Stan Musial (42 page)

Without Musial, the Cardinals reached the World Series again in 1968, losing the final three games to Detroit, with Flood misjudging a drive off the magnificent Gibson.

The following spring, Gussie Busch thought he detected complacency in the Cardinals, who had merely won two World Series and another pennant in the previous five seasons. The beer baron had the players herded into the clubhouse, along with Dick Meyer, Bing Devine, Red Schoendienst, and Musial. Gussie also thoughtfully invited the press, who rarely get to witness an owner chewing out his players.

“
Gentlemen, I don’t think there is any secret about the fact that I am not a very good loser,” Gussie began, expanding on the theme that his hirelings seemed more interested in salary negotiations than in winning another World Series.

Gussie noted the growing power of the union and said, “I am saying,
though, we are beginning to lose sight of who really has to pay the ultimate bill for your salary and your pension … namely the fan.”

During what the Associated Press called “an unusual forty-minute clubhouse meeting,” Busch told the players, “I plead with you not to kill the enthusiasm of the fans and the kids for whom you have become such idols.”

The Cardinals did not even win the division title in 1969, the year of the Miracle Mets. Curt Flood was convinced Busch had destroyed the club’s unity with his sclerotic outburst in St. Pete. The pride that had made the Cardinals one of the best teams—and one of the best clubhouses—was gone.

And soon Flood was gone. Shortly after the 1969 season, the Cardinals included him in a trade to the Phillies, in return for the legendary slugger Dick Allen.

Flood decided he did not want to be traded, not right then, and not to Philadelphia, so he refused to go—thereby touching off an eventual Supreme Court case he would lose but which would lead to unimaginable free-agency salaries decades down the line.

At the Supreme Court session, very few baseball people showed up in support of Flood: Hank Greenberg, Jackie Robinson, the pitcher-turned-writer Jim Brosnan, and Bill Veeck, the maverick who seemed to exist only to make other owners look even more ossified.

There was no reason to expect Musial to join them as they paid public tribute to Flood’s stand. Musial had been supportive of the union’s formation back in 1946, but he seemed to believe the owners could not retain fiscal sanity without a reserve clause. As a businessman, Musial was management, not labor, and he seemed to favor the reserve clause. So did most players, at least until free agency fell into their laps.

Mostly Musial was also a loyal baseball man who enjoyed dispensing cryptic hitting tips in his Stanley fashion.

“
Spring of 1972,” recalled Keith Hernandez. “I’m eighteen years old and Stan and Gibson came down from the big club, all of us in the outfield. Six, seven hundred players. Gibson talked about pitching.

“Musial got a bat in his hand and started talking about hitting and for a minute and a half he was all stops and starts and stutters,” Hernandez recalled.
“Getting frustrated, he threw the bat down and he said, ‘Oh, hell, look for the ball, see it, and hit it.’

“Great for you, Stan, with your hand-to-eye coordination,” Hernandez muttered fondly.

In January 1969, Musial was voted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, along with Roy Campanella and old-timers Waite Hoyt and Stan Coveleski.

Twenty-three eligible writers did not vote for Musial on his first attempt, but then again there has never been a unanimous selection. As of 2010, the number of eligible baseball writers who voted for him, 93.24 percent, was the nineteenth-highest among the 106 players who were voted in via mass balloting. Inexplicably, twenty writers did not vote for Ted Williams in 1966; twenty-eight did not vote for DiMaggio in 1955, after he had been turned down on his three previous tries for the Hall, if you can imagine. Apparently some writers thought Joe D. would come out of retirement, and wanted to make sure he was really done.

Just before Musial was inducted in Cooperstown, a drizzle was falling on the open-air ceremony outside the Hall. But as Commissioner Bowie Kuhn introduced Musial, the sun came out.

“With Musial, it figured,” said Pat Dean, the wife of Dizzy Dean.

Stanley turned the induction into a Musial reunion.

“
I invited my old coaches from high school,” he recalled, laughing about the way his friends and family were looking for hotel rooms “all the way to Syracuse.”

Years later, Musial’s strongest memory of the day was of the induction of Coveleski, an old-time pitcher who had been honored by the veterans committee at the age of eighty—“and he was Polish,” Musial said proudly. Musial, never a comfortable public speaker, was touched by the kindness of Kuhn when Coveleski could not get a word out. Kuhn walked over, put his arm around Coveleski, and said, “This is your day. Take as much time as you need.”

And then, Musial said tenderly, the old player “made the most beautiful speech.”

Small-town boy, man of the establishment, harmonica player to the world, Musial fell in love with the annual induction weekend in the picturesque little town in upstate New York, where baseball most emphatically
was not invented. He became a regular at the midsummer ceremonies, with Lil at his side for many years, and pals like Joe Medwick and Red Schoendienst accompanying him.

On Sunday mornings Musial would attend Mass at the pretty little Roman Catholic church.

“
The church was jammed and a priest from Brooklyn recognized a lot of people, and then he recognized Musial, who was there with Schoendienst,” said Fay Vincent, who became commissioner in 1989. “As they got to the front door, about a hundred people crowded around them, pulling out little scraps of paper, church bulletins, and they both signed.

“The modern player would breeze right through,” Vincent said, “but they must have stood there, it must have been half an hour, and just right on the step of the church. A few people asked me to sign. A little later I went up to Stan and I said, ‘That was so nice of you to stand there,’ and he said, ‘If those people want my autograph, I’m always delighted to help.’ And I thought that was so nice. They were of a different generation. They would never have been rude.”

Late into the night, Musial could be found at the bar facing the lake in the Otesaga Hotel, playing his harmonica with the jazz combo.

He could show up anywhere. In 1994, eighty-one-year-old Dom Corio of New York attended the induction of Phil Rizzuto, whom Corio knew from sandlot ball many decades earlier. That night, at the Pepper Mill restaurant, Dom and his newspaperman son, Ray, were introduced to Musial by a mutual friend, who told Stanley that Dom played a mean harmonica. Later, when Dom took a long time getting back from the men’s room, his son went off to search for him. In the next room, his dad and Musial were playing a duet of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” for the patrons.

“My father died eight years later,” Ray Corio said, “but for one night in Cooperstown, he tasted heaven.”

W
HENEVER STAN
was honored, his mother was there—for the dedication of the bulky statue outside the ballpark in August 1968, for his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1969. As soon as her son was introduced, Mary Musial would start crying out in the audience, and Stan would see her and he would start crying, too.

And when Stan was honored on
This Is Your Life
, Mary flew out to Los Angeles, accompanied by Verna Duda, their old friend from Donora.

“
Stan included her in things,” Verna said with obvious fondness. “I drove to Cooperstown with her. She was a home-loving mother and never capitalized on him.”

Mary had gone to St. Louis when Lukasz took sick in the fall of 1948, but she was too young and had too much energy to be a guest of her daughter-in-law for long, so she went home to Donora.

While Stan was still playing, Roger Kahn showed up in Pittsburgh to do a cover story on him for
Newsweek
. A cover story was a big deal, and Musial was comfortable with Kahn, who had covered the Dodgers back in Brooklyn, but he could cooperate only so much. Musial said he was driving down to Donora on a day off, but certain subjects would have to be off-limits.

“I promised someone I’d visit sick kids in the hospital,” Musial told Kahn. “If you write that, it’ll look like I’m doing it for publicity.”

That was fine, Kahn said, but the magazine really wanted him to write about Musial’s mother, what her life was like, what she thought of his success. Musial said he was sorry but his mom was off-limits, too.

“My mother lives above a store there,” Musial told Kahn. “That’s where she wants to live. We had her in St. Louis, but she missed her old friends, so we found a place she liked. And no matter how you write it, it will come out, ‘Stan Musial Makes $100,000 a Year and His Mother Lives Above a Store.’ ”

So Kahn did not go down to Donora but instead got Musial to make some unusually coherent comments about hitting. Kahn would have preferred something more personal but was running into the barricade, high and powerful, that Musial was erecting around his family and his childhood.

It was too bad Kahn did not get to visit Donora because he would have found a tasteful way to describe how Mary Musial was very much her own person. By some accounts, she continued to clean houses for a while, with no sense of embarrassment, because that was who she was, that was what she did.

“
She had a hard life,” Tom Ashley said with evident sympathy. “She was ill at ease with the fame. She was uneducated. When anybody would talk to her about Stan, she would start crying. Her life was changed. She would burst into tears, after that enormous poverty. She didn’t fit into the limelight, ever. Even in Donora, she was ill at ease.”

Ashley visited Donora a few times with his father-in-law and could see how Musial began to change as they drove south from Pittsburgh.

“He was really affected by being as poor as he was. Something he hated. When he saw it, he would do what he could.”

Whenever the Cardinals played in Pittsburgh, all family members were welcome. Broeg described watching the Pirate broadcasters, Bob Prince and Rosey Rowswell, a couple of characters, hang out of the booth and “holler down to her, and she was cheerful as heck.”

Broeg said his pal had gotten his “liveliness” from his mother’s side. “She was a statuesque woman, kinda cute, a handsome woman,” Broeg said.

Stan’s nephew Edward S. Musial remembered his first trips to Forbes Field with his grandmother, sitting behind the dugout, and how his dad would lift him onto the field, where his uncle would introduce him to some of the Cardinals. All four of Stan’s sisters had moved with their husbands closer to Pittsburgh and were often at the Cardinals games. Pirates-Cardinals
games at Forbes Field were one of the rare occasions when the Musial family could move closer together again, if only for a few hours.

“
We would see him with the Cardinals, but other than that, he didn’t come back at Christmas,” the nephew said, adding that Stan would usually appear when Donora invited him for one celebration or another. He was helping to support his mother, but the five other children saw her more often than he did. Lil would come home occasionally to visit her own family, which meant her children knew her family better.

In 1965, Musial had a ranch house built for his mother at 21 Second Street Extension, up on the hill in a nice section of town. Broeg accompanied his friend to Donora one week when the old football Cardinals were playing in Pittsburgh, and described Mary Musial at home as “a real strong, bare-legged woman, you know, a great hostess.”

To balance things out, Broeg quickly added, “He really loved his father. He really worshipped his dad.”

The grandchildren in Pennsylvania got to see Mary regularly at birthdays and holidays. Edward S. Musial, Stan’s nephew, recalled: “She made these beautiful Easter eggs, paisley-style. Put them in some kind of oil. They were just beautiful. She would never tell us how she did them. And she would crochet things, too.”

In later years, Mary Musial was sometimes seen walking around outside her home, not at all unusual for the elderly.

Some people have suggested she displayed
erratic behavior, but other old-timers in Donora say nothing serious ever crossed their radar.

“In a small town, you know a lot of things about people,” one pillar of the community said, citing a longtime resident who was known to lift things from downtown stores and whose affluent relatives would quietly make restitution.

“I never heard a thing about Mrs. Musial,” the man added.

Her grandson Edward said, “I was young. I don’t know much about my grandmother. You look back, you wish you did. She might have had some kind of Alzheimer’s deal. She’d ask you a lot of questions. It’s hard to remember. I was a little kid.”

Mary Musial died early in 1975 at the age of seventy-eight and was buried in the finest cemetery in town.

STAN WOULD
also return for family reunions, where relatives would tell the same old stories, as families will do, bringing everybody back to some earlier time. His brother, Ed, would express wonderment at Stan’s success in business. “It’s hard to figure out, because he barely got through high school,” Ed said with a laugh during an interview years later. “He was a bad student, so I don’t know—let’s put it this way.”

Ed lived with a famous name and the memories of his own career. Just like his brother, he had signed as a pitcher, with Oshkosh in the Wisconsin State League in 1941, but he wound up spending the entire war in Europe, losing four full years from his career. After the war he was converted to the outfield with Fayetteville in the Coastal Plain League in 1946, when he hit .334.
Then he shuttled around the low minors, finishing up in 1950 with a career total of 469 games, 23 home runs, 188 runs batted in, 67 stolen bases, and an average of around .300. In later years, Ed admitted he had let himself get distracted by life on the road, but then he came home and settled down, working for the Westinghouse Electric Company near Pittsburgh as a machinist and boilermaker.