Stan Musial

by George Vecsey

  “Breadon said, ‘I want to see eyeball to eyeball a man who could steal my players,’ ” Bob Broeg said.

  This expedition annoyed Albert “Happy” Chandler, the former governor of Kentucky who had been named commissioner after the death of Landis. Chandler promptly fined Breadon $5,000, although he may have rescinded it privately later on.

  The American players quickly became restive in Mexico. Vernon Stephens, a powerful shortstop from the Browns, lasted only four days before heading for the border. Owen would fly the coop. Gardella, a fringe outfielder from the Giants, distinguished himself in Mexico by toying with a pistol he’d discovered in the Pasquels’ office and firing a bullet harmlessly through an open window. Gardella ultimately returned to the United States and sued to be reinstated by the Giants, but his career never went far.

  The players who jumped were eventually reinstated, but the only American who really helped his career by going to Mexico was Maglie, a pitcher from the Giants. Maglie had the immense good fortune to have as his pitching tutor the old New York Giants star Adolfo Luque, who had learned his craft from Christy Mathewson. (In the wonderful six-degrees-of-separation world of baseball, Maglie later tutored a young pitcher named Don Drysdale when they overlapped on the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1956–57, making a direct half-century line of Hall of Fame pitchers from Mathewson to Drysdale.)

  After watching his colleagues trek back from Mexico, Musial was glad he had never budged. “A little later on we found out the conditions were pretty terrible,” he said. “You know, roads and traveling and ballparks … It wasn’t major league conditions.”

  He added, “I just had confidence in myself. I just loved baseball in this country, and I just didn’t … give it any second thoughts about ever going down there.”

  “And Stan made a great decision,” Marty Marion said. “I guess they were trying to get Stan more than anybody else, and I understand, although I didn’t see the money, but they said they brought suitcases of money for Stan to look at, you know, but Stan made a wise decision to stay here with American sports.”

  LATER IN life, Owen remained convinced Musial had received a sweetener from Sam Breadon.

  “I’m sure that he had signed not only for that year, but the following year,” Owen said in 1989. “I seen that he didn’t want to go, and his wife didn’t want him to go, and he didn’t want to talk about it too much.”

  Owen had his theory about what went down: “I imagine the wife might have called them and said, ‘Look, they’ve contacted my husband, and we don’t want to go … but it’s a lot of money.’ ” Owen guessed a wife would suggest to the ball club, “Well, you just come up with it.”

  He concluded with a chuckle, “I’m sure that something like that happened. And I think if it did, he better go home and kiss his wife and say, ‘Honey, you’re the best wife a man ever had.’ ”

  While Lil had no desire to take her two children to Mexico, there is no evidence she ever lobbied Breadon. But that does not mean she did not make a suggestion or two to her husband that he get something tangible for his loyalty. What spouse would not?

  Stanley always insisted he had not been offered a raise or bonus not to jump, but in his autobiography he added, “Later, Dyer did go to bat with Sam Breadon for a few of us who had turned our backs on Mexican offers.”

  Was it a total surprise that in August Breadon summoned Musial and said he was giving him a $5,000 raise for the season?

  “I was nearly floored,” Musial said.

  Mickey Owen was not floored.

  “Oh yeah, that was the greatest thing that ever happened for him, that he didn’t go,” Owen said. “The ball clubs then thought they was going to start having to pay the ballplayers some money. And I think that that was probably about the turning point of it, when they said, ‘Well, wait a minute, we’re going to be losing these outstanding ballplayers,’ and I’m sure that there was some contracts with Musial. I’m sure the club owners got together and said, ‘Wait, let’s stop this now before it goes any further.’ ”

  The company line was always that the Cardinals would never expand their salary structure in response to the Mexican challenge. But if Musial had not pressured Breadon for a little present for sticking around, he would have been a fool. And over the years, Stanley would prove he was no fool.

  19

  JUBILEE

  SAYING NO to the Pasquels was a relief to Stanley. He was able to get back to the business he enjoyed so much—being a major-league ballplayer, and a very good one at that.

  The war was over. The Cardinals were glad to be in this uniform, glad to be alive, after what some of them had gone through. They kept it light, although they could see the damage in some of them that would never be repaired.

  In spring training Musial went around camp introducing himself to players he had never met, including freckle-faced Albert (Red) Schoendienst, who had come up in 1945 and played whatever position was open.

  Schoendienst had even worn Musial’s number 6 because that thrifty organization did not like good flannel sitting in mothballs. Now that Musial was back, number 6 was returned to him, and Schoendienst was wearing number 2. Nobody would ever wear those numbers after them.

  But first Stan and Red had to get to know each other. Red always liked to describe their first meeting.

  “He’d shake hands solemnly during introductions and then roar as you suddenly drew back your hand—still grasping a false thumb.”

  War injury, Musial would explain, before giggling. The loose thumb was a staple of his magician’s repertoire.

  They had a lot in common, Stan and Red, including lean times in childhood. Schoendienst, from southern Illinois, had joined the Civilian Conservation Corps as a teenager, nearly losing an eye when a nail flew into it while he was repairing a fence. The damaged eye kept him out of the service, but he learned to work around it as a ballplayer.

  After catching a ride to St. Louis for a tryout, he found himself pitching batting practice to two young catchers from the Hill, an Italian neighborhood in St. Louis—Larry (not yet called Yogi) Berra and Joe Garagiola, who had finally reached minimum age to sign a contract. Berra would swing at anything, Red remembered, and often would drill the ball off the right-field screen.

  The mass tryout over, Branch Rickey corralled the three of them for a further workout in Forest Park. “He scared me to death,” Schoendienst said. “I think he was the worst driver I’ve ever seen.” Rickey was also a bad judge of catchers: he signed Schoendienst for minimal money and induced Garagiola for a $500 bonus but did not offer Berra a bonus, which sent the lumpy little catcher elsewhere. Imagine the Cardinals with Yogi behind the plate from the late forties into the early sixties.

  By 1946, Berra was a Yankee, having survived the invasion at Normandy. Red and Stan were meeting for the first time at St. Pete. Musial went back to left field, and Marion was healthy again at shortstop, so Schoendienst slid over to second base.

  Stan and Red became the quintessential baseball roommates, who would go everywhere together—church, dinner, the ballpark, and eventually the Hall of Fame.

  “I’m no mental giant. Frankly, Musial isn’t either,” Red would say. But woe to anybody who judged them as bumpkins, on or off the field.

  The Cardinals had missed a World Series in 1945, when the war threw the league so far out of balance that the Cubs won the pennant. Now the Cardinals were back and more than a trifle testy because Max Lanier, Lou Klein, and Fred Martin had all jumped to Mexico, spurred by Breadon’s lowball contracts.

  “We win the pennant easily if those three guys had stayed,” Musial said. “It would have been a runaway.”

  He was also factoring in three teammates Breadon had sold over the winter: Walker Cooper to the Giants for $175,000, Jimmy Brown to the Pirates for $30,000, and Johnny Hopp to the Braves for $40,000 and a throw-in.

  The Cardinals’ surly mood at the owner’s deals was compounded by watching Rickey’s efforts starting to pay off in Brooklyn. The
spiritual heirs to the Gashouse Gang wanted to put a stop to that incursion as quickly as possible.

  The first time the two teams met in 1946, Enos Slaughter sidled up to Eddie Stanky, an annoying little second baseman who had prospered with the Dodgers during the war.

  “So you’re the little SOB who’s been acting so big while the men were away,” Slaughter said.

  That’s me, Stanky proudly admitted.

  “Well, look out for me,” Slaughter warned him.

  I’ll be around, Stanky promised.

  It took Slaughter until July before he could dump the little SOB at second. In the minor leagues, Slaughter had trudged back to the dugout after making an out, and Eddie Dyer, his manager, scolded him for not hustling. After that, Slaughter never let up, a trait that would serve the Cardinals well in early October.

  Now Dyer was the manager, with Billy Southworth having moved to Boston. The Cardinals were rusty at the start, particularly Terry Moore. “He had a bad knee and he was out four years and some of the older fellas had a harder time,” Musial said.

  Dyer was patient with the veterans, but he was not afraid to make changes. Dick Sisler, the son of the legendary George, was not hitting, so in early June Musial found a first baseman’s glove in his locker. He began taking throws at first during infield practice and soon was starting there.

  “I didn’t like first base,” Musial added. “It was a lot of work around there.” He recalled Dyer’s telling him that first base was only a temporary move, but Musial found out it was not: “Every year, I’d come to spring training, I’d start in the outfield and we had different first basemen and every year I’d wind up at first. So I stayed ten years there.”

  The night Musial went to first base, Red Barrett broke a slump to beat the Phillies on a one-hitter and then cornball music returned to the clubhouse. Doc Weaver could not locate the 1942 good-luck anthem, the Spike Jones recording of “Pass the Biscuits, Mirandy,” but Robert F. Hyland, the team doctor, had a radio station cut a copy.

  The Cardinals knew how to have fun; they also knew how to police themselves. Early in the season, Walker failed to hustle from first to third base, and Moore let him know about it.

  “Terry would chew you out in a nice way,” Walker said. “He’d say, ‘Don’t fraternize with the other team. What are you gonna do if you’ve got to break up the double play and it’s your buddy out there?’ Heck, Terry wouldn’t let me talk to my own brother.”

  But Harry did talk with his brother, Dixie, the Dodger right fielder who was so popular in Brooklyn that he was known as “the Peepul’s Cherce.” (Some Brooklynites really did talk like that.) Dyer tried to make Harry, a left-handed hitter, pull the ball to right field for power; Dixie advised Harry not to alter his natural stroke to left-center. This fraternal advice would prove to be invaluable one afternoon in October, much to the dismay of Durocher, who shared Moore’s low opinion of fraternizing—even between actual brothers.

  Slaughter got the festivities going in 1946 by trying to run down Musial’s old pal, Les Webber, near first base. Then he made two great catches in right field in a 1–0 victory. The Cardinals began to catch up to the Dodgers, sweeping a series in St. Louis.

  THE NEXT time they visited Brooklyn, Musial blasted hits all over intimate Ebbets Field.

  He had long since figured out there was no point trying to pull the ball down the short 297-foot right-field line to the wall and fence, since the left- and center-field stands were just as inviting.

  While Musial was terrorizing the Dodgers, Bob Broeg, up in the press box, detected some kind of Brooklynese chant—hard for the midwestern ear to decipher. That night at dinner, Broeg asked Leo Ward, the road secretary, if he had heard something.

  “Every time Stan came up, they chanted, ‘Here comes the man!’ ” Ward said.

  Broeg thought the fans were shouting “that man.”

  “The man,” Ward insisted.

  Broeg wrote it in the paper: Stan the Man. A nickname for life, given him by respectful fans—in Brooklyn.

  (As if to justify the growing honor of his nickname from his most formidable opponent, in the Cardinals’ 23 games in Ebbets Field in 1948 and 1949, Stan the Man would make 47 hits in 90 at-bats, good for 96 bases and a batting average of .522.)

  THE CARDINALS were a work in progress early in 1946. On June 9, three days after helping the Musials move, Litwhiler was sold to Boston to be reunited with Southworth. The mainstay players still resented Rickey’s sale of Mize after 1941. Now the players resented the departure of Cooper, who did not get along with Eddie Dyer. When other catchers did not work out, the Cardinals called up Garagiola, the ebullient catcher from the Hill. Now twenty, Garagiola was a much better player than he would ever admit in his later career as broadcaster and celebrity, when he portrayed himself as a hapless, hitless backstop.

  “Oh, man, we were fearless,” Garagiola said of the 1946 Cardinals—all players, really, but certainly the Cardinals. “Anything you did, you felt you were ahead of the game. Not that you’d been in the trenches necessarily. But you were so glad to be back.”

  Garagiola was outwardly brash, but he also felt like an outsider. When he was called up in May, Garagiola was told to room with Marion, but he arrived late at night and was too timid to knock. Rather than disturb Mr. Shortstop, he spent the night sleeping in the hallway.

  The Cardinals trailed the Dodgers by five games at the All-Star break when Musial and four teammates got a sample of Fenway Park and Ted Williams, both imposing. Musial was hitless in two at-bats as the American League pounded the Nationals, 12–0. Williams merely hit two home runs and two singles and drove in five runs.

  DESPISING DUROCHER just might have been worth a game here or there.

  “Durocher would say anything, like, ‘Hit him in the head, knock him down.’ He was always trying to intimidate you,” Musial said.

  Musial added: “We had some tough guys. You know, you had to fight back, and when they’d knock us down, we’d knock them down. You know, there was something happening out at second base, why, next time, you know, one of our guys were there, they’d do it, or vice versa. So, it was, it was a common thing but good tough action.”

  Durocher’s voice had that chalk-on-the-blackboard screech that cut through other ballpark noise. Usually he was obnoxious. Once in a while he was funny.

  “I remember one time Leo came out here and said, ‘You couldn’t get a pint of blood from your whole infield,’ ” Marty Marion said, referring to Musial, Schoendienst, Marion, and Whitey Kurowski. Durocher’s remark made Marion laugh in the retelling, four decades later.

  The Cardinals caught the Dodgers by the final day of the season, touching off the first playoff of the century. Under the best-of-three format, Durocher opted to open the series in St. Louis and then play two at home, rather than open with one game at home, a decision debated at the time by Dodger fans—still debated by aging Brooklyn fans, to be honest.

  The night before the first game, the Cardinals held a team dinner in Ruggeri’s, the popular Italian restaurant on the Hill. J. Roy Stockton, the powerful columnist at the Post-Dispatch, twitted Breadon about getting rid of Mize and Cooper: “Sam, you’ve always liked to slice the baloney thin, but this year you may have sliced it a little too thin.”

  On October 1, in hot, sunny weather, Garagiola kept up a running dialogue with the home-plate umpire, Beans Reardon, until Reardon snarled, “Shut up, dago. You’re lucky you’re not pushing a damn wheelbarrow selling bananas.” That ethnic insult, common at the time, spurred Garagiola, who went three for four and drove in two runs as the Cardinals won, 4–2.

  The Cardinals took the train east, with Moore working the lounge, going from player to player, encouraging, goading, teaching. They don’t make captains like that anymore, but then again, teams don’t ride the trains; players are isolated on charter planes, lost in their headsets and their video games. Those Cardinals talked baseball, made music, watched the country go past their windows.

>   Two days later, Murry Dickson, with relief from Harry “the Cat” Brecheen, beat the Dodgers, 6–4, to win the pennant—the Cardinals’ fourth in five seasons.

  As his team celebrated a few feet down the hall from the Dodgers’ morose clubhouse, Dyer, always gracious, reminded reporters that both teams in this historic playoff had been built by the same man, Branch Rickey.

  Once the Cardinals’ farm director and a Rickey man, Dyer understood that systems won pennants in those days; he also knew his old boss was stockpiling Jackie Robinson and other talent for the next decade. But the fans were not fretting over the future at the moment, and neither were the players. They rushed to Penn Station to catch the overnight train to St. Louis, for their date with the Red Sox and Ted Williams.

  20

  A VISITOR ON THE TRAIN

  BIMBO CECCONI was about to make his first start at tailback for the University of Pittsburgh.

  A nice easy debut.

  At Notre Dame.

  He was a freshman, small and handsome, looking more like an artisan than a football player. He had thought of going to Notre Dame, but the Irish had the pick of the national litter with Johnny Lujack, so Cecconi enrolled at Pitt, not that far from Donora.

  On the night of October 3, 1946, the Pitt team was settling into the sleeper car for the run out to Indiana when one of the players rustled the curtains of Cecconi’s lower bunk and said somebody was looking for him, but not just somebody. It was Stan Musial.

  When he was younger, Cecconi had trailed after Musial in the streets of Donora, asking for an autograph, while Musial was delivering sacks of groceries for the Labash family store.

  Later, when Cecconi was a star athlete up at the high school, Musial used to come around during the winter and use the gym, always asking permission even though the principal said, For goodness’ sakes, Stan, use it anytime you want. But Musial would always ask.