Stan Musial Read online

  Musial is not the first or last public figure to suffer from the short attention span of the vox populi. Even presidents come and go in the power ratings.

  With his deceptively transparent smile, Eisenhower—as in “I Like Ike”—won two elections handily, but after he was out of office Ike was often depicted as a mediocre fuddy-duddy.

  Early in the twenty-first century, Ike began making a comeback. To demonstrate the contrast to a certain inarticulate president of more recent vintage, David Letterman displayed videos of Ike’s clearheaded warning about the “military-industrial complex.” Ike was looking better all the time. Maybe Stan the Man’s time would come around again.

  Artists are also susceptible to shifting tastes. I asked Michael Kimmelman, the arts correspondent of the New York Times, to name an artist whose career is comparable to that of Stan the Man in terms of losing critical or public acclaim after his peak. Kimmelman suggested Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), the French painter of quotidian lunch and midday sunlight and his wife in her boudoir.

  “It has taken a while, but the art world has come to its own ‘a-ha’ moment with Bonnard,” Kimmelman wrote in 2006. “His self-effacement, his reticence, his inclination to see both sides of an issue and to let others perceive him as painting away in his little house, indifferent to the debates of his day, permitted critics after his death, especially those in Picasso’s competitive and devouring orbit, to dismiss him without ever grasping what he had tried to accomplish.”

  Asked to name a performing artist who had been somewhat ignored and then rediscovered, Kimmelman—himself a concert pianist—came up with Dinu Lipatti (1917–1950), the Romanian pianist who died at thirty-three of Hodgkin’s disease. I have heard a couple of Lipatti’s clear, haunting performances on vinyl; they give the impression of a man who senses he does not have much time.

  “He’s the pianist’s pianist and remains known to the pros and aficionados,” Kimmelman wrote to me. “Both he and Bonnard are stylish, understated virtuosos of beauty.”

  Composers? I come up with Antonin Dvořák (1841–1904), so easy to stereotype with his love of Czech and American folk music, but as a dozen CDs in my collection confirm, Dvořák is layered, lush, diverse. He endures. Sam Cooke, Dave Brubeck, Nina Simone, Johnny Cash—every generation needs to discover, and rediscover, the old masters.

  BUD SELIG worried how Musial would react to being so publicly tacked on to the original top twenty-five. The commissioner knew how some other superstars would have taken it. The world revolves around them; this is the nature of the superstar.

  Baseball unveiled its all-century team during the 1999 World Series in Atlanta. Some of the top thirty, including Rose and Musial, had been at a collectors’ show in Atlantic City. Banned from baseball, Pete now made his living signing autographs for money. He would show up in Cooperstown during the Hall of Fame weekend and sell his signature out of a storefront. It’s a free country. He arrived in Atlanta as conspicuously as if he were wearing bells on clown shoes. It was his free pass to be back in the big tent.

  Inevitably, Pete’s presence became the central story. He had been a terrific player, the all-time hit leader, surely worthy of the Hall if he had not been caught lying about his gambling. Musial had always praised Pete, even when Pete chipped away at some of his records, but now he understood that Pete had cheapened their sport, so Stan backed off a bit.

  Perhaps Pete’s election to the top-thirty team had been an instinctive anti-establishment gesture by the fans, to express their view that gambling was not so bad, not in a society that encourages lotteries and casinos. Certainly fans could remember Rose diving headfirst into a base, his Prince Valiant haircut flopping as his helmet flew off. In a new age of reality shows and talk-show screamers, Pete fit right in.

  Rose showed up in Atlanta, unrepentant, giving a bravura performance on national television, sticking out his jaw, asking what he had done that was so bad. Was he some kind of mass murderer, he asked, like Charles Manson?

  While Rose strutted and preened, Musial arrived in the company of eternally charismatic figures like Williams and Gibson and Koufax. Stan the Man had his agendas; he knew what he wanted to show and what he wanted to keep private. Being the gracious old man came naturally to him, and it served him well on that October day when reporters asked him about having been an afterthought by committee.

  “I’m happy to be on their team—added on, voted on, what’s the other word?” Musial said. “It’s good to be with this club. I competed against about ten of these guys—Ted Williams, Mays, Henry Aaron, DiMaggio, Warren Spahn, Koufax. I played in the ’40s but I competed against guys who played in the ’30s and I played in the ’60s and competed against guys who played in the ’70s.”

  Reminded of the method by which he was included, Musial said, “I wasn’t upset. Not really. There are 100 million fans, and only 3 million of them voted.

  “It’s what the fans wanted, and I’m happy to be here. It’s human nature to look at your own generation. It’s hard to analyze what happened fifty, sixty years ago.”

  Fans would recognize Musial, call out “Stan the Man,” and he would go into his crouch, wiggle his hips, waggle an imaginary bat. He was home, where he belonged, among his peers. He did not need to create a fuss.

  “Never,” Selig said. “Never. Never. Never.”

  4

  STANLEY HITS

  JIM FREY’S big mistake in life was coming along in the Cardinals organization. Not much room for career advancement on a team that already had Stan Musial.

  Finally invited to train with the Cardinals in 1958, Frey figured, what the heck, he might as well study the man who was keeping him out of the major leagues.

  One sultry morning in St. Pete, hundreds of fans swarmed behind the dugout, squealing when they spotted the familiar number 6. Musial responded with his regular nonsense mantra, “Hey-hey, whaddayasay-whaddayasay,” causing the fans to squeal some more.

  Making the most of his opportunity, Frey asked this most approachable of stars if he wanted to play a little pepper—one man taps the ball with his bat and the others flip it around with their gloves until somebody flubs it.

  Sure, Musial said.

  Frey thought he might do the batting, but with a big grin on his face, Musial informed the farmhand: “When Stanley plays pepper, Stanley hits.”

  Stanley hits. Frey liked his style.

  The fans cheered every time Musial tapped the ball. The public perception of Musial may have been of a humble superstar, but it was clear to Frey that Musial relished performing in front of the crowd.

  “He’s standing facing the stands, the crowd is going crazy,” Frey recalled. “And he kind of ducks down into the dugout and he says, ‘Lefty, they all come. They love to see Stanley hit.’

  “It was so funny. When he talked about himself, it was almost like he was talking about somebody else.”

  Frey would never play a major-league game. Years later, as the manager of the Royals and Cubs, he loved talking about the man who called himself Stanley.

  “There are a few people in the world who love being themselves,” Frey said. “And I think Stan Musial is one of them.”

  Most of all, he loved being Stanley. It was his stage name, self-perpetuated. To others he was Stan or Stash or Stan the Man. (A woman of a certain age on the Main Line in Philadelphia told me recently that as a teenager she thought of him as Stanley the Manly; she liked his, um, batting stance, the way he wiggled.) However, in his finest moments he referred to himself as Stanley.

  Stanley the magician. Stanley the harmonica-playing virtuoso. Stanley the batting guru (“Aw, hell, Curt, just hit the ball”). Stanley the restaurateur. Stanley the guild greeter, shocking some rookie on the other team by welcoming him to the big leagues.

  Later in life he would chat with a pope, refer to a president as “my buddy,” travel overseas with a famous author. His nom de baseball allowed him to get past his modest beginnings as the poorest kid in town. With a bat
in his hands, he became Stanley.

  THOUSANDS OF people have their Stan Musial story, about his spontaneous generosity of heart and wallet. I call them Musial Sightings. He was a man of action rather than reflection, a man of anecdote rather than narrative. He had a way of appearing at some appropriate moment, making people laugh, followed by the clattering hooves as the Lone Ranger rode off into the sunset. Who was that masked man?

  These sightings are not a string of miracles, to be used as documentation for canonization. He was not without ego. He smoked for a long time. He drank a bit. He could shatter pomposity with a timely obscenity. Late in life, he broke off at least one long friendship over a business disagreement.

  He was no activist, no crusader, no saint, but twice, when baseball was being integrated, Musial was a benignly positive presence, a man who spoke little but who was there.

  For the postwar generation, when baseball was still America’s favorite sport, Stan Musial was its happy face. He was picked by Life magazine as the Player of the Decade from 1946 through 1955, ahead of Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and Jackie Robinson. He exuded endless optimism, a one-man GI Bill, grateful to be working at his trade, which in his case was being one of the greatest hitters the game has ever known. And then, somehow, Stanley was obscured.

  5

  THE STANCE

  STANLEY WAS no fool. When he was out in public, he would move into that familiar batting position—twisting sideways to his left, peering over his right shoulder, addressing his right hip to an imaginary pitcher.

  The stance was his signature, his trademark, and demonstrated why he was a successful entrepreneur. He knew how to brand himself.

  In his later years, from his place in time in long-ago America, Musial knew innately that this was the best way to present himself to people who still remembered him—people who might order memorabilia from Stan the Man, Inc., or pay for his autograph at a collectors’ show.

  The crouch was his essence, the thing that made him Stanley Hits. He performed it in the Vatican, at the Colosseum, for throngs at the Kentucky Derby and Wimbledon, on the streets of Warsaw or Tokyo or Dublin.

  Strangers would see an older gent contort himself halfway into a human pretzel, shake his rear end, flap his right elbow, and wonder, Who is that man, and why is he coiled up like that? Others would smile contentedly and say, Stan the Man.

  As long as he could go out in public, this would be his ultimate way of being himself. The crouch became a self-caricature, a way of identifying himself without showing too much, without getting too deep into politics or social issues. The personal stuff he handled with a smile, all part of the package, but the crouch was for all seasons. Nonverbal was the way to go.

  Perhaps he used the whaddayasay-whaddayasay to cover up the trace of stammer he had picked up in elementary school when teachers made the left-handed boy write with his right hand. His script would remain beautiful and his accent would remain somewhere between western Pennsylvania and Missouri.

  The crouch was sui generis, not an act, not some mannerism he had picked up. It was who he was. It was the source of his .331 batting average, so he treated it with great respect and incorporated it into the act, defending it with great passion.

  When Fay Vincent was commissioner, he loved to study the Hall of Fame ballplayers to try to discover the source of their greatness, what made them themselves—the whiteness of the whale, as Melville put it. One time Vincent engaged Musial in serious conversation.

  “I said, ‘My question is this, if you came along in high school or American Legion baseball, did anybody try to change that?’ I thought that was a legitimate question, but he looked at me and said, ‘Commissioner, why would anybody want to change my stance? I was always hitting .500.’ I thought, from his point of view, he’s absolutely right.”

  Musial probably always contorted himself into some version of the stance, from the first time he picked up a bat in Donora. He was blessed with a lithe body that had been trained in gymnastics classes at the Polish Falcons club.

  When he morphed from sore-armed pitcher to desperate hitter in the low minor leagues, he naturally twisted into a defensive stance, probably because hitting was going to be his ultimate chance to be a professional ballplayer, or maybe to be anything. He could not afford to fail. Make contact or go home. So he waited back on the pitch, then struck, letting his reflexes take over. Power was incidental at first. The important thing was, Don’t let them send me home.

  The result was the Musial crouch—feet parallel, knees bent, right hip showing, bat back, eyes peering over his shoulder. Most hitting stances are personal expressions, and there are thousands of them. Bill James has called Musial’s the Strangest Batting Stance.

  Musial’s stance actually became more pronounced after the war, but it always lent itself to jests, to description. Baseball is such a verbal sport, with its dugout full of drugstore cowboys, making observations on the passing scene.

  Ted Lyons, an older pitcher, spotted Musial in his early years in the majors and quipped that he looked like “a small boy looking around a corner to see if the cops are coming.”

  And Buzzy Wares, a first-base coach for the Cardinals in those simpler times before designated hitting coaches, was impressed with Musial’s selectivity at an early age and urged him to keep twisting into his unique stance, the prewar version.

  “Musial reminds me of a housewife choosing tomatoes at a market,” Wares was known to say. “She picks up one, feels it and puts it down. She squeezes another, pinches a third and then—ah!—here’s the one she wants. That’s the way Stan sorts out pitches.”

  How’s this for discipline: in 1943, his second full season in the majors, Musial struck out only 18 times in 701 plate appearances. Our behemoths today would be ashamed of such a statistic, as an indicator of lack of manliness.

  Musial was never a big man for his sport—six feet, 170 pounds. Nowadays he would be turned back at the tryout gates “unless you can”—wink-wink—“put on some weight, son.” His ribs showed. He had a parlor trick of sucking in his stomach until it seemed to be touching his spine, but when he took off his shirt anybody could see he was blessed with powerful, rippling back muscles, the source of his strength.

  “The only real good hitter I can think of with small hands was Stan Musial. Little bitty hands. But you couldn’t find a better hitter,” said Bob Gibson, who never pitched to Musial in a game but studied him to see what made him work.

  “Stan Musial will twist around so he has to peek over his shoulder,” Gibson said, but then he got to the main point about the Stanley Stance: “In the end, we’re all fundamentally similar, even if we arrive at our release points by different routes.”

  Gibson figured out the secret of Stan Musial: he was an illusionist. In his early years, Musial had a friend named Claude Keefe, who taught him a few magic tricks, just enough to make him the Second Worst Magician in the Sporting World, behind only Muhammad Ali—not bad company when you think about it. Ali always said his faith demanded he explain his tricks, so he did; Musial kept the secrets, such as they were.

  The stance was part of the act—an intermediate step, to make himself comfortable but also to confuse the rubes sixty feet away. By and by, the smart ones figured out what Musial was doing.

  “I never thought his stance was that unusual,” said Ralph Kiner, the Hall of Fame slugger, beloved broadcaster for the Mets, and great admirer of Musial.

  “He did two things,” Kiner said. “With that stance, he was coiled and back with his bat and his body, and he would push off and spring.” In other words, what really mattered was what Musial did afterward.

  “Every time I see Stan now at an autograph show or out to dinner, he says, ‘I kicked your ass, didn’t I?’ and I say, ‘Yes, you did, you wore me out,’ ” said Don Newcombe, the great Brooklyn pitcher who beat back alcoholism to became a valuable member of the Dodgers’ front office.

  “But ask him who won the games,” added Newcombe, who had a 16�
��6 career record against the Cardinals, despite Musial’s .366 average against him.

  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.