Stan Musial

by George Vecsey

  Today, in Musial’s chosen home of St. Louis, with its fine neighborhoods and hospitals and universities and industry, people refer to Musial as being forgotten or overlooked by coastal America.

  “St. Louis thinks of itself as the best baseball town and resents both coasts,” says Rick Wilber, a writer and journalism professor who grew up in the area and whose father, Del Wilber, was a friend and teammate of Musial’s.

  It is not hard to pick up on a form of blue-state/red-state resentment toward the two coasts. The issue surfaces on nearly a generational basis, going back to Musial’s arrival late in 1941, when his predecessors, the Gashouse Gang, were regarded as Huns and Vandals let loose in the big eastern cities. The terrific Cardinal teams of the 1980s were easily annoyed by swarms of chattering New York media plus the celebrity of the underachieving Mets players. And the flyover-neglect theory continues into the age of Albert Pujols.

  Ladies and gentlemen, on the right side of our airplane, you will see the famed St. Louis Gateway Arch alongside the Mississippi River. And ladies and gentlemen, a few blocks inland you may glimpse a large statue of Stan Musial, a local baseball player who used to be a big deal.

  The statue is just about the only lingering controversy in the generally tranquil public life of Stan Musial. Ever since it was unveiled in August 1968, Musial disliked it because it was too bulky and did not capture his coiled stance. Of course, the statue has been a landmark ever since, along with the Arch and the psychic presence of the man himself. As controversies go, the statue issue is pretty tame, as befitting the accepting mid-America region where it is based.

  St. Louis is the Mound City, nicknamed for Native American burial mounds in the region, whereas New York is the Media Capital of the World and California is the Dream Capital of the World. New York is where Ruth and DiMaggio and Robinson and Mantle and Mays all gained sporting immortality, and the brainy harbor city of Boston is where Williams gained his twitchy fame, if not always adoration.

  “May I tell you this?” said Marty Marion, known as Mr. Shortstop when the Cardinals won four pennants in the forties. Marion observed Musial as a weak-armed minor-league pitcher in spring training of 1941 and a few months later encountered him as the kid from nowhere who hit .426 in the last two weeks of a failed pennant drive—one of the most incredible leaps any player has ever made in one season.

  “We always say, in baseball, if you play in New York, you get twice as much publicity, you become more popular,” Marion said in 2000.

  “It’s just a known fact that everybody who plays in New York gets all the credit for being the best players or best whatever. Do you believe that? Well, I tell you, it’s a fact. If Stan Musial played in New York City and was a member of the Giants or the Dodgers, he’d have gotten more publicity than he’s gotten so far.”

  In that same end-of-millennium rush to quantify, ESPN came up with a series listing the top one hundred North American athletes of the twentieth century (Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, and so on). Stan Musial finished sixty-first. Marion insisted that if Musial had played in New York, he would have been among the top twenty-five.

  Musial did not complain publicly, but when ESPN began accumulating interviews with famous athletes, Musial would not cooperate, an act of quiet pique. He had his pride, and he had a long memory, as people would discover over the years. Musial let his friends do the speaking for him, and they did. Asked about Joe DiMaggio, Marion said, “I didn’t see him make all these fantastic catches,” meaning the regular season over the years. “I’ve seen guys catch as many things as he catches, but he wasn’t the hitter that Stan was. Joe wasn’t.”

  Marion added: “If Joe DiMaggio had of played in St. Louis and Stan Musial had of played with the Yankees, you’d see the difference in their ratings. I’m telling you. It’s a fact. Either you can believe me or not. That’s how ballplayers think.”

  But wait. Try reminding Cardinal fans that it was in Brooklyn where Musial was first called Stan the Man. Musial is a member of the Brooklyn Dodger Hall of Fame, in loving tribute to all the dents he put in the scoreboard at Ebbets Field. But the complaint cuts deeper than that.

  The perception of Musial’s slighting is that he is too much a man of the heartland, a son of the Monongahela River valley of Pennsylvania who became a loyal resident of the Mound City, with no juicy scandals attached to him, a guy who played his harmonica in hospitals and for ladies who lunch in the suburbs.

  No less an observer than Jim Murray, the Pulitzer Prize–winning sports columnist with the Los Angeles Times, once suggested that Musial was marginalized because he was a man of faith. Murray made this suggestion in January 1969, after 23 of 340 baseball writers somehow omitted Musial as he was overwhelmingly elected in the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. (Musial’s percentage was 93.24; by contrast, DiMaggio had needed three years to make the 75 percent needed for entry into the Hall.)

  Days after the vote, Murray wrote a lovely column praising Musial, throwing in every apple-pie and peanut-butter-sandwich reference he could. Classic Jim Murray. Then there was this: “Oh, it wasn’t unanimous. I guess that guy in New York with all the hair caught him coming out of church one day. A thing like that can hurt you in this generation.”

  I couldn’t resist. Knowing Murray from a few press boxes, admiring him greatly, I took the liberty of dropping him a note saying that not only was I a New Yorker but, as he knew, I had long hair (it was, after all, 1969) and sometimes I even went to church. I piled it on by reminding Jim that Brooklyn was where Musial had gotten his nickname. I have long since misplaced Jim’s very nice reply, but it was something like, Oh, geez, George, it was just one line in one column, and I was just trying to get through the day. (Years later, as a columnist, I came to understand that level of desperation much more clearly.)

  The oversight by the so-called fans in 1999 brought a response by guardians of the flame.

  Dave Kindred felt much as Marty Marion did. Writing in the Sporting News, he said, “If they’d traded uniforms, DiMaggio in St. Louis and Stan Musial in New York, Musial today would be regarded as the second-best player of all time, raised to Babe Ruth’s side by the Yankee mythology machine.”

  Kindred then submitted his starting lineup for what he called “One Game to Save All Civilization”: Morgan, Wagner, Ruth, Mantle, Gehrig, Schmidt, Musial, Bench, Koufax.

  No DiMaggio. No Williams.

  2

  LUCKY STANLEY

  TIM MCCARVER was called up in the summer of 1961, nineteen years old and filled with warnings from his father. One of them was: “You don’t want to lose your money gambling.”

  Naturally, on his first road trip, McCarver gravitated to the lounge in the back of the old DC-6B the Cardinals used to charter, which had a card table for about eight players. A rookie could lose his four-dollar-a-day meal money very quickly.

  Among the Cardinals who would slide into the semicircle of seats was Stan Musial, now forty-one years old.

  “Stan was a horrible poker player,” McCarver recalled. “He’d admit that today. Horrible.”

  If Stanley needed a six, and three of them had already been drawn, “most good players would have folded,” McCarver said. “But not Stan. He would get the last six and he won money off it. Guys would laugh about it. That’s just Stan.”

  “It always stood out that if you were against Stan, you were going to lose,” McCarver added.

  Musial could not explain his formula for poker just as he could never explain his corkscrew batting stance which set him off from almost every batter who ever lived. He just, ha-ha, did it.

  “Jack Buck used to laugh about it,” McCarver said. “I never played golf with Stan, but Jack said Stan would mishit the ball and the ball would hit the flag and fall next to the hole.”

  Just like Yogi, I said.

  “Yeah, exactly,” McCarver said. “God’s chosen people. Just like that.”

  I remembered flying with the Yankees or Mets on charters
in the early sixties, when the weather grew turbulent and we were slipping and sliding somewhere over a major American city, wondering how the pilot was going to find the airport. I would glance around the DC-6B and see the Mount Rushmore profile of Casey Stengel or the distinctive features of Yogi Berra and I would be reassured that nothing bad could ever happen to either of them, and therefore nothing bad could happen to anybody lucky enough to be in their company. Apparently, it was the same with Stan the Man.

  “Anytime Stan Musial was around, you got the feeling that everything was gonna be all right,” McCarver said. “And there are very few people that you run into in life that you can say that about. A man who can captivate a room without even anyone knowing that he’s there, you could feel him in a room and, and a lot of great men I hear are like that. But with Musial it was very, very special.”

  One time the Cardinals played in Philadelphia on a Sunday and headed back to St. Louis after the game. With a day off Monday, Musial had permission to go to New York to be honored at a charity dinner.

  “Guys were saying, ‘Stan’s not on the flight, uh, I’m not too sure I want to get on the flight.’ And sure enough, we take off and you could look out the left wing and see the propeller. It’s kind of a frightening sight when you’re five thousand feet off the ground and your propeller’s not going.

  “Well, guys are saying, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have gotten on this flight, Musial wasn’t on the flight.’ We had to return to the airport, they repaired the plane or they got a new plane, I forget which, but the fact that Stan wasn’t on it meant that things weren’t all right with the Cardinals as a ball club.”

  McCarver thought about it some more and suggested that Musial’s lucky touch stemmed from being a churchgoer.

  “If you believe in the afterlife strongly, you know that he is one of God’s chosen people,” McCarver said. “And his whole life’s been that way.”

  McCarver paused and added:

  “Never underestimate Stan. As long as I’ve known him, I’ve learned. Never underestimate him. That’s a serious mistake.”

  3

  THE OLD MASTER

  SOMETHING WAS causing people to downsize Stanley. In 1986, Bill James wrote:

  The image of Musial seems to be fading quickly. Maybe I’m wrong, but it doesn’t seem to me that you hear much about him anymore, compared to such comparable stars as Mantle, Williams, Mays and DiMaggio, and to the extent that you do hear of him it doesn’t seem that the image is very sharp, that anybody really knows what it was that made him different. He was never colorful, never much of an interview. He makes a better statue. What he was was a ballplayer. He hustled. You look at his career totals of doubles and triples, and they’ll remind you of something that was accepted while he was active, and has been largely forgotten since: Stan Musial was one player who always left the batter’s box on a dead run.

  The number crunchers, the baseball geeks, professional or amateur, put Musial much higher than the fans did. In the computer age, baseball surely has too many newfangled indices for measuring ballplayers. Stanley did not need printouts of pitchers’ tendencies; he knew what they were going to throw. Billy Martin won a lot of games without computer printouts of statistics. Hell, Billy would say (no doubt flinging the printed report against his office wall), he knew all that damn stuff.

  Still, sometimes it is helpful to walk on the wild side into the dense world of baseball stats. For example, Baseball-Reference.com came up with several new ways to compare hitters. One was the Black Ink test, first formulated by Bill James, which awards points for leading the league in major hitting categories. After the 2009 season, Musial was behind only Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. Another comparison was through the so-called Gray Ink test, which ranks players by appearances in the top ten in various batting categories. In this one, Musial was third, behind Cobb and Henry Aaron.

  James himself contributed to Musial’s slippage. Once upon a time, James listed Musial as the best left fielder of all time, but in 2000 James somehow flipped Musial with Williams. Had Teddy Ballgame been working on his fielding? Had he suddenly begun hitting to left field?

  James’s revision came before Barry Bonds became the all-time leader in home runs in one season and in a career. It also came before Bonds became suspected of using steroids during the Balco scandals. Bonds was so good, with or without the juice, that he was competition for Stanley and Teddy, but his dirty image is going to hold him back for a long time.

  In 2001, James ranked the top one hundred players in history, starting with Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Willie Mays, Oscar Charleston, Ty Cobb, Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, Walter Johnson, Josh Gibson, and Musial.

  By putting Musial in this company, James certainly rebutted the apocrypha that Musial is ignored because he was not all that interesting. All I can say is that the fans who saw Stan Musial play—play being the operative word—in New York are convinced he was one of the best players who ever wore a gray road uniform in Ebbets Field or the Polo Grounds. Or anywhere.

  Fact was, in Musial’s first full nineteen seasons, the Cardinals visited New York and Brooklyn for eleven games in each ballpark each summer, mostly day games, which created ample attention to number 6 in the next day’s newspapers, of which there were nearly a dozen. Because of the great history of the Cardinals, the team itself was the subject of numerous articles during spring training, particularly since the Cards trained in the same sleepy town as the Yankees. New York–based columnists would take themselves over to Al Lang Field and interview that great player and most accommodating of superstars, Stan Musial. All season, every season, there was a forest’s worth of articles.

  Woody Allen, growing up in Brooklyn, loved the writing of Jimmy Cannon,

  the sports columnist with the good old New York Post back in the fifties. Decades later, Allen could recall Cannon raving about Musial’s “serene dependability.”

  Many other odes to Musial were written by New Yorkers and printed in Sport magazine, based in New York:

  “Mr. Musial Marches On,” by Arthur Daley (sports columnist, New York Times), 1947

  “The Man: Stan Musial Is Baseball’s No. 1 Citizen,” by Roger Kahn (later the author of The Boys of Summer, about the Brooklyn Dodgers), 1958

  “Stan Musial’s Last Game,” by Arnold Hano (New York– and California-based writer), 1964

  The New York papers could not get enough of Musial. In 1951, Musial was hired by the World-Telegram and Sun to write a daily critique of the Dodgers-Giants playoff and the Yankees-Giants World Series. Under Musial’s byline was his identification: “Baseball’s Greatest Player.”

  Musial also “covered” the 1953 World Series for the Newspaper Enterprise Association and was identified in the World-Telegram and Sun as “Six Time Batting Champ.” He was treated as visiting royalty by Joe Williams of the Telly, godded up by Red Smith of the New York Herald Tribune, lionized by Frank Graham of the Journal American, flattered by Jimmy Cannon (Woody Allen’s favorite) of the Journal American and later the Post, and adulated by Joe Reichler of the Associated Press.

  “Musial must come perilously close to being the best-liked ballplayer of his generation,” wrote Arthur Daley of the New York Times in his August 16, 1962 piece, “Salute to a Man.”

  After coping with the moody DiMaggio and the irascible Williams, writers adored Musial as a player and accessible superstar. Sports columnists are easy. We love stars who talk to us. That simple. Of course, most fans in St. Louis did not know how much ink Stanley received in Big Town because, in those pre-Internet, pre-cable years (some of us call them the good old days), they were, most of the time, going about their business in St. Louis and did not know how well Musial was treated way out there on the East Coast. But Musial knew. All I’m saying is, don’t blame us.

  MUSIAL SHOWS up at the very core of his sport. Not long ago I was writing a short history of baseball, trying to jam nearly two hundred years of the American game into sixty thousand words, from the dubious myth of Abner Doub
leday to the suspect muscles of Barry Bonds.

  Somehow, the way writers do, I meandered into a prologue about teaching my grandson how to hit during an impromptu dusk lesson on his family’s front lawn somewhere out there in America. Having coached youth baseball when my son was little, I always tried to turn youngsters into the coiled Musial stance. Start back there and then hit the ball. I realized Stanley knew exactly what he was doing.

  After doing this little riff on Stanley’s stance, I found myself coming back to Musial in the main narrative, not just because I had idolized him as a kid but because of his links to the past and the future.

  Almost by accident, I postulated that Musial was the classic example of baseball’s six degrees of separation. He was the heart of the game. He had personal connections backward to Branch Rickey and George Sisler and Dickie Kerr; he matched his contemporaries DiMaggio and Williams; when Jackie Robinson arrived in 1947, Musial let everybody know that he fully intended to show up for work; his batting stance was once used as a teaching tool for a young Japanese prospect named Sadaharu Oh.

  He also met every president from Truman through Obama, except, for no particular reason, Dwight D. Eisenhower, for whom he apparently voted twice. Over time, Musial has come to be seen as the epitome of the Eisenhower years, from 1953 through 1960, a time now ridiculed for its—what? Complacency? Stability? Normalcy? In this age when yappers spout nuttiness over the airwaves and nihilists fly airplanes into buildings, normalcy is looking good.

  In kinder times, Musial even united political opponents. For many years, Victor Gold, a prominent Republican, and Frank Mankiewicz, a prominent Democrat, ran the Stan Musial Society of Washington–Cardinal fans in the capital. Sometimes Musial showed up for the banquet, and played his bipartisan harmonica well into the night.