Stan Musial

by George Vecsey

  He had another reason to feel rejuvenated. In 1962 the National League expanded, after political pressure from the ubiquitous Branch Rickey for a third league. The league added teams in Houston and New York, the latter managed by Casey Stengel, who had taken one look at Musial in the tail end of 1941 and pronounced him one for the ages. Stanley openly adored Stengel—stood around and listened with a wide smile, called him “Case.”

  The hideous Mets—everybody could tell how awful they were after a few days in spring training—opened the season in St. Louis in what turned out to be typical fashion: a few of them got stuck in the elevator of the Chase-Park Plaza Hotel. How was that for an omen?

  Just in case anybody had forgotten him back in Gotham, Stanley sent a little calling card, best described in the box score: Musial … 3-1-3-2.

  From that perfect opening night, Musial just kept hitting. There is a theory that hitters benefited from expansion because each league suddenly had twenty pitchers who might not have been in the majors otherwise. When the American League expanded in 1961, Roger Maris hit 61 homers. More likely, Musial’s renaissance was a credit to his winter workouts, Johnny Keane’s faith in him, and Musial’s own talent.

  Musial enjoyed his visit to the Mets’ temporary home in the rusting old Polo Grounds in uptown Manhattan. As dreadful as they were, the Mets had made possible a number of joyous returns by players not seen in those parts since 1957. Willie Mays came back with the Giants. Duke Snider came back with the Dodgers. And Stanley came back with the Cardinals.

  Just the sight of Musial in the Polo Grounds raised instinctive respect in Alvin Jackson, out of the Pittsburgh organization, a decent left-hander good enough to lose twenty games in 1962.

  “We’ve got a one-run lead with two outs and he comes up to pinch-hit,” Jackson recalled in 2010. “My momma didn’t raise no fool. He’s not beating Mrs. Jackson’s son. Not this day. No. So I walked him. And people are going, ‘You put the tying run on base,’ and I said, ‘Don’t even go there.’ And Curt Flood came up and grounded out and people said, ‘You walked a left-handed hitter,’ and I said, ‘That was no left-handed hitter. That was Stan Musial.’ ”

  In early July 1962, Musial had himself quite a weekend with the extremely short porch in right field in the Polo Grounds. On Saturday he hit a homer in his last at-bat, just to get warmed up. Keane put him back in the lineup on Sunday.

  Lil had missed his two other big home-run days. The time he hit three homers in Springfield in 1941, she was diapering their son. The time he hit five homers in a doubleheader in 1954, she was staying home after a late Saturday night. This time she was present as Stanley drilled three homers.

  Immediately after that splurge, Musial went down to Washington, D.C., for the All-Star Game and a reunion with President John F. Kennedy, who openly cheered as Musial pinch-hit a single in the sixth inning.

  The next day Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri arranged a tour for Stan and Lil and Janet, starting with meeting Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general and brother of the president, who showed them around the Department of Justice. Then the Musials visited FBI headquarters, including the firing range.

  “We came back to Bob Kennedy’s office and he said, ‘How would you like to visit my brother at the White House?’ ” recalled John H. Zentay, then a young staff aide to Senator Symington, who was escorting the Musials. “Stan, being Stan, said, ‘No, we wouldn’t want to bother him.’ ” Zentay assured him that if the Kennedys invited Musial to the White House, they meant it.

  “I started driving Stan around for a few hours,” recalled Zentay, who was thrilled to be handed Symington’s Oldsmobile convertible with senatorial license plates. “The Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, all the sights around Washington. I noticed how often he was recognized and how much he loved it.”

  Musial insisted upon returning to the hotel to change into more formal clothing, and the small group arrived at the White House at three o’clock. Dave Powers, one of JFK’s closest friends, traded baseball talk with Musial in a small room off the Oval Office.

  “The photographer came in and took pictures of us while Janet sat in the president’s chair,” Zentay recalled. “I looked down at her and she went bug-eyed as in walked the president.”

  In his autobiography, Musial recalled: “Sure enough, President Kennedy greeted us personally and spent about fifteen minutes with us. He gave my wife a pen with his name on it. Janet received a paperweight medal and I got a PT Boat tie clasp.”

  Zentay, who had known Kennedy as a Senator from Massachusetts, noted that Musial and the president seemed to get along beyond the natural bonhomie of politician and athlete.

  “It was clear there was affection,” recalled Zentay, later a prominent lawyer in Washington.

  When the president had to get back to work, he asked if they would like a tour of the living quarters.

  “We found out later very few visitors are accorded this privilege,” Musial said.

  A White House aide escorted them to the kitchen and the solarium upstairs and then to the bedrooms. Zentay would remember the president’s bedroom, with a four-poster bed and small table alongside it, containing perhaps twenty-five pillboxes. Nobody mentioned them. Then they visited Jackie Kennedy’s bedroom and saw the extensive wardrobe in her closet.

  “My mom was impressed by how Mrs. Kennedy’s shoes were lined up to match her dresses,” Gerry Ashley said.

  After the unexpected hour in the White House, Zentay drove the Musials around Georgetown, where they sat on his landlord’s porch and had a drink in the late-afternoon sun.

  A few days later, Musial told a reporter: “Everything I have I owe to baseball. Can you imagine the son of a poor steel worker from Donora being invited to visit the President of the United States in the White House?”

  KEANE MADE sure Musial took a day off here and there for important days like Dick’s graduation from Notre Dame and Gerry’s graduation from high school. Stanley wound up playing in 135 games in 1962 and batting .330, third in the league behind Tommy Davis and Frank Robinson.

  “From the day he took over the Cardinals, Johnny Keane let me know that I was not only wanted but needed. He instilled enthusiasm and inspiration in me, and helped me find myself again,” Musial said after the season.

  However, as the season came to a close, Musial saw a familiar shadow over his shoulder: Gussie Busch, tired of waiting for a pennant, summoned Branch Rickey to be his advisor.

  Rickey insisted publicly he was not there to subvert Devine, but Devine knew better and walked out of Rickey’s first press conference. Rickey then moved into Devine’s neighborhood and asked for a ride to the ballpark, which meant Devine not only had to feel Rickey’s stiletto poised at his shoulder blades but also got to sample the blue fumes from Rickey’s cigars and the verbiage on the run downtown.

  One of Rickey’s first acts was to force George Silvey, a prominent member of the front office, to return from a postseason vacation that Devine had authorized. The Cardinals quickly resented Rickey’s meddlesome ways. Decades later, Tim McCarver would say: “I despised the guy.”

  Obviously Rickey had not been paying attention to the Trader Lane frolics of 1959, because he sent out hints that it was time for Musial to retire.

  “Since when do you ask a .330 hitter to retire until you’ve got his equal to replace him?” Busch said, following with this declaration: “I told Frank Lane five years ago that Musial wouldn’t be traded and I’m repeating now that Stan will finish his playing career in the Cardinals’ uniform and that no one will wear his number 6 again.”

  One of Rickey’s strengths was that he was not easily embarrassed.

  “I’m afraid that I was under the impression, gained earlier, that Stanley intended to retire after this year. This was a misunderstanding,” he said.

  Broeg, in his complicated role as friend of Stan and Post-Dispatch sports editor, printed Musial’s response to Rickey’s not-so-subtle hints that he retire.

&nbs
p; “This is hard to believe because both Bing and Johnny said they were counting on me. I won’t retire, not in the good shape I’m in and hitting the way the way I did this year. If the Cardinals don’t want me, I know some others that do.”

  Early in the 1963 season, Rickey sent a memo to Busch blaming two losses on Musial’s slowness, once in left field, once in running out a double play. “He is still a grand hitter but not at all the hitter of former days,” the memo said.

  Musial was the first to admit he was no longer the Donora Greyhound, but he still had his moments, even at forty-two. Early in the 1963 season, Musial made quite an impression on his old pal Warren Spahn, thirty-nine and going strong.

  Stanley would hit seventeen home runs off Spahn, more than off any other pitcher, which was mostly a tribute to the longevity of both great players. One of Spahn’s best pitches was a screwball, which broke in on a left-handed hitter, acting like an ordinary curve from a right-hander.

  Over the years, Spahn had tried everything against Musial.

  “I tried to pitch in, out, up, down,” Spahn once said, adding, “Stan was able to get over the top. He can hit the good curveball and the good high fastball.”

  So Spahn came up with an idea: maybe he could disarm his old adversary by throwing a curve so mediocre it might lull Musial into submission.

  “It was a theory,” Spahn said a few years later, wincing from remembered pain.

  On May 14, 1963, in County Stadium, Spahnie tried out his mediocre-curveball theory. Del Crandall was behind the plate that night, but Joe Torre, a young catcher, was in uniform, observing how the two old hands pitched to Stanley.

  “Normally, a guy would go like this,” Torre said, mimicking a left-handed hitter dropping down, anticipating a left-handed screwball breaking in on his knees.

  “But Stan never moved,” Torre recalled. “Hit a line drive.”

  The St. Louis paper the next day said Spahnie was hit in the stomach; he only wished.

  “Spahnie didn’t wear a cup,” Torre recalled, referring to the protective cup players wear over their groin. “He couldn’t, because of that high leg kick.

  “Spahnie went down, got up, picked up the ball and threw it and got Stan out at first base, and then he lay down again,” Torre recalled.

  While the trainer elevated Spahn’s legs and Spahn waited for the initial wave of pain to subside, Stanley trotted across the infield toward the dugout, right past his ancient opponent.

  “So Stan said to Spahnie, ‘You all right, Old Folks?’ ”

  What did Spahnie have to say about that?

  “Groaned for a while,” Torre recalled.

  STANLEY WAS hitting .213 after that game. The sport was still fun—between the lines—but he was growing tired of the second coming of Branch Rickey, who was agitating to replace Keane with Leo Durocher. One thing Stanley knew: he did not want to play for Leo the Lip, ever.

  On August 12, 1963, at a team picnic at Grant’s Farm, Musial broke the news that he would retire at season’s end. There were tears all around. Johnny Keane said, “One of the biggest honors and privileges of my life has been to put on a Cardinal uniform the same as Stan’s, dress in the same clubhouse as Stan and be on the same field and club as Stan. Think of all the good words in the English language, and they all fit Stan.”

  The Cardinals chased the Dodgers into the final month. On September 10, Dick Musial and his wife, Sharon, had their first child, Jeffrey Stanton Musial, while Dick was on military duty in Kansas. The family stayed up much of the night celebrating—Gerry remembered drinking White Russians—and a few hours later Grandpa whacked a home run.

  The Cardinals came close, finishing with a 93–69 record and a percentage of .574, the best by the team since Eddie Dyer, Keane’s mentor, had a percentage of .623 in 1949. But just as in 1949, the Dodgers outlasted the Cardinals.

  On the last Friday night of the season, Musial took Gerry to the Veiled Prophet’s Ball, one of the major society events in town. He was tired on Saturday and saved his strength for his final game, September 29.

  Despite the legend that Musial did not get attention from the national media, several New York–based magazines had requested permission to follow him step by step on his final day. This was a national hero winding up his career. Attention most definitely was paid.

  That final Sunday morning, Musial attended Mass and then had breakfast with his actor friend Horace McMahon. Then he headed for the ballpark in his blue Cadillac, smoking a cigarillo along the way, with a photographer from Look magazine, Arnold Hano from Sport, and W. C. Heinz from Life all squeezed into the backseat.

  At the ballpark, Musial politely obeyed requests from the squadron of photographers waiting for him at the cramped old clubhouse. Hey, Stan, walk through that door again? they asked. Sure, fellas. He signed autographs for teammates collecting instant memorabilia.

  Before the game, the Cardinals staged a one-hour ceremony of gifts and tears and speeches, the most memorable coming from Commissioner Ford C. Frick.

  Once a writer, Frick said he hoped Musial would be remembered for not just all the hits but for the joy he brought to the game. Then Frick proposed that Musial be remembered this way: “Here stands baseball’s perfect warrior. Here stands baseball’s perfect knight.”

  It was almost as if Frick were chiseling the words in stone—and soon enough they would be. How many commissioners write their own words and have them become immortal while they are still echoing around the ballpark?

  Musial’s final game, on a dank early autumn day, was a relief. In the fourth inning, Musial smacked a single past Pete Rose, the Reds’ second baseman with the Prince Valiant haircut, who would eventually break Musial’s league record for hits.

  In the sixth inning, against Jim Maloney, Musial slapped a single between first and second for his 3,630th hit and his 1,950th run batted in. Then Keane sent out Gary Kolb to run for him, invoking automatic boos from fans who never wanted it to end.

  Musial went to the clubhouse, where he had a beer, and then another beer, chatting amiably with photographers, reporters, friends, and interlopers as the game meandered anticlimactically into extra innings.

  Far too many people reminded Musial that he had made two hits in his first game and two hits in his last game.

  No improvement, he kept saying, armed with a wunnerful new punch line.

  That evening, there was a party for three hundred people at Stan Musial and Biggie’s. Old friends like Frank Pizzica came in from Donora to talk about his basketball prowess. Ki Duda, now the president of the state college in California, Pennsylvania, told how Musial had struck out eighteen batters in seven innings.

  “I don’t wear dark glasses,” Duda said, “but I have them today because tears came to my eyes.”

  Normally the life of the party, Stanley seemed subdued that evening.

  “What’s a fellow do when you’re out of a job?” he asked, more than once. He had been working since he was a teenager; he did not know the meaning of leisure time. He thought out loud. Maybe he would take his family to the Kentucky Derby, the Indy 500, a picnic on the Fourth of July.

  “What else do they do in the summer? I don’t know.”

  38

  FENDER BENDER

  JUST BECAUSE Stanley was retired did not mean he had run out of good fortune.

  The next spring, he was back in St. Pete, pretty much living the same life, except for playing baseball.

  One day he whipped out into traffic and grazed the side of another car.

  “Stan always drove fast, and he always drove a Caddy,” Tom Ashley said.

  Ashley loved just about everything about his father-in-law, but he had to admit, the man drove fast.

  “Stan got out, all apologetic, and the guy recognized him,” Ashley said.

  There were scrapes on both cars, plenty of reason for the man to be annoyed, but Stanley Luck kicked in.

  “The guy said, ‘I’ve got to tell my friends Stan Musial hit my car,’ ”
Ashley recalled.

  Meanwhile, Stanley was shuffling around in his pockets, looking for his wallet, a pen, a piece of paper, an insurance card, all the things we do when we have just scraped somebody’s vehicle—flustered and embarrassed and hoping the insurance policy would cover this.

  “Stan was offering to pay for it,” Ashley said, “but the guy said, ‘No, no, that’s all right, would you just sign my car?’ So Stan signed the crease in the car. The guy was thrilled.”

  39

  RETIREMENT

  REALITY STRUCK home within two months of Musial’s last game. John F. Kennedy—“my buddy”—was assassinated on November 22, 1963, a day after Musial’s forty-third birthday. The charming, entitled young president, who had shared some laughs with Musial, was gone.

  Gerry, now a student at Marymount College in Arlington, Virginia, went to the funeral procession as it approached Arlington National Cemetery. She knew how much her father admired Kennedy, and she felt she was representing her family.

  With the nation, and pretty much the whole world, in mourning, one young man in St. Louis could not face sitting around, so he and his girlfriend went out for a quiet dinner at Stan and Biggie’s. Knowing Musial to be an admirer of the president, the young man figured he would be secluded, grieving, not working at the restaurant.

  “Stan was there, and he graciously went around to each of the tables in the room and asked how the dinners were, how the food was, and just generally acted like a perfect gentleman and host,” the man said in an anonymous Internet posting many years later. “The mood in the room, as all over America, was subdued, numb; but Stan added a bit of humanity and life to it all.

  “Stan was right there, in public, helping strangers cope with the national tragedy.”