Stan Musial

by George Vecsey

  The white players were products of their time, reacting no differently than many politicians, businesspeople, clergy, or, for that matter, journalists.

  IN APRIL 1947, Robinson was elevated to the Brooklyn roster. Some of his teammates were still muttering, but Robinson could count on a few Dodgers, including Branca and Harold “Pee Wee” Reese, the shortstop and captain from Louisville, Kentucky, who sent a message to the South with his visceral support of Robinson.

  Rumors of a strike came out of St. Louis in late April when a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, Rud Rennie, accompanied the Yankees on a trip to play the Browns. Rennie was a friend of Dr. Robert Hyland, the Cardinals’ physician, and whenever they got together they would go out drinking and singing at a piano bar. (God bless day baseball; people used to have more fun back in those more civilized hours.)

  At some point in an otherwise jolly evening, Dr. Hyland apparently told Rennie of his concerns that some Cardinals were planning not to play when they were due to visit Brooklyn, on May 6, 7, and 8. Rennie did not want to name his friend as a source, so he called his boss, Stanley Woodward, and told him the rumor. One of the most respected sports editors in New York, Woodward called the National League president, Ford C. Frick.

  The strike rumors of 1947 have many versions, some of them conflicting. In Frick’s version, he had heard “rumblings of discontent” six weeks before the Cardinals were due in Brooklyn, but he also claimed Sam Breadon called him before the season opened on April 15. Broeg, who covered the club, said he would not have been surprised if Breadon had warned the league office and New York newspapermen in order to get some backup against his restive players.

  “Sam was one of their own,” Broeg said, referring to Breadon’s roots in Noo Yawk. “He had skinny-dipped into the East River as a young bank cashier and … he wined and dined the New York writers. So they were buddy-buddy.”

  Frick quoted Breadon as saying: “I don’t know how far they’ll go, but I’ve got to do something now. They are talking on the bench and in the clubhouse, and if it continues we might have some serious trouble. What do you think I should tell them?”

  “Tell them this is America,” Frick claimed he told the owner, “and baseball is America’s game. Tell them that if they go on strike, for racial reasons, or refuse to play a scheduled game they will be barred from baseball even though it means the disruption of a club or a whole league.” However it came about, Frick sent a letter to the Cardinals that said:

  If you do strike, you will be suspended from the League. You will find that you will be outcasts. I do not care if half the league strikes. Those who do will encounter quick retribution. All will be suspended and I don’t care if it wrecks the National League for five years. This is the United States of America and one citizen has as much right to play as another.

  The National League will go down the line with Robinson whatever the consequences. You will find if you go through with your intention that you have been guilty of complete madness.

  Frick said Breadon called his office a day or two later to say the matter was under control. Breadon later told Jerome Holtzman of Chicago, one of the most plugged-in baseball writers of the time, “You know baseball players. They’re like anybody else. They pop off. Sitting around the table with a drink or two they commit many acts of great courage but they don’t follow through. My feeling was that it was over and done with. We had no more trouble.”

  Most of the Cardinals, true to their code, would deny that anything was ever discussed. However, Freddy Schmidt, who had pitched for them since 1944, remembered a letter, something going around the clubhouse, urging the players not to take the field in Brooklyn.

  In those pivotal days, Musial may have been a bit more of an activist than he ever let on. Frick once said that a “prominent player” on the Cardinals told people he did not care whether Jackie Robinson was white or black or green or yellow. On the Cardinals, there was only one truly prominent player.

  With a loquacious teammate like Harry Walker, Musial had to have known something was brewing. In 1988, Walker reminisced about growing up congenially with blacks in the rural South, fishing and eating and talking with them.

  When asked about 1947, Walker said: “Nothing was ever concrete on it. There was a rumor spread through the whole thing. And everybody was involved to a point, but that was never done.”

  Walker continued his monologue: “All of these things have been blown out of proportion. People didn’t understand. I think the war changed a lot really. It brought people from one part of the country to another part of the country, who had only heard and read negative things about each other. And in doing so I think you put a fear in people that was not there normally. That you just … if you don’t know about something … it’s like a little green door, you’re scared to open that thing ’cause you don’t know what’s going to come out. It might be great. But you’ll always think the negative side a minute.”

  Walker recognized the unfairness that some great black ballplayers never got a chance to play in the majors, but he noted that many white players, despite exposure from barnstorming, had assumed in 1947 that Negro Leaguers played an inferior brand of ball, or just a different brand.

  “I’ll bet you for every great one, there were four or five that were very, very mediocre AA, AAA players,” Walker said. “But they had Josh Gibson and guys like that were super. And that was a misfortune that came along. But that was corrected. But as I say again, I think every ballplayer was worried about what would happen, what would be his future, how it would affect the game.”

  Then Walker got around to admitting the strike rumors were legitimate. “It was talked about when he first came in that if he first walked on the field that they might not do it. But the Dodgers did and everybody else went along with the whole situation.”

  Frick always insisted that strike talk had already been quashed by the time the Herald Tribune ran the story.

  Breadon labeled Woodward’s original article “ridiculous.” By the time the Cardinals played the Dodgers, Harry Walker was elsewhere. The man who delivered the hit that sent Country Slaughter on his way home the previous October was traded on May 3, along with Freddy Schmidt, to the Phillies. There they would get to play for southerner Ben Chapman, who spouted vicious racial epithets in the dugout and was not too high on northerners, either, calling them “carpetbaggers.”

  Right after the trade, the Cardinals came into Brooklyn with a 3–11 record and won two of three.

  “We never had a meeting. We never talked about having any organized boycott,” Musial said in 1997. “We were having problems winning and getting started. Enos will tell you. Marty Marion. Kurowski. We’ll all tell you we never had any thoughts in that direction, whatsoever.”

  Musial added that New Yorkers had preconceptions about St. Louis and southerners on the Cardinals. “I think they felt that we were, you know, we’re a Southern town in a way,” he said, “but as far as the players were concerned, you mighta heard some mumbles before that about playing against Robinson, but when the time came to play, why, everybody played, and it was really nothing. We didn’t have any special meeting or anybody give us any special talk.”

  However, in a separate interview with Roger Kahn, Musial seemed more forthright: “I heard talk. It was rough and racial and I can tell you a few things about that. First of all, everybody has racial feelings. We don’t admit it. We aren’t proud of it. But it’s there. And this is big-league baseball, not English tea, and ballplayers make noise. So I heard the words and I knew there was some feelings behind the words, but I didn’t take it seriously. That was baseball.”

  In the same interview, Musial seemed to give credence to the rumors: “For me at the time—I was twenty-six—saying all that would have been a speech and I didn’t know how to make speeches. Saying it to older players, that was beyond me. Besides, I thought the racial talk was just hot air.”

  In 1997, Musial told a reporter with the Pittsburgh Post-
Gazette: “I didn’t give it a second thought. I played against blacks in high school, played with Buddy Griffey.” And he added, “You’d have thought fifty years ago we’d be a lot farther along in race relations in this country.”

  All this adds up to a man who, whether or not he made speeches, was not going to be stampeded into a racially motivated walkout.

  Besides, Musial was dealing with something else on that trip to Brooklyn. He had not felt well the previous winter and doctors had suggested appendix and tonsil problems, but he shrugged it off. In early May he was confined to his room in the New Yorker Hotel while rumors circulated that Slaughter had punched him in the stomach during an argument over whether to strike.

  The hotel doctor confirmed that Musial was suffering from acute appendicitis and recommended an appendectomy right away.

  “I was in a hotel room with him the day the doctor came up,” Broeg said in an interview in 1948. “Stan looked terrible. His face was drawn and thin, his ribs were sticking out and he was deathly pale.”

  Broeg, in his triple role as journalist, friend, and collaborator, said Musial had been naked from the waist up in the hotel, and that Broeg had seen no marks on his midsection. In subsequent photos of Musial being tended by nurses in St. Louis, his slender midsection is unmarked.

  Dr. Hyland proposed that Musial fly home, which he did, accompanied by Del Wilber, a third-string catcher and friend of his. Dr. Hyland examined Musial at one in the morning and treated both the appendix and tonsils; Musial called the process “freezing” his appendix. He missed five games, then went twenty-two at-bats without a hit, and played the rest of the season in a weakened condition.

  Strike talk pretty much vanished. By the time the Dodgers visited St. Louis on June 12, several Cardinals made a point of welcoming Robinson as the Dodgers took the shortcut from their clubhouse to the field through the Cardinals’ dugout.

  “Dyer says, ‘Hiya, pal,’ ” Broeg recalled, and Robinson said hello back. After Robinson had moved away, Broeg teased Dyer, saying, “Consorting with the enemy?” Dyer then compared Robinson to Frankie Frisch, the crusty old competitor: “You get him mad, he’ll beat you by himself. So, I told my players to take it easy. This is a great, great competitor.”

  The Cardinals were on their best behavior for a while. Marion expressed visible concern after spiking Robinson in a normal collision at second base. Joe Medwick—back with the Cardinals after a seven-year absence—sidled up to Robinson at the batting cage and told him he was going to be a terrific player but needed to relax his muscular hitting and throwing techniques.

  Interviewed by the Pittsburgh Courier’s Wendell Smith, one of the giants of sportswriting, Robinson praised Musial, Garagiola, and the rest as “a swell bunch of fellows. They treated me so nice I was actually surprised.”

  Musial had reason to feel a little more friendly toward the Dodgers because the annoying Leo Durocher was suspended for a year by Happy Chandler for associating with known gamblers. Leo the Lip was replaced by Musial’s old friend from the shaky spring of 1941, Burt Shotton, who wore civilian clothing in the dugout, à la Connie Mack.

  But things never remained benign for long between the Dodgers and the Cardinals.

  IN AN August series at Ebbets Field, Medwick landed on Robinson’s left foot at first base, which was attributed to Robinson’s raw footwork at that unfamiliar position. Because Medwick had already welcomed Robinson to the majors, nothing was made of this collision. But a few days later, Enos Slaughter stepped on Robinson, and that was a totally different case.

  The spiking happened in the eleventh inning, with Hugh Casey pitching in relief with Musial on first base. Slaughter hit a grounder to Robinson, who decided not to try to force Musial at second but instead stepped on first base for the sure out. However, as Robinson turned to check on Musial at second, Slaughter’s spikes raked down against the back of his right leg, just above the heel.

  Robinson jumped around in pain before seeking treatment from the trainer, Harold Wendler, who later said, “Jackie was lucky he wasn’t maimed. I can’t understand how one ballplayer can deliberately do that to another one. He might have severed Robinson’s Achilles’ tendon and finished his baseball career.”

  Robinson did not doubt Slaughter had tried to spike him. “What else could it have been?” Robinson asked.

  Different people remember it different ways. Branca, who had gone into the seventh inning with a no-hitter, was out of the game during the spiking. Branca was in the dugout by then and can describe Slaughter swerving to his left to plant his foot on Robinson’s calf.

  “How he didn’t go tumbling, I’ll never know,” Branca said of Robinson.

  Another close spectator was Joe McDonald, a high school kid who was working as visiting batboy that night. Later a general manager for the Mets and Cardinals, and a friend of Musial’s, McDonald said he was on the field outside the Cardinals’ dugout when Slaughter raced down the baseline. As a batboy, McDonald had a better look at the play than anybody sitting in the dugout. The dugout is a notoriously bad site for watching action on the crowded field. When a manager says “I couldn’t see the play,” he is probably telling the truth.

  “I see it developing,” McDonald narrated sixty years later. “I really thought Robinson was not the greatest first baseman; he hadn’t played there much.”

  McDonald continued: “When you’re reaching for the ball, you don’t put your foot on the bag. I thought his foot was not straddling the bag but that it was indeed on top of the bag. Slaughter spiked him but I came to the conclusion that he didn’t mean it.

  “I’m not defending him in any way. I thought it was accidental,” McDonald said.

  McDonald recalled Slaughter trotting past the mound after being called out, and Dodger relief pitcher Hugh Casey taking a step toward Slaughter, as if to challenge him. “Two southerners were going to go at it, one of them in defense of Jackie.”

  Musial soon became embroiled in the hard feelings. He was playing first base that year, a position he did not like except that it allowed him to get to know opponents. Not long after the spiking incident, Robinson reached first base. Like many other incidents that year, this casual encounter has several versions.

  “He said something to me like ‘Well, I’ll step on you, too,’ or something like that,” Musial once said. “I said something to him too, in a way, but it was such a thing that happened so quickly.” Musial recalled how he was “kinda keyed up, in a way, too, but it was nothing.”

  Everybody knew that Rickey had instructed Robinson to hold in his competitive nature—“which was probably good,” Musial said. “Rickey was a good influence there, you know. And I think it kinda helped the situation.” But Musial understood Robinson’s temptations: “I think about that time, he was about fed up with all of this that was going on, you know, but he’d lose his temper every once in a while.”

  In another version of that first-base meeting, Roger Kahn quoted Robinson telling Musial, “I wish I could punch the son of a bitch in the mouth,” the SOB being Slaughter. In a third version, Musial replied, “I don’t blame you.” There is also a version that somebody—perhaps even a Dodger—heard Musial’s alleged response and relayed it to Slaughter, who then beat up Musial in the clubhouse.

  The fight version is bogus. The SOB remark, if it happened at all, took place in August, whereas the purported fight took place, or did not take place, in May. And if appendicitis was a cover story for a Musial-Slaughter fight, why did Dr. Hyland perform an appendectomy in October? This was after the weakened Musial had struggled through the season with a mere .312 average, down from .365, but he did hit 19 homers, a new personal high.

  The real statistic is that the Cardinals finished five games behind the Dodgers. Robinson and Rickey had changed the order of the National League.

  One detail that sounds realistic is that Robinson called Slaughter an SOB. The old war horse was sure that his identification with the rumored strike and the actual spiking kept him
from being voted into the Hall of Fame until 1985, twenty-six years after his retirement. By that time, Musial was a power on the veterans committee that finally accepted Slaughter into the Hall—making it hard to work up a fight scenario after Musial’s proactive support of Slaughter.

  In 1997, Slaughter returned to Brooklyn for the Robinson anniversary and found himself questioned sharply about the incident at first base.

  “I’m glad you asked that question,” Slaughter said, off and running as if it were still 1946. “I was there. I did not intentionally step on Jackie. It was a low throw and he reached for it, he did step off the base, and I did step on his ankle.”

  Slaughter was in full stride now. “I can straighten out a lot of things. I played the game the way it’s supposed to be played. I came up with the Gashouse Gang back in ’38. We asked a lot and gave none. Jackie was the same type of ballplayer. He would run right over you. He was out to win.”

  Up to his death on October 28, 2005, Bob Broeg conceded that some of the 1947 Cardinals “beat their gums” about a strike but insisted this was a natural reaction to living in a world grown more complicated. Broeg also noted that Slaughter spiked a lot of people.

  Years later, Musial said: “You have to admire a guy like Robinson going through what he did. He was pointed out, you know, as different, and ’course I’m sure a lot of the players and pitchers worked harder to try to not let him succeed against them, you know, and so, you know, you kinda gotta admire him in a way.”

  Then he added, “So what I am trying to say is that I was glad Jackie came along. He was a great ballplayer. He made a big difference with our way of life in our society, and he opened up a lot of doors. And I am sure Robinson took more abuse than we really, really know about.”

  No amount of political correctness can sugarcoat the rivalry. Robinson was just another reason the Cardinals despised and resented the Dodgers, more than ever once the Dodgers carried the mantle as good guys, progressives doing the right thing.