Stan Musial (20 page)

Williams then grounded out to Schoendienst, stationed perfectly halfway into right field—a portent of what was to come.

The Sox won the first game, 3–2, on Rudy York’s homer in the tenth inning off Howard Pollet. But the Cardinals tied the Series the next day as the left-handed Brecheen allowed four singles in a 3–0 victory.

Facing good left-handers, with a sore right elbow, Williams was over-compensating.

“
Once he missed a third-strike screwball with such a violent swing that his bat flew like a javelin into the visitors’ dugout,” Musial wrote.

The series moved to Boston on October 9, and Williams broke his refusal to acknowledge the Boudreau shift by plopping the ball down the third-base line and beating it out. The headline in one Boston newspaper said, “Williams Bunts.” That annoyed the Kid, too.

In the same game, Musial wandered off second base and was promptly picked off. He had no excuse, just lost his concentration. The Sox won, 4–0, as York belted a three-run homer and Boo Ferriss pitched a complete game.

The Cardinals won the fourth game, 12–3, tying a Series record with 20 hits, four each by Slaughter, Garagiola, and Kurowski.

But Boston went ahead again on October 11 as Joe Dobson beat the Cardinals, 6–3, and hit Slaughter on the elbow. Doc Weaver soaked the elbow in Epsom salts on the train ride home, but Dr. Hyland warned Slaughter against playing, for fear of doing permanent damage to the elbow.

“
If I’m breathing, I’m all right to play,” Slaughter said.

Before the sixth game, Slaughter tested his elbow with a few tosses as the Sox watched attentively. “I thought I had him out of there,” Dobson said later, respectfully. Slaughter played, and the Cardinals drew even with a 4–1 victory behind Brecheen.

After a day off, the teams took the field for an epic seventh game that is still being dissected, more than six decades later.

Still hurt, still stubborn, Williams was trying to crank the ball over the short porch at Sportsman’s Park. He hit two long flies early, but they were chased down by Moore and Walker. Dickson retired eighteen of nineteen Red Sox from the second to the seventh inning.

In the eighth inning, Dickson gave up two hits and was replaced by Brecheen, who was feeling sick as he sat on the bench, but told nobody.

DiMaggio hit a double to drive in two runs to tie the game, but injured his hamstring racing to second and had to come out.

Brecheen now had to face Williams, with two outs and DiMaggio’s pinch runner on second base. This was a chance for the Kid to make his statement, a chance to live up to his self-image as the greatest hitter in history. Williams tipped a Brecheen screwball, splitting a bare finger on the right hand of Garagiola, who had to come out of the game. Then Williams popped up to Schoendienst to end the rally, with the game still tied.

In the bottom of the eighth, the Boston manager, Joe Cronin, sent in thirty-six-year-old Bob Klinger, who had not pitched since September 19. Years later, some of the Sox would reveal they had been lobbying Cronin not to use Klinger, but it was too late. He was in the game.

Slaughter, playing with an injury, just like Williams, then hit a single to center. The next two batters made outs without advancing Slaughter from first.

That brought up Harry Walker, who had fought his way through the
killing fields of Germany and organized rudimentary baseball games on Hitler’s tainted marching grounds in Nuremberg. Back in civilian life, Walker—counseled by his rival and brother, Dixie—had ignored orders from Dyer to pull the ball for more power.
Be true to your stroke
, the Dodger had told his Cardinal brother.

Klinger, a righty with a sinkerball, got a 2–1 count on Walker, who followed his brother’s advice and stroked a hit over the shortstop into left-center field.

Slaughter, running on the pitch, raced around second as DiMaggio’s replacement, Leon Culberson, chased the ball from straightaway center field. (Only after Culberson’s death in 1989 did the gentlemanly DiMaggio admit he had been agonizing on the bench, watching his substitute far out of position for Walker. DiMaggio had feared what would happen next.)

Slaughter’s dash had a history to it: in the first game of the Series, Slaughter had been held up by coach Mike Gonzalez and had vowed he would not be held up again. Thus, when Culberson bobbled the ball momentarily and then threw toward Pesky, the cutoff man, Slaughter was prepared.

“That gave me the first inkling of scoring,” Slaughter said years later. “I knew John would not be expecting it and I knew I had to slow up just enough to decoy him into relaxing as I headed for third.”

“My God, I thought he was crazy,” Gonzalez said. “Who knows—maybe he is. But who cares?”

“
Gonzalez couldn’t have stopped Enos with a gun,” Garagiola said. And neither could Pesky.

As Pesky received the ball, Slaughter barreled around third base and headed home. First reports said Pesky double-pumped as he turned toward home, but these were naked-eye impressions without modern television replays. Films showed minimal hesitation on Pesky’s part.

Country Slaughter ran—and ran—and slid home as catcher Roy Partee dove ten feet up the line chasing Pesky’s hurried throw. The run was the doing of Slaughter and Walker, but every World Series game has to have a goat as well as a hero, so Pesky was elected. Forever.

“
I’ve looked at those films a thousand times,” Pesky said later. “They said I took a snooze, but I can’t see where I hesitated. Slaughter was at second when the ball was hit. He was twenty feet from home plate when I
turned. I can’t blame anybody. Those things have happened to better ballplayers than me. I guess you have to live with it.”

The official scorer took some of the romance out of Slaughter’s dash by calling Walker’s hit a double. The play would look better in posterity if the box score said Slaughter scored on a single, which essentially he did, with Walker taking second on the throw.

Either way, Slaughter scored—“the run heard ’round the world,” Musial called it, pre-dating the immortal phrase for Bobby Thomson’s pennant-winning homer in 1951.

In the ninth inning, the bloodless infield Leo Durocher had belittled held off the Red Sox. The wobbly Brecheen gave up two hits, but Kurowski and Marion collaborated on a force at second. Musial caught a foul pop near the dugout for the second out. Then Schoendienst, the man with the bad eye from the CCC accident in his teens, controlled a tricky grounder that threatened to roll up his forearm, and backhanded the ball to Mr. Shortstop for the final out.

The great game in the great Series in the great season was over. Not many people in St. Louis were thinking about the war as horns honked and bells chimed and men threw fedoras in the air.

In the rollicking clubhouse, Garagiola, the class clown, his split finger in bandages, was chirping: “
I’m out for the season! I’m out for the season!” In the middle of the joy, Musial was surrounded by equals, by normalcy, just one of the gang.

LESS THAN
two hours later, ten Nazi leaders were hanged, after trials for war crimes, in Nuremberg, where Harry Walker had been. The Nazis walked up thirteen steps to dual scaffolds “in an old gymnasium, used the previous weekend by American security guards for a basketball game,” as journalist John McGuire wrote fifty years later. “The bodies were removed at 10:34 p.m., St. Louis time, as wild celebrations raged throughout the city over the world championship.”

WHEN THE
Sox arrived in Union Station, Williams stumbled to the private car and slumped into a seat, but forgot to pull the blinds. Hundreds of
fans were standing on the platform, separated by glass, a few inches away, gaping at one of the great hitters in baseball as he sobbed.

Williams had no way of knowing he would never get back to the Series. All he knew was that he’d gotten five singles in twenty-five at-bats and driven in one run. The injured elbow? He was fine, dammit.

The self-styled Colonel Egan would devise a list of Williams’s alleged failures in “the ten biggest games of his career.” Everything the Kid did was larger than life.

Stanley had six hits in twenty-seven at-bats in the Series, but they included four doubles, a triple, and four runs batted in—and that one embarrassing pickoff in the third game. That gave him a highly ordinary batting average of .256 with one home run in twenty-three World Series games. The Cardinals had won three of four World Series in Musial’s first four full seasons. As far as he could see, he would have more chances to do better.

Yet nobody in his adopted city, nobody in the great breadth of Cardinals radio, ever devised a list of Stanley’s failures. Nobody would ever write or shout that he was not a clutch hitter or a team man.

“I hadn’t contributed much, batting just .222, but in my head-to-head test against Williams, I had the edge,” he would say about that series.

Because both parks were unusually small, the gate receipts were correspondingly low. Williams, known for his generosity to friends, would sign over his losing share of $2,141 to Johnny Orlando, the clubhouse attendant.

Full shares for the winning Cardinals would be $3,742, enough for a down payment on a postwar house for the Musials—and just low enough to draw a rare flash of sarcasm from Stanley, the good citizen.

A
FTER THE
last out of the 1946 Series, Musial did not have much time to celebrate. He rushed out to California, where Bob Feller had organized a barnstorming tour between white major-leaguers and the Satchel Paige all-stars from the Negro League. To Feller’s credit, he was paying everybody the same, $100 per game, and treating the players well, chartering two DC-3s to transport them around California.

The World Series ended on the afternoon of October 15 (that classic seventh game, injuries and pitching changes and all, took exactly two hours and seventeen minutes). The next day Musial was in Los Angeles, in front of 22,577 fans, going hitless in two at-bats. (
It was not the first time Musial had faced Paige: he’d hammered a home run off him in a similar barnstorming game in Sportsman’s Park right after his meteoric 1941 season, on a day when blacks were allowed to sit anywhere for a rare breakdown in the normally segregated seating.)

After the 1946 season, the public got a glimpse of the inner Mother Jones in Stanley: making a speech at the Dapper Dan Dinner in Pittsburgh over the winter,
Musial said he loved barnstorming for Feller because he made three times more money with Rapid Robert than he did in the World Series. Musial may have been exaggerating, but he managed to annoy some of the owners, who began pressuring Feller to cut down on the barnstorming. The idea of players making money from their baseball skills outside the season made the owners very nervous. They were operating on the assumption that they owned the players in perpetuity—and that included the off-season.

However, the players were getting restive, even Musial, who was not
known as a radical in any form. He certainly knew about labor strife from growing up in Donora, one of the last steel towns to accept unions long after the 1892 Homestead Strike. His associations with businessmen in Pennsylvania and St. Louis had conditioned him to think of himself as an individual entrepreneur, but he also saw himself as part of the trade or profession of major-league ballplayer. And 1946 had been a landmark year in labor relations.

The end of the war had caused players to question their contracts with the owners. Returning service veterans were legally entitled to their old jobs, but players were still bound to their clubs by the so-called reserve clause, which had been approved in 1922 by the United States Supreme Court.
The Court had declined to change the decision by lower courts that clubs operated as individual local businesses and that baseball was not an interstate business, despite being the national pastime. That non-ruling by the highest court was still in effect when the players came home from the service.

One of the great curiosities about baseball is that its players mostly came from the working class, like Musial, yet when they got to the major leagues they fell prey to something like the Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages identify with their captors. After having fought to save their country, however, some players began asking questions.

“
I think a lot of these ballplayers, after they came back from the service … had to check the contracts they’d played with years ago, and all this came to a boiling point,” Musial said.

The players hired a Harvard-educated lawyer, Robert Francis Murphy, who proposed a players union—he called it the American Baseball Guild—that would demand a minimum salary of $6,500, arbitration of all salary disputes, and a player’s right to half the price in the event he was sold to another club.

Murphy’s efforts were blocked by the owners, who worked on the players’ fears and their patriotism. As Rickey told the writer Arthur Mann: “You couldn’t get enough ballplayers to agree on any one thing to pull a strike. It’s bogey-man stuff.”

Murphy did not make significant inroads with the Cardinals, but in Pittsburgh, one of the stronger union towns, players scheduled a vote
about ratifying the guild.
On June 7, 1946, the Pirates’ manager, Frankie Frisch, made out an alternative lineup with himself and coach Honus Wagner ready to be activated for a game against the Giants. In the clubhouse, Rip Sewell and Jimmy Brown, both from southern mill towns, urged teammates to take the field.

Ralph Kiner, later a Hall of Fame slugger and venerated broadcaster for the Mets, was a rookie on the Pirates. Kiner recalled Al Lopez, then finishing up his catching career, advising Kiner, “You don’t know enough about this, so don’t get wound up in this thing.”

The players voted 20–16 in favor of striking, but short of the two-thirds needed for it to pass. The game was on and the public was spared the spectacle of Frisch and Wagner back in action.

After the game, Brown was roughed up by two men as he walked outside Forbes Field. Was he pushed around because of his anti-strike posture in the clubhouse? “Oh, positively,” said William O. DeWitt, the owner of the St. Louis Browns.