The stables were air-conditioned; the clubhouse at Sportsman’s Park was not.
In later years, for special games, Busch would hitch up the Clydesdales and drive the wagon onto the artificial turf of the second Busch Stadium, entering the field to the jingle-jangle tune of “Here Comes the King,” which sounded like an old Bavarian drinking song but was merely an advertising ditty created for his product.
When Good King August waved his white cowboy hat, he gave the impression of a powerful landowner inspecting the serfs. Then the grounds-keepers would come out with shovels and brooms to clean up after the Clydesdales, after which Ozzie Smith would trot out and perform his stylized back flip at shortstop. Play ball!
From the beginning, Busch became one of the signature owners in American sport, inflicting his outsized will and corporate stamp on the Cardinals, giving them more operating capital than they’d ever had before, even in their best of years.
He tried to rename Sportsman’s Park for the company’s leading product—Budweiser—but that did not sit well with the commissioner, so he called it Busch Stadium, which at least was the family name.
Revamping the team itself was a bit more difficult. On April 11, 1954, the Cardinals traded Enos Slaughter to the Yankees for outfielder Bill Virdon, in an attempt to get younger and quicker. This was a wake-up call for Musial: Slaughter was only four years older than he was.
Musial hit .337 in 1953 and .330 in 1954 as the Cardinals finished sixth, twenty-five games behind Willie Mays’s Giants. In 1955, the Dodgers won their first World Series and the Cardinals finished seventh. Despite his homer to win the All-Star Game and his .319 average with 33 homers, Musial would call it “The Year of the Big Minus.” Mandolin-playing Doc Weaver, who had spooked the Yankees with voodoo signs during the 1942 World Series and helped create the pension plan, died of a heart attack.
After playing for Billy Southworth and Eddie Dyer in his first eight seasons, Musial began to experience a more typical turnover. Marty Marion did not work out in 1951. Eddie Stanky, Leo Durocher’s intense protégé, lasted from 1952 into 1955. Harry Walker took over in the middle of 1955 but pushed the Cards with midday drills in the summer heat, and when the team finished seventh, Walker was not retained.
In 1956 the Cardinals brought in Fred Hutchinson, the burly and competitive former Detroit Tigers pitcher, who once punched out the overhead bulbs in the corridor behind the dugout after being taken out of a game. He was, in the vernacular, a ballplayer’s manager.
However, the new general manager in 1956 was not a favorite of the players. Frank Lane, known as “Trader Lane,” never met the man he could not dispatch somewhere.
Lane’s first act was to get rid of the two cardinals (two male cardinals, to be precise, although their cheery togetherness did not seem to be the reason Lane scuttled them) that had been perched on a bat on the front of the home jersey since 1922. The fans grumbled all year, so the two birds made a comeback in 1957. But the fashion note was a warning: this man would get rid of anybody or anything.
Bob Broeg, Musial’s confidant, once described Lane’s need to trade people as almost lascivious, like a sexual charge. “The thrill of the trade was paramount,” Broeg said. “It’s ridiculous, but, you know, the guy, when he was under restraint, he was great,” Broeg added.
Lane’s next move was to send Virdon to the Pirates on May 17, 1956, thereby leaving a huge gap in center field for the rest of the decade. Athletes are pragmatic out of need. Their survival depends on knowing what is real, what works. If they think a manager or general manager is a wrongo, they tune him out.
Lane pronounced that Stan and Red were among the five “untouchables” on the Cardinals, but he undoubtedly sensed that the core of the team did not respect him. Schoendienst had the impression that Lane could not actually see what his players were doing on the field.
“We would be taking batting practice and he’d hear the crack of the bat and say things like, ‘There’s a fine ballplayer,’ ” Red would write in his autobiography. “He had no idea who was batting but he was able to get away with statements like that.”
Lane knew only one way to make the Cardinals his team. With the trading deadline of June 15 approaching, Musial received a call from Biggie, who said the Sporting News was investigating a rumor that Lane was preparing to trade Musial to the Phillies for Robin Roberts.
After talking to Musial, Biggie promptly called a brewery official and said, “Well, if it’s true, I’ve got news for you. The kid won’t report. He’ll quit.” The “kid” always maintained that Biggie had acted on his own, but this is surely another example of Stanley’s division of labor: he did the hitting, and Biggie did the phoning.
The brewery walls quivered as the news worked its way up toward Gussie Busch. Meanwhile, Musial fumed. He and Red lived a few blocks from each other, often driving together to the ballpark, which allowed Lil and Mary to drive together later.
“I’m picking up Stan this particular day, and he comes out of the house, you know, and I could see there’s something wrong with him,” Schoendienst recalled. “He wasn’t the same old Stan. And I says, I thought maybe they had a big argument or something at home. And I says, ‘What? What’s wrong, Stan?’ And, and he says, ‘That darn Frank Lane, he wants to trade me, and I ain’t going,’ he said, like that.”
Red tried to cheer Stan by saying Busch would never allow the trade.
“That’s one time I’ve seen Stan upset. And he couldn’t understand why he wanted to trade him,” Red recalled. “He says, ‘Well I’m not gonna go,’ and he says, ‘I’m gonna talk to Mr. Busch—to the boss.’ So evidently he did.”
Musial and Busch were friendly, socializing together in Florida and St. Louis. The impulsive beer baron had not hired Trader Lane to send away the popular star who helped sell beer all over the country.
After a day or two, Lane put out a statement that said: “August A. Busch, Jr., and myself are in complete accord that Musial will not be traded.”
What the statement did not say was that Lane was finished trading. He had to trade people. Otherwise, what was the point?
Red began to wonder: if Trader Lane could not get his charge by trading Musial, whom could he trade? The answer was suddenly apparent: “I guess I’ll be next, because that’s the way Lane was. Trader Lane. And I was. I was gone the next day.”
On June 14, 1956, Lane traded Schoendienst to the Giants, theoretically to get a shortstop, Alvin Dark, who was well past his prime. Red found out about it over the radio before Lane’s secretary bothered to call Red’s house with the news.
Mary Schoendienst, a St. Louis girl, wrote a letter to the papers thanking the fans for their support of Red, and people from Red’s hometown in southern Illinois never changed the road sign: WELCOME TO GERMANTOWN, HOME OF RED SCHOENDIENST, ST. LOUIS CARDINALS. They must have known something.
Musial’s memory of that awful day: “The rest of us got the word that Red had been traded just as we were boarding a train out of St. Louis for an eastern trip. It was the saddest day of my career. I slammed the door to my train berth shut and didn’t open it for a long time.”
“Yeah, boy, he didn’t like that at all,” Red said. “I didn’t either.”
Long after Red was sacrificed, Broeg finally found the nerve to ask Stanley if he actually would have quit baseball rather than be traded.
“Musial just laughed,” Broeg recalled. “He says, ‘I wouldn’t report? I got to report, you know?’ ” Broeg said Musial would have been “crushed” to go to another team, but as Broeg put it, “He wasn’t gonna walk away from his career.”
Red was pretty miserable in New York, but the trade worked out for him. A year and a day after leaving the Cardinals, he was traded to Milwaukee, and soon some of the Braves would sidle up to Musial at the batting cage and whisper that his buddy was even better than they could have imagined. Red was the missing link, the professional who helped Henry Aaron and Eddie Mathews win pennants in 1957 and 1958. Schoend
ienst then contracted tuberculosis, fought his way back, and rejoined the Cardinals in 1961. By that time, Trader Lane was long gone.
One consequence of the Schoendienst trade was that Busch brought the hammer down on Lane, making him clear all trades with the brewery. But Lane was nothing if not brazen, seeking an extension of his contract. Busch clarified matters by sending Lane a telegram containing three little words: “Kiss my ass.”
Lane took the hint and moved on after the 1957 season. While working in Cleveland, he would trade Rocky Colavito, one of the most popular players in the history of that franchise. He would even trade managers in 1960, swapping Joe Gordon for Jimmy Dykes, still the only time two managers have ever been traded.
Stanley was not perceived as a vengeful man, but he had his moments. In 1967, he would inherit Lane’s old job as general manager, with the prodigal Red as the manager. One day the two old friends were sitting up front in the team bus that was about to leave the hotel when Trader Lane hopped on board, hoping to hitch a ride to the ballpark, a courtesy sometimes extended to baseball friends.
“I never saw Stan move so fast in my life,” Red said. “He sprang up from his seat and walked to where Lane was sitting. ‘Get the hell out of here,’ he ordered Lane. ‘Get off our bus.’ ”
Red added: “I wish Stan, or somebody else, had the authority to tell Lane what to do in earlier times. Then maybe I wouldn’t have been headed to New York becoming a member of the Giants.”
AT LEAST Red helped win two pennants. Stanley was mired in a stagnant organization, not getting any younger. Hutch was not the problem; his gruff credibility enabled him to move Musial, once again, from the outfield to first base, telling reporters that Musial did not “cover the ground that he used to. He doesn’t get the ball to the infield as quickly. I thought he would be better off at first base because we do need a first baseman.”
Although Musial hit .310 in 1956, Hutch dropped him from third to fifth in the lineup. True to his code, Musial did not gripe about it. He was still having his moments.
One moment came at the 1956 All-Star Game in Washington, D.C., after Williams hit a homer and the public-address announcer told the crowd that Williams had just tied Musial for All-Star home runs with his fifth. In the next inning, Musial hit a homer off Tom Brewer, prompting the revised announcement that, ladies and gentlemen, Musial has just passed Williams.
Upon turning thirty-six, Musial gave up cigarettes for the most part, although not the occasional cigar or cigarillo. His reward was his seventh and last batting championship, with a .351 average, 102 runs batted in, and 29 homers in 1957.
On June 12, he broke Gus Suhr’s National League record for consecutive games with 823, after making a token appearance along the way to keep the streak going. He had also played injured a number of times, living up to the old Gashouse code that a player never took a day off.
“We were a tough bunch of guys back then,” he once told Julius Hunter, a popular St. Louis commentator. “We played hurt a lot. We had a game to play, and when you hit the field you forgot a while about this or that hurting you. You get a bruise, you pour a little iodine on it and keep on playing. You get a sprain, either you or the team doctor would tape it up real tight and you’d head back out in the field. I used to think of all the fans that paid their hard earned money to come see me play. They didn’t buy tickets to see me sitting on the bench.”
Musial always stressed his luck in avoiding major injuries, but there was something else—his workman’s pride in showing up, doing an honest job.
He had learned a lesson earlier in his career from a conversation with Al Simmons—originally Aloys Szymanski, one of the great players of Polish ancestry. Simmons, who finished his career with 2,927 hits, once told Musial he would have reached 3,000 hits if he had played a few more games every season.
The streak ended at 895 when Musial injured his left shoulder trying to pull an outside pitch to protect the runner. He wound up playing only 134 games that season, his lowest total in fifteen seasons. Athletes are always stunned at the suggestion their bodies are deserting them. The first reaction is: Bad day.
But at least Musial did not have to see Lane’s smirking face anymore. The new general manager was Bing Devine, a local boy from Washington University who had worked his way up in the organization. Musial’s first salary negotiation with Devine involved a modest request for 1958: Kiner had reached $90,000 and Musial told Devine he wanted $91,000. Devine checked it out and came back with the news that Gussie Busch wanted Musial to become the first National League player to make $100,000, which Musial accepted gracefully.
The aura of the grand old star of the National League also carried a legend: Musial had never been thrown out of a game. He did come very close on opening day of 1958 after being called out on strikes to end the home half of the first. Musial gave a brief look to home-plate umpire Frank Dascoli, who was known to have a low tolerance for criticism, even from Stanley.
Normally, umpires began to question their call (to themselves, of course) when Stanley fixed his sad-eyed look on them. Dascoli may have taken the look as a challenge. When Musial was called out again to end the third inning, he gave Dascoli a major-league glare.
As Musial trudged away from home plate, Del Ennis, in the on-deck circle, warned him not to look back because Dascoli was glaring back at the number 6 between Musial’s shoulder blades. Musial kept walking, giving Dascoli no cause to toss him.
Musial was friendly with most umpires and sometimes could even laugh at their mistakes. In return, he received just about universal respect.
“I met Al Barlick once at Cooperstown and was asking him what happened if Stan took a pitch with two strikes,” Joe Torre said. “Barlick thought about it and said, ‘If he didn’t swing at it, it’s a ball.’ ”
Another umpire anecdote turns out to be about seven-tenths urban myth, like alligators in the sewer system. According to legend, Stanley once had a game-winning grand-slam home run negated because time had been called as a ball rolled onto the field; thereupon Stanley promptly hit a bases-clearing triple to alleviate the home-plate umpire’s guilt.
In one version, this happened off Ben Wade of Brooklyn in St. Louis in the early fifties. The only thing wrong with this version is that no box score exists for such an epic event.
Something like this did happen on April 18, 1954, off Paul Minner of the Cubs at Wrigley—a one-run double was negated when the first-base umpire blew the call and ruled Musial’s ball to be foul. True story: Musial trudged home, did not complain to umpire Augie Donatelli, and promptly whacked a double to the same place, this time to be called fair. Still a nice story, however.
Stanley has even received credit for giving career-altering advice to a Hall of Fame umpire, Doug Harvey. In 1961, when Harvey was breaking in, he became so mesmerized by a curveball from Don Drysdale that he called Musial out on strikes. Musial politely told Harvey that Drysdale’s excellent pitch had actually broken a few inches before home plate, and suggested Harvey slow down his procedure for making calls. Harvey listened and soon became the strict but fair presence known to the players as “God.”
Musial was not playing politics with the umps; he just had a high standard.
In 1958, Musial approached another milestone—the eighth player ever to accumulate 3,000 career hits. Biggie arranged for a huge party for Musial on Sunday evening, May 11, by which time, Biggie estimated, Musial would reach that number. Accommodating soul that he was, Stanley rapped out five hits in a doubleheader that afternoon but was still two hits away when it was time for the party. Musial pulled out his harmonica and the 350 guests cheered the man with 2,998 career hits. Then the Cardinals took off for a two-day trip to Chicago.
After getting one hit on Monday, Musial mused out loud that it would be nice if he could make his 3,000th at home. Always a straight shooter, Hutchinson informed players, press, and fans that Musial would be rested on Tuesday—unless the Cards absolutely needed a hit.
On Tu
esday Lil saw Stanley off to the ballpark and then made a sortie down Michigan Avenue to shop for a hat she could wear in St. Louis for the big moment a day or two later.
She found the right hat and then told her friends, “Girls, we came here to see his 3000th base hit, and even if they don’t play him, we have to be at the ballpark because you never know what’s going to happen.”
When Lil arrived, Stanley was out in the bullpen, working on his ballplayer tan. In the sixth inning, with a runner on base and the Cardinals trailing by a run, Hutch did what any manager would do: he called on Stanley. By some odd coincidence, the pitcher was a right-hander, Moe Drabowsky, who actually had been born in Poland, Musial’s ancestral home.
Drabowsky was not about to toss Musial a friendly helping of golumpki; he tried to tantalize Musial with an outside pitch. But as he had been doing since he was a kid playing on the odd-shaped field in Donora, Musial stroked the ball to the left side. Ernie Banks, one of Musial’s greatest admirers, watched the ball sizzle past him at shortstop, hooking into the corner, and Banks could not help his let’s-play-two smile as Musial pulled into second. Hutchinson came lumbering onto the field to congratulate Musial, apologizing for ruining the plans for St. Louis.
The ball was retrieved by the third-base umpire, none other than Frank Dascoli, who had been looking to eject Stanley back on April 15. With a big smile, Dascoli came running over to present the ball at second base. Cubs and Cardinals were applauding and laughing, and then Musial spotted Lil and kissed her as photographers clicked away. One of the photographers asked, “Who’s the blonde, Stan?”
The celebration continued as the team pulled out of the Illinois Central depot, heading home. Harry Caray gave Musial a pair of cuff links with “3,000” engraved on them, and Sam Jones, the winning pitcher, delivered a magnum of Champagne. Coincidentally, with the arrival of the jet age, this was the last time the Cardinals would ever take a train on this route. Fans in Illinois waved from the side of the tracks, with fans in Springfield singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”
Stan Musial Page 24