Stan Musial

by George Vecsey

  “They were making such a big deal out of it, and we thought, really, they showed partiality to Robinson,” Marion said of the eastern media. “We thought he got the better of the deal, and we didn’t think that was quite right because we were baseball players, too.”

  Marion added, “He was a heck of a ballplayer, and everybody didn’t like him, really. But he was a heck of a ballplayer, one of the best ballplayers I ever played against. And a great competitor.”

  Asked if he ever chatted with Robinson, Marion said: “No. I tell you, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Cardinals were kind of enemies, to tell you the truth.” He added, “We didn’t like anybody. Pee Wee Reese. We was always fighting. Me and Pee Wee were always fighting. And we just didn’t like each other at all, and we were great competitors and I don’t think we had any personal love for anybody in the whole club, and I’m sure they didn’t for us.

  “Well, the only time you would talk to the people, when you pass in the infield, you know, you say something nasty to ’em,” Marion added, chuckling at the memory. “Yeah, you would. You know, you’d give a blast of something. It was very difficult times when the Dodgers had a great ball club and we did. We were always battling.”

  Long afterward, Harry Walker always praised Robinson, calling him “one of the classiest guys, a college graduate, one of the great athletes of all time. And why Rickey picked him was that reason. The man had the fight in him to fight back. Not let them hammer him down. And he was a superstar doing it. He went to bat quite a few times before he got a hit. But when he opened up, he just was a superstar same as Babe and the other guys.”

  In his mellow years as a manager, Harry Walker noted that taunting Robinson had proved extremely counterproductive.

  “Well, it seemed to just rally him up. It didn’t do much damage and so … the more you throwed at him, it seemed the harder he fought back at you. But he and Chapman had a row going on all the time. And Jackie would throw it back at him. You know he didn’t back up.”

  In 1967, while managing the Pirates, Walker started eight players of color, blacks and Latinos. He would have started nine except that it was Dennis Ribant’s turn to pitch. After working as a hitting coach with the Cardinals, Walker became hunting buddies with Bill White, the outspoken African American first baseman of the Cardinals. He’d come a long way.

  THEN THERE was the question of what Robinson thought about Musial.

  Julius Hunter, a broadcaster and writer in St. Louis who is African American and a friend of Musial’s, recalled:

  Robinson had said that while he was catching the nastiest worst hell of his life, with catcalls and objects being hurled onto the field in a very racist St. Louis at the time, Stan was one of only a couple of the Cardinals who stayed above it all. Robinson often noted that Stan never said a discouraging word in front of, or behind Jackie’s back. Some thought that Musial was too much of a superstar to lower himself to racial mud-slinging with players or fans who had much less talent of any sort to offer the world. Stan had taken to the field in high school with black baseball players at Donora, but I had always given Stan extra props for not joining the rampant mistreatment leveled at the Black trailblazer on his first visits to the old Sportsmen’s Park in good old racist St. Louis.

  However, Roger Kahn, who had the ear of both men, said Robinson believed Musial was too passive in those vital years.

  “He was like Gil Hodges,” Kahn quoted Robinson as saying. “A nice guy, but when it came to what I had to do, neither one hurt me and neither one helped.”

  Hodges was the southern Indiana miner and former Marine who kept his thoughts to himself and was beloved in Brooklyn in somewhat the same way Musial was in St. Louis. There was never a trace of prejudice in Hodges. As everybody knew, Jackie Robinson had a mind of his own.

  AND THEN there was the story Joe Black told.

  It was June 9, 1952, and Black was a rookie pitcher with the Dodgers, a college man who had played in the Negro Leagues and heard some racial stuff in his first two months in the major leagues. On his first appearance in St. Louis, Black did not know what to expect.

  When Black was called in from the bullpen, the first batter was Musial.

  “After I warmed up and looked at Campy for the sign, out of their dugout come words like, ‘Hey, Stan, you shouldn’t have any trouble hitting the baseball with that big black background.’ ”

  Black stepped off the mound, tempted to smile at the crude remark. Then he saw Robinson running over.

  “That was sorta funny, wasn’t it?” Robinson said.

  “Yeah,” Black said.

  “Forget that son of a bitch,” Robinson said of the heckler. “Go get ’em.”

  Black gathered his intensity for the man in the crouch, who popped up, although not out of kindness.

  The next day, Black was taking the shortcut through the Cardinals’ dugout. Stan Musial was waiting for him.

  “He pulled me over to the side and he said, ‘Forget those guys who call you names like that. You’re a good pitcher, you’re going to do okay.’ ”

  Black went on to become Rookie of the Year and the first African American pitcher to win a World Series game.

  After his pitching days, Black became an executive with Greyhound and was active in good causes until his death in 2002. In many of his speeches, Black would tell about the man who waited for him in the runway.

  25

  STANLEY AND THE KID

  THE WAY Ted Williams told it, the incident took place in 1960, after he had hit his 521st and last home run, the subject of the classic John Updike story in the New Yorker. Williams abruptly retired before the final road trip but returned to the ballpark to cover the World Series for Life magazine.

  Rather than put Williams in the press box with his old friends, the knights of the keyboard, the magazine arranged for him to watch the game from a box seat.

  Before one of the first games in Pittsburgh, a woman leaned over from the adjacent box and asked Williams to sign her souvenir program.

  “You know, you’re one of my favorite players,” she said while he signed.

  “Oh, is that right?” Williams replied.

  “Yes,” she said. And then she added, “I’m Stan Musial’s mother.”

  According to Williams, he told her he ought to be asking for her autograph.

  IN MUSIAL’S version, it happened at the 1959 All-Star Game in Pittsburgh, when he and Williams were both having subpar years.

  Mary Musial was in a box seat before the game, asking for autographs, just another lady fan in the crowd. Williams came by and politely signed her program.

  “And that is Stan Musial’s mother,” somebody told Williams.

  Over the years, Musial always added that Williams sought him out at the batting cage to needle him about who really counted. Musial insisted that Williams was his mother’s second-favorite player—next to her son.

  But whenever he told the story, Stanley made himself sound not quite sure he was really ahead of the Kid in his mother’s estimation.

  26

  THE BIG THREE

  THEY BECAME a trio after the war—the two distant stars of the American League and the approachable man-next-door of the National League. Welcome to the club, Stanley.

  From 1946, when all three came back from the war, until 1951, when DiMaggio retired, Musial was every bit their equal—some would say maybe even better. They remained linked into old age, refugees from a time when baseball was king, but somehow DiMaggio and Williams excited the public with their air of mystery and inaccessibility, whereas Musial grew more familiar and somehow smaller.

  DiMaggio became known for what was perceived as dignity, or maybe it was hauteur. He performed in a city that believed it was the center of the universe, and DiMaggio had the ego to encourage that adoration. In retirement, he brokered a guarantee that he would always be introduced last at every Old-Timers’ Day in Yankee Stadium—the greatest living Yankee, after Ruth died in 1948—and he accepted all the b
ooty and perks that went with it.

  Williams was known for his edgy perfectionism, for ducking his long red neck when crossing home plate, for spitting in the direction of the fans or the press box. In his retirement he became a guru with a booming voice, John Wayne with batting theories.

  Ever since that seething, handsome head was preserved in fluids in some nut-case regeneration laboratory, Williams has become a punch line for late-night comedians. Teddy Ballgame deserved better.

  Musial had his own façade. It just happened to be a wall of good humor, a plastic bubble of harmonica solos and magic tricks. By the strange standards of today, if a man stood in a parking lot and signed autographs for urchins, how great could he have been?

  Musial was a very different kind of superstar from the Kid and the Clipper. The latter two both arrived from California with expectations, which made their debuts and their moods and their demands all the more dramatic; Stanley came from inland, remained inland, and stroked his way into the formation of the Big Three.

  Look at the photographs of the three greatest sluggers of the forties. They all had Depression physiques. Even in the bunchy flannel uniform of the time, DiMaggio is slim-waisted, slim-hipped, a gazelle who gracefully roamed the vast steppes of Yankee Stadium. In a classic photo, wearing only long white underpants, known as sanitaries, and waving a bat in the cramped Red Sox clubhouse, Williams is elongated, like a figure in an El Greco painting. Until late in his career, Musial’s ribs were clearly visible, the torso of a boy who never had enough to eat.

  Bob Feller, the great pitcher of that era, always said he developed his back muscles carrying buckets of water from the Raccoon River on the family farm in Van Meter, Iowa. He turned rural life into an asset, which it was, for him, but the three great sluggers of midcentury were more urban than Feller. DiMaggio was from San Francisco, Williams from San Diego, and Musial from a steel town near Pittsburgh; Stanley had never been hunting until Red Schoendienst took him.

  Whatever it means, the three sluggers were also “ethnic” in the American way, meaning they had fairly recent roots in other countries. Did this give them a drive to excel, to fit in? A lot of successful Americans have recent ties to some other place.

  Giuseppe DiMaggio came to the States in 1898 and four years later sent for his wife, the former Rosalie Mercurio, and their daughter, Nellie, who had been born shortly after Giuseppe departed. The family settled first in Martinez, California, and later worked at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, with eight more children born in California, Joe arriving in 1914. The family spoke a Sicilian dialect around the house.

  The Clipper’s childhood was certainly the most stable of the three stars, with his older brothers and sisters bringing in money, supporting one another. The culture was secure—large Sunday dinners, a glass of homemade vino. In his early years as a Yankee, DiMaggio allowed photographers into his family life, and he was depicted perfectly attired in shirt and tie, admiring the long strands of Mamma’s spaghetti dangling from a fork. The al dente photojournalism stopped after he settled in New York and became a steak guy.

  In the clubhouse, sometimes even in print, his nickname was “the Dago” or “the Big Dago” or “the Daig.” He married two actresses, neither Italian.

  His family’s hard work around the wharf strengthened DiMaggio’s feeling that a man had to stand up for himself in this America. He adapted an immigrant suspicion—don’t let the bastards rip you off—toward Yankee management, as well he should have.

  Williams was more ethnic than people imagined. He somehow managed to obscure the fact that his mother, a Salvation Army activist in downtown San Diego, was of Mexican descent. May Venzer (alternately spelled Venzor) Williams was out of the house most of the time, doing the Lord’s work, and the Kid, when he was actually a kid, went off to school without breakfast or lunch money. His father, a photographer, was pretty much out and about, so Williams, just like Musial, sought mentors in park supervisors and school coaches.

  Sometimes young Teddy’s mom made him march with the Salvation Army band. “I never wore a uniform or anything but I was right at that age when a kid starts worrying about what other kids might think, especially a gawky introverted kid like me, and I was just so ashamed. Today I’d be proud to walk with those people, because they are truly motivated,” Williams would say years later.

  In the public eye, Williams came off as a flinty Anglo curmudgeon, more Welsh and English on his father’s side than Latino on his mother’s. Amazingly, in a time of blatant stereotypes, Williams’s teammates never called him “Mex” (as players would call the thoroughly gringo Keith Hernandez) and Williams’s good chums in the press never hooked his smoldering temper to stereotypical hot Latin blood.

  The mother’s activism may have rubbed off on him, since Williams became the most politically outspoken of the Big Three, a Nixon Republican. He would also use the occasion of his Hall of Fame induction to speak out for the inclusion of Negro League stars. Was his advocacy connected to his Mexican ancestry? He never said.

  In this land of immigrants, it was not cool to be too ethnic, but Musial was the most comfortable with his ancestry. Known in the clubhouse as Stash, he told and laughed at Polish jokes for a long time and bragged about his mother’s East European specialties. At social gatherings he would demonstrate the polka steps he had learned at Falcon meetings back in Donora.

  DIMAGGIO ARRIVED in the majors first, in 1936, at twenty-one, missing Ruth but playing with Gehrig. In 1941 he hit in fifty-six consecutive games, a feat that may never be broken in a sport that now values the dinger, the long ball, at the expense of consistency.

  Frank Robinson, perhaps the second most underrated player in history, right behind Musial, cites DiMaggio’s career totals of 361 home runs and 369 strikeouts as perhaps even more impressive than the streak—proof of DiMaggio’s stunning discipline mixed with power. DiMaggio hit .325 in his career, his right-handed power sometimes negated by the long veldt in left-center at Yankee Stadium, known as Death Valley. He was clearly the best fielder of the three, a graceful center fielder and base runner who almost never made a mistake.

  Williams arrived in 1939 at the age of twenty—the Kid. In 1941 he hit .406—making him the last .400 hitter of the century and maybe forever. He would retire with 521 home runs and that stunning .344 average, tarnished only by the .200 in his sole World Series.

  Was it Williams’s fault that the Sox won only one pennant in his time? In his retirement, he often boomed, “We’d have won a lot more pennants if we’d had that little SOB at shortstop,” meaning Phil Rizzuto. Sometimes Williams would even say that in the company of Johnny Pesky, one of his best friends, who happened to be the shortstop in three of those seasons. That was Teddy.

  Musial measured up statistically with Williams and DiMaggio, with his .331 average and 475 home runs and his speed. He scored plenty of manager points for his willingness to move between first base, which was hard work, and left field, where he compensated for his weak arm. He became the first Hall of Famer to play more than 1,000 games at each of two positions—1,896 in the outfield and 1,016 at first base. (Robin Yount, Ernie Banks, and Rod Carew all did it later.)

  Williams and DiMaggio were strictly one-position guys, although Williams did pitch one inning for laughs, and DiMaggio did play one game at first base, decidedly not for laughs, when Casey Stengel tinkered with him in 1950.

  All three were one-city guys, in the days before free agency, when players did not change teams voluntarily. The big three were rarely in the same place at the same time—five All-Star Games from 1946 through 1950, one World Series between Musial and DiMaggio, and one World Series between Musial and Williams. Stanley won both Series, if that means anything.

  The leagues were more separate back then, so not many players could take the measure of the Big Three firsthand, but Ned Garver, a stylish right-hander who played for the Browns from 1948 into 1952, got to know all of them. In 2009, Garver was a very active eighty-four-year-old, s
plitting his time between Florida and his native Ohio.

  “For some reason, Ted Williams kind of adopted me,” Garver said. “One of the first times I pitched against the Red Sox, Williams was on third base. I was a rookie, and he acted like he was going to steal home. I mean, he danced up the line.”

  The sight of Ted Williams making like Jackie Robinson down the third-base line would be priceless on video today, but Williams refrained from taking a mad dash home.

  “I didn’t balk, but maybe I stopped off the mound,” Garver said. “He looked back at me and smiled. That made me feel great. And all through his career, you look at the interviews, he says I could throw my glove out there and get him out; he couldn’t pick up the spin off my slider.” Williams did hit 10 homers off Garver, the most by any hitter except Gus Zernial, who also hit 10.

  One time Garver caused Williams to break his bat lunging at a slider; somehow the bat came into Garver’s possession, glued together—a memento of his duels with the Splinter.

  Long into retirement, Garver brought the bat to a winter baseball gathering in Florida and asked his colleague to autograph it.

  “Just don’t let John Henry know I signed it,” Williams whispered to Garver, referring to his son, who controlled Ted’s autographs like a farmer with his cash cow.

  For DiMaggio, Garver used the word “majestic,” just like the stadium in which Joe D. played. “When he was taking batting practice at Yankee Stadium, a couple of us Browns, we’d just stop and watch. He was that way. But, by the same token, he did not communicate,” Garver added.

  “I don’t remember ever saying anything to Joe on the field,” Garver added. “Joe was aloof.”

  In 1951, Garver was selected to start the All-Star Game in Detroit and went to the park early “because I was so tickled being there.” One of the other early birds was DiMaggio, who was injured and would not play, and was therefore a bit more sociable than usual.