Stan Musial (34 page)

On June 12, he broke Gus Suhr’s National League record for consecutive games with 823, after making a token appearance along the way to keep the streak going. He had also played injured a number of times, living up to the old Gashouse code that a player never took a day off.

“
We were a tough bunch of guys back then,” he once told Julius Hunter, a popular St. Louis commentator. “We played hurt a lot. We had a game to play, and when you hit the field you forgot a while about this or that hurting you. You get a bruise, you pour a little iodine on it and keep on playing. You get a sprain, either you or the team doctor would tape it up real tight and you’d head back out in the field. I used to think of all the fans that paid their hard earned money to come see me play. They didn’t buy tickets to see me sitting on the bench.”

Musial always stressed his luck in avoiding major injuries, but there was something else—his workman’s pride in showing up, doing an honest job.

He had learned a lesson earlier in his career from a conversation with Al Simmons—originally Aloys Szymanski, one of the great players of Polish ancestry. Simmons, who finished his career with 2,927 hits, once told Musial he would have reached 3,000 hits if he had played a few more games every season.

The streak ended at 895 when Musial injured his left shoulder trying to pull an outside pitch to protect the runner. He wound up playing only 134 games that season, his lowest total in fifteen seasons. Athletes are always stunned at the suggestion their bodies are deserting them. The first reaction is:
Bad day
.

But at least Musial did not have to see Lane’s smirking face anymore. The new general manager was Bing Devine, a local boy from Washington
University who had worked his way up in the organization. Musial’s first salary negotiation with Devine involved a modest request for 1958: Kiner had reached $90,000 and Musial told Devine he wanted $91,000. Devine checked it out and came back with the news that Gussie Busch wanted Musial to become the first National League player to make $100,000, which Musial accepted gracefully.

The aura of the grand old star of the National League also carried a legend: Musial had never been thrown out of a game. He did come very close on opening day of 1958 after being called out on strikes to end the home half of the first.
Musial gave a brief look to home-plate umpire Frank Dascoli, who was known to have a low tolerance for criticism, even from Stanley.

Normally, umpires began to question their call (to themselves, of course) when Stanley fixed his sad-eyed look on them. Dascoli may have taken the look as a challenge. When Musial was called out again to end the third inning, he gave Dascoli a major-league glare.

As Musial trudged away from home plate, Del Ennis, in the on-deck circle, warned him not to look back because Dascoli was glaring back at the number 6 between Musial’s shoulder blades. Musial kept walking, giving Dascoli no cause to toss him.

Musial was friendly with most umpires and sometimes could even laugh at their mistakes. In return, he received just about universal respect.

“
I met Al Barlick once at Cooperstown and was asking him what happened if Stan took a pitch with two strikes,” Joe Torre said. “Barlick thought about it and said, ‘If he didn’t swing at it, it’s a ball.’ ”

Another umpire anecdote turns out to be about seven-tenths urban myth, like alligators in the sewer system. According to legend, Stanley once had a game-winning grand-slam home run negated because time had been called as a ball rolled onto the field; thereupon Stanley promptly hit a bases-clearing triple to alleviate the home-plate umpire’s guilt.

In one version, this happened off Ben Wade of Brooklyn in St. Louis in the early fifties. The only thing wrong with this version is that no box score exists for such an epic event.

Something like this did happen on April 18, 1954, off Paul Minner of the Cubs at Wrigley—a one-run double was negated when the first-base umpire blew the call and ruled Musial’s ball to be foul. True story: Musial
trudged home, did not complain to umpire Augie Donatelli, and promptly whacked a double to the same place, this time to be called fair. Still a nice story, however.

Stanley has even received credit for giving career-altering advice to a Hall of Fame umpire, Doug Harvey. In 1961, when Harvey was breaking in, he became so mesmerized by a curveball from Don Drysdale that he called Musial out on strikes. Musial politely told Harvey that Drysdale’s excellent pitch had actually broken a few inches before home plate, and suggested Harvey slow down his procedure for making calls. Harvey listened and soon became the strict but fair presence known to the players as “God.”

Musial was not playing politics with the umps; he just had a high standard.

In 1958, Musial approached another milestone—the eighth player ever to accumulate 3,000 career hits. Biggie arranged for a huge party for Musial on Sunday evening, May 11, by which time, Biggie estimated, Musial would reach that number. Accommodating soul that he was, Stanley rapped out five hits in a doubleheader that afternoon but was still two hits away when it was time for the party. Musial pulled out his harmonica and the 350 guests cheered the man with 2,998 career hits. Then the Cardinals took off for a two-day trip to Chicago.

After getting one hit on Monday, Musial mused out loud that it would be nice if he could make his 3,000th at home. Always a straight shooter, Hutchinson informed players, press, and fans that Musial would be rested on Tuesday—unless the Cards absolutely needed a hit.

On Tuesday Lil saw Stanley off to the ballpark and then made a sortie down Michigan Avenue to shop for a hat she could wear in St. Louis for the big moment a day or two later.

She found the right hat and then told her friends, “Girls, we came here to see his 3000th base hit, and even if they don’t play him, we have to be at the ballpark because you never know what’s going to happen.”

When Lil arrived, Stanley was out in the bullpen, working on his ballplayer tan. In the sixth inning, with a runner on base and the Cardinals trailing by a run, Hutch did what any manager would do: he called on Stanley. By some odd coincidence, the pitcher was a right-hander, Moe Drabowsky, who actually had been born in Poland, Musial’s ancestral home.

Drabowsky was not about to toss Musial a friendly helping of golumpki; he tried to tantalize Musial with an outside pitch. But as he had been doing since he was a kid playing on the odd-shaped field in Donora, Musial stroked the ball to the left side. Ernie Banks, one of Musial’s greatest admirers, watched the ball sizzle past him at shortstop, hooking into the corner, and Banks could not help his let’s-play-two smile as Musial pulled into second. Hutchinson came lumbering onto the field to congratulate Musial, apologizing for ruining the plans for St. Louis.

The ball was retrieved by the third-base umpire, none other than Frank Dascoli, who had been looking to eject Stanley back on April 15. With a big smile, Dascoli came running over to present the ball at second base. Cubs and Cardinals were applauding and laughing, and then Musial spotted Lil and kissed her as photographers clicked away. One of the photographers asked, “Who’s the blonde, Stan?”

The celebration continued as the team pulled out of the Illinois Central depot, heading home. Harry Caray gave Musial a pair of cuff links with “3,000” engraved on them, and Sam Jones, the winning pitcher, delivered a magnum of Champagne. Coincidentally, with the arrival of the jet age, this was the last time the Cardinals would ever take a train on this route. Fans in Illinois waved from the side of the tracks, with fans in Springfield singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

“Now I know how Lindbergh felt,” Musial told Broeg.

When the train finally reached Union Station in St. Louis around eleven that night, hundreds of people were waiting, including Gerry Musial, now a teenager.

“
He told the fans, ‘All you kids get a day off from school,’ ” Gerry recalled. “And there were a lot of kids there.”

Did the Musial children follow their father’s advice and become truants?

“I think Mom took us in late,” Gerry said.

MUSIAL HIT
.337 in 1958, with a slight drop-off in power, and Hutch was dismissed in mid-September as the Cardinals tied for fifth. Nearly thirty-eight years old, physically and mentally worn out, Musial could have used a restful off-season at home with Lil, who was pregnant with their fourth
child, but the Cardinals were committed to a trip to Asia, and Musial’s presence was very much part of the deal. He was allowed to miss three early stops but reported in Seoul, South Korea, before the team went to Japan.

“
At first, I wasn’t too keen about making the trip,” Musial recalled. “I knew I’d be worn out. But I’m mighty glad that I went. That trip thirty years ago was worth it. I have lasting impressions. My wife does, too.”

The trip was important because of baseball’s status as the national sport of Japan. General Douglas MacArthur had encouraged the sport to be resumed quickly after World War II, and Lefty O’Doul, the great San Francisco slugger, had returned with financial and moral support. The knowledgeable and passionate fans were waiting for the Cardinals and their star player.

“They gave us a parade like we won the World Series,” recalled Joe Cunningham, a younger teammate, who added: “Stan was tired. We all were tired.”

Just like the American navy brass in 1945, the Japanese fans had high expectations of Musial’s power.

“I tried awfully hard to please the Japanese fans. But I remember hitting only two home runs,” Musial said. “Home runs were what the Japanese expected of me. I was tired, worn out after the regular season. I’m sorry they couldn’t have seen me earlier.”

The hosts would give a present to every player who gave an interview for radio or television, along with a gift to his wife or girlfriend. In his autobiography, Musial described “one unending whirl of parades, ball games, receptions, conducted tours, cocktail parties, dinners and entertainment. From the prime minister to the countless Japanese school kids we saw playing ball every day, the Japanese were gracious hosts, kind and courteous.”

He impressed the Japanese by learning how to sign his autograph in Japanese characters. He also came up with a story he would tell for decades: “At one of the countless interviews I had with the radio and TV people, I mentioned that I was in the restaurant business. One writer asked, ‘Ah, so, Musial-san. Are you then a waiter?’ ”

Without knowing it, Musial had a role in the career of one of Japan’s
greatest players—Sadaharu Oh, then seventeen, the son of a Chinese noodle-shop operator and a Japanese mother. In a country that loves its national high school tournament, the Koshien, Oh was already Japan’s best known prospect.

With Musial on everybody’s mind, Oh’s batting coach, Tetsuharu Kawakami, strongly suggested Oh adapt Musial’s coiled stance.

“Hitting is with your hip, not with your hand,” said Kawakami, who had won five batting titles in Japan. “You can see the ball with your hip.” But the youngster was uncomfortable twisting his body that way and, with the obstinacy of a seventeen-year-old, Oh declined.

Several years later, on the brink of failure, partially through his excesses and hardheadedness, Oh would submit to his guru and accept an even more idiosyncratic stance, with his front leg, the right one, lifted in the middle of his swing.

The flamingo stance, as the Japanese would call it, had its roots in the twisted Musial position. That barnstorming trip by the Cardinals would help produce Oh’s 868 homers, the greatest total by any hitter in baseball history.

Years later, Musial and Oh would meet, shake hands, and bow to each other, left-handed sluggers from opposite shores, comrades in unorthodoxy.

PLAYING AGAINST
all-star teams, the Cardinals won 14 games and lost 2. The players also had a chance to get acquainted with their new manager, Solomon Joseph Hemus, known as “Solly” or “the Mouse,” one of those pepper-pot middle-infielder types out of the Durocher mold.

Hemus had come up with the Cardinals in 1949 and immediately showed an opportunistic side, slipping his shoes in Musial’s locker so they would get shined on Musial’s tab.

“
Butch Yatkeman did a real good job,” Hemus said in 2010, by which time he had long left baseball and become rich in the oil bidness. “He always took care of Stan, and I was just a rookie. I’d just slide ’em in there. One day he almost caught me. I don’t think Stan cared.”

His parents did not name him Solomon for nothing. Upon being traded
to the Phillies in 1956, Hemus wrote a letter to Busch saying how much he loved the Cardinals and would like to come back someday.

“I thought maybe I could go back as a coach, maybe manage in the minor leagues, something,” Hemus said. “I put it in the back of my mind; I don’t know if I was really striving. When I had the job offered to me, naturally I took it.”

Naturally. Busch never forgot the letter and told Devine that Hemus was going to be the next manager, starting with the Asian trip. Watching a tired old man trudge through a November barnstorming tour, Hemus formed his impression that Stanley had very little left.

Jeanne was born early in 1959, and Musial received permission to report late to spring training, which did not help him. He did not hit early in the season and looked awkward in left field, so Hemus moved him to first base, forcing Bill White to play the outfield. Some days Hemus did not play Musial at all. His explanation was that he was resting him, not benching him.

In August, the
Sporting News
ran a copyrighted story that Musial might be traded for Yogi Berra, who could have been a Cardinal all along if Branch Rickey had had the presence of mind to sign him. The paper also reported a “coolness” between Hemus and Musial.

This was the first time Musial had confronted the serious prospect of failure and rejection since the Trader Lane episode, yet this most stable athlete managed to not upset his entire household. Gerry Ashley could not remember any dark cloud hanging over her father as she entered her teens. Half a century later, she asked her mother about the Hemus years.