Stan Musial

by George Vecsey

  Musial was also named Most Valuable Player for a third time, missing the Triple Crown by a narrow margin after he hit a home run in a game that was rained out and nullified, leaving him one behind Kiner and Mize. He also tied Ty Cobb’s record by making five hits in a game four times in one season.

  He still did not think of himself as a slugger and rarely intentionally swung for a home run because he said it made him overanxious, but he did drop his hands down to the knob to provide more leverage, more power. His slender body was surprisingly powerful, and he seemed to have an inner discipline and superior muscle memory. He figured out how to get more torque from an increased crouch.

  After the postwar surge in 1946, Musial realized he would have to dig into his slugger’s crouch in order to carry the Cardinals. Moore was just about done, Marion’s back had given way, and the Cardinals could not keep pace with the Dodgers.

  The cause was obvious. Former commissioner Fay Vincent said he once asked Musial about his perceptions once Jackie Robinson and the other black players joined the Dodgers.

  “He said, ‘Yeah, Commissioner, once the Dodgers integrated, we couldn’t do it in St. Louis. We would never win again.’ ”

  The timidity of their owners and executives doomed the Cardinals to become also-rans for the rest of the Musial generation. Management was surely affected by the racial attitudes of the border states, left over from the Civil War. St. Louis was still the gateway of the major leagues, with a loyal following to the south and west; its fans would listen on the radio and drive long distances to catch a game, but the region was not exactly petitioning the Cardinals to sign a black player.

  The Browns’ front office, just down the hallway in Sportsman’s Park, signed a couple of black players, probably for a quick boost of attendance, which did not work out. Other teams were more committed: Cleveland signed Larry Doby, the Giants hit the jackpot with Willie Mays, the Boston Braves signed a slim kid with quick wrists named Henry Aaron, and the Reds found a man in Oakland named Frank Robinson.

  Asked why the Cardinals were so slow to integrate, Musial once said: “You know, that was the decision up to the front office.”

  A few franchises were slow, including the Yankees, not that it hurt them much. The Phillies would win a pennant in 1950, playing the Yankees in the last all-white Series of the century. And the Red Sox became the last major-league team to bring up a black player, Pumpsie Green in 1959, twelve years after Robinson. The Sox begrudgingly gave Robinson a phony tryout in 1945 but couldn’t wait to get him out of Fenway Park.

  The Cardinals just bumbled along. Quincy Trouppe, scouting for the Cardinals in the spring of 1953, recommended a shortstop with the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro League. The Cardinals dispatched another scout who sent back the word: “I don’t think he is a major league prospect. He can’t hit, he can’t run, he has a pretty good arm but it’s a scatter arm. I don’t like him.” And that was how the Cubs, and not the Cardinals, came to sign Ernie Banks.

  Elston Howard might have loved to sign with his hometown Cardinals, but he became the first black Yankee in 1955. Watching his booming right-handed drives get caught in Yankee Stadium’s Death Valley, Howard could only visualize his shots cannonading around Sportsman’s Park.

  Howard’s widow, Arlene, has said her husband would run into Musial at the gym or sports banquets and would ask for advice about his career or contract negotiations. Musial was always kind, she said. A nice man.

  In addition to losing out on potential teammates like Banks and Howard, Musial was deprived of the tentative white-black dynamics taking place on other teams. Dixie Walker got to play with Jackie Robinson for one year and quickly came to respect him. The Cardinals finally brought up a black player in 1954, but Tom Alston, a large first baseman, was just not up to it, and that set them back even longer.

  While Musial became the great player of his league, the Dodgers won pennants in 1947, 1949, 1952, 1953, 1955, and 1956. The resentments from the Durocher era remained as Robinson evolved into an intense and physical competitor.

  “The only time that we would talk in a way was when we had to take a picture together,” Musial said. “We both were leading the league but personally I didn’t know him and I didn’t get to talk to him too much.”

  Musial could not help chatting with Roy Campanella, the Dodgers’ wise catcher, who was half Italian and half black.

  “He had something to say every time I came to the plate, you know. ‘I don’t know how we can handle ya,’ or something like that,” Musial said.

  As the Cardinals slipped backward, some of them still maintained a racial edge to their comments.

  “We’d watch ’em in the dugout,” said Don Newcombe. “Wisecracks, call names. I could see from the mound when I got there in ’49. You never saw guys like Musial or Schoendienst. They never showed you up. The man went about his job and did it damn well and never had the need to sit in the dugout and call a black guy a bunch of names, because he was trying to change the game and make it what it should have been in the first place, a game for all people.”

  THE CARDINALS’ paralysis toward black players came during a series of turnovers in ownership. Breadon bowed out in November 1947, looking to settle his estate, and would die of prostate cancer in mid-1949 at the age of seventy-two.

  The new owners were Robert E. Hannegan, a former postmaster general, and Fred Saigh, a real estate investor. Hannegan lasted one year and continued Breadon’s tactics of selling off players to raise cash, then became ill and sold his share to Saigh, dying on October 6, 1949.

  Musial the businessman learned how to negotiate his salary from dealing with all these owners. He had committed a gaffe with Breadon early on when he said he would have to try even harder with some of the stars away at war; that cost him a few dollars. Breadon came to respect Musial during the Pasquel frolics of 1946, even when Musial squawked about the raise Breadon tried to pass off as a one-time bonus among good friends.

  Musial’s pose toward the owners was that he was not greedy and knew he was living better than he ever could have imagined. But he learned to define what was fair for him, particularly in the “adjustment” he had negotiated with Hannegan in 1948, including the attendance bonus. In 1949, Saigh paid him $50,000 per year for two years, with a bonus of $5,000 per year if the Cardinals went over 900,000 paid admissions. This was an astute judgment by Musial, operating without an agent and anticipating the postwar boom in attendance. The Cardinals drew over a million each year from 1946 through 1951, when Musial was paid $75,000 plus the $5,000 attendance bonus, although he had to wait for the postwar Wage Stabilization Board to approve his raises.

  “He had always approached the subject logically and in a businesslike manner,” Saigh said in 1952. “I think the experience of operating his own restaurant has made him conscious of some of the problems of management.”

  On Valentine’s Day 1952, Saigh pulled a publicity stunt by calling in whatever the media swarm was like in those days and proffering a blank contract to Stanley, who had waited to be the last Cardinal to sign.

  “I told him that anything short of his owning the St. Louis Cardinals the next morning was all right with me,” Saigh said. It is hard to imagine Tom Yawkey coming up with a gimmick like that involving Williams, or the grim burghers who owned the Yankees acting like that with the suspicious DiMaggio.

  Did Saigh sandbag Musial into being the polite son-husband-father figure, or was the scene prearranged, thereby making Stanley a much better actor than anybody had realized? Musial never said. He went along with it, either way.

  “Mr. Saigh, I have been well satisfied with my contracts in the past and I think I am going to be satisfied with my 1952 contract with the same terms in 1951—if that is satisfactory,” Musial said as flashbulbs popped.

  Afterward, Harry Caray, the bumptious broadcaster, told Saigh in private, “You must be a helluva fine crap-shooter, too.”

  Not that good, it turned out. In January 1953, Saigh was co
nvicted of income tax evasion and ultimately spent time in prison; he had to sell the club to the Anheuser-Busch company.

  THE OWNERS came and went. Baseball remained a tight little world in the decade before expansion—eleven road games in seven parks, six cities if you combined New York and Brooklyn. Musial lived a familiar and comfortable routine. He knew the angles of the ballparks, knew the ushers, knew the fans, knew the regional accents, knew the bell captains.

  As youngsters, Stan had lived on cabbage and Red had lived on squirrel. Now they knew the headwaiters; now they appreciated the menus.

  “I think about that sometimes when Stan and I are ordering the biggest and freshest lobster flown in from Maine or are cutting into choice strips of sirloin steak,” Schoendienst said in midcareer. “They’re wonderful, the eating experiences we’ve had and they’re part of our getting along so well together.”

  Other players came to think of Musial as a worldly star who knew the circuit.

  “When we were on the road, we’d look for new places to eat,” Hank Sauer once said. “We’d use a Diner’s Club card and ask people where the best restaurants were. Musial really knows food. He can always tell the good cuts of meat from the bad ones. In New York, we’d go to the shows.”

  Ralph Kiner recognized Musial as a kindred soul in the big cities. “The Pirates would be in New York and the Cardinals were playing Brooklyn and we were playing a lot more day games in those days,” Kiner said. He would take a few teammates to Bertolotti’s, a landmark restaurant on Third Street in Greenwich Village, known for its Bohemian atmosphere and Italian restaurants.

  “I’d see Musial and Red at one table, the two of them, and I’d be with some of the Pirates at another table, and we happened to meet,” Kiner said. The code of the day said players did not fraternize with opponents, but Stanley and Red would salute Kiner.

  Jim Brosnan, a pitcher with the Cardinals for part of 1958 and 1959, ran into Stan and Red at a midtown restaurant. They seemed impressed he knew about the place and introduced him to their dinner companion, an actor whom Brosnan does not identify but probably was Horace McMahon, a friend of Musial’s. When Stan and Red left, the actor came over and sat and chatted with Brosnan.

  “That was a real nice thing that Stan and Red did,” Brosnan thought. “The two of them had passed along this TV star to me. It was the kind of thing you did if you were a Cardinal”—or if you were Stan and Red.

  Brosnan later wrote a wry and literate book, The Long Season, about his view from the bullpen; he retained his impression of the kind way Stanley treated people.

  WITH MUSIAL, it was a fraternity that included just about anybody putting on a uniform. At the end of the 1949 season, a wispy infielder named Wayne Terwilliger made his first start against the Cardinals.

  “Early in the game, I went out to second base from our dugout and Stan was coming in from left field and as we crossed the pitcher’s mound, I thought, ‘There he is, Stan Musial, I watched him play,’ ” Terwilliger recalled. “And as I got to him, he said, ‘Hi, Wayne, how’s it going?’ or something like that, and it really startled me. I don’t think I mumbled anything really but I thought, ‘Geez, Stan Musial knew my name, for cryin’ out loud.’ It was really a shock. I tell that every time somebody mentions him. He was a class guy from what I know and read.”

  Sixty years later, still slender and boyish, Terwilliger was coaching in the minor leagues, still in uniform, like Schoendienst and Johnny Pesky from his era.

  “I’ve used that,” Terwilliger said of Musial’s gesture. “When I was managing in the minor leagues, I would find out their names and call ’em by name when I went by, and I knew they appreciated that.”

  Terwilliger wondered how Musial could hit from that crouch. “I think I did fool around with it a little because I struggled as a hitter and I was trying to find something comfortable for me. I tried the crouching, but it never felt comfortable for me. I never did find a good stance.” He batted .240 in 666 games in the majors.

  Catchers just up from the minors were stunned when they would squat behind home plate and Musial would introduce himself—already knowing their names. This was not fraternization; it was being human.

  Musial rarely gave advice to teammates, but when he spoke it made sense to listen. When Joe Cunningham was a rookie, he was shagging flies before a game and indulging in some modest backbiting toward the manager. Musial, who had been jerked around by a manager or two by then, quickly told Cunnningham, “Joe, don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

  “I never forgot that,” Cunningham said, long after making a good career and settling in St. Louis. He remained a friend of Musial’s even though he had been moved to the outfield so Musial could play first.

  “I kidded him once. I said, ‘Stan, do you feel good about all the guys you sent back to the minor leagues?’ He just laughed it off. You know, I’ve never heard Stan say a bad word about anybody.”

  Ed Mickelson was a pretty fair minor-league hitter who finally got called up by the Cardinals late in the 1950 season. When Musial came down with a 103-degree fever, Eddie Dyer let Mickelson start, then added that Warren Spahn was pitching that day. Given a chance, Mickelson got one of the Cardinals’ two hits that day.

  The following spring, Mickelson was training with the Cardinals. One day he noticed Musial sitting in the next stall in the clubhouse bathroom, separated by a partition.

  “I thought, ‘Okay, I got a captive audience here,’ ” Mickelson said, “so I asked him, ‘Stan, you seem so confident and carefree, do you ever get nervous before a game?’ and he said, ‘Ed, I tell you what, if you don’t, you might as well quit. Sure I get nervous.’ ”

  Mickelson, who batted .081 in 18 games with the Cardinals and Browns, remembered that advice during his long career as a minor-league hitter and high school coach. “He’s so calm and collected. It helped me a lot.”

  It was nice to be Stanley. He used to make fun of the Pirates’ rudimentary batting helmets, worn on order of Branch Rickey, who had moved from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh. Joe Garagiola, who had gone on to play with the Pirates, was under orders to wear the helmet backward while catching.

  “There was a half inch of rubber under the helmet,” Garagiola recalled. “You hated playing on a hot day because if you caught a foul tip, the sweat would come running down your face like you needed windshield wipers. And if you went after a foul pop, you’d throw off the mask, but the bill of the helmet would stick you in the back of the neck, like you were getting stabbed.”

  Stanley was having none of the helmets.

  “Musial was adamant,” Garagiola said. “He thought he looked funny in a helmet, so he wore a little plastic insert under his cap.”

  Pretty much everything was funny to Stanley.

  There was a night game in St. Louis when Garagiola was catching for the Pirates and his old buddy came up to hit.

  “Hey, Stan, about ten of us are coming over to the restaurant after the game. Do we need a reservation?”

  Musial watched the first strike.

  “Should we take taxis, or do you have enough parking?”

  Musial did not answer. Strike two.

  On the third pitch, Musial slugged a home run out into the humid St. Louis night. When he touched home he asked Garagiola, “How do you people like your steaks?”

  Sometimes Musial even surprised himself. On May 2, 1954, he became the first major leaguer ever to hit five homers in one day.

  Lil happened to stay home for the Sunday doubleheader. Stan walked the first time, then hit a homer off the left-handed Johnny Antonelli. In the fifth, Musial golfed a low inside pitch from Antonelli onto the pavilion in right field. In the sixth he singled off the right-handed Jim Hearn. In the eighth, with two men on base and the score tied, he hit a slider by Hearn onto the roof of the pavilion, the first time he had hit three homers in one game.

  In the second game, with the lights on, he walked the first time up. The second time Willie Mays tracked down his drive i
n the deepest part of the ballpark, right-center field. Over the years both Musial and Monte Irvin would say Willie had taken away a sixth homer, but it would have had to be an inside-the-park version with a ferocious carom.

  In his third at-bat in the second game, Musial hit one onto the roof of the pavilion—40 feet high, 394 feet away. The next time, Hoyt Wilhelm fluttered one of his trademark knuckleballs, and Musial hit it to right-center, on top of the roof. The last time up—one of the rare times when he actually tried to jerk one out—he popped to first. For a guy who came up as a cautious singles hitter, it was quite an afternoon.

  Musial told this story on himself many times: when he got home from the ballpark that day, thirteen-year-old Dick said, “Gee, Dad, they sure must have been throwing you fat pitches today.”

  Then there was the 1955 All-Star Game in Milwaukee, with young Bud Selig in attendance with his mom. Musial was not voted to start that year but batted for Del Ennis in the fourth inning and was still in the lineup as the game meandered into the twelfth inning. With the players due back in uniform two days later, nobody wanted to miss the last flight or train out of town that evening. Legend says that Musial promised everybody in the dugout he was about to end the game, but Robin Roberts, who pitched the first three innings and was rooting in the dugout in the twelfth, said he did not hear any prediction.

  Henry Aaron, in the same dugout at the same time, recalled Musial heading toward the bat rack and saying, “They don’t pay us to play overtime.”

  “And he went up and hit a home run,” Aaron said. “I heard that myself. I know a lot say Babe Ruth pointed”—a reference to Ruth’s homer in the 1932 World Series. “I know Stan called his.”

  Does talking about not getting paid for overtime qualify as calling his shot? That is open to interpretation. At the very least, Musial was setting himself up for a Stanley-hits kind of moment.