Stan Musial (5 page)

Newcombe insisted the Musial stance was just a charade: by the time the ball was pitched, Musial had already unlocked his hips and was in a forward motion, able to hit the ball to any part of the field.

No less an authority than Branch Rickey, the master builder of the Cardinal farm system, explained the Musial stance. “
The preliminary movement he has is a fraud,” Rickey boomed. “No batter’s form is determined by his preliminary stance. When the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand, that is the time when you take a picture of a batsman to get his form. Before the ball is pitched doesn’t mean a thing. If you want to see a proper stride, a short stride, a level swing bat full back, a coin wouldn’t drop off the top of the bat. He is ideal in form.”

Musial agreed with Rickey.

“
Stance is not so important,” he once said, adding that he found his way into that stance because of his desire to meet the ball in his early years in the majors.

“At St. Louis, I always wanted to hit .300,” he said, adding, “My stance is very comfortable.” In one way, hitting is more complicated than people think, Musial said, in that a good hitter learns to adjust to the pitcher, the count, the situation, the weather, the field. The main thing is to have a good level swing, and to learn to hit to the opposite field.

In the same interview, he made himself sound like a lucky stiff to have played at Sportsman’s Park, shared by the Cardinals and Browns for most of his career, a place whose lumpy infield was so baked by the sun and worn by constant usage that players called it “Hogan’s Brickyard.”

“I got a lot of hits through the infield,” Lucky Stanley insisted.

BALLPLAYERS TRIED
to analyze Musial, pin down his secrets.

Was it the bat itself?

In 1962, the Mets signed a brash teenager named Ed Kranepool, straight out of the Bronx. He was not in awe of anybody, not his manager, Casey Stengel, and not his esteemed opponent, forty-one-year-old Stan Musial. Around the batting cage one day, Kranepool picked up Musial’s bat, the M159 model.

“I said, ‘Stan, it’s got a very thin handle,’ ” Kranepool recalled. “He said, ‘Ed, I don’t hit ’em with the handle.’ ”

Stanley honed the bat handles even thinner using sandpaper in the clubhouse, thereby validating the shop classes he took back at Donora High.

Or was it the stance?

Ed Mickelson, who was briefly a teammate of Musial’s and later a prominent high school coach in the area, tried to break down what happened after the man went into that temporary crouch.

“
I have a theory why Stan’s bat showed ball marks only closely aligned in a small area on the sweet spot of his bat,” Mickelson wrote. “No ball marks on the end or on the handle. I believe it had to do with the placement of his front foot as he would stride toward the ball.”

Mickelson made a drawing of what Musial did with his feet. The marks looked like something out of an old-fashioned learn-to-waltz diagram.

For the outside pitch, Musial’s front (right) foot would move toward the plate.

For the inside pitch, Musial’s front foot would open up slightly, toward the outside of the batter’s box.

For the pitch over the plate, Musial’s front foot would move straight ahead.

This consistency of ball marks on the bat indicated excellent discipline,

control, balance, eyesight, reflexes—a command of the body that probably went back to his days in the Falcons gymnastics drills.

Amateur prestidigitator that he was, Stanley seemed to be hiding his secrets. According to Joe Garagiola, Curt Flood, at the time buried deep on the Cardinals’ bench, once asked Musial the secret of his hitting.

“
Curt, all you can do is when you see the ball just hit the hell out of it,” Musial said, thoroughly mystifying the young player.

The closest Musial ever came to explaining himself was to Roger Kahn, who had built a rapport with him over the years.

“
Do you guess?” Kahn asked Musial in 1957.

“I don’t guess. I know,” Musial replied.

“You know?”

“I can always tell, as long as I’m concentrating.”

Some hitters say they read the rotation of the ball, but Musial said his edge came even earlier.

“I pick the ball up right away. Know what I mean? I see it as soon as it leaves the pitcher’s hand. That’s when I got to concentrate real hard. If I do, I can tell what the pitch is going to be.”

That meant, in the clubby days of the eight-team National League, that Musial had a feel for the repertoire of approximately seventy pitchers at a time.

“Every pitcher has a set of speeds,” he told Kahn. “I mean, the curve goes one speed and the slider goes at something else. Well, if I concentrate real good, I can pick up the speed of the ball about the first thirty feet it travels.”

Perfectionist that he was, Musial said that approximately twenty or thirty times a season he found himself not concentrating. Imagine what he could have hit if he’d paid attention.

Just consider the pitchers he victimized for the most home runs: Warren Spahn, 17; Preacher Roe, 12; Johnny Antonelli, 11 (all three of them lefties, thereby defying the general rule that lefty pitchers are tough on lefty hitters); Newcombe, 11; Murry Dickson, 11; Bob Rush, 10; Robin Roberts, 10. All these double-digit victims ranged from Hall of Fame level to very good starters. Of course, a pitcher would have to be pretty good to last long enough to give up that many homers to one man.

Stanley hit his homers without causing animosity. Roberts, who gave up
505 career home runs, remained socially friendly with Musial, often meeting him in Florida after they were retired.
Roberts said he had exactly one photograph of an opposing player in his home—Stan the Man.

Everybody liked the way he referred to himself as Stanley, creating a character in his own personal video, much the way latter-day superstars refer to themselves in the third person—
Michael Jordan doesn’t do garbage time
, or whatever.

But Stanley was not a showbiz celebrity. The television highlight show had not yet been invented, which is another reason some of us call them the good old days. Stanley just wanted to make contact. Nobody took it personally.

Newcombe respected Musial going back to when the league was being integrated and Musial was a symbol of moderation.

“He was one of the true professionals,” Don Newcombe said. “That’s what I say about Stan Musial. A true professional. In that era when Jackie came in and then Roy [Campanella] and then me, and Mays and all those others, Musial was a man who hit you hard but never showed you up. He hit the ball out of the ballpark, he wouldn’t clown going into the dugout. He’d go in and shake hands with a few guys and get a drink of water. He would never show you up. You wouldn’t have to knock him down.”

That was important in the old days, when showboating was discouraged. If a hitter lost sight of that nicety, he might get his uniform dirty, fast.

“Today, if me and Drysdale and Gibson pitched like that, we’d wind up in jail because we’d be killing somebody,” Newcombe said in 2009. “They’re trying to show you up, going around the bases waving their hands and all that high-fiving when they get to the dugout. Our guys didn’t do that. They hit the ball out of the ballpark and they ran around the bases. We watched ’em, you know, to see what they would do and how they would do it, and Stanley never showed you up.”

The Dodgers did not hate Stanley, which was the highest respect possible in that harsh rivalry. Everybody recognized that the man with the unusual stance was a gentle man, a kind man.

J
OHN HALL’S
father died when the boy was seven. To bring some life back into the house, John’s mother bought an RCA Victor radio and phonograph. One day John’s uncle was doing some work around the house, and he turned on the radio and he told the boy, “I want you to listen to this.”

It was a baseball game, emanating from St. Louis but coming over the local station in nearby Carthage, Missouri, one of eighty-four stations that carried Cardinals games all over Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.

The boy listened to Harry Caray blustering names like Slaughter and Marion and Musial, and from then on he was a Cardinals fan, like much of the American South and Southwest.

On July 2, 1950, when the boy was eleven, family friends drove him and his mother along Route 66 all the way up to Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis, where George “Red” Munger outpitched Bill Werle of the Pirates, 2–1. Half a century later, Hall could remember the details.

After the game, there was only one choice for a restaurant—Stan Musial and Biggie’s, where, legend had it, Musial himself appeared whenever he did not have a game.

During the meal, John set off in search of a men’s room.

“Being a country boy, or at least one from a small town, I went outside to see if there might be an outhouse somewhere,” Hall would recall. “When making a visual search for an outside privy, I observed something that I hadn’t seen in my hometown—a parking lot full of Cadillacs.” In his
imagination, one of those Cadillacs belonged to Musial. However, he did not spot a restroom in the parking lot.

“When I came back in, I guess I looked lost,” Hall said. “All of a sudden there were two hands on my shoulder, and a voice said, ‘Son, can I help you?’ and my heart stopped.”

His heart stopped because it felt good to be called “son,” particularly by Stan Musial, wearing a nice suit. The boy promptly forgot his other mission and darted back to his table to see if anybody had a paper and pencil.

“I had never asked for an autograph in my life, and when I went back he was seated with the guy that I later figured out was Amadee”—Amadee Wohlschlaeger, the renowned illustrator for the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
and the
Sporting News
, known by his first name.

Eyeing the pencil and scrap of paper, Musial said, “Come here, bud,” and he led the boy into his office, where he produced a photograph of himself and a fountain pen.

“I was surprised, he was writing with his right hand,” Hall said years later, after learning the left-handed boy had been forced to write right-handed by his teachers.

“He signed it in green ink, ‘To John Hall, from Stan Musial,’ and he asked, ‘How’s this, is this better than a piece of paper?’ ” The boy said, “Yes, sir, it is. Thank you very much.”

Nearly sixty years later, a historian of minor-league baseball, Hall had met Musial a time or two. He wanted it known that the man was just as decent as he had seemed on that evening back in 1950. John Hall still had the autographed photo, still cherished the memory of being called “son.”

H
IS FAMILY
lived down by the river, close to the mill. This was bottomland in every sense, where the newest immigrants lived, closest to the noise and the grime. The ground was barren, and people understood that was because of the smoke that flowed twenty-four hours a day; they had yet to learn just how much the smoke was damaging their bodies.

In the afternoon, the boy would sometimes wait for his father outside the mill.
Lukasz Musial was not much more than five feet tall, and he spoke mostly Polish, calling the boy Stashu, the diminutive of Stanislaus.

At home there was Lukasz and Mary Musial and the girls, Ida, Victoria, Helen, and Rose, all born within six years, and then Stanislaus, born on November 21, 1920.

“
They didn’t even have enough money to baptize my father until his brother came along and they were baptized together. That was poor!” Musial’s oldest daughter, Gerry Ashley, said. “I don’t even think they had indoor plumbing for quite a long time,” she added.

Just before Stashu’s second birthday, he was joined by Edward, so the family arranged a bargain christening at the Polish church overlooking the steel mill. The church was the Holy Name of the Blessed Virgin Mary, popularly called St. Mary’s.

When the boy was seven or eight, the family moved from 465 Sixth Street up the hill to 1139 Marelda Street—eight Musials plus Mary’s mother in a two-bedroom house. Because the house was farther from the mill, Lukasz took more time getting home, stopping in the Polish social
club and maybe the Russian social club or the Croatian social club or the Czech social club or any of the other ethnic clubs on the hillside.

The beer and the shot, or some variation, helped dissipate the metallic particles in the men’s throats, took the pain from the fresh burns from the sparks and spattered drops of acid. Lukasz Musial was not healthy and did not always work, but even when he did work he made more stops than some of the men, trudging home without his full paycheck.

“
As far as drinking, the guys in the steel mill worked hard,” said Mark Pawelec, whose maternal grandfather was a prominent Donora gymnast named Frank Musial, no relation to Lukasz. In 2009, Pawelec was living high on the hill in a family home, commuting to Pittsburgh on a modern toll road a few miles to the west, and in his spare time he studied the history of the Poles of Donora.

“My grandfather, Frank Musial, was an alcoholic,” Pawelec said. “He did drink. That’s not something I tell people, but I know for a fact it was true.” Pawelec would not speculate about Lukasz Musial but said he would not be surprised if anybody thought he needed a drink or three on the way back from that mill.

Stan Musial never talked much about Lukasz within his family; men of the thirties and forties did not say much about what they saw at work or at war, and they tended not to discuss destructive behaviors under the roof of their childhood home.

“
I think he struggled with alcohol, that’s what I would prefer to say, as reported from my grandmother,” said Gerry Ashley, the second child of Stan and Lil, as she tried to reconstruct the life of her grandfather, whom she barely remembered.

Watching Lukasz struggle did not turn Stan into a teetotaler. He was loyal to his father and a proud son of Donora, but parts of his life were off-limits. His friend Bob Broeg discovered this reticence in 1963 when they were collaborating on Musial’s autobiography, right after Musial’s retirement.