The Yankees were not used to such loosey-goosey behavior in the more staid American League, although that was probably not the reason they lost three straight games in their awe-inspiring stadium in the Bronx. Yankee management had to blame somebody: it promptly fired the trainer, Earle “Doc” Painter, apparently because he was not as good as Doc Weaver at the mandolin or the double whammy.

  Musial batted only .222 in his first World Series, but that was not the reason he was upset as the Cardinals celebrated in the Yankees’ home park.

  “Stan was having a terrible time trying to decide whether to go back or go home to his family in Donora,” Marty Marion recalled. “He finally decided it would be better if he went home.”

  Marion described the scene in the train station as the giddy Cardinals piled into their special car, heading for a raucous celebration in St. Louis: “He went around shaking hands with all of us and then the guy busted right out and began to bawl like a kid. As he walked away, so did some of the others.”

  Musial would always insist that this was the best Cardinals team he’d played on. The winners’ share was $6,192.50—nearly 50 percent more than his salary—which made it a happy winter in Donora.

  The Rickey era ended after the World Series. Breadon had become unhappy with Rickey’s contract, which called for him to receive a percentage for every player he sold, and let him move on to the rival Dodgers. It was impossible to predict the impact Rickey would have within a few years, but for now, Musial was the great product of the Rickey farm system and the Cardinals were back on top.

  NOW THAT Rickey was gone, the team would be dominated by the longtime owner, Sam Breadon, a former automobile mechanic with a gravelly accent that revealed his New York roots. Breadon had worked on Pierce-Arrows and later on Fords before buying his own agency. He was a salesman, but with an approach different from Rickey’s.

  “They were entirely opposites,” said William O. DeWitt, who worked across the hallway with the Browns, and later owned them. “Rickey never took a drink,” DeWitt added, whereas Breadon “belonged to a little club at the Jefferson Motel. And he’d go down and have two or three drinks at lunch, and then he’d drink at night. And after he’d drink a while he wanted to sing.”

  Now that he was handling the payroll, Breadon negotiated with Musial directly. He did
not call Musial “my boy,” as Rickey had done, but he did find a way to work on him, offering Musial a $1,000 raise to just over $5,000. Musial asked for $10,000 at first and later dropped his request to $7,500, but he also made a crucial negotiating mistake: with Moore and Slaughter going into the service, Musial told Breadon he would have to play “even harder” in their absence, which was just the opening the master auto salesman needed. He said he was disappointed in Musial, which, of course, was translated into dollars.

  Musial held off for a while, taking advice from his friend Frank Pizzica, himself an auto dealer, who theoretically might have had insight into Breadon’s tactics. Breadon dispatched Eddie Dyer, the Cardinals’ farm director, to Donora to talk Musial into signing. With Pizzica out of town, Musial listened to the fatherly Dyer and signed for $6,250.

  Because of wartime restrictions on travel, the Cards trained in Cairo, Illinois, in 1943. Musial was moved to right field after Slaughter went into the service, and he felt comfortable there because he did not have to throw across his body so often. Mostly he played wherever the manager put him.

  The Cardinals were somewhat more divided than has been generally thought. Marty Marion has talked about cliques developing between the beer-drinking, card-playing teammates and the family-man teammates like himself, Walker, Howie Pollet, and Musial. Walker Cooper, his brother Mort, and some of the other older players referred to them as the “college kids,” which possibly alluded to Danny Litwhiler, who actually had a degree in science and social science from Bloomsburg State in Pennsylvania.

  LITWHILER BECAME Musial’s first good friend on the team, arriving from the Phillies early in 1943 because Southworth liked the way he hustled. From a Pennsylvania Dutch area in anthracite country, Litwhiler was a disciplined family man, and he began hanging out with Musial, bringing their families to a little lake in nearby Illinois, where Litwhiler had the key to a friend’s cabin.