Stan Musial Read online

  BY GEORGE VECSEY

  Baseball: A History of America’s Favorite Game

  Forever Yours, Faithfully (by Lorrie Morgan)

  Troublemaker (by Harry Wu)

  Five O’Clock Comes Early: A Young Man’s Battle With Alcoholism

  (by Bob Welch)

  Get to the Heart (by Barbara Mandrell)

  A Year in the Sun

  Martina (by Martina Navratilova)

  Sweet Dreams (with Leonore Fleischer)

  Kentucky: A Celebration of American Life (with Jacques Lowe)

  Getting Off the Ground: The Pioneers of Aviation Speak for Themselves

  (with George C. Dade)

  Coal Miner’s Daughter (by Loretta Lynn)

  One Sunset a Week: The Story of a Coal Miner

  The Way It Was: Great Sports Events from the Past (Editor)

  Joy in Mudville: Being a Complete Account of the Unparalleled History

  of the New York Mets

  Naked Came the Stranger (1/25th authorship) (Lyle Stuart, 1969)

  Stan Musial: An American Life

  CHILDREN’S BOOKS:

  Frazer/Ali

  The Bermuda Triangle: Fact or Fiction? (with Marianne Vecsey)

  The Harlem Globetrotters

  Pro Basketball Champions

  Photographer with the Green Bay Packers (with John Biever)

  The Baseball Life of Sandy Koufax

  Baseball’s Most Valuable Players

  Copyright © 2011 by George Vecsey

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by ESPN Books, an imprint of ESPN, Inc., New York, and Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The ESPN Books name and logo are registered trademarks of ESPN, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vecsey, George.

  Stan Musial: an American life / George Vecsey.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-52644-1

  1. Musial, Stan, 1920– 2. Baseball players—United States—Biography. 3. St. Louis Cardinals (Baseball team)—History. I. Title.

  GV865.M8V47 2011

  796.357092—dc22 [B] 2011003271

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  www.espnbooks.com

  Front-jacket photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

  Jacket design: Scott Biel

  v3.1_r1

  TO THE MUSIAL FAMILY

  WITH ADMIRATION

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: Morning in Florida

  1 The Do-Over

  2 Lucky Stanley

  3 The Old Master

  4 Stanley Hits

  5 The Stance

  6 A Hand on the Shoulder

  7 Lukasz and Mary

  8 Invitation to Lunch

  9 How Donora Got Its Name

  10 Mentors

  11 Lil

  12 Takeoff

  13 Pennant Race

  14 Meet Me at the Fair

  15 The Mahatma of the Midwest

  16 Old Navy Buddies

  17 The War

  18 Checks All Over the Bed

  19 Jubilee

  20 A Visitor on the Train

  21 Best Series Ever

  22 Boat-Rocker

  23 Stanley the Scout

  24 The Strike That Never Happened

  25 Stanley and the Kid

  26 The Big Three

  27 Bad Air

  28 Family Life

  29 Day Off in Chicago

  30 Prime Time

  31 Stanley Gives an Interview

  Photo Insert

  32 Temper, Temper

  33 And Some Bad Times

  34 On the Hustings

  35 Better Pants

  36 When the Times Changed

  37 Old Folks

  38 Fender Bender

  39 Retirement

  40 Stanley Runs the Team

  41 Hometown

  42 Stanley Goes to a Reunion

  43 The Polish Connection

  44 The Face in the Crowd

  45 Stanley’s Statues

  46 More Funerals

  47 Upstaged Again

  Epilogue: Here He Comes Now

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Prologue

  MORNING IN FLORIDA

  WE DROVE straight through the night, married only a few months, on spring break, our first vacation together. Like Bonnie and Clyde, we had the feeling of putting something over on everybody. Every mile we traveled south of Baltimore was the farthest I had ever been from New York. We were twenty-one.

  We arrived in St. Petersburg just after dawn on a Sunday, nothing much moving but the pelicans down by the bay. It was much too early to locate our friends, so we had a few hours to kill.

  I happened to find the ballpark.

  I had known about Al Lang Field since I was young, hearing Mel Allen describe DiMaggio and Henrich taking their first rips of the spring, the waves, and the sailboats on Tampa Bay.

  The Yankees shared this homey little ballpark with the Cardinals, a team I had followed since I was seven years old, back in 1946. It was a wonderful year for the game, even though the Cardinals beat our beloved Brooklyn Dodgers in a playoff.

  As that epic World Series began, my father, who worked at the Associated Press, brought home a full set of photographs—“glossies,” they called them—of all the players: one head shot and one posed action shot of all thirty Cardinals and Red Sox. (The rosters were expanded that year to make room for the veterans—the rusty, the wounded, and the aged.)

  Mesmerized by the glossies, I would make lineups out of them, scrutinize the faces of the hard-boiled players who had known war and the Depression and the struggle to get to the major leagues.

  I can remember the studious glint of Boston’s Dominic DiMaggio, who wore glasses, and the exuberance of the Cardinals’ Joe Garagiola, who already had a reputation as a clubhouse character. But the player I liked best was Stan Musial, the lithe slugger of the Cardinals, just back from the war, who always seemed to be smiling as he went about his business of smiting terror in Brooklyn. Stan the Man, as we had named him, seemed to represent all the daily goodness of his sport—the workaday regularity, the possibilities, the joy.

  Now, fourteen years later, I was a young sportswriter who had covered a few Yankee games, Casey and Mantle, the year before. I was old enough to be married, to be parked outside Al Lang Field, noticing a few cars arriving, men disappearing through the clubhouse door, with the quiet diligence of Depression-era workers grateful to be punching the time clock for another paycheck.

  From the rearview mirror, I spotted two men strolling down the sidewalk, each carrying a bat. Why, it was Stan Musial and Red Schoendienst, old friends reunited after Schoendienst’s four-year exile in New York and Milwaukee. They seemed as comfortable as matching salt and pepper shakers, wearing nice slacks and collared shirts, most likely just having come from church.

  They walked past my car, not noticing the grimy clunker with New York plates that had gotten us out of the frozen North. Up close, I spotted Schoendienst’s freckled catlike features and Musial’s vaguely lopsided smile, straight off the glossies I had studied years earlier. They were strolling to another March Sunday at the ballpark.

  My pretty, young wife professed not to mind when I woke her up to point out the two ballplayers. Look, I babbled, it’s Stan and Red. I tried to explain about Musial’s coiled batting
stance, how he could run, how we had loved him in Brooklyn, how he was the most beloved man in his sport. She humored me. We had driven through the night and had found the heart of baseball.

  1

  THE DO-OVER

  BUD SELIG could see it coming. He did not know exactly which great player was going to be overlooked by the capricious impulses of baseball fans, but he was certain it was going to be somebody he loved.

  The commissioner had brought this agony on himself by approving a commercial gimmick he suspected might backfire. A credit card company, a major sponsor, would arrange for fans to select the top twenty-five players of the twentieth century, using computerized punch cards. The winners would be announced during the World Series of 1999.

  The drawback, and Selig knew it right away, was that this election could produce an injustice for some great players who had concluded their careers before the current generation of fans, before cable television began displaying endless loops of home runs by sluggers who were mysteriously growing burlier by the hour.

  In addition to being the commissioner, with all the crass business decisions that post entails, Selig is a legitimate fan who grew up in Milwaukee, whose mother took him to Chicago and New York, giving him a lifelong appreciation for the game.

  Knowing, just knowing, that some great players would be left out by mathematical inevitability, Selig did the prudent, fretting, consensual, quintessential Bud Selig thing: he arranged for an oversight committee that would add five players, making it a top-thirty team. He just knew.

  Selig’s premonition came true when voting closed on September 10, 1999. Pete Rose, who had been banned from baseball after blatantly denying he had gambled on games, was among the top nine outfielders on the all-century team; Stan Musial, with his perfect image, who ranked among the top ten hitters who ever played, was mired at eleventh. Stan the Man, an also-ran.

  “Ughhhh,” Selig groaned, a decade later, from deep in his innards. “How could they vote Pete Rose on that team before the great Stan Musial? You look at Musial’s stats, oh, oh, I can’t emphasize enough to you my regard for him, not only as a player, but when I got to know him in later years, when he came to Cooperstown. I can’t begin to tell you what a wonderful human being he is.”

  His voice rising to an aggrieved squeal, Selig continued: “Did he deserve to be there? Are you kidding me? That to me was the biggest shock of the whole thing. I felt an incredible sadness. I said, ‘This is impossible.’

  “I love Stan Musial,” Selig added. “He was just awesome. I watched him eleven, twelve times a year. I saw him in Ebbets Field, where they called him Stan the Man, because that’s what he was.”

  “I’m seventy-four years old and I still say, in a kidlike way, wow!” Selig said, gaining steam. “And if you were trying to win a game in the eighth or ninth inning, you didn’t want to see him up. In old Sportsman’s Park, with that screen, he would pepper it. He was the man in every way.”

  It would have been easy enough for voters to look up Musial’s statistics. Even in 1999, everybody had access to instant electronic information. And this is what Stan Musial accomplished: twenty-two seasons, a career batting average of .331, with 725 doubles, 177 triples, 1,951 runs batted in. Three times the National League’s Most Valuable Player. Seven batting championships. He led the league in total bases and slugging percentage six times each, and he led the league in doubles eight times and triples five times.

  Musial also hit 475 home runs and struck out only 696 times in his entire career—twenty-two seasons—an astounding ratio in contrast to the chemically enhanced worthies of recent vintage, who strike out 696 times per season, or so it seems.

  Oh, yes, and Musial was also the most beloved great player of his time, was never thrown out of a game—and yet the fans of the Internet age, with all that information available to them, did not see fit to include him among the top twenty-five.

  “He has not gotten the recognition he deserves,” Selig said. “He is truly one of the great hitters. And believe me, I have great admiration for Ted Williams, but if you look at the stats, Stan Musial is right there. As far as I’m concerned, he’s got to be on the all-time team. He’s that great.”

  In the top twenty-five, the fans included not only Rose but four players active in 1999—Cal Ripken Jr., Ken Griffey Jr., Roger Clemens, and Mark McGwire.

  Knowing what they know now—McGwire’s extremely belated admission that he indeed used steroids that were illegal under the law of the land, though he still maintained he used them only for physical healing and never to gain extra power—fans of today might not vote for him.

  But in 1999, given the choice, the fans voted for Bluto and stiffed Popeye the Sailor Man.

  On further review, fans might not vote for the two Juniors a decade down the line, while Clemens’s seedy image and rumors of his using illegal body-enhancing chemicals probably would keep him out of the top twenty-five just on general principle. But that was the way things looked to fans with a punch-out computer card in the summer of 1999, listening to the incessant now-now-now babble of the tube and the blare of the public-address system.

  Fortunately, Bud Selig’s oversight committee kicked in—the same panel that had come up with the original computer-card list of one hundred: Paul Beeston and Richard Levin from Major League Baseball, Gene Orza from the Players Association, Bob Costas and Jaime Jarrin, two experienced broadcasters, and four respected writers, Jerome Holtzman, Larry Whiteside, John Thorn, and Claire Smith. They did their work via conference call.

  “The first thing we said was, ‘We start here, we start with Musial,’ ” recalled Costas, the baseball buff who had lived much of his adult life in St. Louis. Costas loved Musial. Everybody in St. Louis loved Musial. Now it was time for Costas to do the right thing.

  “We had to scurry to improvise a nudnik-cancelling measure,” Thorn recalled. As Orza remembered it, the committee first added Musial and Christy Mathewson, then swiftly went to Warren Spahn, Honus Wagner, and Lefty Grove.

  Even at that, to Selig’s chagrin, Frank Robinson, one of the great clutch hitters of all time, was left off the top thirty, along with Roberto Clemente, the great right fielder who died in a humanitarian airlift mission. The top-thirty team did not include a single Latino star or Negro League star, not Satchel Paige, not Josh Gibson, which rendered the venture still something of a gimmick.

  When you think about it, all lists are gimmicks. Top ten movies. Top hundred books. Five worst presidents. I once wrote a column saying I could pick a team of players who are not in the Hall of Fame and on any given day “my guys”—just off the top of my head, Roger Maris, Gil Hodges, Tony Oliva, Ron Santo, Maury Wills, Thurman Munson, Dick Allen, Jack Morris, Tommy John, Jim Kaat, Lee Smith (sure, I’d take Pete Rose the ballplayer on that team; I covered him from the day he was nicknamed Charlie Hustle, and I believe he was clean as a player)—could give the Cooperstown guys a heckuva game. Somebody is always left off every list.

  “It broke my heart to leave them off,” Costas said of players like Robinson and Clemente. And he added, “There would have been hell to pay if Musial had been left off.”

  OTHER TOMFOOLERY was taking place in the closing months of 1999. People were obsessing that the world was going to fly out of orbit as computers spun from one digital millennium to another. People were hoarding gold bullion and plastic jugs of water and tins of tuna fish in their basements, getting weird over all kinds of apocalyptic nonsense. Maybe that explains why fans voted for Pete Rose over Stan Musial.

  Through it all, Stan the Man remained Stan the Mensch—a Yiddish word for a human being, someone of high integrity, a major compliment where I come from. He handled the oversight with the same grace he had shown throughout his public life.

  In July of that year, Musial was content to be a side man in the band of superstars that traveled to Boston for the All-Star Game. Ancient Fenway Park was one site of the ineffective World Series mano a mano between Musial and Ted Williams back in 1946,
when both of them were young. Now Williams was partially blind because of a stroke, unable to walk without a cane, no longer the postadolescent who could be goaded into a fury. The Kid was now the patron of the Jimmy Fund charity and a sage of hitting, probably the last .400 hitter ever, a charismatic storyteller, a beloved elder, dying in front of our eyes.

  During the All-Star jamboree, the great players of past and present swarmed around Williams, giving him his due. This was his moment. The old storms were over, and the fans went crazy in their adoration for him; he had long since learned to accept this love. Henry Aaron and Junior Griffey helped him stand to throw out the first pitch, a haunting reminder for everybody hurtling toward old age and infirmity. Musial did not need the spotlight. In Ted’s town, Musial was content to be the nice old guy playing “The Wabash Cannonball” on his harmonica.

  MUSIAL’S MODEST pose in 1999 raises the question: why did he not strike a chord with the voters in that poll? Some players grow in stature over time, the way Williams did, while others dwindle, as Musial seems to have done with the general public. We all know that new trumps old just about every time, but was some other factor working in the general overlooking of Stan Musial?

  The answer may have been that, in the celebrity-driven sizzle of the turn of the century, Musial was just not sexy enough. Once upon a time he had been sort of the American ideal, at least the white mainstream version of it, the Life cover boy. Friends and strangers semi-adopted him as the smiling brother, the amiable cousin, the father figure of his time, while Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, his counterparts, became known for their broken marriages, their moods, their absences.

  Almost as if by will, DiMaggio and Williams became distant towering legends, the stormy Himalayas, whereas Stan the Man endured as the weathered old Appalachians, like the coal-laden hills behind his boyhood home in Donora, Pennsylvania.

  DiMaggio would be remembered for the rose on Marilyn Monroe’s grave.

  Williams would be remembered for crash-landing his burning jet on an airfield in South Korea.

  But Musial, a diligent businessman with a successful marriage, would be the nice old guy who mimicked his own batting stance in public. Was this a flaw on Musial’s part—or ours?