Stan Musial (2 page)

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?

Today, in Musial’s chosen home of St. Louis, with its fine neighborhoods and hospitals and universities and industry, people refer to Musial as being forgotten or overlooked by coastal America.

“
St. Louis thinks of itself as the best baseball town and resents both coasts,” says Rick Wilber, a writer and journalism professor who grew up in the area and whose father, Del Wilber, was a friend and teammate of Musial’s.

It is not hard to pick up on a form of blue-state/red-state resentment toward the two coasts. The issue surfaces on nearly a generational basis, going back to Musial’s arrival late in 1941, when his predecessors, the Gashouse Gang, were regarded as Huns and Vandals let loose in the big eastern cities. The terrific Cardinal teams of the 1980s were easily annoyed by swarms of chattering New York media plus the celebrity of the underachieving Mets players. And the flyover-neglect theory continues into the age of Albert Pujols.

Ladies and gentlemen, on the right side of our airplane, you will see the famed St. Louis Gateway Arch alongside the Mississippi River. And ladies and gentlemen, a few blocks inland you may glimpse a large statue of Stan Musial, a local baseball player who used to be a big deal
.

The statue is just about the only lingering controversy in the generally tranquil public life of Stan Musial. Ever since it was unveiled in August 1968, Musial disliked it because it was too bulky and did not capture his coiled stance. Of course, the statue has been a landmark ever since, along with the Arch and the psychic presence of the man himself. As controversies go, the statue issue is pretty tame, as befitting the accepting mid-America region where it is based.

St. Louis is the Mound City, nicknamed for Native American burial mounds in the region, whereas New York is the Media Capital of the World and California is the Dream Capital of the World. New York is where Ruth and DiMaggio and Robinson and Mantle and Mays all gained
sporting immortality, and the brainy harbor city of Boston is where Williams gained his twitchy fame, if not always adoration.

“
May I tell you this?” said Marty Marion, known as Mr. Shortstop when the Cardinals won four pennants in the forties. Marion observed Musial as a weak-armed minor-league pitcher in spring training of 1941 and a few months later encountered him as the kid from nowhere who hit .426 in the last two weeks of a failed pennant drive—one of the most incredible leaps any player has ever made in one season.

“We always say, in baseball, if you play in New York, you get twice as much publicity, you become more popular,” Marion said in 2000.

“It’s just a known fact that everybody who plays in New York gets all the credit for being the best players or best whatever. Do you believe that? Well, I tell you, it’s a fact. If Stan Musial played in New York City and was a member of the Giants or the Dodgers, he’d have gotten more publicity than he’s gotten so far.”

In that same end-of-millennium rush to quantify, ESPN came up with a series listing the top one hundred North American athletes of the twentieth century (Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, and so on). Stan Musial finished sixty-first. Marion insisted that if Musial had played in New York, he would have been among the top twenty-five.

Musial did not complain publicly, but when ESPN began accumulating interviews with famous athletes, Musial would not cooperate, an act of quiet pique. He had his pride, and he had a long memory, as people would discover over the years. Musial let his friends do the speaking for him, and they did. Asked about Joe DiMaggio, Marion said, “I didn’t see him make all these fantastic catches,” meaning the regular season over the years. “I’ve seen guys catch as many things as he catches, but he wasn’t the hitter that Stan was. Joe wasn’t.”

Marion added: “If Joe DiMaggio had of played in St. Louis and Stan Musial had of played with the Yankees, you’d see the difference in their ratings. I’m telling you. It’s a fact. Either you can believe me or not. That’s how ballplayers think.”

But wait. Try reminding Cardinal fans that it was in Brooklyn where Musial was first called Stan the Man. Musial is a member of the Brooklyn
Dodger Hall of Fame, in loving tribute to all the dents he put in the scoreboard at Ebbets Field. But the complaint cuts deeper than that.

The perception of Musial’s slighting is that he is too much a man of the heartland, a son of the Monongahela River valley of Pennsylvania who became a loyal resident of the Mound City, with no juicy scandals attached to him, a guy who played his harmonica in hospitals and for ladies who lunch in the suburbs.

No less an observer than Jim Murray, the Pulitzer Prize–winning sports columnist with the
Los Angeles Times
, once suggested that Musial was marginalized because he was a man of faith. Murray made this suggestion in January 1969, after 23 of 340 baseball writers somehow omitted Musial as he was overwhelmingly elected in the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. (Musial’s percentage was 93.24; by contrast, DiMaggio had needed three years to make the 75 percent needed for entry into the Hall.)

Days after the vote, Murray wrote a lovely column praising Musial, throwing in every apple-pie and peanut-butter-sandwich reference he could. Classic Jim Murray. Then there was this: “
Oh, it wasn’t unanimous. I guess that guy in New York with all the hair caught him coming out of church one day. A thing like that can hurt you in this generation.”

I couldn’t resist. Knowing Murray from a few press boxes, admiring him greatly, I took the liberty of dropping him a note saying that not only was I a New Yorker but, as he knew, I had long hair (it was, after all, 1969) and sometimes I even went to church. I piled it on by reminding Jim that Brooklyn was where Musial had gotten his nickname. I have long since misplaced Jim’s very nice reply, but it was something like,
Oh, geez, George, it was just one line in one column, and I was just trying to get through the day
. (Years later, as a columnist, I came to understand that level of desperation much more clearly.)

The oversight by the so-called fans in 1999 brought a response by guardians of the flame.

Dave Kindred felt much as Marty Marion did. Writing in the
Sporting News
, he said, “
If they’d traded uniforms, DiMaggio in St. Louis and Stan Musial in New York, Musial today would be regarded as the second-best
player of all time, raised to Babe Ruth’s side by the Yankee mythology machine.”

Kindred then submitted his starting lineup for what he called “One Game to Save All Civilization”: Morgan, Wagner, Ruth, Mantle, Gehrig, Schmidt, Musial, Bench, Koufax.