Stan Musial (39 page)

Early in the 1963 season, Rickey sent a memo to Busch blaming two losses on Musial’s slowness, once in left field, once in running out a double play. “He is still a grand hitter but not at all the hitter of former days,” the memo said.

Musial was the first to admit he was no longer the Donora Greyhound, but he still had his moments, even at forty-two. Early in the 1963 season, Musial made quite an impression on his old pal Warren Spahn, thirty-nine and going strong.

Stanley would hit seventeen home runs off Spahn, more than off any other pitcher, which was mostly a tribute to the longevity of both great players. One of Spahn’s best pitches was a screwball, which broke in on a left-handed hitter, acting like an ordinary curve from a right-hander.

Over the years, Spahn had tried everything against Musial.

“
I tried to pitch in, out, up, down,” Spahn once said, adding, “Stan was able to get over the top. He can hit the good curveball and the good high fastball.”

So Spahn came up with an idea: maybe he could disarm his old adversary by throwing a curve so mediocre it might lull Musial into submission.

“It was a theory,” Spahn said a few years later, wincing from remembered pain.

On May 14, 1963, in County Stadium, Spahnie tried out his mediocre-curveball theory. Del Crandall was behind the plate that night, but Joe Torre, a young catcher, was in uniform, observing how the two old hands pitched to Stanley.

“
Normally, a guy would go like this,” Torre said, mimicking a left-handed hitter dropping down, anticipating a left-handed screwball breaking in on his knees.

“But Stan never moved,” Torre recalled. “Hit a line drive.”

The St. Louis paper the next day said Spahnie was hit in the stomach; he only wished.

“Spahnie didn’t wear a cup,” Torre recalled, referring to the protective cup players wear over their groin. “He couldn’t, because of that high leg kick.

“Spahnie went down, got up, picked up the ball and threw it and got Stan out at first base, and then he lay down again,” Torre recalled.

While the trainer elevated Spahn’s legs and Spahn waited for the initial wave of pain to subside, Stanley trotted across the infield toward the dugout, right past his ancient opponent.

“So Stan said to Spahnie, ‘You all right, Old Folks?’ ”

What did Spahnie have to say about that?

“Groaned for a while,” Torre recalled.

STANLEY WAS
hitting .213 after that game. The sport was still fun—between the lines—but he was growing tired of the second coming of Branch Rickey, who was agitating to replace Keane with Leo Durocher. One thing Stanley knew: he did not want to play for Leo the Lip, ever.

On August 12, 1963, at a team picnic at Grant’s Farm,
Musial broke the news that he would retire at season’s end. There were tears all around. Johnny Keane said, “One of the biggest honors and privileges of my life has been to put on a Cardinal uniform the same as Stan’s, dress in the same
clubhouse as Stan and be on the same field and club as Stan. Think of all the good words in the English language, and they all fit Stan.”

The Cardinals chased the Dodgers into the final month. On September 10, Dick Musial and his wife, Sharon, had their first child, Jeffrey Stanton Musial, while Dick was on military duty in Kansas.
The family stayed up much of the night celebrating—Gerry remembered drinking White Russians—and a few hours later Grandpa whacked a home run.

The Cardinals came close, finishing with a 93–69 record and a percentage of .574, the best by the team since Eddie Dyer, Keane’s mentor, had a percentage of .623 in 1949. But just as in 1949, the Dodgers outlasted the Cardinals.

On the last Friday night of the season, Musial took Gerry to the Veiled Prophet’s Ball, one of the major society events in town. He was tired on Saturday and saved his strength for his final game, September 29.

Despite the legend that Musial did not get attention from the national media, several New York–based magazines had requested permission to follow him step by step on his final day. This was a national hero winding up his career. Attention most definitely was paid.

That final Sunday morning, Musial attended Mass and then had breakfast with his actor friend Horace McMahon. Then he headed for the ballpark in his blue Cadillac, smoking a cigarillo along the way, with a photographer from
Look
magazine, Arnold Hano from
Sport
, and W. C. Heinz from
Life
all squeezed into the backseat.

At the ballpark, Musial politely obeyed requests from the squadron of photographers waiting for him at the cramped old clubhouse.
Hey, Stan, walk through that door again?
they asked.
Sure, fellas
. He signed autographs for teammates collecting instant memorabilia.

Before the game, the Cardinals staged a one-hour ceremony of gifts and tears and speeches, the most memorable coming from Commissioner Ford C. Frick.

Once a writer, Frick said he hoped Musial would be remembered for not just all the hits but for the joy he brought to the game. Then Frick proposed that Musial be remembered this way: “Here stands baseball’s perfect warrior. Here stands baseball’s perfect knight.”

It was almost as if Frick were chiseling the words in stone—and soon
enough they would be. How many commissioners write their own words and have them become immortal while they are still echoing around the ballpark?

Musial’s final game, on a dank early autumn day, was a relief. In the fourth inning, Musial smacked a single past Pete Rose, the Reds’ second baseman with the Prince Valiant haircut, who would eventually break Musial’s league record for hits.

In the sixth inning, against Jim Maloney, Musial slapped a single between first and second for his 3,630th hit and his 1,950th run batted in. Then Keane sent out Gary Kolb to run for him, invoking automatic boos from fans who never wanted it to end.

Musial went to the clubhouse, where he had a beer, and then another beer, chatting amiably with photographers, reporters, friends, and interlopers as the game meandered anticlimactically into extra innings.

Far too many people reminded Musial that he had made two hits in his first game and two hits in his last game.

No improvement, he kept saying, armed with a wunnerful new punch line.

That evening, there was a party for three hundred people at Stan Musial and Biggie’s. Old friends like Frank Pizzica came in from Donora to talk about his basketball prowess. Ki Duda, now the president of the state college in California, Pennsylvania, told how Musial had struck out eighteen batters in seven innings.

“
I don’t wear dark glasses,” Duda said, “but I have them today because tears came to my eyes.”

Normally the life of the party, Stanley seemed subdued that evening.

“What’s a fellow do when you’re out of a job?” he asked, more than once. He had been working since he was a teenager; he did not know the meaning of leisure time. He thought out loud. Maybe he would take his family to the Kentucky Derby, the Indy 500, a picnic on the Fourth of July.

“What else do they do in the summer? I don’t know.”

J
UST BECAUSE
Stanley was retired did not mean he had run out of good fortune.

The next spring, he was back in St. Pete, pretty much living the same life, except for playing baseball.

One day he whipped out into traffic and grazed the side of another car.

“Stan always drove fast, and he always drove a Caddy,” Tom Ashley said.

Ashley loved just about everything about his father-in-law, but he had to admit, the man drove fast.

“Stan got out, all apologetic, and the guy recognized him,” Ashley said.

There were scrapes on both cars, plenty of reason for the man to be annoyed, but Stanley Luck kicked in.

“The guy said, ‘I’ve got to tell my friends Stan Musial hit my car,’ ” Ashley recalled.

Meanwhile, Stanley was shuffling around in his pockets, looking for his wallet, a pen, a piece of paper, an insurance card, all the things we do when we have just scraped somebody’s vehicle—flustered and embarrassed and hoping the insurance policy would cover this.

“Stan was offering to pay for it,” Ashley said, “but the guy said, ‘No, no, that’s all right, would you just sign my car?’ So Stan signed the crease in the car. The guy was thrilled.”

R
EALITY STRUCK
home within two months of Musial’s last game. John F. Kennedy—“my buddy”—was assassinated on November 22, 1963, a day after Musial’s forty-third birthday. The charming, entitled young president, who had shared some laughs with Musial, was gone.

Gerry, now a student at Marymount College in Arlington, Virginia, went to the funeral procession as it approached Arlington National Cemetery. She knew how much her father admired Kennedy, and she felt she was representing her family.

With the nation, and pretty much the whole world, in mourning, one young man in St. Louis could not face sitting around, so he and his girlfriend went out for a quiet dinner at Stan and Biggie’s. Knowing Musial to be an admirer of the president, the young man figured he would be secluded, grieving, not working at the restaurant.

“
Stan was there, and he graciously went around to each of the tables in the room and asked how the dinners were, how the food was, and just generally acted like a perfect gentleman and host,” the man said in an anonymous Internet posting many years later. “The mood in the room, as all over America, was subdued, numb; but Stan added a bit of humanity and life to it all.

“Stan was right there, in public, helping strangers cope with the national tragedy.”

In that terrible week, Musial seemed to understand his role: his buddy had been gunned down, and the world needed to see Stanley. And if that was not how he was thinking, it was how he came off.

The restaurant became even more important to Musial upon his retirement.
Greeting strangers was part of his persona. Besides, the family was spread out. Dick and Sharon were new parents, and Gerry was in college back East.

In her first few months away from home in the fall of 1962, Gerry had been living across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., as President Kennedy stared down the Soviet Union in a nuclear confrontation after the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba.

“
Washington would have been the first place bombed,” she recalled. “I called my mom and asked what I was going to do. She said, ‘Well, we’re going to be with Mr. Busch. He has a bomb shelter and we’ll be there. Try to get there as best you can.’ ”

Gerry said she felt “deserted and grown-up—all at once,” but it was nice to know that her parents were on Gussie’s ultimate A-list.

The missile crisis was averted, but soon the nation had to cope with the assassination. While the grief was still raw, the new president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, asked Musial to become the special consultant to the president on physical fitness, replacing Bud Wilkinson, the former Oklahoma football coach. The job was partially a showcase for a celebrity like Musial, but it could have been an opportunity to influence policy.

The Musials flew into Washington on February 27, 1964, for the ceremony. Stan alluded to the gymnastics programs of the Polish Falcons, and he also tried to sketch out a broader vision.

“
Calisthenics are fine but they are not the entire basis of physical fitness,” he said in spring training in March. “Exercise is only one phase. Games and other means of recreation are important, too.” He said he would concentrate on adults as well as children.

Because the job paid a per diem of seventy-five dollars, Musial sometimes had to choose between making real money at his business and doing something more or less for the public good. He asked his friend Bob Stewart, the athletic director at St. Louis University, to be his liaison with the government, but Stewart did not have the Washington contacts needed for that role. Without an insider guiding him, Musial turned down most invitations for personal appearances all over the country.

There was also more politics than Musial would have liked. Once he was told not to make a public appearance with a baseball official from Rochester, New York, because the man happened to be a Republican.

“
LBJ had Stan lobbying a Polish congressman for one thing or another,” recalled Tom Ashley. “Stan would call and say, ‘I’m doing this because the president asked.’ After a while he got word to the president that he didn’t want to do that.”

Johnson was busy expanding the war in Vietnam, lobbying for civil rights, and waging a so-called war on poverty, all at the same time. He had his priorities, and physical fitness was not among them. He was a dominant personality who tended to put his hands on senators to manipulate them into doing his will. There is no indication he and Musial ever meshed.

“
But didn’t you find Johnson vulgar?” somebody asked Musial in 1976.

“No,” Musial said politely, “because we only talked politics.”

MUSIAL STILL
gravitated to the ballpark, spending more time than was healthy in the press box, which in St. Louis pretty much meant hot dogs and beer. One night he found himself in the hospital, being treated for indigestion and exhaustion.

Feeling better, Musial had a front-row seat for the bizarre doings of 1964. In June, Devine engineered a trade for an outfielder named Lou Brock, who was underperforming with the Cubs, and Keane installed Brock in left field and let him run. However, with the Cardinals still eight games out of first place in mid-August. Busch fired Devine and replaced him with Bob Howsam, a baseball man but not a Cardinal—a very big thing in that insular town.

Keane went around during the late season with a tight smile on his face, knowing that Rickey planned to bring in his old pal Leo Durocher after the season. With Durocher warming up his lungs in the managers’ bullpen, Brock ignited the Cardinals while the Phillies staged one of the epic collapses in pennant race history, losing 10 straight games and blowing a 6½ game lead with 12 games to play.