Stan Musial (15 page)

Musial missed a week early in the season with an ankle injury, and the Cards fell ten games behind the Dodgers, the defending league champions, a cocky bunch managed by the old Gashouse Gang shortstop Leo Durocher. The hard feelings had begun in 1940, when Bob Bowman of the Dodgers beaned Medwick, and by now there was a long list of grievances on both sides.

Leo would put one foot up on the top dugout step, point to his own ear, and shout “Stick it in his ear” so loudly he could be heard over any crowd. Les Webber, a nondescript right-hander who did Durocher’s dirty work,
threw at Musial in 1942, and Musial tried to charge the mound, but the catcher and umpire got in the way. Tellingly, he was not ejected from the game, an indication the umpires knew Durocher had instigated it.
This was the only time in his career that Musial would go after a pitcher; from then on he held an open contempt for Durocher, one of the few people in the game he did not like.

After the quiet young man went after Leo’s pitcher, Cardinal fans understood: Musial could have played for the Gashouse Gang.

In August, Harry Walker became enamored with a Spike Jones recording of “
Pass the Biscuits, Mirandy”—a goofus ditty about obstinate hillbillies. The Cardinals played “Mirandy” after every victory, punctuating it with music of their own. Trainer Harrison “Doc” Weaver, a big man who had played tackle for Rickey at Ohio Wesleyan, could strum the mandolin between stints of ankle taping. Walker and Musial beat time with coat hangers; Johnny Beazley thought he could sing a bit.

The Cardinals were hot, and Southworth could do no wrong. Musial was hitting well over .300, but one day the manager replaced him with the right-handed Coaker Triplett, who drove in the winning run. They won the pennant on the final day, beating the Cubs twice, with Musial finishing third in batting at .315 with 10 homers and 72 runs batted in.

Now they would play the Yankees in the World Series, the Cardinals’ first since the fruit bombardment in Detroit in 1934.

THE YANKEES
won the first game of the 1942 Series in St. Louis, with Musial going hitless, but the Cards won the second as he made a hit. Now he and Lil had to decide if she would come to New York for the next three games. With money tight and wartime travel difficult, they reasoned she could go home to Donora and then catch the final game or two in St. Louis.

Instead, Lukasz and Mary came to New York. Emaciated and shy, all dressed up, Lukasz could not stop beaming as his son took him around the clubhouse in Yankee Stadium.

This was probably the only World Series ever influenced by a trainer. Doc Weaver came up with a hex gesture called the
double whammy—“crossed wrists, hands back to back, then closed the second and third fingers
of each hand so that the first and fourth fingers protruded like horns,” Musial recalled.

The Yankees were not used to such loosey-goosey behavior in the more staid American League, although that was probably not the reason they lost three straight games in their awe-inspiring stadium in the Bronx. Yankee management had to blame somebody: it promptly fired the trainer, Earle “Doc” Painter, apparently because he was not as good as Doc Weaver at the mandolin or the double whammy.

Musial batted only .222 in his first World Series, but that was not the reason he was upset as the Cardinals celebrated in the Yankees’ home park.

“
Stan was having a terrible time trying to decide whether to go back or go home to his family in Donora,” Marty Marion recalled. “He finally decided it would be better if he went home.”

Marion described the scene in the train station as the giddy Cardinals piled into their special car, heading for a raucous celebration in St. Louis: “He went around shaking hands with all of us and then the guy busted right out and began to bawl like a kid. As he walked away, so did some of the others.”

Musial would always insist that this was the best Cardinals team he’d played on. The winners’ share was $6,192.50—nearly 50 percent more than his salary—which made it a happy winter in Donora.

The Rickey era ended after the World Series. Breadon had become unhappy with Rickey’s contract, which called for him to receive a percentage for every player he sold, and let him move on to the rival Dodgers. It was impossible to predict the impact Rickey would have within a few years, but for now, Musial was the great product of the Rickey farm system and the Cardinals were back on top.

NOW THAT
Rickey was gone, the team would be dominated by the longtime owner, Sam Breadon, a former automobile mechanic with a gravelly accent that revealed his New York roots. Breadon had worked on Pierce-Arrows and later on Fords before buying his own agency. He was a salesman, but with an approach different from Rickey’s.

“
They were entirely opposites,” said William O. DeWitt, who worked
across the hallway with the Browns, and later owned them. “Rickey never took a drink,” DeWitt added, whereas Breadon “belonged to a little club at the Jefferson Motel. And he’d go down and have two or three drinks at lunch, and then he’d drink at night. And after he’d drink a while he wanted to sing.”

Now that he was handling the payroll, Breadon negotiated with Musial directly. He did not call Musial “my boy,” as Rickey had done, but he did find a way to work on him, offering Musial a $1,000 raise to just over $5,000. Musial asked for $10,000 at first and later dropped his request to $7,500, but he also made a crucial negotiating mistake: with Moore and Slaughter going into the service, Musial told Breadon he would have to play “even harder” in their absence, which was just the opening the master auto salesman needed. He said he was disappointed in Musial, which, of course, was translated into dollars.

Musial held off for a while, taking advice from his friend Frank Pizzica, himself an auto dealer, who theoretically might have had insight into Breadon’s tactics. Breadon dispatched Eddie Dyer, the Cardinals’ farm director, to Donora to talk Musial into signing. With Pizzica out of town, Musial listened to the fatherly Dyer and signed for $6,250.

Because of wartime restrictions on travel, the Cards trained in Cairo, Illinois, in 1943. Musial was moved to right field after Slaughter went into the service, and he felt comfortable there because he did not have to throw across his body so often. Mostly he played wherever the manager put him.

The Cardinals were somewhat more divided than has been generally thought.
Marty Marion has talked about cliques developing between the beer-drinking, card-playing teammates and the family-man teammates like himself, Walker, Howie Pollet, and Musial. Walker Cooper, his brother Mort, and some of the other older players referred to them as the “college kids,” which possibly alluded to Danny Litwhiler, who actually had a degree in science and social science from Bloomsburg State in Pennsylvania.

LITWHILER BECAME
Musial’s first good friend on the team, arriving from the Phillies early in 1943 because Southworth liked the way he hustled. From a Pennsylvania Dutch area in anthracite country, Litwhiler was
a disciplined family man, and he began hanging out with Musial, bringing their families to a little lake in nearby Illinois, where Litwhiler had the key to a friend’s cabin.

The lake was pleasant in the evening after a day game, and on days off ten or fifteen Cardinal families might congregate at the retreat.

“
We’d cook corn on the cob and hot dogs and sometimes we’d gig frogs and cook them right there,” Litwhiler recalled with great fondness in 2010. Gigging frogs, a regional pastime, required a long stick with prongs at the end; major-league hands helped considerably. Once Litwhiler brought a bag of live frogs home with him from an evening excursion with Musial, planning to ask the hotel chef to cook up the legs for lunch. He deposited the sack in the hotel bathroom, forgetting that his wife, Dot, was an early riser and would not be amused by the frogs that squirmed loose.

Many of the Cardinals stayed in the Fairgrounds Hotel because it was close to the ballpark and the players could walk to work, not having enough money for cars under the Breadon-Rickey payroll. Dickie Musial thought the Litwhilers were rich because Danny and Dot had an automobile.

“We named our son after Dickie,” Litwhiler said.

Most of the Cardinals rented rooms on the top floor, which tended to heat up nicely on long sunny days. After a few seasons, Musial was given a cool corner room on a lower floor because he was a star, recalled Freddy Schmidt, a useful pitcher on those teams. Schmidt had no complaints. The Cardinals were fast becoming Musial’s team, and they did not begrudge him the favor he had not sought.

“
We had a young club,” Litwhiler recalled of the 1943–44 Cardinals. “Pepper Martin and the Gashouse Gang were pretty hard-nosed. Stan was as nice a guy as I’ve ever met. He set the pace. Such a nice guy.”

Musial and Litwhiler hung around together on the road as well. One time, on a day off in Philadelphia, Litwhiler invited Musial to his hometown, Ringtown. One woman in a modest restaurant heard that Musial was a ballplayer and said, “You keep trying hard and you’ll get there. I know you will.”

“I ran into Pappy Kleckner at the gas station, on the porch,” Litwhiler recalled in 2010. Relishing dusting off an old Pennsylvania accent, Litwhiler mimicked the old-timer asking Litwhiler, “Who is dis?” When Litwhiler
told him, Pappy asked, “And vat are you doing here?” Litwhiler said they had an off day, which must have grated on the Pennsylvania Dutch work ethic.

“Vat is this off day?” Pappy asked.

“I told him about baseball, and he wished Stan luck,” Litwhiler said. “Stan told me, ‘I’m never coming back here with you. Nobody knows who I am.’ ”

By now, most of the country knew who Stan Musial was. He made the All-Star team for the first time in 1943, won his first batting title with .357, and was voted Most Valuable Player, and the Cardinals won their second straight pennant.

Stanley also showed his inner Gashouse Gang in August against his old pal Les Webber, who had thrown at him in 1942. With first base open, Durocher was heard to order Webber to walk Musial.

Webber was steaming because earlier in the season Musial had hit a line drive that broke the hand of Hugh Casey, who was Webber’s drinking buddy. What’s worse, Musial broke Casey’s drinking hand, the Dodgers’ catcher, Mickey Owen, joked.

“
Musial came up next time,” Owen recalled. “Four straight times, right by his ears.” Rather than charge the mound this time, Musial turned to Owen and said, “That SOB can’t hit me if he throws all day.” Owen was awed by Musial’s coolly evading Webber’s beanballs: “That’s how agile that man is.”

Players had their own ways of handling these matters. The Cards’ next batter was Walker Cooper, who had run Musial out of the batting cage back in 1941 but had since figured out that Musial was a vital part of the team. Cooper slapped a grounder to second base and then planted his left foot high on the calf of first baseman Augie Galan, which could have seriously injured Galan. Owen then tackled Cooper, and they rolled around for a while—just a normal day at the ballyard between the Cardinals and Dodgers.

The two teams battled on the field, but Rickey’s stockpiled players on the Dodgers were no match for Rickey’s wartime work-in-progress with the Cardinals. The Cardinals won the pennant by 18 games over Cincinnati, as Musial led the league in batting with .357 and 48 doubles and 20 triples.

Because of wartime travel restrictions, the teams were able to make only one trip, so the Series began with three games in the Bronx, with the Yanks winning the first and third. Mort Cooper won the second game, pitching to his brother, although their father had died earlier in the day. The Yanks then won two straight in St. Louis to close out the Series, getting by with one Tuck Stainback playing center field in place of DiMaggio, who had enlisted under pressure from fans and press. Musial batted .278 in the Series with no extra-base hits, and had to settle for the losing share of $4,321.99.

In 1944, still deferred, Musial signed a three-year contract worth $10,000, $12,500, and $13,500. The Cardinals won their third straight pennant as Musial hit .347 against increasingly depleted wartime pitching.

The Yankees were so decimated by the draft that the Browns actually won the pennant, something they had never done with George Sisler or their few other stars. The Browns were beneficiaries of wartime baseball, having thirteen of their prewar players disqualified from military service for one impediment or another.

Lil made an amazing discovery during the first and only all–St. Louis World Series. She and Stan rented a modest apartment near the ballpark because they did not have a car. As the city heated up for the trolley-car World Series, she noticed that although the Cardinals had won three straight pennants, St. Louis was, as she put it, a “
Brownie town.”

It was true. The old loyalties to the Browns came pouring out, but the Cardinals won in six games as Musial hit what would be his only World Series homer and batted .304. Because of low wartime ticket prices in small Sportsman’s Park, the Cardinals’ winning share was $4,626.01. Musial had now played three full seasons and had won three pennants and two championships, but he knew that streak was about to end.

J
OHN HERNANDEZ
considered himself lucky. Here he was, a professional ballplayer getting to play his sport on Pearl Harbor in the middle of the war, on the same team as Stan Musial.

A pretty fair hitter himself, Hernandez had been beaned in the minors—no batting helmets in those days—and was having trouble seeing the ball at night in the rickety minor-league parks. He pretty much knew he was never going to make it to the majors.

However, at Pearl Harbor in the spring of 1945, the sun was always out, and life was fairly peaceful three and a half years after the horrific attack on December 7, 1941.

In the mornings, Hernandez helped repair the
Yorktown
and the
Lexington
, some of the behemoths that had played a role in the United States regaining control of the Pacific. In the afternoons, he played ball. The commanding officer loved the sport and had set up an eight-team league comprised mostly of professionals. Sometimes there were parties, luaus, on the beach in front of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.