Stan Musial (28 page)

Dick did not become a doctor, but he was an athlete and did go to college, fulfilling the dream that Stan had been maintaining for twenty years. Given Lil’s short stature, Dick turned out to be an inch or two shorter than Stan but very much an athlete, running track at Notre Dame.

The star quarterback at Christian Brothers was a rugged, rangy kid named Mike Shannon—now a gravel-voiced broadcaster for the hometown team, earlier a regular with the Cardinals in the sixties before an injury cut short his career. The Cardinals called him “Moon” because he was a bit spacey.

In high school, Mike Shannon was a star. During one game he heard fans from St. Louis University mocking his backfield teammate.

“
Those kids used to try to kill Stan Musial’s kid,” Shannon recalled.
“And Dick was very talented. They kept saying, ‘Give it to Musial, give it to Musial,’ and I said, ‘Okay, you guys want Musial?’ ”

Down near the goal line, Shannon called the money play, handing the ball to his teammate.

Touchdown, Musial.

“And I said, ‘You guys want any more of that Musial?’ ”

J
OHN BISKUPSKI
was running a Little League on the North Side of Chicago in the mid-fifties. Most of the boys in the league were of Polish descent, and their hero was Stanislaus Musial, perhaps the most visible Polish American in the twentieth century, unless you wanted to count Liberace. However, the pianist with the wavy hair could not hit like Musial.

In a surge of ethnic pride, John Biskupski and his brother, Joseph, sent a note to Musial, saying they ran a league not far from Wrigley Field and would be honored to meet him sometime. They would have settled for shaking his hand at Wrigley, telling him how much it meant to them to read his frequent references to the polka and pierogis.

What the brothers did not expect was that one day, while they were hitting grounders to their young players, Stan Musial would materialize. The Cardinals had a day off in Chicago, and there he was.

“
The kids were all thrilled to have a famous ballplayer there,” John Biskupski’s son, M. B. B. Biskupski, said years later.

Musial inquired if the kids had uniforms, and the brothers said no. Then Musial asked if they had bats and balls and the brothers again said no. At that point, Musial took out his checkbook and started writing.

M. B. B. Biskupski does not know the amount of the check—he was living elsewhere, since his parents were separated—but he often heard his father and uncle tell the story.

“Musial was spoken of with great respect for what he symbolized for all of us,” said Biskupski, now the holder of the Stanislaus A. Blejwas Endowed Chair in Polish and Polish American Studies at Central Connecticut
State University. He grew up hearing Polish spoken at home and also endured Polish jokes on the street and in the media. Musial had been an answer to the stereotypes. “In addition to being a fine ballplayer, he had the reputation for being a fine gentleman, somebody the people could admire,” Biskupski said.

The professor added that his own young son is named Stanislaus—partially after an uncle and a dear friend, he said, but also after the man who once showed up at the Little League field on the North Side of Chicago on a day off.

H
E HAD
always been a hitter. In 1948, Musial became a slugger. Baseball has had similar transformations in more recent times, with hitters suddenly discovering their inner Babe, their latent Henry, in their late twenties. If Musial had staged his metamorphosis in the steroid generation, there would have been demands that he be tested on a daily basis—
get this man a Dixie cup!
Except he never bulked up.

Suddenly Stan Musial could hit home runs. He had come up to the majors as an insecure stripling, slapping at the ball to avoid being exposed and shipped back to Donora. Then during the war, to satisfy the admirals and the sailors in Pearl Harbor, he had exaggerated his crouch, stayed in it longer, and swung for the fences. Now,
after Dr. Hyland removed his appendix and tonsils in October 1947, Musial began hitting the ball farther, more often.

“
Stash seemed to stand up much straighter then,” Terry Moore said, referring to the slap hitter who came from nowhere in 1941. “He didn’t crouch nearly so much. That’s something I think he picked up during the war.”

Moore added, “But if you ask me, I think he’d hit over .300 on one leg with one eye closed, crouched over or standin’ as straight as a barber pole. He’s just a hitter, that’s all.”

The explanation for his power surge went beyond maturation and a shift in his technique.
But Musial has suggested another reason: he saw Ralph Kiner and Johnny Mize hitting home runs and getting paid for it. Kiner came out of the service in 1946 and hit 23 homers—and then hit 271
more in the next six years, to become the highest-paid player in the National League at $90,000 in 1951, while Musial was making $75,000 plus an attendance bonus. He wanted some of that home run money, and he began circumventing the pitchers’ strategy. “
Pitchers generally had thrown high and tight to me, but now they were throwing low and away, a tough pitch to pull.”

When he hit 4 homers in his first twenty-one games in 1948, he figured he might be good for 20 that season, one more than his highest total the year before.

Instead, he hit 39, 36, 28, 32, 21, 30, 35, 33, 27, and 29 homers in the next decade. From the age of twenty-seven to the age of thirty-six, he was a different hitter than he had been in his first five seasons, Not only that, but after the separate surgeries in the autumn of 1947, he produced batting averages of .376, .338, .346, .355, and .336, plus four batting championships in five seasons—one of the greatest spurts by any hitter ever.

Musial was also named Most Valuable Player for a third time, missing the Triple Crown by a narrow margin after he hit a home run in a game that was rained out and nullified, leaving him one behind Kiner and Mize. He also tied Ty Cobb’s record by making five hits in a game four times in one season.

He still did not think of himself as a slugger and rarely intentionally swung for a home run because he said it made him overanxious, but he did drop his hands down to the knob to provide more leverage, more power. His slender body was surprisingly powerful, and he seemed to have an inner discipline and superior muscle memory. He figured out how to get more torque from an increased crouch.

After the postwar surge in 1946, Musial realized he would have to dig into his slugger’s crouch in order to carry the Cardinals. Moore was just about done, Marion’s back had given way, and the Cardinals could not keep pace with the Dodgers.

The cause was obvious. Former commissioner Fay Vincent said he once asked Musial about his perceptions once Jackie Robinson and the other black players joined the Dodgers.

“He said, ‘Yeah, Commissioner, once the Dodgers integrated, we couldn’t do it in St. Louis. We would never win again.’ ”

The timidity of their owners and executives doomed the Cardinals to
become also-rans for the rest of the Musial generation. Management was surely affected by the racial attitudes of the border states, left over from the Civil War. St. Louis was still the gateway of the major leagues, with a loyal following to the south and west; its fans would listen on the radio and drive long distances to catch a game, but the region was not exactly petitioning the Cardinals to sign a black player.

The Browns’ front office, just down the hallway in Sportsman’s Park, signed a couple of black players, probably for a quick boost of attendance, which did not work out. Other teams were more committed: Cleveland signed Larry Doby, the Giants hit the jackpot with Willie Mays, the Boston Braves signed a slim kid with quick wrists named Henry Aaron, and the Reds found a man in Oakland named Frank Robinson.

Asked why the Cardinals were so slow to integrate, Musial once said: “
You know, that was the decision up to the front office.”

A few franchises were slow, including the Yankees, not that it hurt them much. The Phillies would win a pennant in 1950, playing the Yankees in the last all-white Series of the century. And the Red Sox became the last major-league team to bring up a black player, Pumpsie Green in 1959, twelve years after Robinson. The Sox begrudgingly gave Robinson a phony tryout in 1945 but couldn’t wait to get him out of Fenway Park.

The Cardinals just bumbled along.
Quincy Trouppe, scouting for the Cardinals in the spring of 1953, recommended a shortstop with the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro League. The Cardinals dispatched another scout who sent back the word: “I don’t think he is a major league prospect. He can’t hit, he can’t run, he has a pretty good arm but it’s a scatter arm. I don’t like him.” And that was how the Cubs, and not the Cardinals, came to sign Ernie Banks.

Elston Howard might have loved to sign with his hometown Cardinals, but he became the first black Yankee in 1955. Watching his booming right-handed drives get caught in Yankee Stadium’s Death Valley, Howard could only visualize his shots cannonading around Sportsman’s Park.

Howard’s widow, Arlene, has said her husband would run into Musial at the gym or sports banquets and would ask for advice about his career or contract negotiations. Musial was always kind, she said. A nice man.

In addition to losing out on potential teammates like Banks and
Howard, Musial was deprived of the tentative white-black dynamics taking place on other teams. Dixie Walker got to play with Jackie Robinson for one year and quickly came to respect him. The Cardinals finally brought up a black player in 1954, but Tom Alston, a large first baseman, was just not up to it, and that set them back even longer.

While Musial became the great player of his league, the Dodgers won pennants in 1947, 1949, 1952, 1953, 1955, and 1956. The resentments from the Durocher era remained as Robinson evolved into an intense and physical competitor.

“
The only time that we would talk in a way was when we had to take a picture together,” Musial said. “We both were leading the league but personally I didn’t know him and I didn’t get to talk to him too much.”

Musial could not help chatting with Roy Campanella, the Dodgers’ wise catcher, who was half Italian and half black.

“
He had something to say every time I came to the plate, you know. ‘I don’t know how we can handle ya,’ or something like that,” Musial said.

As the Cardinals slipped backward, some of them still maintained a racial edge to their comments.

“
We’d watch ’em in the dugout,” said Don Newcombe. “Wisecracks, call names. I could see from the mound when I got there in ’49. You never saw guys like Musial or Schoendienst. They never showed you up. The man went about his job and did it damn well and never had the need to sit in the dugout and call a black guy a bunch of names, because he was trying to change the game and make it what it should have been in the first place, a game for all people.”

THE CARDINALS
’ paralysis toward black players came during a series of turnovers in ownership. Breadon bowed out in November 1947, looking to settle his estate, and would die of prostate cancer in mid-1949 at the age of seventy-two.

The new owners were Robert E. Hannegan, a former postmaster general, and Fred Saigh, a real estate investor. Hannegan lasted one year and continued Breadon’s tactics of selling off players to raise cash, then became ill and sold his share to Saigh, dying on October 6, 1949.

Musial the businessman learned how to negotiate his salary from dealing with all these owners. He had committed a gaffe with Breadon early on when he said he would have to try even harder with some of the stars away at war; that cost him a few dollars. Breadon came to respect Musial during the Pasquel frolics of 1946, even when Musial squawked about the raise Breadon tried to pass off as a one-time bonus among good friends.

Musial’s pose toward the owners was that he was not greedy and knew he was living better than he ever could have imagined. But he learned to define what was fair for him, particularly in the “adjustment” he had negotiated with Hannegan in 1948, including the attendance bonus. In 1949, Saigh paid him $50,000 per year for two years, with a bonus of $5,000 per year if the Cardinals went over 900,000 paid admissions. This was an astute judgment by Musial, operating without an agent and anticipating the postwar boom in attendance. The Cardinals drew over a million each year from 1946 through 1951, when Musial was paid $75,000 plus the $5,000 attendance bonus, although he had to wait for the postwar Wage Stabilization Board to approve his raises.

“
He had always approached the subject logically and in a businesslike manner,” Saigh said in 1952. “I think the experience of operating his own restaurant has made him conscious of some of the problems of management.”

On Valentine’s Day 1952, Saigh pulled a publicity stunt by calling in whatever the media swarm was like in those days and proffering a blank contract to Stanley, who had waited to be the last Cardinal to sign.

“I told him that anything short of his owning the St. Louis Cardinals the next morning was all right with me,” Saigh said. It is hard to imagine Tom Yawkey coming up with a gimmick like that involving Williams, or the grim burghers who owned the Yankees acting like that with the suspicious DiMaggio.

Did Saigh sandbag Musial into being the polite son-husband-father figure, or was the scene prearranged, thereby making Stanley a much better actor than anybody had realized? Musial never said. He went along with it, either way.

“
Mr. Saigh, I have been well satisfied with my contracts in the past and I think I am going to be satisfied with my 1952 contract with the same terms in 1951—if that is satisfactory,” Musial said as flashbulbs popped.

Afterward, Harry Caray, the bumptious broadcaster, told Saigh in private, “You must be a helluva fine crap-shooter, too.”

Not that good, it turned out. In January 1953, Saigh was convicted of income tax evasion and ultimately spent time in prison; he had to sell the club to the Anheuser-Busch company.