Stan Musial (11 page)

Back home in Donora, Lil was aware that her boyfriend was playing for pennies so far from home.

“
She wanted him to get a job,” Verna Duda, the widow of Musial’s teacher-mentor, said in 2009. “Her family had money. They weren’t wanting for anything.”

With war looming, Lil’s father told Musial to give it another year, so the young man went off to Daytona Beach, Florida, in the spring of 1940, a
minimal upgrade. His manager was Richard Kerr, who already had an honorable place in baseball history.

In 1919, Kerr had been a rookie left-hander with the Chicago White Sox, ignored by some unscrupulous older teammates who were involved, to one degree or another, in a gambling scheme to lose the World Series. This scandal has been chronicled by Eliot Asinof in his book
Eight Men Out
and later by John Sayles in his movie of the same name. In both works, Dickie Kerr is a minor character, but an honest one.

Ostracized by the sharpies, Kerr pitched a three-hit shutout in the third game and a ten-inning victory in the sixth game, but the conspirators managed to lose the Series to the Reds. When the scandal was exposed after the 1920 season, all eight players were found not guilty of legal charges but were banished for life by the new commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

Dickie Kerr suffered in the wake of the scandal. The symbol of incorruptible decency, he asked for a better contract after 1921 but was turned down by the same haughty owner, Charles Comiskey, whose cheapness—dirty uniforms, substandard salaries, broken promises—had emboldened Kerr’s crooked teammates to blow the 1919 Series. Kerr quit the White Sox and pitched in independent leagues, returning to the majors only for a cameo in 1925.

The reward for his honesty was that in 1940 Kerr was still scuffling for a modest minor-league managing salary when the Cardinals sent him the wild left-hander from up north.

Stanley’s poker luck came through at a crucial time. He could have been managed by a bully, a drunk, a liar, an incompetent, or some combination thereof. The wrong manager could have sent him rushing back to Donora. Instead, Musial drew another inside straight in the card game of life.

When Lil joined Stan in Florida early in the spring, she was visibly pregnant. They said they had been married in secret on Stan’s birthday, November 21, 1939. Kerr and his wife, Cora, had no children, and they took the young couple into their home.

On May 25, 1940, Stan and Lil were married at St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church in Daytona Beach. For Lil, this involved a conversion from the Orthodox faith of her family to the Roman Catholicism of her
husband. They would always celebrate their anniversary in conjunction with Stan’s birthday; many years later, one family member was surprised to learn about the May wedding.

Far away from her own protective family, Lil now had two kind people looking after her. In early August 1940, Lil gave birth to a son, whom they named Richard Stanley Musial, in tribute to their host.

BECAUSE OF
the small roster, Kerr began using Musial in the outfield. Later in August, Musial dove for a line drive, landing on his left shoulder. Pitching in pain the rest of the season, he managed to win 18 games and lose only 5, by far his best record as a pitcher, and his ERA was an excellent 2.62, but his wildness had gotten worse. Then again, he batted .311 in 113 games.

At the end of the season, Stan and Lil stayed in Daytona Beach, where he worked in the sporting goods department at Montgomery Ward for $25 a week, to supplement his salary, which had been $100 a month for essentially six months. Ki Duda wrote letters telling him to be patient, but Musial realized the Cardinals were not about to bring in a lower-echelon pitcher for medical treatment.

“
I didn’t even see a doctor,” he said years later, recalling the legions of players in all those Cardinal camps. “You’re mostly a number.”

Musial realistically began to fear he was finished as a pitcher. At some point Lil went home to Donora to stay with her family.

“
He called me one day and he was kind of despondent, and he said, ‘I might have to come and work in the Donora mills,’ ” Lil recalled. “I got my father on the phone and he said, ‘Now you just keep on playing baseball because I’ll take care of Lil and Dick here. Don’t worry about anything.’ ”

Dickie Kerr would not let him quit.

“
You won’t make it to the top as a pitcher, but you’ll get there some way because you’re a damn fine ballplayer and a big-league hitter,” Kerr told him.

SKIP AHEAD
nearly two decades to 1958, when the Cardinals stopped in Houston on their way north and Musial visited Cora and Dick Kerr. Dick
was now turning sixty-five and working as a bookkeeper for a construction company. Musial told him to go out and buy himself a birthday present—a house.

“He had mentioned a house before but we had never taken it seriously,” Kerr said when the secret came out. “This time he told us to get busy. So we did.”

The Kerrs moved into a subdivision where homes cost between $10,000 and $20,000 in 1958 dollars.
Over the years it has been widely written that the Musials gave the house to the Kerrs, but in fact they held title to it, which suggests the Musials also paid the taxes on it, and who knows what else. Either way, it was a generous act toward a couple who had kept them going in a shaky time.

The Kerrs and Lil’s family helped Musial keep his confidence and hit his way out of obscurity. By that summer of changes, Stan and Lil had known each other for six years. Their long and stable marriage would be a beacon for everybody who knew them.

I
N A
nation that professes to love underdogs, very few great American athletes have come as far as Stan Musial did from 1940 to 1941. That glorious year is one of the great sagas of sport—the slow, sputtering toy firecracker of a minor-league career suddenly turned into a rocket.

Musial had good reason to doubt himself as a pitcher, and he had only vague hopes he could make it as a hitter. In May 1940, Ollie Vanek, who had scouted Musial three years earlier back in Pennsylvania, was assigned to inspect the Daytona Beach club. His evaluation of Musial: “Good form and curve, fast ball a bit doubtful. Also a good hitter. May make an outfielder.”

Bob Broeg once ruminated on how far his pal had traveled, noting how the 1940 All-Star Game had been held in St. Louis while Musial was mostly pitching in the low minor leagues.

“
And he is sitting in a room in Daytona Beach, trying to keep score,” Broeg said for a documentary. Pausing for effect, Broeg added, “I’ve seen this scorecard. Max West of the Braves hit a three-run homer to win the game, 4–0.” Broeg noted that West was a right fielder—and that twelve months later Musial would be playing right field in Sportsman’s Park.

“Now that’s incredible,” said Broeg, who had a bit of a stammer. “I mean, I think it’s, uh, the most fantastic story you have.”

It became even more fantastic after Musial injured his shoulder and faced the 1941 season fearing his career was over.

Nineteen forty-one is most remembered for the attack on Pearl Harbor and the growing global involvement in World War II. But in the narrow
world of American baseball, that year is remembered for Ted Williams’s .406 batting average, Joe DiMaggio’s consecutive-game hitting streak of 56, and Bob Feller’s 25 victories and 260 strikeouts.

It was also the year Stan Musial roared upward, from virtual reject to astounding rookie.

He began his fourth season at the Cardinals’ minor-league camp in Hollywood, Florida, a sore-armed pitcher scheduled to pitch batting practice to top prospects and then perhaps be released. Fortunately for him, the Cardinals had a vast cadre of managers and instructors who could recognize talent and bring it along.

In the swarm at Hollywood, Musial came under the scrutiny of the manager of the Class AA farm team at Columbus, Ohio, an older gent named Burt “Barney” Shotton, who had once played the outfield for the Browns and Cardinals.

Shotton watched Musial try to pitch on the sidelines and said, “Son, there’s something wrong with your arm. At least, I know you’re not throwing hard enough to pitch here. I think you can make it as a hitter. I’m going to send you to another camp with the recommendation that you be tried as an outfielder.”

Years later, Musial would honor Shotton as “a man who never seems to have received enough credit for the help he gave me,” and would describe Shotton as “a dignified, bespectacled man best known for later managing the Brooklyn Dodgers to two pennants.” This was in 1947 and 1949, when Shotton would manage Jackie Robinson against Musial’s Cardinals.

One person Musial did not include in his memories of those trying days was the general manager of the Cardinals, Branch Rickey. However, as Musial became the best player ever to emerge from the Cardinals’ farm system, Rickey placed himself near the center of the process.

Interviewed on camera nearly two decades later, Rickey gave his ornate version of the retooling of Stanley:

After that long shot, Musial at least had some hope of making it as a hitter as he traveled from coastal Hollywood deep inland, first to Albany, Georgia, and then to Columbus, Georgia, where the Cardinals’ lowest minor leaguers trained.

However, as often happens in large organizations, Shotton’s observations about Musial’s hitting did not make their way to Columbus. Clay Hopper, the manager of Columbus, noticed Musial was listed as a pitcher and asked him to pitch against the Cardinals’ varsity as it headed north.

“
I told Clay, ‘I’m not a pitcher anymore,’ ” Musial said, but Hopper told him to pitch anyway. Terry Moore and Johnny Mize both hit home runs off him, and a few days later he pitched against the Phillies and was whacked again.

As he despairingly waited for the next step, Musial spotted a familiar, weathered face—Ollie Vanek. In a not overly friendly world, here was somebody Musial knew, somebody who had once trekked to the Musial house to help persuade Lukasz Musial to sign the contract, somebody who might understand the desperation in a young man’s eyes.

“Mr. Vanek, remember me?” Musial asked.

Vanek, who had praised Musial as a hitter the year before while scouting in Daytona Beach, drew a momentary blank.

“I place the face, kid, but not the name.”

“Stan Musial … Stan Musial of Donora, Pennsylvania.”

“
Oh, sure, I remember,” Vanek said. “You’re the kid whose father needed so much persuasion to let you play.”

The decency of both of them was very much in play. Musial was not polished enough to know how to work on the guilt or sympathy of managers
or farm directors; he needed a deus ex machina, somebody to swoop out of the sky and rescue him.

If the young man—still not twenty-one—had been a smart aleck or a whiner, the Shottons and Vaneks might have turned their backs on him. But people saw something decent in Musial as he virtually begged for a chance.

WHO WAS
Ollie Vanek? He had grown up around St. Louis, where his father worked for a foundry, and had attended St. Procopius College, now Benedictine, outside Chicago. After college, Ollie went into the Cardinal system, playing the outfield or third base or catching, which is how he had taken a foul tip off his right pinky in 1937, bending it permanently at a forty-five-degree angle.

Years later, Vanek’s son, Ben, a dentist near Denver, would recall how the father would point “over there” as he told his sons to perform a household chore—and the Vanek boys would ask Dad to be more specific since his catcher’s fingers were pointing in various directions. That was catcher humor—what, you thought Joe Garagiola invented it?—typical for that miserable breed, whose handshake often resembles a sack of peanuts, bulging in odd shapes.

In 1941 Vanek was slated to be a player-manager at Springfield, Missouri, with moderate leeway in choosing his players. At a staff meeting in Georgia, conducted by Rickey, managers at the A and B levels passed on Musial.

Dib Williams, who had played for the 1930 and 1931 champion Philadelphia A’s, was a player-manager with the Cardinals’ Class C team in Decatur, Illinois, in 1941. Williams said he put in a bid for Musial but was rebuffed.

“
Mr. Rickey, in a fairly loud voice, told me he didn’t want to put the weakest outfield arm in the organization [Musial] in the largest professional ballpark [my ballpark] relaying throws to the weakest-throwing second baseman—ME!” However, the ballpark in Springfield, Missouri, had a short right-field fence, Williams said. In later years Musial and Vanek made it sound as if Vanek had been proactive in asking for the boy he had scouted.

The more Musial hit in the major leagues, the more Branch Rickey would assert that he had his eye on the lad all along, while Vanek would insist Rickey had merely gone along with his request. Vanek could remember the boy crying as his father balked at signing the contract, and Vanek felt that a boy who wanted to play that badly …

The relationship between Vanek and Rickey is complicated. In 1962, Rickey would resurface in St. Louis as the éminence grise of Gussie Busch, and would purge most of the front office staff, including the longtime scout Ollie Vanek. This cut Vanek’s income and pension, leading to bitterness toward Rickey.