Stan Musial (29 page)

THE OWNERS
came and went. Baseball remained a tight little world in the decade before expansion—eleven road games in seven parks, six cities if you combined New York and Brooklyn. Musial lived a familiar and comfortable routine. He knew the angles of the ballparks, knew the ushers, knew the fans, knew the regional accents, knew the bell captains.

As youngsters, Stan had lived on cabbage and Red had lived on squirrel. Now they knew the headwaiters; now they appreciated the menus.

“
I think about that sometimes when Stan and I are ordering the biggest and freshest lobster flown in from Maine or are cutting into choice strips of sirloin steak,” Schoendienst said in midcareer. “They’re wonderful, the eating experiences we’ve had and they’re part of our getting along so well together.”

Other players came to think of Musial as a worldly star who knew the circuit.

“
When we were on the road, we’d look for new places to eat,” Hank Sauer once said. “We’d use a Diner’s Club card and ask people where the best restaurants were. Musial really knows food. He can always tell the good cuts of meat from the bad ones. In New York, we’d go to the shows.”

Ralph Kiner recognized Musial as a kindred soul in the big cities. “
The Pirates would be in New York and the Cardinals were playing Brooklyn and we were playing a lot more day games in those days,” Kiner said. He would take a few teammates to Bertolotti’s, a landmark restaurant on Third Street in Greenwich Village, known for its Bohemian atmosphere and Italian restaurants.

“I’d see Musial and Red at one table, the two of them, and I’d be with some of the Pirates at another table, and we happened to meet,” Kiner said. The code of the day said players did not fraternize with opponents, but Stanley and Red would salute Kiner.

Jim Brosnan, a pitcher with the Cardinals for part of 1958 and 1959,
ran into Stan and Red at a midtown restaurant. They seemed impressed he knew about the place and introduced him to their dinner companion, an actor whom Brosnan does not identify but probably was Horace McMahon, a friend of Musial’s. When Stan and Red left, the actor came over and sat and chatted with Brosnan.

“
That was a real nice thing that Stan and Red did,” Brosnan thought. “The two of them had passed along this TV star to me. It was the kind of thing you did if you were a Cardinal”—or if you were Stan and Red.

Brosnan later wrote a wry and literate book,
The Long Season
, about his view from the bullpen; he retained his impression of the kind way Stanley treated people.

WITH MUSIAL
, it was a fraternity that included just about anybody putting on a uniform. At the end of the 1949 season, a wispy infielder named Wayne Terwilliger made his first start against the Cardinals.

“
Early in the game, I went out to second base from our dugout and Stan was coming in from left field and as we crossed the pitcher’s mound,
I thought, ‘There he is, Stan Musial, I watched him play,’ ” Terwilliger recalled. “And as I got to him, he said, ‘Hi, Wayne, how’s it going?’ or something like that, and it really startled me. I don’t think I mumbled anything really but I thought, ‘Geez, Stan Musial knew my name, for cryin’ out loud.’ It was really a shock. I tell that every time somebody mentions him. He was a class guy from what I know and read.”

Sixty years later, still slender and boyish, Terwilliger was coaching in the minor leagues, still in uniform, like Schoendienst and Johnny Pesky from his era.

“I’ve used that,” Terwilliger said of Musial’s gesture. “When I was managing in the minor leagues, I would find out their names and call ’em by name when I went by, and I knew they appreciated that.”

Terwilliger wondered how Musial could hit from that crouch. “I think I did fool around with it a little because I struggled as a hitter and I was trying to find something comfortable for me. I tried the crouching, but it never felt comfortable for me. I never did find a good stance.” He batted .240 in 666 games in the majors.

Catchers just up from the minors were stunned when they would squat
behind home plate and Musial would introduce himself—already knowing their names. This was not fraternization; it was being human.

Musial rarely gave advice to teammates, but when he spoke it made sense to listen. When Joe Cunningham was a rookie, he was shagging flies before a game and indulging in some modest backbiting toward the manager. Musial, who had been jerked around by a manager or two by then, quickly told Cunnningham, “Joe, don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

“I never forgot that,” Cunningham said, long after making a good career and settling in St. Louis. He remained a friend of Musial’s even though he had been moved to the outfield so Musial could play first.

“I kidded him once. I said, ‘Stan, do you feel good about all the guys you sent back to the minor leagues?’ He just laughed it off. You know, I’ve never heard Stan say a bad word about anybody.”

Ed Mickelson was a pretty fair minor-league hitter who finally got called up by the Cardinals late in the 1950 season. When Musial came down with a 103-degree fever, Eddie Dyer let Mickelson start, then added that Warren Spahn was pitching that day. Given a chance, Mickelson got one of the Cardinals’ two hits that day.

The following spring, Mickelson was training with the Cardinals. One day he noticed Musial sitting in the next stall in the clubhouse bathroom, separated by a partition.

“I thought, ‘Okay, I got a captive audience here,’ ” Mickelson said, “so I asked him, ‘Stan, you seem so confident and carefree, do you ever get nervous before a game?’ and he said, ‘Ed, I tell you what, if you don’t, you might as well quit. Sure I get nervous.’ ”

Mickelson, who batted .081 in 18 games with the Cardinals and Browns, remembered that advice during his long career as a minor-league hitter and high school coach. “He’s so calm and collected. It helped me a lot.”

It was nice to be Stanley. He used to make fun of the Pirates’ rudimentary batting helmets, worn on order of Branch Rickey, who had moved from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh. Joe Garagiola, who had gone on to play with the Pirates, was under orders to wear the helmet backward while catching.

“
There was a half inch of rubber under the helmet,” Garagiola recalled. “You hated playing on a hot day because if you caught a foul tip, the sweat would come running down your face like you needed windshield wipers.
And if you went after a foul pop, you’d throw off the mask, but the bill of the helmet would stick you in the back of the neck, like you were getting stabbed.”

Stanley was having none of the helmets.

“Musial was adamant,” Garagiola said. “He thought he looked funny in a helmet, so he wore a little plastic insert under his cap.”

Pretty much everything was funny to Stanley.

There was a night game in St. Louis when Garagiola was catching for the Pirates and his old buddy came up to hit.

“
Hey, Stan, about ten of us are coming over to the restaurant after the game. Do we need a reservation?”

Musial watched the first strike.

“Should we take taxis, or do you have enough parking?”

Musial did not answer. Strike two.

On the third pitch, Musial slugged a home run out into the humid St. Louis night. When he touched home he asked Garagiola, “How do you people like your steaks?”

Sometimes Musial even surprised himself. On May 2, 1954, he became the first major leaguer ever to hit five homers in one day.

Lil happened to stay home for the Sunday doubleheader. Stan walked the first time, then hit a homer off the left-handed Johnny Antonelli. In the fifth, Musial golfed a low inside pitch from Antonelli onto the pavilion in right field. In the sixth he singled off the right-handed Jim Hearn. In the eighth, with two men on base and the score tied, he hit a slider by Hearn onto the roof of the pavilion, the first time he had hit three homers in one game.

In the second game, with the lights on, he walked the first time up. The second time Willie Mays tracked down his drive in the deepest part of the ballpark, right-center field. Over the years both Musial and Monte Irvin would say Willie had taken away a sixth homer, but it would have had to be an inside-the-park version with a ferocious carom.

In his third at-bat in the second game, Musial hit one onto the roof of the pavilion—40 feet high, 394 feet away. The next time, Hoyt Wilhelm fluttered one of his trademark knuckleballs, and Musial hit it to right-center, on top of the roof. The last time up—one of the rare times when he
actually tried to jerk one out—he popped to first. For a guy who came up as a cautious singles hitter, it was quite an afternoon.

Musial told this story on himself many times: when he got home from the ballpark that day, thirteen-year-old Dick said, “Gee, Dad, they sure must have been throwing you fat pitches today.”

Then there was the 1955 All-Star Game in Milwaukee, with young Bud Selig in attendance with his mom. Musial was not voted to start that year but batted for Del Ennis in the fourth inning and was still in the lineup as the game meandered into the twelfth inning. With the players due back in uniform two days later, nobody wanted to miss the last flight or train out of town that evening.
Legend says that Musial promised everybody in the dugout he was about to end the game, but Robin Roberts, who pitched the first three innings and was rooting in the dugout in the twelfth, said he did not hear any prediction.

Henry Aaron, in the same dugout at the same time, recalled Musial heading toward the bat rack and saying, “They don’t pay us to play overtime.”

“And he went up and hit a home run,” Aaron said. “I heard that myself. I know a lot say Babe Ruth pointed”—a reference to Ruth’s homer in the 1932 World Series. “I know Stan called his.”

Does talking about not getting paid for overtime qualify as calling his shot? That is open to interpretation. At the very least, Musial was setting himself up for a Stanley-hits kind of moment.

Yogi Berra, Musial’s St. Louis pal, had caught the entire game and was still squatting behind home plate. In one of his books, Berra and his writer put it this way: “
Stash is the oldest player in the game and tells me he’s getting weary. I tell him my feet are tired, too. And ain’t it a shame nobody can see the ball through the shadows? Stash tells me to relax, says we’re all going home soon. And he smashed the first pitch for a home run.”

In a conversation in 2009, Berra recalled that All-Star Game: “
It was a long game, you know. We were just talking, saying, I wish this game would get over with.”

“It’s been said that Stanley told you he was going to get it over with,” I told Berra.

“Nah, he didn’t,” Berra insisted.

Then there is Frank Sullivan of the Red Sox, who delivered the pitch. Known for his wit as a player, Sullivan claimed half a century later that Musial was laughing as he got into the batter’s box and that Yogi said, “For crying out loud, Stan, do something. This game has gone on far too long.”

Musial promptly hit the ball into the stands (Bud Selig still waxes on about the parabola of the game-ending drive) and toured the bases, clearly quite happy with himself.

Sullivan ended his story this way: “Later, Berra came over to my locker and said, ‘I should have told you he was a high fastball hitter.’ ”

Yogi was too much of a competitor to intentionally allow Sullivan to put the wrong pitch in the wrong place for the wrong slugger—even if it was his St. Louis pal. But that was the result: Stanley the homebody sent everybody home.

Z
EV YAROSLAVSKY
is not sure of the year. It was either 1958 or 1959, the first or second season the Dodgers were ensconced in Los Angeles.

Yaroslavsky would later become a supervisor of Los Angeles County, a nationally prominent politician, but back in the late fifties he had loftier goals: he wanted to be the next Vin Scully.

Scully was conducting a primer course in major-league baseball for denizens of southern California, who would bring transistor radios to the Coliseum to listen to his mellifluous yet still New York accent.

Yaroslavsky decided the best way to become the next Vin Scully was to secure an interview with the reigning grand old deity of the National League, Stan Musial.

The boy of ten or eleven did not work for a radio station. He did not even own a tape recorder. However, he did have nerve.

“I found out that the Cardinals were staying at the old Statler downtown,” Yaroslavsky said. “I must have found that in a baseball media guide or something. I called the hotel and asked for Mr. Musial’s room and they connected me. That wouldn’t happen today, of course.

“He picked up the phone and I put on my deepest pre-puberty voice,” Yaroslavsky recalled. “I said my name was Bob Price and I worked for KLAC and asked if I could have a brief interview.”

Musial agreed, so Bob Price commenced.

“How’s the team?”

“The Cardinals look pretty good.”

“In what ways?”

“Good hitting, good fielding, good defense, good pitching.”

“Let’s talk about the hitting.”

“We have this kid Curt Flood and he looks good, and Kenny Boyer is a good power hitter.”

“What about the defense?”

“That Julian Javier is a terrific fielder.”

“What about pitching?”

“Gibson and Broglio are excellent pitchers. We think we have a good staff that can win a lot of games.”

Four decades later, Yaroslavsky remembered running out of questions before Stan Musial ran out of answers. Bob Price thanked Musial for his time.

Musial’s last words were, “Thank you, son.”

“
AT THAT
moment, I was very embarrassed,” Yaroslavsky remembered. “My con didn’t work. He could have hung up or lectured me or chewed me out, but he didn’t. In his own inimitable way, he let me know that he knew, but he gave me the interview anyway.

“You know,” Yaroslavsky continued, “I’ve been around a lot of people since then. I’ve seen people acting like jerks. As I got into politics, I thought about that moment. If Stan Musial could take the time for somebody, so could I. If somebody’s power got cut off on a weekend, or somebody had a landslide in their backyard at night, or somebody died on a Sunday and needed a death certificate, you could never be too busy to listen to them.”