Stan Musial

by George Vecsey

  “I said, ‘Stan, it’s got a very thin handle,’ ” Kranepool recalled. “He said, ‘Ed, I don’t hit ’em with the handle.’ ”

  Stanley honed the bat handles even thinner using sandpaper in the clubhouse, thereby validating the shop classes he took back at Donora High.

  Or was it the stance?

  Ed Mickelson, who was briefly a teammate of Musial’s and later a prominent high school coach in the area, tried to break down what happened after the man went into that temporary crouch.

  “I have a theory why Stan’s bat showed ball marks only closely aligned in a small area on the sweet spot of his bat,” Mickelson wrote. “No ball marks on the end or on the handle. I believe it had to do with the placement of his front foot as he would stride toward the ball.”

  Mickelson made a drawing of what Musial did with his feet. The marks looked like something out of an old-fashioned learn-to-waltz diagram.

  For the outside pitch, Musial’s front (right) foot would move toward the plate.

  For the inside pitch, Musial’s front foot would open up slightly, toward the outside of the batter’s box.

  For the pitch over the plate, Musial’s front foot would move straight ahead.

  This consistency of ball marks on the bat indicated excellent discipline,

  control, balance, eyesight, reflexes—a command of the body that probably went back to his days in the Falcons gymnastics drills.

  Amateur prestidigitator that he was, Stanley seemed to be hiding his secrets. According to Joe Garagiola, Curt Flood, at the time buried deep on the Cardinals’ bench, once asked Musial the secret of his hitting.

  “Curt, all you can do is when you see the ball just hit the hell out of it,” Musial said, thoroughly mystifying the young player.

  The closest Musial ever came to explaining himself was to Roger Kahn, who had built a rapport with him over the years.

  “Do you guess?” Kahn asked Musial in 1957.

  “I don’t guess. I know,” Musial replied.

  “You know?”

  “I can always tell, as long as I’m concentrating.”

  Some hitters say they read the rotation of the ball, but Musial said his edge came even earlier.

  “I pick the ball up right away. Know what I mean? I see it as soon as it leaves the pitcher’s hand. That’s when I got to concentrate real hard. If I do, I can tell what the pitch is going to be.”

  That meant, in the clubby days of the eight-team National League, that Musial had a feel for the repertoire of approximately seventy pitchers at a time.

  “Every pitcher has a set of speeds,” he told Kahn. “I mean, the curve goes one speed and the slider goes at something else. Well, if I concentrate real good, I can pick up the speed of the ball about the first thirty feet it travels.”

  Perfectionist that he was, Musial said that approximately twenty or thirty times a season he found himself not concentrating. Imagine what he could have hit if he’d paid attention.

  Just consider the pitchers he victimized for the most home runs: Warren Spahn, 17; Preacher Roe, 12; Johnny Antonelli, 11 (all three of them lefties, thereby defying the general rule that lefty pitchers are tough on lefty hitters); Newcombe, 11; Murry Dickson, 11; Bob Rush, 10; Robin Roberts, 10. All these double-digit victims ranged from Hall of Fame level to very good starters. Of course, a pitcher would have to be pretty good to last long enough to give up that many homers to one man.

  Stanley hit his homers without causing animosity. Roberts, who gave up 505 career home runs, remained socially friendly with Musial, often meeting him in Florida after they were retired. Roberts said he had exactly one photograph of an opposing player in his home—Stan the Man.

  Everybody liked the way he referred to himself as Stanley, creating a character in his own personal video, much the way latter-day superstars refer to themselves in the third person—Michael Jordan doesn’t do garbage time, or whatever.

  But Stanley was not a showbiz celebrity. The television highlight show had not yet been invented, which is another reason some of us call them the good old days. Stanley just wanted to make contact. Nobody took it personally.

  Newcombe respected Musial going back to when the league was being integrated and Musial was a symbol of moderation.

  “He was one of the true professionals,” Don Newcombe said. “That’s what I say about Stan Musial. A true professional. In that era when Jackie came in and then Roy [Campanella] and then me, and Mays and all those others, Musial was a man who hit you hard but never showed you up. He hit the ball out of the ballpark, he wouldn’t clown going into the dugout. He’d go in and shake hands with a few guys and get a drink of water. He would never show you up. You wouldn’t have to knock him down.”

  That was important in the old days, when showboating was discouraged. If a hitter lost sight of that nicety, he might get his uniform dirty, fast.

  “Today, if me and Drysdale and Gibson pitched like that, we’d wind up in jail because we’d be killing somebody,” Newcombe said in 2009. “They’re trying to show you up, going around the bases waving their hands and all that high-fiving when they get to the dugout. Our guys didn’t do that. They hit the ball out of the ballpark and they ran around the bases. We watched ’em, you know, to see what they would do and how they would do it, and Stanley never showed you up.”

  The Dodgers did not hate Stanley, which was the highest respect possible in that harsh rivalry. Everybody recognized that the man with the unusual stance was a gentle man, a kind man.

  6

  A HAND ON THE SHOULDER

  JOHN HALL’S father died when the boy was seven. To bring some life back into the house, John’s mother bought an RCA Victor radio and phonograph. One day John’s uncle was doing some work around the house, and he turned on the radio and he told the boy, “I want you to listen to this.”

  It was a baseball game, emanating from St. Louis but coming over the local station in nearby Carthage, Missouri, one of eighty-four stations that carried Cardinals games all over Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.

  The boy listened to Harry Caray blustering names like Slaughter and Marion and Musial, and from then on he was a Cardinals fan, like much of the American South and Southwest.

  On July 2, 1950, when the boy was eleven, family friends drove him and his mother along Route 66 all the way up to Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis, where George “Red” Munger outpitched Bill Werle of the Pirates, 2–1. Half a century later, Hall could remember the details.

  After the game, there was only one choice for a restaurant—Stan Musial and Biggie’s, where, legend had it, Musial himself appeared whenever he did not have a game.

  During the meal, John set off in search of a men’s room.

  “Being a country boy, or at least one from a small town, I went outside to see if there might be an outhouse somewhere,” Hall would recall. “When making a visual search for an outside privy, I observed something that I hadn’t seen in my hometown—a parking lot full of Cadillacs.” In his imagination, one of those Cadillacs belonged to Musial. However, he did not spot a restroom in the parking lot.

  “When I came back in, I guess I looked lost,” Hall said. “All of a sudden there were two hands on my shoulder, and a voice said, ‘Son, can I help you?’ and my heart stopped.”

  His heart stopped because it felt good to be called “son,” particularly by Stan Musial, wearing a nice suit. The boy promptly forgot his other mission and darted back to his table to see if anybody had a paper and pencil.

  “I had never asked for an autograph in my life, and when I went back he was seated with the guy that I later figured out was Amadee”—Amadee Wohlschlaeger, the renowned illustrator for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Sporting News, known by his first name.

  Eyeing the pencil and scrap of paper, Musial said, “Come here, bud,” and he led the boy into his office, where he produced a photograph of himself and a fountain pen.

  “I was sur
prised, he was writing with his right hand,” Hall said years later, after learning the left-handed boy had been forced to write right-handed by his teachers.

  “He signed it in green ink, ‘To John Hall, from Stan Musial,’ and he asked, ‘How’s this, is this better than a piece of paper?’ ” The boy said, “Yes, sir, it is. Thank you very much.”

  Nearly sixty years later, a historian of minor-league baseball, Hall had met Musial a time or two. He wanted it known that the man was just as decent as he had seemed on that evening back in 1950. John Hall still had the autographed photo, still cherished the memory of being called “son.”

  7

  LUKASZ AND MARY

  HIS FAMILY lived down by the river, close to the mill. This was bottomland in every sense, where the newest immigrants lived, closest to the noise and the grime. The ground was barren, and people understood that was because of the smoke that flowed twenty-four hours a day; they had yet to learn just how much the smoke was damaging their bodies.

  In the afternoon, the boy would sometimes wait for his father outside the mill. Lukasz Musial was not much more than five feet tall, and he spoke mostly Polish, calling the boy Stashu, the diminutive of Stanislaus.

  At home there was Lukasz and Mary Musial and the girls, Ida, Victoria, Helen, and Rose, all born within six years, and then Stanislaus, born on November 21, 1920.

  “They didn’t even have enough money to baptize my father until his brother came along and they were baptized together. That was poor!” Musial’s oldest daughter, Gerry Ashley, said. “I don’t even think they had indoor plumbing for quite a long time,” she added.

  Just before Stashu’s second birthday, he was joined by Edward, so the family arranged a bargain christening at the Polish church overlooking the steel mill. The church was the Holy Name of the Blessed Virgin Mary, popularly called St. Mary’s.

  When the boy was seven or eight, the family moved from 465 Sixth Street up the hill to 1139 Marelda Street—eight Musials plus Mary’s mother in a two-bedroom house. Because the house was farther from the mill, Lukasz took more time getting home, stopping in the Polish social club and maybe the Russian social club or the Croatian social club or the Czech social club or any of the other ethnic clubs on the hillside.

  The beer and the shot, or some variation, helped dissipate the metallic particles in the men’s throats, took the pain from the fresh burns from the sparks and spattered drops of acid. Lukasz Musial was not healthy and did not always work, but even when he did work he made more stops than some of the men, trudging home without his full paycheck.

  “As far as drinking, the guys in the steel mill worked hard,” said Mark Pawelec, whose maternal grandfather was a prominent Donora gymnast named Frank Musial, no relation to Lukasz. In 2009, Pawelec was living high on the hill in a family home, commuting to Pittsburgh on a modern toll road a few miles to the west, and in his spare time he studied the history of the Poles of Donora.

  “My grandfather, Frank Musial, was an alcoholic,” Pawelec said. “He did drink. That’s not something I tell people, but I know for a fact it was true.” Pawelec would not speculate about Lukasz Musial but said he would not be surprised if anybody thought he needed a drink or three on the way back from that mill.

  Stan Musial never talked much about Lukasz within his family; men of the thirties and forties did not say much about what they saw at work or at war, and they tended not to discuss destructive behaviors under the roof of their childhood home.

  “I think he struggled with alcohol, that’s what I would prefer to say, as reported from my grandmother,” said Gerry Ashley, the second child of Stan and Lil, as she tried to reconstruct the life of her grandfather, whom she barely remembered.

  Watching Lukasz struggle did not turn Stan into a teetotaler. He was loyal to his father and a proud son of Donora, but parts of his life were off-limits. His friend Bob Broeg discovered this reticence in 1963 when they were collaborating on Musial’s autobiography, right after Musial’s retirement.

  Broeg was a writer, one of those curious types who always want to know more. He prevailed on Musial to drive to 1139 Marelda, where strangers now lived, and urged his friend to slow down, maybe even get out and walk around and dredge up a few memories.

  Undoubtedly, Broeg was hoping his friend would knock on the door and say, Hello, my name is Stan Musial, and I used to live here. What a chapter that would have been—digging into Stanley’s Rosebud, Stanley’s madeleines—but Musial showed no interest in revisiting what had taken place inside that tiny house. Musial kept the car rolling, did not want to go there.

  Family members told Broeg how in the old days, when nobody was watching, the young Stashu might take a swig of the sweet canned milk used for coffee. The father might get annoyed by this bit of mischief, but the women would say, Look at that smile. Stashu is a good boy.

  Musial alluded to spankings, but Broeg, ever sensitive to his friend’s mixed feelings about his childhood, added a modifier: “Not unkindly, either.”

  Lukasz remained a man of the old country, the perpetual outsider, the greenhorn, even among the large Polish community. He said he was born on a farm near Warsaw, but according to immigration records he was actually born in Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary. Since Warsaw was the only city in Poland that most Americans knew, in some small way Lukasz may have been trying to fit in, to sound a bit more mainstream.

  Either way, Lukasz left Hamburg, Germany, on January 24, 1910, sailing out of the massive Elbe River, arriving at Ellis Island in New York Harbor six days later. He was pointed directly to Donora and the American Steel and Wire Company, where he loaded wire into freight trains, becoming a small speck in the great mosaic of the new American factory class.

  The family’s name was pronounced MEW-shill, the Polish way. When Stan got to the major leagues, he pronounced his name for reporters and broadcasters, but they turned it into three syllables, MEWS-ee-al, and it has been that way ever since.

  Musial’s tone always softened when he spoke about his mother. Mary Lancos was born in New York City with a Hungarian name but of Czech origin, due to the blurring of borders back in Europe. She arrived in Donora when she was around eight years old and soon was rowing across the Monongahela River every day to deliver a hot lunch to her father, who was working in a coal mine. At fourteen she went to work at the wire mill.

  They met at a dance—a tiny man who spoke mostly Polish and a large girl, five foot eight, who spoke Czech and English—and they were married on April 14, 1913, when Lukasz was nearly twenty-three and Mary was sixteen, although the marriage certificate said she was twenty-one. In a hard company town, the details on a marriage certificate were not scrutinized too closely.

  There was a pecking order among the town’s fifteen thousand residents. The Spanish lived closest to the mill and the Italians lived farther up the hill, with their gardens and their decorations. On the East Coast there had been NINA signs—NO IRISH NEED APPLY—but in Donora the Irish were virtually landed aristocracy. The East Europeans lived where they could; for the most part, so did the African Americans.

  For those who had jobs, the salaries were enough to make many people feel they were living better than they ever had in the old country. Women dressed up to go shopping on McKean or Thompson, the main drags. At one point there were three movie theaters downtown, including the Harris, which Mary Musial swept out as one of her part-time jobs. She also cleaned other people’s homes.

  “Mommy did a lot of housework,” Ed Musial recalled for a documentary years later, “and we lived almost, might as well say, rent-free, because we lived with my grandma, it was her house.” Ed added, “Between my grandma and my mother and that, we weathered the storm pretty good. Well, them old-timers can stretch a dollar, boy, I’ll tell you.”

  Bill Bottonari, who lived in the same part of town and would stay in touch with Musial into old age, remembered watching Mary Musial, a tall, powerful woman, carrying homemade bread to the church to be blessed on Palm Sunday.


  “My grandmother would tell me that she would go buy a sack of potatoes each week for the kids, and that’s how she would feed them,” Gerry Ashley said. “She said she had to go work in the church just to make extra money to feed her family.”

  For most meals, there was always cabbage, which could be stored all winter in a cold room, as could potatoes. The meat was usually bologna, known in Appalachia as coal miners’ steak, but for holidays Mary learned to make the Polish dishes her husband liked.

  In later years, Musial would learn the best cuts of meat as the proprietor of a famous restaurant with his name on it. On the road, he would not seek out the East European pockets in the big cities; major leaguers were expected to patronize upscale restaurants. But when he talked about his childhood, he would grow weepy, never abandoning the Polish culture.

  “I’ll never forget the ‘hunky’ dishes Mom turned out, such as pierogi, halucki and kolatche,” Musial wrote in his autobiography. “Kolatche is a kind of sweet roll, halucki the more familiar cabbage roll and pierogi a delicate combination of flour, potato and sugar folded into a thin turnover and baked.”

  He liked being called Stash by teammates and would go along with Polish jokes until later in life, when he’d had enough of them. His pride in carrying a Polish name would lead him to adventures and contacts that enriched his life.

  He loved talking about Polish delicacies, but his childhood was not open to retrospection. After Musial had become a star, a New York writer named Ray Robinson, a subsequent biographer of Lou Gehrig and Christy Mathewson, was working on a children’s book about Musial, and called Mary Musial on the telephone.

  “She did not care to talk to me and I figured it was a lost cause, so I said, ‘Mrs. Musial, you have a very young voice on the phone,’ ” Robinson recalled. “That made a difference because she suddenly became more animated, and kept talking for a while, very giving.”