Stan Musial

by George Vecsey

  The lake was pleasant in the evening after a day game, and on days off ten or fifteen Cardinal families might congregate at the retreat.

  “We’d cook corn on the cob and hot dogs and sometimes we’d gig frogs and cook them right there,” Litwhiler recalled with great fondness in 2010. Gigging frogs, a regional pastime, required a long stick with prongs at the end; major-league hands helped considerably. Once Litwhiler brought a bag of live frogs home with him from an evening excursion with Musial, planning to ask the hotel chef to cook up the legs for lunch. He deposited the sack in the hotel bathroom, forgetting that his wife, Dot, was an early riser and would not be amused by the frogs that squirmed loose.

  Many of the Cardinals stayed in the Fairgrounds Hotel because it was close to the ballpark and the players could walk to work, not having enough money for cars under the Breadon-Rickey payroll. Dickie Musial thought the Litwhilers were rich because Danny and Dot had an automobile.

  “We named our son after Dickie,” Litwhiler said.

  Most of the Cardinals rented rooms on the top floor, which tended to heat up nicely on long sunny days. After a few seasons, Musial was given a cool corner room on a lower floor because he was a star, recalled Freddy Schmidt, a useful pitcher on those teams. Schmidt had no complaints. The Cardinals were fast becoming Musial’s team, and they did not begrudge him the favor he had not sought.

  “We had a young club,” Litwhiler recalled of the 1943–44 Cardinals. “Pepper Martin and the Gashouse Gang were pretty hard-nosed. Stan was as nice a guy as I’ve ever met. He set the pace. Such a nice guy.”

  Musial and Litwhiler hung around together on the road as well. One time, on a day off in Philadelphia, Litwhiler invited Musial to his hometown, Ringtown. One woman in a modest restaurant heard that Musial was a ballplayer and said, “You keep trying hard and you’ll get there. I know you will.”

  “I ran into Pappy Kleckner at the gas station, on the porch,” Litwhiler recalled in 2010. Relishing dusting off an old Pennsylvania accent, Litwhiler mimicked the old-timer asking Litwhiler, “Who is dis?” When Litwhiler told him, Pappy asked, “And vat are you doing here?” Litwhiler said they had an off day, which must have grated on the Pennsylvania Dutch work ethic.

  “Vat is this off day?” Pappy asked.

  “I told him about baseball, and he wished Stan luck,” Litwhiler said. “Stan told me, ‘I’m never coming back here with you. Nobody knows who I am.’ ”

  By now, most of the country knew who Stan Musial was. He made the All-Star team for the first time in 1943, won his first batting title with .357, and was voted Most Valuable Player, and the Cardinals won their second straight pennant.

  Stanley also showed his inner Gashouse Gang in August against his old pal Les Webber, who had thrown at him in 1942. With first base open, Durocher was heard to order Webber to walk Musial.

  Webber was steaming because earlier in the season Musial had hit a line drive that broke the hand of Hugh Casey, who was Webber’s drinking buddy. What’s worse, Musial broke Casey’s drinking hand, the Dodgers’ catcher, Mickey Owen, joked.

  “Musial came up next time,” Owen recalled. “Four straight times, right by his ears.” Rather than charge the mound this time, Musial turned to Owen and said, “That SOB can’t hit me if he throws all day.” Owen was awed by Musial’s coolly evading Webber’s beanballs: “That’s how agile that man is.”

  Players had their own ways of handling these matters. The Cards’ next batter was Walker Cooper, who had run Musial out of the batting cage back in 1941 but had since figured out that Musial was a vital part of the team. Cooper slapped a grounder to second base and then planted his left foot high on the calf of first baseman Augie Galan, which could have seriously injured Galan. Owen then tackled Cooper, and they rolled around for a while—just a normal day at the ballyard between the Cardinals and Dodgers.

  The two teams battled on the field, but Rickey’s stockpiled players on the Dodgers were no match for Rickey’s wartime work-in-progress with the Cardinals. The Cardinals won the pennant by 18 games over Cincinnati, as Musial led the league in batting with .357 and 48 doubles and 20 triples.

  Because of wartime travel restrictions, the teams were able to make only one trip, so the Series began with three games in the Bronx, with the Yanks winning the first and third. Mort Cooper won the second game, pitching to his brother, although their father had died earlier in the day. The Yanks then won two straight in St. Louis to close out the Series, getting by with one Tuck Stainback playing center field in place of DiMaggio, who had enlisted under pressure from fans and press. Musial batted .278 in the Series with no extra-base hits, and had to settle for the losing share of $4,321.99.

  In 1944, still deferred, Musial signed a three-year contract worth $10,000, $12,500, and $13,500. The Cardinals won their third straight pennant as Musial hit .347 against increasingly depleted wartime pitching.

  The Yankees were so decimated by the draft that the Browns actually won the pennant, something they had never done with George Sisler or their few other stars. The Browns were beneficiaries of wartime baseball, having thirteen of their prewar players disqualified from military service for one impediment or another.

  Lil made an amazing discovery during the first and only all–St. Louis World Series. She and Stan rented a modest apartment near the ballpark because they did not have a car. As the city heated up for the trolley-car World Series, she noticed that although the Cardinals had won three straight pennants, St. Louis was, as she put it, a “Brownie town.”

  It was true. The old loyalties to the Browns came pouring out, but the Cardinals won in six games as Musial hit what would be his only World Series homer and batted .304. Because of low wartime ticket prices in small Sportsman’s Park, the Cardinals’ winning share was $4,626.01. Musial had now played three full seasons and had won three pennants and two championships, but he knew that streak was about to end.

  16

  OLD NAVY BUDDIES

  JOHN HERNANDEZ considered himself lucky. Here he was, a professional ballplayer getting to play his sport on Pearl Harbor in the middle of the war, on the same team as Stan Musial.

  A pretty fair hitter himself, Hernandez had been beaned in the minors—no batting helmets in those days—and was having trouble seeing the ball at night in the rickety minor-league parks. He pretty much knew he was never going to make it to the majors.

  However, at Pearl Harbor in the spring of 1945, the sun was always out, and life was fairly peaceful three and a half years after the horrific attack on December 7, 1941.

  In the mornings, Hernandez helped repair the Yorktown and the Lexington, some of the behemoths that had played a role in the United States regaining control of the Pacific. In the afternoons, he played ball. The commanding officer loved the sport and had set up an eight-team league comprised mostly of professionals. Sometimes there were parties, luaus, on the beach in front of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.

  One day Hernandez was pitching batting practice and decided to fire his best fastball down the middle, just to see what Musial could do with it. Big mistake.

  Musial was known to hit a ball exactly where it was pitched. Middle of the plate? Back at you. With no malice, Musial drilled a line drive a few inches past the head of John Hernandez, straight out to center field, making Hernandez decide that from here on he would keep the ball on the corners.

  They were not teammates for long. Musial was shipped home later in 1945 because his father was gravely ill, but the men kept in touch after the war. Hernandez wound up in the St. Louis farm system and in 1947 helped win the Dixie Series for the Houston Buffs, managed by Johnny Keane. Not long afterward, Hernandez went home to San Francisco and became a fireman.

  Then it was 1960, and Hernandez told his seven-year-old son that an old navy friend was leaving tickets for them at Candlestick Park.

  “I remember the old Cardinal uniform, the baby blue caps,” the son would recall. “We’d sit right over the third-base dugout and I could see
that batting stance. I could see that swing. My dad told me Stan coiled like a cobra.”

  After the game, father and son visited the clubhouse and chatted with Musial, Ken Boyer, and some of the other Cardinals, just enough for the young man to gain an insight into the minds of major leaguers. Even the great Musial could suffer a slump or an injury or an impatient manager.

  Musial offered to leave tickets for every game the Cards played in San Francisco, “but my father did not want to go overboard,” the son said.

  The boy, Keith Hernandez, would become an excellent left-handed hitter and one of the best defensive first basemen ever to play the game, and would help both the Cardinals and Mets win a World Series. (The son would also receive copious amounts of late-night telephone batting instruction from his very Americanized dad, whom he referred to, rather darkly, as Juan.) Long after his dad had passed, Keith Hernandez treasured the memories of the two former sailors talking over the old days.

  17

  THE WAR

  MUSIAL WAS the last of the superstars to go into active service. He did everything properly, registering with his draft board in Donora, reporting his whereabouts—the sports pages tended to confirm that—and never appearing to lobby for special treatment.

  “I was fortunate just to miss one season,” Musial once said. “ ’Course, I was married and had a couple youngsters, and they weren’t drafting married men from our area at that time, until later on.”

  There is no record of anybody in Donora or St. Louis complaining because the baseball player got a lucky break. He was married, and a second child, Geraldine, would be born on January 23, 1945. Lukasz had had a stroke in 1943, and Musial was the primary support of his parents.

  The people of Donora could not have considered him a draft-dodger inasmuch as they held a celebration on October 18, 1943, chipping in to give him war bonds and other presents. The event was sponsored by the Donora Zinc Works, where Musial worked that off-season—in the office—which qualified as essential service.

  Musial was not called up sooner because Donora had a large supply of single men of military age. Bimbo Cecconi recalled how either his football teammates would volunteer or their number would be called. “They were called into the service their junior, senior year. They would just disappear. You might have ’em for football and they were gone.”

  Musial was playing by the rules set at the highest levels of government. Early in the war, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had issued what was later called the “Green Light Letter,” saying organized baseball should continue but asserting that major-league players were subject to the draft, just like anybody else. The fans in St. Louis, who would have smoked out a slacker, were happy to have their young star as long as they could.

  Musial signed up to visit the troops for six weeks in the winter of 1943–44, going to Alaska and the Aleutian islands along with his Cardinal pal Danny Litwhiler, Hank Borowy of the Cubs, and Dixie Walker of the Dodgers, along with Frankie Frisch, the crusty old manager. The players found the weather and conditions far worse than they could have imagined. Walker had to leave when several members of his family took ill back home, and Frisch departed after a two-day storm rocked the ship and sent five inches of water sloshing on the deck. Back on land, the three remaining players were booked for a boat trip that would take them to a plane heading home.

  “A storm came out and we got marooned up there,” Litwhiler recalled, referring to the strong and sudden winds, called williwaws, that kick up in that part of the world. Jeeps were not able to get up the hill, so the three players decided to hike a mile downhill to the harbor, in a foot of snow.

  “The blizzard was blowing,” Litwhiler said. “You’d walk down at a forty-five-degree angle against the wind. We just pulled our knit caps over our eyes. You had an idea where you were going though you weren’t too sure. But we were able to get down in time to get the ship out.”

  The return flight grew even more perilous. As Litwhiler told it many years later, the military pilot welcomed the ballplayers and invited them into the cockpit. Litwhiler accepted and the pilot showed him how to maneuver the plane, using both hands and feet, while the co-pilot actually commanded the plane, at least theoretically.

  “The pilot gave me a seat while he took a break,” Litwhiler recalled, suspecting that the pilot had taken a quick nap.

  “When he came back, he said, ‘Let me in there,’ ” Litwhiler said, recalling a vast amount of urgency on the pilot’s part. “It was night and we were flying through the mountains,” Litwhiler said. The plane had drifted down to eight thousand feet, with mountains several thousand feet taller on both sides of them in the wintry night. The pilot raised the plane out of danger as Litwhiler tiptoed back to his seat. Musial was aware of the danger, although he never mentioned that flight in his autobiography.

  That trip to Alaska made Musial realize how lucky he was. He always praised the other stars who went into the service earlier than he did.

  Bob Feller could have requested a deferment because his father had terminal cancer, but Feller joined up right after Pearl Harbor and sought active duty with an anti-aircraft gun crew on the USS Alabama in the South Pacific. Hank Greenberg was drafted early in the 1941 service, was released on a technicality on December 5, 1941, and voluntarily went right back into uniform after Pearl Harbor.

  A star athlete from the University of California at Los Angeles, Jack Roosevelt Robinson, became an army officer and entertained the quaint impression that wearing the uniform of his country and facing the distinct possibility of being killed entitled him to the right to sit anywhere in a public bus in Texas. He did just that and wound up being court-martialed, although not convicted, and he left the military.

  Cardinal fans who claim Musial did not—does not—receive the adulation of the national press might want to study the way two great East Coast idols were pursued in matters of salary demands, private lives, and military service. New York and Boston papers definitely took an independent and critical tone toward Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams.

  From the first day he reported from San Diego, Williams had been impulsive and immature—“the Kid” was a perfect nickname. When war broke out, Williams was classified as 3-A because he was the sole support of his mother; then he was reclassified as 1-A, but upon review he was moved back to 3-A. Williams said he would enlist as soon as he had made his mother secure.

  “If I hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t have been doing right by my mother,” Williams said. “If I wasn’t sure of that, I couldn’t steel myself to face all the abuse.”

  Oddly enough, sportswriter Dave Egan, one of Williams’s most caustic critics (he called himself “Col. Egan” but was a colonel only in his own fevered imagination), actually defended Williams, saying, “The patrioteers should examine their own consciences.”

  Ultimately, Williams responded to the pressure and signed up with a naval reserve unit in Massachusetts, where he quickly became such a good pilot that he was used as an instructor rather than in combat, which was not his choice. At one point, he said, when the ruckus was over, he might consider a full-time career as a pilot, which may have been his way of expressing disdain for baseball, Boston, the press, or all of the above. This was a cranky dance that would continue virtually to his retirement.

  Williams was shipped to Pearl Harbor in August 1945 and was headed for China when the war ended. He proudly kept his commission in the Marines and was hounded back into active duty in Korea, where he flew as a wingman for John Glenn. He was flying an F-9 jet over Korea when his plane was hit, his radio went out, and Williams did not hear the instructions to bail out. He landed at 200 miles per hour, and his plane exploded; he probably would have been killed except that he had only a minute’s supply of fuel left. Williams dove for safety and lived to bat again. For the rest of his long and colorful life, the fiery crash in Korea would define Williams.

  DiMaggio was married with a son and was entitled to a deferment under the draft rules. But the Yankees, i
n their charming way, managed to equate his salary demands with a lack of patriotism.

  “Doesn’t he know there’s a war on?” Ed Barrow, the general manager, asked.

  Having been labeled ungrateful in an earlier salary impasse, DiMaggio understood that many New York writers took the side of Yankee management. When DiMaggio rejected the first contract offer of $37,500 for 1942, Dan Daniel wrote in the World-Telegram: “People just don’t like to hear a ballplayer grumbling over being asked for a paltry $37,500 a year when the base pay for privates is twenty-one clackers per month.”

  This criticism of DiMaggio played on public suspicion of Italian Americans, since Italy had been led into being an ally of Nazi Germany. Joe D. was no fool. He signed his contract, publicly placed $5,000 into war bonds, and then played the 1942 season, including the World Series against Musial.

  Joe D. had other trouble: his wife, Dorothy Arnold, an actress, had gone to Nevada to begin divorce proceedings. She also advised him to push up his active duty, on the theory that he would not have to serve in combat. DiMaggio may have thought going into the military would somehow save the marriage. Without notifying the Yankees—nuts to them—he enlisted in San Francisco on February 17, 1943, and a week later reported for duty.

  Arnold was right. DiMaggio would receive a pretty good deal in the service, playing ball and making appearances, but his enlisting did not save the marriage. Arnold filed for divorce in 1944 and Joe D. wound up in Honolulu, where he played ball. In February 1945 he showed signs of duodenal ulcers and was transferred to Atlantic City. He was released in September 1945.

  The question can be asked, why did Musial not push up his service just to be part of the war effort? Some of his contemporaries saw the threat and signed up for action; others sought units that seemed eager, at least at first, to give a major leaguer a break.