Stan Musial (14 page)

T
HE CITY
was also associated with one of the great builders of that sport, or any sport: Branch Rickey. If not an American original, Rickey was an American prototype—a Bible-quoting, money-loving lawyer and teacher and lay preacher. But most of all he was a baseball man—athlete, coach, manager, builder, intellectual inventor at the peak of his career.

Nineteen hundred and forty-two would turn out to be the only full season in which Rickey and Musial would overlap as general manager and player. (Rickey would return twenty years later in a highly divisive role as advisor.)

In 1942, Rickey was already acknowledged as one of a kind. He had started with the Browns in 1913 when they were the top team in St. Louis, but then he switched to the Cardinals and turned them into champions.

One of Rickey’s most famous sayings was “Luck is the residue of design.” Musial was, in his own Stanley way, the epitome of Rickey’s design.

Rickey’s take over the years was that he had always been there for Musial, a cigar-chomping fairy godfather, shepherding the lad through the less imaginative dunderheads in the organization.

“
I went down to see him two different times,” Rickey recounted years later. “He went to Rochester in the International League. He had led the Springfield league. Now he led the International League. I was so intrigued with his kaleidoscopic advance—extra-base hits galore—I brought him into St. Louis at the end of the season, and he led that league, too.”

Actually, Stanley had stood in the batter’s box all by himself. Rickey
would give him that. But that was the point of the Rickey farm system: put an infinite number of lads (hungry) in an infinite number of uniforms (frayed) and, Judas Priest (Rickey’s favorite declaration), you get Stan Musial.

By coming along when he did, Musial got to size up Rickey in his prime.

“
He was very diplomatic in a way, and then he had a … terminology of his words that was very impressive,” Musial once said with a laugh. “He was a pretty impressive guy.”

Asked to elaborate, Musial added, “Well, he was very nice, knowledgeable baseball man, and he was a hard worker and he was always involved in baseball. Loved baseball. He worked hard at it.

“I would say that he could have probably gone ahead in any profession because he was a brilliant man.”

Could have been a senator. Could have been a corporate founder. Could have been a college president. Rickey did better. First he built the St. Louis Cardinals. Then, he would have you believe, he flicked his magic cigar in the air, and presto—he produced Stan Musial.

WESLEY BRANCH
Rickey was a farm boy raised in rural southeast Ohio, whose family dressed up and drove buggies to church in town every Sunday morning, singing hymns above the clatter of the hooves. The Rickeys were settlers, farmers, pioneers, but hardly primitives: they made sure their son went to college at Ohio Wesleyan.

Rickey played ball well enough to work his way up to the major leagues early in the century. A sore-armed catcher with the Highlanders, the predecessors of the Yankees, he had eleven bases stolen against him in one game, still a record. Then he became a lawyer and coached baseball at the University of Michigan, where he developed a young player named George Sisler, who would move on to the Browns and become their greatest star. Rickey soon followed, as Sisler’s manager.

Sisler was baseball’s perfect knight before Commissioner Ford Frick laid that term on Musial. In fact, if Musial had not come along, St. Louis would still be celebrating the dignified Sisler, who could pitch as well as hit.

Rickey was never much of a manager, perhaps because his mind was usually a step beyond the immediate action, but the Browns were a better franchise than the Cardinals, the other team in town.

Often insolvent, with few prospects for relocation, the Cardinals did have the first female owner of a major-league team, Helen Robison Britton, who had inherited the team from her uncle in 1911. Known as “Lady Bee,” she was hamstrung by financial problems and a failing marriage, and the Cardinals stagnated. In 1917, the Cardinals’ new ownership persuaded the Browns’ owner, Philip Ball, to allow Rickey to move a few feet from the Browns’ office to the Cardinals’ office.

After serving in World War I, Rickey began developing a farm system that would control players, an idea that nineteenth-century pioneers like Harry Wright and Albert Spalding had tried. In 1926, the Cardinals won their first pennant, with Rogers Hornsby and Grover Cleveland Alexander beating the Yankees.

Sam Breadon, the Cards’ new owner, persuaded the Browns that it would be to their advantage if the Cardinals were tenants in shabby Sportsman’s Park, the last major-league stadium to get a public-address system. (Until it did, a man with a megaphone announced the starting lineups and subsequent changes.) While many fans remained loyal to the Browns, the Cardinals won five pennants and three world championships from 1926 through 1934, but their best attendance was only 778,000 in 1928, just before the Depression.

“
You know he was a man who never took a drink. And he never came to the office on Sunday, and when he managed the Browns, later the Cardinals, he never managed on a Sunday,” said William O. DeWitt, who began his career selling soda in the ballpark and later became general manager under Rickey.

(In the St. Louis flow of things, DeWitt moved to the Browns and eventually bought them. His son, William O. DeWitt Jr., would later own the Cardinals in the age of Pujols.)

Rickey had promised his mother never to work on the Sabbath, and he kept his word via a classic Rickey stratagem: by taking a room at the YMCA across the street from Sportsman’s Park and no doubt counting the crowds flowing through the turnstiles.

Despite close monitoring by Judge Landis, Rickey managed to stockpile
hungry players from the Depression. Dizzy Dean, the great pitcher who broke down too soon, knew the alternative for uneducated southerners was to bend in the hot Delta sun, picking cotton. Pepper Martin and Leo Durocher had come from other hard corners of the country and would raise their spikes into anybody’s knees to avoid having to go home.

Martin and Joe Medwick provoked the Detroit Tigers during the World Series of 1934, with Medwick’s hard slides causing fans to heave fruit at his head. With the Cardinals far ahead, Landis persuaded Medwick to leave the game to calm the fans, as the Cardinals wrapped up the Series.

The Gashouse Gang was known for pranks like disrupting ladies’ luncheons in a hotel dining room by arriving with scaffolding and painters’ costumes. Some of them were masters at throwing water balloons out hotel windows. In an age before headsets and clubhouse boom boxes, they made their own music.

“
Pepper played the banjo-guitar,” Terry Moore recalled in 1957. “And Lonny Warneke played the guitar. Fiddler Bill McGee played the fiddle. He held it down low, in the crook of his arm. I never did see him put it under his chin. He’d sit there straight as a board, real serious holding the fiddle down low and sawing away on it. Bob Weiland played the jug. Boomp, boomp. Boomp, boomp. And Frenchy Bordagaray played the washboard. You know, running a stick up and down on it. Damn, they practiced all the time. They drove Frank Frisch crazy. Their favorite song was ‘Buffalo Gal.’ I heard ‘Buffalo Gal’ so often I used to dream it at night: ‘Buffalo Gal, ain’t you comin’ out tonight, comin’ out tonight, comin’ out tonight.’ ”

Moore recalled the anger of Frisch, the playing manager who had never seen a clubhouse band on his first team, John McGraw’s more conservative Giants.

“Frisch couldn’t stand it,” Moore chortled to sportswriter Robert Creamer. “He used to say he was going to trade McGee and send Weiland down to the minors just to break up the Mudcats. We sure had a lot of fun.”

That Gashouse Gang had pretty well dissipated when Musial arrived. The mainstays were Moore; Cooper; Enos Slaughter, the hard-driving right fielder; and Marty Marion, the elegant and lanky shortstop. Medwick,
the scowling son of New Jersey, was helpful to Musial, perhaps because Medwick saw him as a fellow easterner.

Musial caught the tail end of Mize’s time with the Cardinals in 1941. Rickey had a theory, often expressed, that it was better to unload a player a year too soon than a year too late. That theory was reinforced by the little detail of Rickey’s receiving a percentage of the profit every time he unloaded a player. After the 1941 season, Rickey traded Mize, still only twenty-eight, to the Giants.

“
That one really got to him,” Tom Ashley, Musial’s ex–son-in-law, said. “He thought they were shortsighted. He would talk about all the games they would have won if they had Mize in the lineup.”

Musial did not seem to be under extreme pressure to replace the output of Mize, who had led the league with .349 in 1939 and hit 43 homers in 1940 before getting hurt in 1941. The Cardinals really did not know what they had in Musial, who seemed to spring straight out of Branch Rickey’s fevered prayers.

THE 1942
season began on a somber note with the world at war following Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Williams, Feller, and Hank Greenberg had either enlisted or been drafted, but Musial was deferred because he was a father and the main support of his own parents, and also because the Donora area had enough eligible men to fill the quota. So he headed for spring training, unsure he actually belonged.

The breezy Stanley-hits persona had not yet emerged. For all he knew, Walker Cooper would still run him out of the batting cage. But the good side was that on this veteran team, Musial did not have to take responsibility for anybody but himself. He could be the kid, let the veterans show him how it was done.

Half convinced he would be back in Donora by opening day, Musial started out slowly in Florida, possibly because his roommate, Ray Sanders, a rookie first baseman, was keeping late hours. Also, this was the first time Musial had ever trained with the big club, and he had trouble seeing the ball with the bright sun shining on the water and the wind fluttering in the palm trees of St. Pete.

“
I didn’t do well. In my low crouch, I was always looking up at the palm trees. We had a terrible background. I never did well in spring training.”

If Musial had come along as an untested rookie in March of 1942, the club might have been seen him flailing and been tempted to send him back for more seasoning. With the war coming on, he could have gotten lost in the minors, been called up sooner by his draft board, who knows? But we are talking here about Stanley, always in the right place at the right time. Rickey and the rest had seen him for two weeks at the end of 1941. Musial changed roommates, started to get more sleep, and manager Southworth reassured him he had the job.

When the Cardinals reached St. Louis for opening day, Rickey summoned Musial into his office, known years later in Brooklyn as the “Cave of the Winds.”

The cigar-chewing preacher could quote Scripture or the Bill of Rights with equal fervor, making baseball seem like the finest way to serve God and country, preferably at minimal pay. Joe Garagiola once described a similar visit to the man everybody called Mr. Rickey: “
He was big. I noticed his eyebrows first because they were so thick, almost as if they need a haircut as they drooped over his horn-rimmed glasses. His hair was just as thick and might have been combed that morning, but looked like he had been running his hands through it all day.”

Musial had never spent much time around Rickey until this moment in April 1942. Rickey told him he had been monitoring the lad’s progress from stop to stop in the minors. He then alluded to the prorated salary of $400 a month he had paid Musial for his two weeks with the Cards at the end of 1941.

“
I’m tearing it up, my boy,” Rickey said. (Players sensed it was dangerous when Rickey referred to them as “my boy.” That paternal affection usually came at a price.) “We’re going to pay you $700 a month,” he announced, meaning Musial would make a total of $4,250 for 1942. “We expect you to be our regular left fielder,” Rickey added.

Stanley promptly called Lil in Donora and told her to come to St. Louis.

Not everybody was convinced Musial was here to stay. Harry Walker, who was competing with Musial for the left-field job, remembered how Don Padgett, one of the Cardinals’ spare catchers, had questioned
Musial’s odd stance in 1941. Musial turned to his left, wiggled his hips, and waited on the pitch rather defensively.

“
Don Padgett told me I had nothing to worry about,” Walker said in 1957, recalling Padgett saying, “This guy has a real crazy stance. The league’s pitchers will get on to him the second time around because there is one pitch that bothers him.” That pitch, Walker said, was the changeup.

Marty Marion also observed the odd posture. “
Everybody started laughing when they saw him walk into the batting cage, you know, and take a few swings with that unique stance, I’d call it. We said, ‘Kid, you’ll never make it to the big leagues with that kind of stance.’ ” The lanky shortstop added that until Musial retired after the 1963 season, “I’ll bet they was still talking about that funny stance.”

The older players figured out that Musial was going to be around a while, and they began teaching him how to play left field. Musial was well aware of his one weakness, and would refer to it long after his playing days were over: “
I didn’t have my good arm,” he once said. Without that shoulder injury? “I’d have been a good complete ballplayer,” he said. He had fine instincts as an outfielder, kept strengthening his arm, and listened to everything Terry Moore said.

“
Whenever the center fielder would say ‘I got a ball,’ we’d say ‘Take it,’ ” Enos Slaughter recalled, adding: “We listened to Terry Moore, Musial and I both. I know in St. Louis, myself, every time a ball was hit up against a screen, I’d go to the wall and when I heard ‘careful,’ I knew I was close and when I heard ‘plenty room,’ I knew I could go all out. And that’s one thing about Terry Moore. To me I think he’s one of the greatest defensive center fielders I ever played with, bar none. And I think Musial listened to him a lot in playing left field.”