Stan Musial

by George Vecsey

  “I remember that very well because Pete Reiser always wanted me to join the Fort Riley team out here, in the Army,” Musial would recall of the Dodger from St. Louis. “And I said no, Pete, my mind’s set up to go in the Navy when I go in, but he said, no, we had a great ball club and the general watched baseball.”

  Musial added, “Before long, they were in the Battle of the Bulge over in Germany.”

  Was this another example of Stanley always picking the right card? Somebody who knows Musial very well calls him a “pacifist,” not in the conscientious-objector sense but in the conflict-avoidance sense. Musial had every right to claim his status as provider for his family, with a lot of obligations. And when his number came up, he went.

  On April 22, 1944, Musial was contacted by his draft board. On May 16, he was examined at the Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis and accepted for navy duty. On June 23, the Donora Herald-American reported he would have more time to play for the Cardinals.

  “It depends on how well we can fill our quota,” one member of the local draft board said. “We are calling single men ahead of the married registrants.”

  In January 1945, Musial was called up by the navy and was sent for basic training at Bainbridge, Maryland, where his head was shaved by a zealous navy barber.

  “Why didn’t you tell me who you were?” the barber said after the fact. “I wouldn’t have cut it so short.”

  “Thanks,” Musial said, “but now I know how a guy feels when he’s going to the electric chair.”

  Playing first base for the base team at Bainbridge, Musial quickly learned the unique responsibility of a major leaguer. The sailors—and the admirals—did not want to see a single chipped to left field. From a man who had just played in three consecutive World Series, they wanted the real thing, the big bang, the long ball.

  “I altered my batting stance a bit,” Musial said. “I moved up closer to the plate. This proved to be an important step in my evolution as a hitter.”

  He was soon assigned to Treasure Island in San Francisco and then to Pearl Harbor. Men who were training there could soon be dying out in the Pacific, but Musial was scheduled for other duties.

  The navy’s league in Hawaii contained good minor-league players like John Hernandez as well as major leaguers like Cookie Lavagetto, Billy Herman, Bob Scheffing, Johnny Pesky, and Williams himself. Bill Dickey, the old Yankee catcher, was the commissioner of the league, and Dan Topping, part owner of the Yankees, ran two marine teams.

  Musial worked on a launch in the morning, ferrying sailors out to the giant ships they were repairing.

  “After bouncing around in that launch for three hours … God, my legs were like rubber,” Musial said. “So I told him, ‘Sir, I’m either going to play baseball on a regular basis or run the launch, because I can’t be doing what I’m doing and do a good job playing baseball.’ ”

  The brass kept him mostly on solid ground after that, playing three or four games a week.

  “One thing about the Navy,” Musial said years later, “if you’re a ballplayer, they let you play ball. If you were … you know, had some form of talent, why they let you do that sort of talent, but … as compared to the Army … know a lot of the Army guys didn’t have a chance to play ball.”

  Eager to please the brass with home runs, Stanley moved closer to home plate, again exaggerating his stance. That October, playing in the Service World Series at Furlong Field in front of crowds of over forty thousand he hit four doubles in one game, all within two feet of one another.

  He was also persuaded to pitch one game in August, beating an army all-star team with a four-hitter, without further damage to his shoulder.

  He knew just how blessed he was, and would find out even more when the war ended. The only criticism he ever discussed came via a letter from home. Dickie Musial had been teased by a boy in his neighborhood about Musial’s soft duty, and the boy had knocked Dickie to the floor.

  “My five-year-old picked himself up and hit the boy back, right in the nose,” Musial wrote in his autobiography.

  Late in October, Lukasz came down with pneumonia, and Mary asked the Red Cross if her son could come home to take care of his father. Musial was sent east and rushed straight to his father’s bedside (where he was photographed in a navy uniform, administering a spoonful of medicine), and Lukasz bounced back. Musial was then assigned to a navy yard in Philadelphia.

  He told the story himself: “The day before I was scheduled to work, I walked over to watch men already at work, wearing goggles and heavy gloves and carrying blowtorches. I realized that a green pea like me could wind up maiming himself or someone else. I went to the athletic officer and said: ‘Sir, I’m a ship repairman who has never repaired a ship. For my sake and the Navy’s, can’t you please have my orders changed?’ ”

  The officer recognized a chance to help the war movement—addition by subtraction, as Branch Rickey often said—and gave Musial duty away from the blowtorches.

  Early in 1946, after fourteen months of duty, Musial was released, hitchhiking across the state in uniform. He caught a lift from a member of the state legislature, heading home from Harrisburg. Recognizing the man in the navy uniform, the legislator made a detour and drove Musial right to his door in Donora.

  MUSIAL WAS no doubt grateful to be home in one piece, particularly when he learned what some of his colleagues had gone through.

  Baseball struggled through the war with older players and younger players, including fifteen-year-old Joe Nuxhall, whom Musial encountered in 1944, swatting a hit off the kid in his first major-league appearance. While Musial was gone in 1945, the Browns had used Pete Gray, an outfielder who had lost an arm in a childhood farming accident.

  Bert Shepard, a minor-league pitcher, was shot down over Germany while flying for the Air Corps in 1944 and had his right leg amputated below the knee. In 1945, as an outpatient from Walter Reed Hospital, Shepard pitched five and a third innings for the Senators against the Red Sox, giving up one run and three hits in what turned out to be his only major-league appearance, but he did pitch in the minors after that.

  DiMaggio, Williams, and Musial had not been sent to the beaches of Normandy like more anonymous ballplayers such as Yogi Berra, or the woods of Germany, like Harry Walker, or the atolls of the Pacific, like Gil Hodges.

  More than five hundred players served during the war, including thirty-one Cardinals. Most of them spent the winter of 1945–46 getting discharged, going home to their families, and resting up. Then came spring training of 1946, when they would try to get back in shape and also catch up on what their teammates had been through.

  Musial was reminded of his decision not to join Pete Reiser’s unit. “They sent the whole unit over there,” Musial said, referring to Europe. “Everybody. Harry Walker, Murry Dickson, all those guys. They were in some battles, I’ll tell you! And I think Harry killed twenty-two guys or something like that. Al Brazle captured a division that was surrendering. I often think of that—that I could have gone with those guys.”

  War veterans generally do not speak of these things. Harry Walker was one of the more loquacious men ever to wear a uniform—he was known to fans as “Harry the Hat” because of the way he fidgeted with his cap at the plate, but to reporters he was “Walker the Talker.”

  As a coach and manager, Walker would hold forth on hitting or just about anything else, but I never heard him so much as allude to military service, much less his personal role. However, in 1979 Walker did discuss the Battle of the Bulge with the writer Richard Goldstein.

  “It happened right near the end,” Walker said. “You realized the war couldn’t last much longer and it scared the hell out of you. You’ve always read about how many people were killed after the war was over because nobody knew it. I thought, ‘My God, why don’t they just go ahead and quit. The last bunch we captured were boys fifteen to eighteen years old.’ ”

  Walker described being in a reconnaissance outfit near Passeau, looking for bridges
in the sleet and rain, and how he tried to get three German soldiers to surrender.

  “Well, one guy pulled his gun up in my face. I had a .45 revolver that I’d bought in the States. That little thing saved my life. The guy that pulled the gun, I shot him in the chest and then I shot the others. Killed the first two and wounded the third guy. It was so damned quick, it was almost like a machine gun went off. It was just one of those deals that you didn’t want to happen, but your reaction was to live and that’s about it.”

  The next day, Walker was the point man with a .50-caliber machine gun “when we ran into a bunch that were trying to get across the bridge. I shot a few with that. It would tear up most anything. And we captured a bunch of soldiers and some big guns, 88s.”

  “First I got hit in the hand with a piece of artillery, shrapnel from an 88. Later, I got hit in the rump with a piece of our own. I took a rifle grenade and threw it. It hit this building before we could get out. But it wasn’t too bad. I was real lucky.”

  Near the end of the war, Walker was ordered to construct a baseball field on crushed brick in the stadium in Nuremberg where Hitler had staged his rallies.

  “All the guys wanted to play ball all day long,” Walker said. “They didn’t understand it was no toy to me—it was my livelihood.”

  Walker received the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. A year later he would help the Cardinals win the World Series.

  Other Cardinals came back wounded. Howie Krist, a useful pitcher before the war, had been injured carrying ammunition in France and was never the same.

  Johnny Grodzicki, a pitcher, had taken shrapnel in the right thigh five weeks before V-E Day as his paratroop unit tried to scale a wall near Berlin. He came to camp in 1946 wearing a steel brace on his leg, but despite the ministrations of Doc Weaver, he was never the same.

  “Some of the guys told war stories. But Johnny never talked about the war. He kept everything inside,” Walker said.

  Terry Moore played ball in Latin America in the three years he missed; Enos Slaughter was an instructor in the Army Air Corps, keeping fit by playing ball in the South Pacific during his three years away. And Musial served where he was sent—Hawaii.

  “He stands in awe of Ted Williams and Bob Feller for missing those years,” Tom Ashley said of his father-in-law. “Whenever he refers to them, he says Williams would have hit over forty home runs for five years, maybe two hundred more home runs. He had great respect for them.”

  By collating Williams’s statistics directly before and after his hitch, I come up with a total of 99 homers and 558 hits for his three missing years. By averaging DiMaggio’s best seasons before and after his service, I come up with 84 homers and 531 hits. By averaging Musial’s seasons around the war, I come up with 18 homers and 201 hits for that one missing season of 1945.

  “If it hadn’t been for missing those years, the fellas I mentioned would have set all kinds of hitting records in baseball,” Musial said. “They were just unfortunate to miss that time during the war.”

  They did not yap about it. They all knew others who had given more.

  18

  CHECKS ALL OVER THE BED

  STAN AND Lil stared as a stranger signed five checks, each worth $10,000, and laid them on the hotel bed that was serving as a desk. This was just the bonus, the man said. The majority would come later, if Stan would cross the border and play ball in Mexico. The stranger was Alfonso Pasquel, one of five brothers who ran the Mexican League.

  The date was June 6, 1946—two years after D-Day. All of St. Louis quivered, knowing that Alfonso Pasquel was visiting the Musials in their room at the Fairgrounds Hotel, presumably carrying suitcases crammed with money.

  The Pasquels had already siphoned off some useful players from the majors. When they went after Pistol Pete Reiser, Branch Rickey ran them out of camp in Florida, shouting, “Assassins of careers! Assassins of careers!” and other language considerably more profane than his normal “Judas Priest.”

  The Pasquels also made overtures to Jackie Robinson, the Negro League player who was in camp with the Dodgers’ Montreal farm team, but Robinson was not interested.

  Robinson surely knew the Mexican League was on the level of AAA ball in the United States, partially because it was a haven for outstanding African American players like Cool Papa Bell and Satchel Paige and Latinos like Santos Amaro of Cuba, whose skin was too dark to allow him to play in the United States.

  Willie Wells, an African American, once said about playing in Mexico: “I am not faced by the racial problem.… I’ve found freedom and democracy here, something I never found in the United States.… In Mexico I am a man.”

  In the spring of 1946, Ray Dandridge, playing third base in Mexico because of segregation in El Norte, spotted two new faces in the clubhouse—Sal Maglie and Danny Gardella from the New York Giants. Dandridge gave them a show by swatting drives all over the ballpark and picking hot grounders off the pebbly field.

  After the workout, the two Americans asked him where in the world he’d come from.

  “Same country you did,” Dandridge replied.

  Everybody knew that Gardella and Maglie were mere appetizers for the ambitious Pasquel brothers. An American advance man, who may have exaggerated his contact with Musial, was claiming that Musial was willing to drive his family to Mexico if the Pasquels would furnish a new car. The agent clearly did not know much about Stanley the loyalist, Stanley the homebody.

  On May 31, 1946, Musial told the St. Louis Star-Times: “I don’t think I will go, but I haven’t told [the Pasquels] yes or no.”

  Musial had a lifelong affinity for the established process, for management, even when negotiating for money. Now, with the Pasquels wooing him, Musial sought out the new manager, Eddie Dyer, who had replaced Billy Southworth over the winter. He liked Dyer, who as farm director had once journeyed to Donora to urge Musial to sign his contract.

  The two men stepped into an equipment room off the clubhouse, and Dyer told him, “Stan, you’ve got two children. Do you want them to hear someone say, ‘There are the kids of a guy who broke his contract’?”

  Perhaps Dyer was playing Musial pretty well, or perhaps he was being honest and fatherly. Either way, Musial was probably inclined to turn down the offer, but the Pasquels were persistent, sending Mickey Owen, who had jumped from the Dodgers to Veracruz in the Mexican League, to meet with Musial.

  Owen, who was from Missouri, had remained friendly with Musial despite the rivalry between the Cardinals and Dodgers. Given permission to slip home to pick up his son, Owen visited Musial at the hotel.

  “Musial was smoking a big cigar, and playing real cool, so I said, ‘Stan, have you talked to the Mexicans?’ ” Owen said. “He said, ‘No, no, I haven’t talked to the Mexicans.’ ”

  With the war over, the Musials were feeling secure enough to rent a house in St. Louis for the first time. While the Cardinals were on a home stand, Stan and Lil were packing their goods as reporters staked out the hotel on Pasquel watch.

  This might have been the best poker game Stanley ever played. Alfonso came around with a briefcase and, concerned the Cardinals might have hired security to keep him from Musial, asked Owen to accompany him.

  “Alfonso threw out those checks for $10,000 apiece, and he signed them,” Owen recalled with a chuckle in 1989. “And I thought Musial would just swallow that cigar when he seen all that money on that table.

  “Of course, that’s peanuts to him now,” Owen said decades later, “but then, that looked like all the money than they had in Donora, Pennsylvania.… He wouldn’t say much, and he just kind of held back and looked at it, and bit on that cigar some more, and blew smoke all over the place.”

  While Stanley was blowing smoke, he was also doing the math.

  “As I recall, Alfonso plunked five cashier’s checks for $10,000 each onto a bed and said I could consider them a bonus,” Musial said, recalling that Pasquel told him the actual contract would be for an additional $125,000 for five years.


  “My eyes bugged out at the sight of so much money. I was getting only $13,500. How long would I have to play to be assured of $175,000?” (Something like thirteen years.)

  Then came the big scare. Around midday, reporters spotted Musial and Litwhiler lugging suitcases and boxes and clothes to Litwhiler’s car. Somebody asked Dickie Musial, going on six, what the family was doing, and Dickie tersely replied, “Packing,” thereby touching off a modest nervous breakdown in the greater St. Louis metropolitan area.

  What Dickie neglected to tell the reporters was that his family was merely moving to Mardel Avenue in southwest St. Louis rather than Mexico City.

  Somewhere in the middle of packing, while St. Louis fretted, Musial informed Alfonso Pasquel he would not be accepting the checks.

  “I told ’em that I wasn’t interested in going to Mexico,” Musial said in 1990. “That was about the gist of the conversation,” he added.

  Owen left that meeting convinced that Stanley the poker player had an extra card hidden away somewhere. He later claimed he asked Musial if he had a contract that forbade him from going to the Mexican League, and Musial told him he couldn’t talk about it. Musial would forever remain coy about why he turned down the offer.

  That night St. Louis fans—and Cardinal management—were thrilled to see Stanley reporting for work, putting on his familiar number 6 uniform, having his typical two-for-five game, to raise his batting average to .337, third in the league.

  That same June 6, the Associated Press reported that Pasquel and Owen “boldly came to town today” and solicited Musial but “failed to sign” him.

  Musial meandered around the subject in a mid-June interview, saying, “All that money makes a fellow do a lot of thinking before he says no.” He added, “I’m still young. I should be able to make a lot of money for a long time here in the United States. Let’s consider this Mexican thing a closed matter for the present. Let’s say no more.”

  Breadon, the onetime auto mechanic from New York, had enough street smarts to recognize the Pasquels were serious—and to take them on. After losing Lou Klein, Fred Martin, and Max Lanier, a pitching mainstay of the 1944 Cardinals, Breadon flew to Mexico City to talk to the Pasquels.