Stan Musial

by George Vecsey

  “He said to me, ‘I didn’t know you were going in the service,’ ” Garver said, “and I said, ‘I’m not going in the service,’ and he said, ‘You sure got a GI haircut,’ ” which was true, Garver said.

  That was one of the rare times Garver saw DiMaggio unwind. Years later, he appeared at a card show and went out to dinner with DiMaggio and a few other players. A fan asked DiMaggio for his autograph, but the Clipper iced him.

  “He didn’t let that guy interrupt him,” Garver recalled. “He just ran the show, you understand. He stayed in control.”

  DiMaggio did not talk much to opponents, Garver said, which was normal in those days. “I watch TV, everybody talks to everybody else at first base and second base, holy crap. We didn’t do anything of that.

  “We were taught, whoever was in the other uniform was your enemy. We were told not to talk to Yogi Berra, and if the mask was on the ground, you kicked dirt in it. It was an altogether different atmosphere. But Stan was a nice guy. I’m sure he communicated with guys in his league.”

  Garver loved Stanley. On the rare occasion the Browns happened to be in town while the Cardinals had a game, Garver went out to inspect the Musial stance up close.

  “I thought it was a handicap,” Garver said with a laugh. “I mean, to get down in that crouch, you’ve got to get into that coil. To me, it seems like you’re in too much of a position.”

  Garver never really got to test himself against Musial. The only time they ever met was in 1951, when Garver started the All-Star Game.

  “Jackie Robinson was next. Richie Ashburn was already on third base with one out and I didn’t want to mess with Musial. I didn’t have much confidence in striking him out. I pitched around him,” Garver recalled.

  Ashburn scored the only run Garver would give up in three innings. Musial got his chance to hit in the fourth inning against Ed Lopat, a lefty with tantalizing stuff, and hit a home run.

  Garver often wondered how he would have done against Musial.

  “He was just a guy with no weakness. He would hit the ball where it was pitched, and you just hate to pitch to people like that.”

  The friendship carried over after Garver moved on to the Tigers. After an exhibition against the Yankees in St. Pete, Garver was standing in the parking lot talking with some relatives when the Cardinals’ bus returned from their exhibition elsewhere.

  “Stan saw me and walked over through the parking lot, through the crowd, to say hello to me,” Garver recalled. “I introduced him to my cousins, and he was so gracious to them that they never forgot it for the rest of their lives.”

  PERSONALITIES ASIDE, there was plenty of room to debate who was the best player of the big three.

  Tyrus Raymond Cobb once declared that the game was better in his day—of course it was, bless his heart—but he did praise two players of 1949: Musial and Phil Rizzuto. Both of them, in Cobb’s eyes, had the bat control and discipline from when baseball was baseball, before World War I.

  “I don’t want to say anything that may distress Cobb, but I simply can’t go along with him,” Musial told the World-Telegram and Sun’s Joe Williams, a great admirer of his. “I don’t know when he ever saw me play and I must wonder how often he saw DiMaggio play.

  “I’d take DiMaggio. He’s a whole ballplayer,” Musial continued. “I mean he can do everything. He can run, throw, field and hit. Williams is interested mostly in hitting. At least he was until this spring. I notice now that he is working on his fielding. I think he wants to be known as a whole ballplayer, too.”

  Joe Williams said DiMaggio had more power than Musial early in their careers, and clearly DiMaggio was superb on defense, but he rated Musial ahead of Ted Williams.

  Musial met Cobb once. A few years after Cobb’s kind words to Joe Williams, Cobb called Musial at the team hotel in New York and invited him for breakfast. They mostly talked hitting, but Cobb’s biggest contribution was to change Musial’s diet. “Cobb said, ‘I see you use cream and sugar in your coffee. It would be better if you just used one or the other.’ So Stan gave up sugar,” said Musial’s former son-in-law, Tom Ashley.

  The debate over the three players continued into their retirement. Bill White, a teammate in Musial’s later seasons, maintained that Musial was the best hitter he ever saw from the time he arrived in the majors in 1956—and remember that Willie Mays, in his prime, was a teammate.

  White was a National League guy who wound up broadcasting for the Yankees, spending dizzying hours in the booth with Rizzuto, emphatically an American League guy.

  In their long and loopy dialogues, White would praise Stan the Man, whereas Rizzuto would praise DiMaggio (presumably for the six World Series winners’ checks they earned together). Rizzuto also praised Williams, who had terrorized the Yankees in that era.

  Freddy Schmidt, who was a teammate and remained a friend of Musial, saw Williams in the 1946 World Series and saw DiMaggio in spring training a few years. At the age of ninety-two and clearheaded, Schmidt picked DiMaggio.

  “I only faced him in spring training, but you could see he was polished. And the other players knew it,” Schmidt said in 2008.

  Income was not an easy indicator of their abilities because DiMaggio came along three years before Williams, who came along three years before Musial. As of 1949, the Clipper and the Kid were both making around $100,000, while Musial was making half that.

  “Well, St. Louis isn’t New York and I guess it isn’t Boston, either,” Musial said that year, probably knowing that his six-figure salary would arrive eventually. And if not, he was a businessman. He would catch up.

  ONE THING the Big Three had in common was that all three were subject to itchy trade impulses. Musial blew up a proposed trade for Robin Roberts in 1956. And nine years earlier, in April 1947, Tom Yawkey, the owner of the Red Sox, woke up with the vague recollection of having traded Williams for DiMaggio a few hours earlier in Toots Shor’s. Yawkey rang up Dan Topping of the Yankees, and they agreed to forget all about it. Alka-Seltzers all around.

  That late-night trade would have given fans a laboratory experiment, since both DiMaggio and Williams would have moved to parks ideally structured for them.

  “If we had traded Williams for DiMaggio, do you have any doubt at all that the Yankees still would have won those pennants and we still would have finished second?” asked Joe Cronin, the Red Sox’ manager through 1947 and general manager through 1958.

  Given the proximity of Athens and Sparta, Williams and DiMaggio could not help being in contention with each other—the kind of personal comparison Musial hardly had to deal with in far-off St. Louis.

  The relationship between Williams and DiMaggio was respectful, with the occasional zinger dropped into the conversation.

  “Sure, he can hit. But he never won a thing,” DiMaggio once said.

  In 1948, DiMaggio said: “He may out-homer me, but I will out-percentage him, I can out-throw him, I can out-run him, and out-think him.”

  DiMaggio thought of Williams as Teddy Tantrum. And one time Joe D. said: “He throws like a broad, and he runs like a ruptured duck.”

  Williams was more circumspect toward DiMaggio. In 1941, when DiMaggio was voted Most Valuable Player despite Williams’s .406 batting average, Williams said, “Yeah, awright. But it took the Big Guy to beat me!”

  ALL THREE had brothers.

  DiMaggio’s brothers were fishermen or major leaguers: Vince hit 125 homers in parts of ten seasons in the National League, while Dommy—as Williams called the bespectacled DiMaggio—roamed far into left field, saving Williams’s legs for his true calling, hitting. The Clipper sometimes seemed a trifle frosted when his little brother took away doubles and triples from him. Williams and Dommy would remain loyal friends, and Dominic would have a stable marriage and business success, able to function out in the real world.

  Williams’s brother, Danny, did a little time in San Quentin, then straightened out, and after that Ted conscientiously kept him solvent.


  Musial’s brother, Ed, made a decent life for himself after his minor-league career faltered; their lives mostly went separate ways.

  Even in matrimony, Musial was the boring one—no divorces, no scandals, no notoriety. If he stayed out of the limelight, that was fine with him.

  WILLIAMS PRAISED Musial as a peer, as a hitter. The Kid loved his calling so much he opened a museum in Florida dedicated only to hitters. As far as Teddy was concerned, pitchers could open their own freaking museum.

  “He once told me about a time when he and Musial were at some old-timers’ event,” said Jim Prime, who collaborated with Williams on a book about hitting. “Ted’s young son, John Henry, was with him, and Williams pointed to Musial and said, ‘There’s Stan Musial over there, John Henry. He was one hell of a hitter.’ John Henry was skeptical and asked if Musial really was as good as his dad. Ted said he replied, ‘Yes, I really think he was.’ ”

  Williams went on to say that their hitting styles were vastly different and that he had more power than Musial. In fact, Williams said, if he had been blessed with Musial’s speed, “there wouldn’t have been that much comparing,” Prime added. But speed, versatility, and reflexes happened to be part of Musial’s arsenal, and he used them admirably.

  Williams ranked Musial seventh among all-time hitters, comparing him to Shoeless Joe Jackson, the Black Sox’ banned star whom Williams constantly pushed for the Hall of Fame despite his murky role in the Black Sox scandal.

  “Musial was a slashing, all-around-the-ballpark hitter but he also hit to left-center and certainly to right center quite a bit,” Williams said. “That’s where he could pull the ball more—and Musial was definitely a guy who learned how to pull the ball. When he first came up he was hitting like he had two strikes all the time. Then he got to where he was taking a pitch and waiting for a certain pitch, and finally he reached the point where he was a lot more selective. Then they didn’t know how to pitch him, so they’d try him inside and he’d rip the ball to right. I’m making an educated guess when I make that comparison with Jackson. It’s a theory of mine.”

  Williams also said of Musial: “He was a better all-round hitter than Hank Aaron.” And he added, “He was a quiet leader on the field and in the clubhouse and was one of the most universally respected ballplayers of our generation. He wasn’t the biggest guy in the world but he was a lithe six-one and 175 pounds, and he was whippy.”

  Musial, always the first to admit DiMaggio and Williams had been held back by their longer military hitches, once said of Williams: “All he ever wants to do is talk about hitting. I don’t say he doesn’t know about anything else, but that is always the first thing he always wants to talk about.” He also said: “Ted was a great student of baseball. He was the greatest hitter of our era.”

  But was Williams better than Stan the Man?

  “When I get asked about Ted Williams, I always say, ‘He was good, too,’ ” Musial said.

  THEY WERE all good. Joe Cronin, who was Williams’s manager in the 1946 World Series and the Red Sox’ general manager from 1948 through 1958, was one of the voters in the Sporting News poll that chose Musial as the Player of the Decade from 1946 through 1955.

  Cronin did not vote for his own man. He voted for Stan Musial.

  27

  BAD AIR

  JIMMY RUSSELL could not see his players at the other end of the football field. Donora was known for its fogs, thick and brown and vile-smelling, but this was like nothing they had ever seen or inhaled. When Russell realized he could not keep track of his players, he sent them home.

  The air kept getting worse on Friday evening, October 29, 1948.

  Verna Duda, the vivacious wife of Musial’s high school mentor, Ki Duda, was serving as Miss Halloween on a parade down McKean Avenue, tossing apples and candy to the townspeople. The air was bad, but then again, it was usually bad, so the parade continued.

  By Saturday morning, nine people had died.

  In the middle of the football game on Saturday afternoon, one player was urgently instructed by the public-address announcer to rush home. According to legend, the player’s father was dead by the time he got home, but historians say that part is apocryphal.

  The game went to its conclusion, a 27–7 victory for Monongahela City, and then people went home and discovered Donora had suddenly, in the middle of a football game, become infamous.

  “I was a senior in high school,” said Dr. Charles Stacey, who would become the superintendent of schools. “I heard Walter Winchell talk about the killer smog in Donora, and I said that must have been a different Donora.”

  Winchell was the radio predecessor to the shock jocks and cable screamers of the next century. He was likewise known to exaggerate, but in this case he was entirely accurate. By Saturday night eighteen people were dead.

  Devra Davis, author of When Smoke Ran Like Water, was an infant in 1948. Years later, as an internationally known scientist and writer, she acknowledged that Donora’s industry, thick air and all, had drawn her family to Donora.

  “My zadie said, ‘It smells like money,’ ” Davis said, using the Yiddish word for grandfather. Her grandfather was a big, strong man who lived to be ninety-seven, but her bubbe, her grandmother, was already infirm, from bearing children in the foul air of the Mon Valley.

  “When I was very young, I simply assumed that all blue-haired grannies stayed in bed, tethered to oxygen tanks,” Davis wrote.

  LUKAZS AND Mary Musial were home on Halloween weekend. He had retired in 1943, after a stroke, and had suffered several others after the war.

  People collapsing in the street, funerals up and down the main streets, made bad publicity for the steel industry. Once Walter Winchell’s rat-a-tat-tat news had ricocheted into the consciousness of America, Roger Blough, the chief counsel for American Steel and Wire, called Michael Neale, the superintendent of the zinc works, at three o’clock on Sunday morning and told him to dead-fire the furnaces—turn them down halfway.

  They both knew the situation: A coke oven, or battery, runs above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. If it goes below 800 degrees, the bricks will crack. “Once cooled, it can never be restarted,” Davis would write. The halfway step would protect the furnace but temporarily reduce the plant’s emissions.

  Neale took three hours to follow Blough’s instructions; only after company officials arrived at his plant did he finally turn down the fires. Fortunately, rain began on Sunday, cutting the thick air, and by Monday, November 2, the mill was able to resume full production. But at least eighteen funerals had been held or planned.

  Lukasz Musial grew weaker and was moved to St. Louis, where he was given Dickie’s room.

  KILLER SMOGS in cities like London were regarded as local. Dozens of people had died in the steel city of Liège, Belgium, during an inversion in 1930, but a world war had rolled through the Meuse Valley since then, and nobody had time to study the cause of the smog.

  The Public Health Service labeled the deaths in Donora as “a one-time atmospheric freak.” In the age before computers, before the Internet, before curiosity, before outrage, the concepts of “pollution” and “environmental health” had not yet been articulated. Nobody linked Donora to its sister city in death until many years later.

  “Zinc is one of those elements that the body needs in very small doses in certain forms, but zinc can be poisonous in larger amounts and other forms,” Davis wrote in 2002.

  Another material used in the zinc mill is fluorspar, “a rock made of crystals of fluorine tied with calcium,” Davis wrote. One sign of excess fluorspar in the air is mottled teeth. “My father had teeth like that,” Davis wrote. “We figured he simply hadn’t brushed enough as a kid.” Many years later, a chemist would find twelve to twenty-five times the normal levels of fluoride in the residents of Donora.

  Scientists would learn that large amounts of sulfur leave “distinct marks on the linings of the lungs, but fluoride gases do not,” Davis wrote. “They pass right into the bloodstream and a
ttack the heart and other organs, without marring the nasal passages, throat, or lungs. The lungs of those who died in Liège were clean. Nobody noticed.”

  It would take science half a century to link fluoride gases with what had happened in Donora in 1948.

  “Where there are valleys, the colder air from the hills can create an inversion layer that keeps warmer air from rising,” Davis would write, describing the “massive, still blanket of cold air over the entire Mon Valley. All the gases from Donora’s mills, furnaces, and stoves were unable to rise above the hilltops and began to fill the homes and streets of the town with a blinding fog of coal, coke, and metal fumes.”

  Davis took a topographical map of her hometown and marked where the eighteen deaths had taken place. “Most of the deaths occurred in the parts of town that sat just under the plume that spewed within a half-mile circle of the zinc mill.” The Musial home was well within that circle.

  “The fifty people who died in the month following the smog are nowhere counted,” Davis wrote. “The thousands who died over the following decade are nowhere counted. And there is no counting of the thousands whom Clarence Mills called the non-killed—all those who went on to suffer in various poorly understood ways.”

  LYING IN his grandson’s bed, Lukasz began to go downhill.

  “Our grandfather Musial spoke very little English,” Gerry Ashley said. “Dick had to give up his bedroom for our dying grandfather, who died right before Christmas. We knew when he died because Grandmother Musial screamed. We opened our gifts early because we were going back to Donora for Christmas.”

  Lukasz died on December 19 and the funeral was held at St. Mary’s on December 24. Lukasz Musial was buried on the hill above Donora, where the air is relatively good.

  28

  FAMILY LIFE