Stan Musial

by George Vecsey

  AT LEAST one former teammate was dubious about Musial as an executive.

  “As the reader already knows, Stan’s administrative gifts were not exactly apparent while he was knocking the shit out of the ball,” Curt Flood wrote a few years later. “But no matter. He was Stan the Man and Busch could bolster him with whatever assistance was needed.”

  Stanley Luck held again. Howsam had left the Cardinals in good shape, having traded for Roger Maris to play right field. Red was already drilling Mike Shannon—Dick Musial’s football teammate from high school—to move to third base, and first baseman Orlando Cepeda was now healthy.

  “I can put myself back on the active list,” Stanley said, more than once. “After all, I’ve been resting for three years.”

  His first chore was to round up a few unsigned players, including Dal Maxvill, the shortstop, one of the new breed, with a major in electrical engineering at Washington University. Maxvill had grown up in Illinois, across the river, and spent part of his childhood in Sportsman’s Park. On his first time in the Cardinal clubhouse in the spring of 1962, Maxvill was welcomed by Musial, and as soon as he could, Maxvill slipped over to the pay phone and relayed this news to his wife: Stan Musial had said hello to him!

  A regular by 1967, Maxvill had declined Howsam’s first contract. The night before his meeting with Musial, Maxvill visited a troop of Boy Scouts, who gave him a baseball bat with an axe attached to it—“a real nice gift,” Maxvill recalled.

  Maxvill decided to carry the souvenir into negotiations with Stanley. A few players might have made a general manager nervous by carrying a sharp object into negotiations, but the slender college graduate was not one of them.

  “Stan said, ‘Hey, how you doing, what you got there?’ ” Maxvill recalled. “I said, ‘Stan, this is what I’m going to use on you; the Boy Scouts gave it to me last night, if we can’t reach agreement on a contract.’ Well, he laughed like hell, took a couple of swings with the bat with the hatchet head on it, and we sat down and after about fifteen or twenty minutes, I had gotten a nice increase over what I’d been sent in the mail, and he was his usual self.”

  Years after his own ten-year stint as general manager of the Cardinals, Maxvill remembered the nice way Musial had handled the negotiations.

  “He said, ‘I think you deserve more than you’re getting. You’re our regular shortstop and are going to be our shortstop for a number of years and I think you deserve more money.’ I said, ‘Good, I’m glad you feel that way.’ ”

  Stanley also had a nice touch with Maris, who had grown grouchy after his life-changing 61 homers in 1961. Although he and Mickey Mantle were friendly, Maris resented having to play center field while Mantle was hurt, feeling the Yankees had not recognized his own injuries.

  “Maris was very temperamental,” said Bill Bergesch, a veteran baseball man who was working with Bing Devine for the Mets in those years. “Stan could quiet him down,” Bergesch added.

  Musial chatted up Maris and revived the sardonic team player Maris had been in his earlier days. Maris began to enjoy life in a clubhouse with the sarcastic Gibson and the exuberant Cepeda, and would help win two pennants before retiring.

  But could Stanley run a team? Reporters raised that question with Devine in spring training.

  “Tell me one thing Musial has ever done wrong,” Devine said.

  Musial showed his diplomatic side at a banquet in St. Louis on the eve of the 1967 season, with the Cardinals and their opponents, the San Francisco Giants, in attendance. “Gentlemen, I have a feeling the National League’s 1967 pennant-winning ball club is one of the two in this room,” he said.

  Stanley had a soft spot for the Giants. Many years earlier, Horace Stoneham, the convivial owner of the Giants, had learned that he and Musial had the same shoe size. Every time the two teams met, Stoneham would have a gift pair of shoes for lucky Stanley.

  The Cardinals won their first six games in 1967, and Musial established his style early—one of the boys.

  “It was so cold, around twenty degrees,” recalled Alvin Jackson, who had come over from the Mets that season. “Everybody was complaining it was cold. He comes over and does this”—Jackson imitated the Musial crouch—“and says, ‘Today, I’d go four for four.’ ” Of course, Musial was likely to go four for four any day, but his point was clear: play ball.

  As general manager, Musial was a benign presence, showing no inclination to tinker. Trader Lane he was not.

  “When the club was in St. Louis, he’d come down to the clubhouse and schmooze when the club was going good,” Maxvill recalled. “But when the club wasn’t going good, he knew nobody really wanted to sit around and talk about things. I think he was smart enough to know. That didn’t happen much in ’67 because we had a pretty good ball club, but on the road he’d show up—team plane to the West Coast, New York, maybe some of the places that he and Red liked to go to have dinner.

  “It wasn’t like he was an absentee GM. I don’t think Mr. Busch would have put up with him not putting his finger on the pulse of the team.

  “We were very lucky that year,” Maxvill continued. “We avoided injury. Our roster was pretty much set. We didn’t really need a lot, and nobody really got hurt for a great length of time. Stan did his job as GM. We didn’t make too many moves because you make moves when guys are playing poorly or you have injuries. And we were fortunate.”

  Red remembered how he would visit his old buddy in his office while Musial was going over the waiver list.

  “He says, ‘Well I got some more telegrams, this guy’s on waivers, we can pick him up,’ ” Red recalled, “and we’d look at him and throw him right in the waste paper basket.” The two of them agreed: “We got a ballplayer like him, so why go through the paper work and get him?”

  For a time, Musial relied on Bob Stewart, who had been his administrator in the physical fitness post, but Stewart was not familiar with the rudimentary baseball finances of the time.

  When Stanley really needed advice, he would place a call to Bing Devine, who was living out of a suitcase in New York, working for the Mets, his wife and three daughters not about to leave St. Louis and move to somebody else’s city.

  “Graciously, Der Bingle would straighten out the fine points for me,” Musial once wrote in Broeg-speak.

  General managers normally chat with friends in other organizations; neither man was giving away industrial secrets. Maxvill never heard that Musial and Devine talked on occasion but said he would not be surprised if they did.

  “Obviously, he and Bing had known each other a long, long time. He would be one guy that Stan would call and say, ‘Hey, explain this to me. I’m doing this or I’m doing that. Is there anything I need to check with the commissioner’s office?’ Something that simple.”

  Nowadays, despite rules forbidding “fraternization,” ballplayers talk, laugh, hug, pray, exchange useful telephone numbers, and trade agent gossip around the batting cage, in full view of the fans. In Musial’s time as general manager, Gibson would have thrown at any opponent who made the gaffe of speaking to him or digging in at the plate. (“Gibby, you’re crazy, man,” Bill White said when his pal drilled him after White was traded to the Phillies.)

  But there was no anti-fraternization code stopping a couple of St. Louis guys from chatting on the phone. Devine probably explained the mysteries of the waiver rule to his friend, not that Stanley was doing much waiving.

  “If ever a general manager under–general managed, I guess it was me,” Musial said.

  Tim McCarver said Musial “had no true skills to be a general manager because he was an ex-player, so they helped him along. He was more a figurehead in ’67.” McCarver meant it in the nicest way.

  The Cardinals shuffled a few fringe players in 1967 but went out of their organization only once—when Roberto Clemente hit a shot off Gibson’s leg in mid-July. Gibson told everybody to get the heck away from him and pitched to three more batters before leaving the game. Turned out he had
a broken leg.

  Musial needed a pitcher, so he turned to Devine, who sent over Jack Lamabe, a durable veteran who took some of the workload until Gibson came back in September.

  The Cardinals virtually ran themselves under Stan and Red.

  “He has actually shown more patience than I thought he’d have,” Musial said about Schoendienst, “and he didn’t panic or press when things didn’t go well his first two years.”

  Musial added, “Red doesn’t try to over-manage, doesn’t try to fancy up too much a basically simple game.… It was tough on Red, having to start managing in the majors but he has learned how to handle men, when to give them a rest and when to take out his pitchers.”

  As might be expected, Red had nothing but good things to say about his buddy, calling him “a manager’s general manager.” He said Musial added to the confidence of the Cardinals just by visiting the clubhouse.

  “He calls, though, often before a game and always afterward. Stan has patience, knows the game and we talk about it. He might see something and tell me what he’s seen or ask me about something. He believes in paying ballplayers well but he shares my views that it’s wise to get rid of discontented or unhappy ballplayers and not to take on any who are apt to disrupt harmony.

  “Above all, he let me keep the players I wanted.”

  MUSIAL WAS gliding between his business and the front office until June 19, 1967, when Biggie Garagnani died suddenly of a heart attack at fifty-three. He had been under a doctor’s care for heart and blood pressure problems but had not slowed his hectic pace, including raising more than $80,000 for Governor Warren E. Hearnes’s reelection campaign of 1964. Musial had relied on Biggie for his business acumen and psychic muscle. Now at a shockingly early age, Biggie was gone.

  THE CARDINALS won the 1967 pennant with a 101–60 record and then beat the Red Sox in the World Series, with its echoes of 1946. Musial enjoyed the triumph but soon grew tired of details he kept discovering were in his domain. A mix-up in distributing tickets at the first home World Series game forced ushers to bring out chairs and seat people in the aisles, which temporarily inconvenienced guests and might have been an issue for fire marshals. Presumably the Cardinals could have hired somebody to dole out World Series tickets next time around, but Musial was not long for that job.

  “Stan twiddled his thumbs in the front office for less than a year till, he told me, he ‘couldn’t stand being cooped up not knowing what I was doing in there,’ ” wrote Julius Hunter, a St. Louis television personality who knew Musial.

  Shortly after the Series, Musial told Red he was getting out. “You can’t do that,” Schoendienst blurted, but Musial said he certainly could.

  “If you want to do the right job, the good job, you have to be here twenty-four hours a day. And I just can’t handle that, with all the other business that I have,” Stan told Red.

  On December 5, Busch announced that Devine was coming back to run the Cardinals and that Musial was going back to being a businessman, goodwill ambassador, and team vice president. Musial was not around to comment. After the winter meetings in Mexico City, he and Lil took off for a vacation in Acapulco.

  Clearly, Biggie’s death forced Musial to change his priorities. The two partners had invested in several hotels in Florida as well as the Redbird Lanes in St. Louis with Joe Garagiola. Musial and Teresa Garagnani delegated responsibility to their respective sons, Richard Musial and Jack Garagnani, and Stan relied on Pat Anthony, his longtime assistant, but there was only one Biggie. Somebody had to watch the store.

  IT WAS Christmas Eve 1967, getting late at the Redbird Lanes. The last group bowled its final frame and was changing shoes, about to head home for the holidays, except for John Kopchak, a Cardinal farmhand who had been called up late in the season but had not gotten into a game. He was still in St. Louis, two and a half months later.

  Kopchak was nursing his beer when he noticed the last worker at Redbird Lanes hovering near him.

  “I sure would like to clean up,” Stan Musial said, recognizing the young player. “Why don’t you go home to your family?”

  Kopchak said his family lived east of Los Angeles. Musial thought about this for a moment and promptly invited the young man home for dinner. Forty-three years later Kopchak could still describe the feast Lil had prepared for her family: ham, fried chicken, polish sausages, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, the works.

  Lil fussed over the nineteen-year-old. “A lady, very sweet,” Kopchak recalled in 2010. “A mother figure.”

  After dinner, Musial said he had to make a run to the airport and asked Kopchak to keep him company. Stanley parked the car and said he had to go inside to pick up a package. Twenty minutes later he came back bearing an airplane ticket, round-trip, to Los Angeles.

  “You’ve got thirty minutes to catch your plane,” Musial said.

  Kopchak does not remember how much the ticket cost—“More than I had, I can tell you that.” He called his folks, flew home for the holidays, and when he returned to St. Louis he tried to return the money, but Musial would not hear of it.

  “It was my Christmas present to you,” he said.

  Before long, Kopchak was drafted during the Vietnam War, and when he got back it was too late for the majors. In recent years he has worked as chief of security for the Memphis Redbirds, a Cardinal farm team. He occasionally gives talks to baseball fans, who want to know what Stan Musial is really like.

  Musial worked harder than many retired players know how to do, spending regular hours in his office, dressing in a suit, reading the Wall Street Journal, making investment decisions about his money.

  “Are you a millionaire like Hank Greenberg?” Roger Kahn asked Musial in 1976.

  “Just write that I’m not hanging for my pension,” Musial told Kahn, sounding justifiably proud of his own disciplined life. “A long time ago I knew I couldn’t hit forever, and I knew that I didn’t want to be a coach or manager. So Biggie Garagnani, who died young, and I started the restaurant in 1949. Biggie knew the business, and I knew that just my name wasn’t enough. I put in time. I like mixing with people up to a point, and my being here was good for business. I still walk around in the place six nights a week when I’m in town. So while I was playing. I was building a permanent restaurant business, and that just led naturally into the hotels. What’s my title? President of Stan Musial & Biggie’s, Inc.”

  Without Musial, the Cardinals reached the World Series again in 1968, losing the final three games to Detroit, with Flood misjudging a drive off the magnificent Gibson.

  The following spring, Gussie Busch thought he detected complacency in the Cardinals, who had merely won two World Series and another pennant in the previous five seasons. The beer baron had the players herded into the clubhouse, along with Dick Meyer, Bing Devine, Red Schoendienst, and Musial. Gussie also thoughtfully invited the press, who rarely get to witness an owner chewing out his players.

  “Gentlemen, I don’t think there is any secret about the fact that I am not a very good loser,” Gussie began, expanding on the theme that his hirelings seemed more interested in salary negotiations than in winning another World Series.

  Gussie noted the growing power of the union and said, “I am saying, though, we are beginning to lose sight of who really has to pay the ultimate bill for your salary and your pension … namely the fan.”

  During what the Associated Press called “an unusual forty-minute clubhouse meeting,” Busch told the players, “I plead with you not to kill the enthusiasm of the fans and the kids for whom you have become such idols.”

  The Cardinals did not even win the division title in 1969, the year of the Miracle Mets. Curt Flood was convinced Busch had destroyed the club’s unity with his sclerotic outburst in St. Pete. The pride that had made the Cardinals one of the best teams—and one of the best clubhouses—was gone.

  And soon Flood was gone. Shortly after the 1969 season, the Cardinals included him in a trade to the Phillies, in return for the legendary s
lugger Dick Allen.

  Flood decided he did not want to be traded, not right then, and not to Philadelphia, so he refused to go—thereby touching off an eventual Supreme Court case he would lose but which would lead to unimaginable free-agency salaries decades down the line.

  At the Supreme Court session, very few baseball people showed up in support of Flood: Hank Greenberg, Jackie Robinson, the pitcher-turned-writer Jim Brosnan, and Bill Veeck, the maverick who seemed to exist only to make other owners look even more ossified.

  There was no reason to expect Musial to join them as they paid public tribute to Flood’s stand. Musial had been supportive of the union’s formation back in 1946, but he seemed to believe the owners could not retain fiscal sanity without a reserve clause. As a businessman, Musial was management, not labor, and he seemed to favor the reserve clause. So did most players, at least until free agency fell into their laps.

  Mostly Musial was also a loyal baseball man who enjoyed dispensing cryptic hitting tips in his Stanley fashion.

  “Spring of 1972,” recalled Keith Hernandez. “I’m eighteen years old and Stan and Gibson came down from the big club, all of us in the outfield. Six, seven hundred players. Gibson talked about pitching.

  “Musial got a bat in his hand and started talking about hitting and for a minute and a half he was all stops and starts and stutters,” Hernandez recalled. “Getting frustrated, he threw the bat down and he said, ‘Oh, hell, look for the ball, see it, and hit it.’

  “Great for you, Stan, with your hand-to-eye coordination,” Hernandez muttered fondly.

  In January 1969, Musial was voted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, along with Roy Campanella and old-timers Waite Hoyt and Stan Coveleski.

  Twenty-three eligible writers did not vote for Musial on his first attempt, but then again there has never been a unanimous selection. As of 2010, the number of eligible baseball writers who voted for him, 93.24 percent, was the nineteenth-highest among the 106 players who were voted in via mass balloting. Inexplicably, twenty writers did not vote for Ted Williams in 1966; twenty-eight did not vote for DiMaggio in 1955, after he had been turned down on his three previous tries for the Hall, if you can imagine. Apparently some writers thought Joe D. would come out of retirement, and wanted to make sure he was really done.