Stan Musial (38 page)

White had many careers: he helped the Cardinals win the 1964 World Series, tried to straighten out the syntax of Phil Rizzuto as a broadcaster with the Yankees, and served as president of the National League. He had mixed feelings about Musial but knew he was not one of the athletes who talked about striking when Jackie Robinson arrived in 1947.

“The Pittsburgh area has a lot of great athletes,” White said. “I don’t think he had any prejudice toward blacks. I think Stan didn’t want to get involved either way.”

When I suggested Musial had set an example to southern teammates like Harry Walker, White was defensive about the man who had been his hitting coach.

“Walker was instrumental in my career,” White said, citing Walker’s advice to drop a few bunts early in the season, when nobody was on guard, just to get a few surprise hits in the ledger. They had also talked openly about race.

“We’d yell and scream and get it out into the open,” White said, suggesting Musial was more opaque—even about hitting.

“I think Stan was Stan,” White added. “He was serious about hitting. Nobody could hit like that. He couldn’t tell you how to hit.

“In batting practice, he hit the ball to left field, left center, center field, and then he’d say, ‘Hey, hey, how do you like that hitting? Tee-hee, tee-hee.’ And then he’d get the hell out of there.”

Late into the conversation, White remembered one time he and Musial indulged in shop talk: “He did tell me he cut his eyelashes so he could see the ball better, so after that I cut my eyelashes, too.”

The way things happen in life, some black players softened their views over the decades. Gibson was much too complicated to go on perceiving Musial as merely a man who spouted “wunnerful” all the time. They also wound up having the same business agent in Dick Zitzmann. By 2010, Gibson had nice things to say about Musial.

“
The Cardinals were different. A group of us would go out to eat after a game on the road, and there’d be a dozen guys or so, black and white. Some of the white players—Stan Musial and Ken Boyer, to start with—were as adamant against segregation as the black players were.”

Flood had found Musial saccharine in the early sixties and probably was not thrilled when Musial did not openly support his challenge to the reserve clause, but toward the end of Flood’s short and turbulent life, he ran into Musial at the ballpark during the making of a documentary about Stan the Man. In the sweetest way, Flood told Musial that everybody on the Cardinals had tried to win one more pennant for him in his final season.

I
N THE
final weeks of the 1961 season, Johnny Keane called Musial into his office. Probably even the most loyal Musial fans would have understood if Keane had shuffled his extra lineup cards, looked up at the ceiling, and said, “Stan, a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”

Musial was getting the feeling that nobody thought he had much left, maybe even the owner, maybe even Bing Devine, a supportive presence but also a general manager rebuilding a ball club. Stanley could catch the drift.

Only eighty games into his long-delayed chance to manage the Cardinals, Keane was about to show his independence. He had been admiring Musial from his days as a minor-league manager, when Keane was a perpetual candidate to take over the big club but was bypassed in favor of Walker, Hutchinson, and then Hemus. The front office finally brought Keane to the Cardinals in 1959 as a coach, maybe part of the master plan or maybe just a reward for a forty-seven-year-old lifer, to get him on the pension plan. Whatever the reason, Keane became a sane and unobtrusive buffer for the players, the way coaches can be. Then, probably to his own surprise, he replaced Hemus.

Keane immediately established himself as his own man, abolishing the poker games in the back of the plane because he did not like the idea of players losing money to teammates, with resentments carrying from plane to clubhouse. Now Keane had to make up his mind about Musial.

“
Stan was on the bench,” Keane said a few years later. “And as far as the Cardinals’ organization was concerned, he was through as a player. He’d
had it. I went over to him, and I said, ‘Stan, I want you to play. What are you resting for? You haven’t got far to go. Let’s run the string out, but let’s run it out on the ball field.’

“Stan Musial is the greatest guy in the world, and he reacted right away. He said, ‘That’s just exactly what I want to do, Johnny.’ ”

It is not enough to believe in oneself. Self-motivation and self-delusion are mirror images. What Musial wanted to hear was: “We need you, big guy.”

Keane was not threatened by Musial, as managers are often threatened by fading superstars. He did not have the insecurity of Trader Lane or Solly Hemus, who had to shake up the team on a daily basis, to make the team over in their images. Keane and Musial seemed comfortable with each other, both of them disciplined men who understood they were not perfect.

The manager could blister the ears of an umpire with language that would have gotten him tossed out of Kenrick Seminary (where he cut class to moonlight as a high school quarterback). Musial could drop a bawdy line. They both smoked cigars. Musial drank a bit more than Keane, who sipped only out of politeness. It takes a great deal of inner security to say, “I want the old guy back.” And toward the end of the 1961 season, that was what Keane said.

With Keane’s encouragement, Musial went back to the gym in the winter of 1961–62, performed some of the old Falcons agility exercises, and came back more slender and lithe than he had been in a while. He had weighed 175 as a rookie and had gone up as far as 187—imagine: a slugger who weighed only 187 pounds—but in 1962 he was back down to 180, “and I could tell the difference,” Musial said.

He had another reason to feel rejuvenated. In 1962 the National League expanded, after political pressure from the ubiquitous Branch Rickey for a third league. The league added teams in Houston and New York, the latter managed by Casey Stengel, who had taken one look at Musial in the tail end of 1941 and pronounced him one for the ages. Stanley openly adored Stengel—stood around and listened with a wide smile, called him “Case.”

The hideous Mets—everybody could tell how awful they were after a few days in spring training—opened the season in St. Louis in what turned
out to be typical fashion: a few of them got stuck in the elevator of the Chase-Park Plaza Hotel. How was that for an omen?

Just in case anybody had forgotten him back in Gotham, Stanley sent a little calling card, best described in the box score: Musial … 3-1-3-2.

From that perfect opening night, Musial just kept hitting. There is a theory that hitters benefited from expansion because each league suddenly had twenty pitchers who might not have been in the majors otherwise. When the American League expanded in 1961, Roger Maris hit 61 homers. More likely, Musial’s renaissance was a credit to his winter workouts, Johnny Keane’s faith in him, and Musial’s own talent.

Musial enjoyed his visit to the Mets’ temporary home in the rusting old Polo Grounds in uptown Manhattan. As dreadful as they were, the Mets had made possible a number of joyous returns by players not seen in those parts since 1957. Willie Mays came back with the Giants. Duke Snider came back with the Dodgers. And Stanley came back with the Cardinals.

Just the sight of Musial in the Polo Grounds raised instinctive respect in Alvin Jackson, out of the Pittsburgh organization, a decent left-hander good enough to lose twenty games in 1962.

“
We’ve got a one-run lead with two outs and he comes up to pinch-hit,” Jackson recalled in 2010. “My momma didn’t raise no fool. He’s not beating Mrs. Jackson’s son. Not this day. No. So I walked him. And people are going, ‘You put the tying run on base,’ and I said, ‘Don’t even go there.’ And Curt Flood came up and grounded out and people said, ‘You walked a left-handed hitter,’ and I said, ‘That was no left-handed hitter. That was Stan Musial.’ ”

In early July 1962, Musial had himself quite a weekend with the extremely short porch in right field in the Polo Grounds. On Saturday he hit a homer in his last at-bat, just to get warmed up. Keane put him back in the lineup on Sunday.

Lil had missed his two other big home-run days. The time he hit three homers in Springfield in 1941, she was diapering their son. The time he hit five homers in a doubleheader in 1954, she was staying home after a late Saturday night. This time she was present as Stanley drilled three homers.

Immediately after that splurge, Musial went down to Washington, D.C., for the All-Star Game and a reunion with President John F. Kennedy, who openly cheered as Musial pinch-hit a single in the sixth inning.

The next day Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri arranged a tour for Stan and Lil and Janet, starting with meeting Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general and brother of the president, who showed them around the Department of Justice. Then the Musials visited FBI headquarters, including the firing range.

“
We came back to Bob Kennedy’s office and he said, ‘How would you like to visit my brother at the White House?’ ” recalled John H. Zentay, then a young staff aide to Senator Symington, who was escorting the Musials. “Stan, being Stan, said, ‘No, we wouldn’t want to bother him.’ ” Zentay assured him that if the Kennedys invited Musial to the White House, they meant it.

“I started driving Stan around for a few hours,” recalled Zentay, who was thrilled to be handed Symington’s Oldsmobile convertible with senatorial license plates. “The Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, all the sights around Washington. I noticed how often he was recognized and how much he loved it.”

Musial insisted upon returning to the hotel to change into more formal clothing, and the small group arrived at the White House at three o’clock. Dave Powers, one of JFK’s closest friends, traded baseball talk with Musial in a small room off the Oval Office.

“The photographer came in and took pictures of us while Janet sat in the president’s chair,” Zentay recalled. “I looked down at her and she went bug-eyed as in walked the president.”

In his autobiography, Musial recalled: “Sure enough, President Kennedy greeted us personally and spent about fifteen minutes with us. He gave my wife a pen with his name on it. Janet received a paperweight medal and I got a PT Boat tie clasp.”

Zentay, who had known Kennedy as a Senator from Massachusetts, noted that Musial and the president seemed to get along beyond the natural bonhomie of politician and athlete.

“
It was clear there was affection,” recalled Zentay, later a prominent lawyer in Washington.

When the president had to get back to work, he asked if they would like a tour of the living quarters.

“We found out later very few visitors are accorded this privilege,” Musial said.

A White House aide escorted them to the kitchen and the solarium upstairs and then to the bedrooms.
Zentay would remember the president’s bedroom, with a four-poster bed and small table alongside it, containing perhaps twenty-five pillboxes. Nobody mentioned them. Then they visited Jackie Kennedy’s bedroom and saw the extensive wardrobe in her closet.

“
My mom was impressed by how Mrs. Kennedy’s shoes were lined up to match her dresses,” Gerry Ashley said.

After the unexpected hour in the White House, Zentay drove the Musials around Georgetown, where they sat on his landlord’s porch and had a drink in the late-afternoon sun.

A few days later, Musial told a reporter: “
Everything I have I owe to baseball. Can you imagine the son of a poor steel worker from Donora being invited to visit the President of the United States in the White House?”

KEANE MADE
sure Musial took a day off here and there for important days like Dick’s graduation from Notre Dame and Gerry’s graduation from high school. Stanley wound up playing in 135 games in 1962 and batting .330, third in the league behind Tommy Davis and Frank Robinson.

“From the day he took over the Cardinals, Johnny Keane let me know that I was not only wanted but needed. He instilled enthusiasm and inspiration in me, and helped me find myself again,” Musial said after the season.

However, as the season came to a close, Musial saw a familiar shadow over his shoulder: Gussie Busch, tired of waiting for a pennant, summoned Branch Rickey to be his advisor.

Rickey insisted publicly he was not there to subvert Devine, but Devine knew better and walked out of Rickey’s first press conference. Rickey then moved into Devine’s neighborhood and asked for a ride to the ballpark, which meant Devine not only had to feel Rickey’s stiletto poised at his shoulder blades but also got to sample the blue fumes from Rickey’s cigars and the verbiage on the run downtown.

One of Rickey’s first acts was to force George Silvey, a prominent member of the front office, to return from a postseason vacation that Devine
had authorized. The Cardinals quickly resented Rickey’s meddlesome ways.
Decades later, Tim McCarver would say: “I despised the guy.”

Obviously Rickey had not been paying attention to the Trader Lane frolics of 1959, because he sent out hints that it was time for Musial to retire.

“Since when do you ask a .330 hitter to retire until you’ve got his equal to replace him?” Busch said, following with this declaration: “I told Frank Lane five years ago that Musial wouldn’t be traded and I’m repeating now that Stan will finish his playing career in the Cardinals’ uniform and that no one will wear his number 6 again.”

One of Rickey’s strengths was that he was not easily embarrassed.

“
I’m afraid that I was under the impression, gained earlier, that Stanley intended to retire after this year. This was a misunderstanding,” he said.

Broeg, in his complicated role as friend of Stan and
Post-Dispatch
sports editor, printed Musial’s response to Rickey’s not-so-subtle hints that he retire.

“This is hard to believe because both Bing and Johnny said they were counting on me. I won’t retire, not in the good shape I’m in and hitting the way the way I did this year. If the Cardinals don’t want me, I know some others that do.”