Stan Musial (24 page)

The Clipper’s childhood was certainly the most stable of the three stars, with his older brothers and sisters bringing in money, supporting one
another. The culture was secure—large Sunday dinners, a glass of homemade
vino
. In his early years as a Yankee, DiMaggio allowed photographers into his family life, and he was depicted perfectly attired in shirt and tie, admiring the long strands of Mamma’s spaghetti dangling from a fork. The al dente photojournalism stopped after he settled in New York and became a steak guy.

In the clubhouse, sometimes even in print, his nickname was “the Dago” or “the Big Dago” or “the Daig.” He married two actresses, neither Italian.

His family’s hard work around the wharf strengthened DiMaggio’s feeling that a man had to stand up for himself in this America. He adapted an immigrant suspicion—don’t let the bastards rip you off—toward Yankee management, as well he should have.

Williams was more ethnic than people imagined. He somehow managed to obscure the fact that his mother, a Salvation Army activist in downtown San Diego, was of Mexican descent. May Venzer (alternately spelled Venzor) Williams was out of the house most of the time, doing the Lord’s work, and the Kid, when he was actually a kid, went off to school without breakfast or lunch money. His father, a photographer, was pretty much out and about, so Williams, just like Musial, sought mentors in park supervisors and school coaches.

Sometimes young Teddy’s mom made him march with the Salvation Army band. “
I never wore a uniform or anything but I was right at that age when a kid starts worrying about what other kids might think, especially a gawky introverted kid like me, and I was just so ashamed. Today I’d be proud to walk with those people, because they are truly motivated,” Williams would say years later.

In the public eye, Williams came off as a flinty Anglo curmudgeon, more Welsh and English on his father’s side than Latino on his mother’s. Amazingly, in a time of blatant stereotypes, Williams’s teammates never called him “Mex” (as players would call the thoroughly gringo Keith Hernandez) and Williams’s good chums in the press never hooked his smoldering temper to stereotypical hot Latin blood.

The mother’s activism may have rubbed off on him, since Williams became the most politically outspoken of the Big Three, a Nixon Republican. He would also use the occasion of his Hall of Fame induction to speak out
for the inclusion of Negro League stars. Was his advocacy connected to his Mexican ancestry? He never said.

In this land of immigrants, it was not cool to be too ethnic, but Musial was the most comfortable with his ancestry. Known in the clubhouse as Stash, he told and laughed at Polish jokes for a long time and bragged about his mother’s East European specialties. At social gatherings he would demonstrate the polka steps he had learned at Falcon meetings back in Donora.

DIMAGGIO ARRIVED
in the majors first, in 1936, at twenty-one, missing Ruth but playing with Gehrig. In 1941 he hit in fifty-six consecutive games, a feat that may never be broken in a sport that now values the dinger, the long ball, at the expense of consistency.

Frank Robinson, perhaps the second most underrated player in history, right behind Musial, cites DiMaggio’s career totals of 361 home runs and 369 strikeouts as perhaps even more impressive than the streak—proof of DiMaggio’s stunning discipline mixed with power. DiMaggio hit .325 in his career, his right-handed power sometimes negated by the long veldt in left-center at Yankee Stadium, known as Death Valley. He was clearly the best fielder of the three, a graceful center fielder and base runner who almost never made a mistake.

Williams arrived in 1939 at the age of twenty—the Kid. In 1941 he hit .406—making him the last .400 hitter of the century and maybe forever. He would retire with 521 home runs and that stunning .344 average, tarnished only by the .200 in his sole World Series.

Was it Williams’s fault that the Sox won only one pennant in his time? In his retirement, he often boomed, “We’d have won a lot more pennants if we’d had that little SOB at shortstop,” meaning Phil Rizzuto. Sometimes Williams would even say that in the company of Johnny Pesky, one of his best friends, who happened to be the shortstop in three of those seasons. That was Teddy.

Musial measured up statistically with Williams and DiMaggio, with his .331 average and 475 home runs and his speed. He scored plenty of manager points for his willingness to move between first base, which was hard work, and left field, where he compensated for his weak arm. He became
the first Hall of Famer to play more than 1,000 games at each of two positions—1,896 in the outfield and 1,016 at first base. (Robin Yount, Ernie Banks, and Rod Carew all did it later.)

Williams and DiMaggio were strictly one-position guys, although Williams did pitch one inning for laughs, and DiMaggio did play one game at first base, decidedly not for laughs, when Casey Stengel tinkered with him in 1950.

All three were one-city guys, in the days before free agency, when players did not change teams voluntarily. The big three were rarely in the same place at the same time—five All-Star Games from 1946 through 1950, one World Series between Musial and DiMaggio, and one World Series between Musial and Williams. Stanley won both Series, if that means anything.

The leagues were more separate back then, so not many players could take the measure of the Big Three firsthand, but Ned Garver, a stylish right-hander who played for the Browns from 1948 into 1952, got to know all of them. In 2009, Garver was a very active eighty-four-year-old, splitting his time between Florida and his native Ohio.

“
For some reason, Ted Williams kind of adopted me,” Garver said. “One of the first times I pitched against the Red Sox, Williams was on third base. I was a rookie, and he acted like he was going to steal home. I mean, he danced up the line.”

The sight of Ted Williams making like Jackie Robinson down the third-base line would be priceless on video today, but Williams refrained from taking a mad dash home.

“I didn’t balk, but maybe I stopped off the mound,” Garver said. “He looked back at me and smiled. That made me feel great. And all through his career, you look at the interviews, he says I could throw my glove out there and get him out; he couldn’t pick up the spin off my slider.” Williams did hit 10 homers off Garver, the most by any hitter except Gus Zernial, who also hit 10.

One time Garver caused Williams to break his bat lunging at a slider; somehow the bat came into Garver’s possession, glued together—a memento of his duels with the Splinter.

Long into retirement, Garver brought the bat to a winter baseball gathering in Florida and asked his colleague to autograph it.

“
Just don’t let John Henry know I signed it,” Williams whispered to Garver, referring to his son, who controlled Ted’s autographs like a farmer with his cash cow.

For DiMaggio, Garver used the word “majestic,” just like the stadium in which Joe D. played. “
When he was taking batting practice at Yankee Stadium, a couple of us Browns, we’d just stop and watch. He was that way. But, by the same token, he did not communicate,” Garver added.

“I don’t remember ever saying anything to Joe on the field,” Garver added. “Joe was aloof.”

In 1951, Garver was selected to start the All-Star Game in Detroit and went to the park early “because I was so tickled being there.” One of the other early birds was DiMaggio, who was injured and would not play, and was therefore a bit more sociable than usual.

“He said to me, ‘I didn’t know you were going in the service,’ ” Garver said, “and I said, ‘I’m not going in the service,’ and he said, ‘You sure got a GI haircut,’ ” which was true, Garver said.

That was one of the rare times Garver saw DiMaggio unwind. Years later, he appeared at a card show and went out to dinner with DiMaggio and a few other players. A fan asked DiMaggio for his autograph, but the Clipper iced him.

“He didn’t let that guy interrupt him,” Garver recalled. “He just ran the show, you understand. He stayed in control.”

DiMaggio did not talk much to opponents, Garver said, which was normal in those days. “I watch TV, everybody talks to everybody else at first base and second base, holy crap. We didn’t do anything of that.

“We were taught, whoever was in the other uniform was your enemy. We were told not to talk to Yogi Berra, and if the mask was on the ground, you kicked dirt in it. It was an altogether different atmosphere. But Stan was a nice guy. I’m sure he communicated with guys in his league.”

Garver loved Stanley. On the rare occasion the Browns happened to be in town while the Cardinals had a game, Garver went out to inspect the Musial stance up close.

“I thought it was a handicap,” Garver said with a laugh. “I mean, to get down in that crouch, you’ve got to get into that coil. To me, it seems like you’re in too much of a position.”

Garver never really got to test himself against Musial. The only time they ever met was in 1951, when Garver started the All-Star Game.

“Jackie Robinson was next. Richie Ashburn was already on third base with one out and I didn’t want to mess with Musial. I didn’t have much confidence in striking him out. I pitched around him,” Garver recalled.

Ashburn scored the only run Garver would give up in three innings. Musial got his chance to hit in the fourth inning against Ed Lopat, a lefty with tantalizing stuff, and hit a home run.

Garver often wondered how he would have done against Musial.

“He was just a guy with no weakness. He would hit the ball where it was pitched, and you just hate to pitch to people like that.”

The friendship carried over after Garver moved on to the Tigers. After an exhibition against the Yankees in St. Pete, Garver was standing in the parking lot talking with some relatives when the Cardinals’ bus returned from their exhibition elsewhere.

“Stan saw me and walked over through the parking lot, through the crowd, to say hello to me,” Garver recalled. “I introduced him to my cousins, and he was so gracious to them that they never forgot it for the rest of their lives.”

PERSONALITIES ASIDE
, there was plenty of room to debate who was the best player of the big three.

Tyrus Raymond Cobb once declared that the game was better in his day—of course it was, bless his heart—but he did praise two players of 1949: Musial and Phil Rizzuto. Both of them, in Cobb’s eyes, had the bat control and discipline from when baseball was baseball, before World War I.

“
I don’t want to say anything that may distress Cobb, but I simply can’t go along with him,” Musial told the
World-Telegram and Sun
’s Joe Williams, a great admirer of his. “I don’t know when he ever saw me play and I must wonder how often he saw DiMaggio play.

“I’d take DiMaggio. He’s a whole ballplayer,” Musial continued. “I mean he can do everything. He can run, throw, field and hit. Williams is interested mostly in hitting. At least he was until this spring. I notice now
that he is working on his fielding. I think he wants to be known as a whole ballplayer, too.”

Joe Williams said DiMaggio had more power than Musial early in their careers, and clearly DiMaggio was superb on defense, but he rated Musial ahead of Ted Williams.

Musial met Cobb once. A few years after Cobb’s kind words to Joe Williams, Cobb called Musial at the team hotel in New York and invited him for breakfast. They mostly talked hitting, but Cobb’s biggest contribution was to change Musial’s diet. “Cobb said, ‘I see you use cream and sugar in your coffee. It would be better if you just used one or the other.’ So Stan gave up sugar,” said Musial’s former son-in-law, Tom Ashley.

The debate over the three players continued into their retirement. Bill White, a teammate in Musial’s later seasons, maintained that Musial was the best hitter he ever saw from the time he arrived in the majors in 1956—and remember that Willie Mays, in his prime, was a teammate.

White was a National League guy who wound up broadcasting for the Yankees, spending dizzying hours in the booth with Rizzuto, emphatically an American League guy.

In their long and loopy dialogues, White would praise Stan the Man, whereas Rizzuto would praise DiMaggio (presumably for the six World Series winners’ checks they earned together). Rizzuto also praised Williams, who had terrorized the Yankees in that era.

Freddy Schmidt, who was a teammate and remained a friend of Musial, saw Williams in the 1946 World Series and saw DiMaggio in spring training a few years. At the age of ninety-two and clearheaded, Schmidt picked DiMaggio.

“
I only faced him in spring training, but you could see he was polished. And the other players knew it,” Schmidt said in 2008.

Income was not an easy indicator of their abilities because DiMaggio came along three years before Williams, who came along three years before Musial. As of 1949, the Clipper and the Kid were both making around $100,000, while Musial was making half that.

“Well, St. Louis isn’t New York and I guess it isn’t Boston, either,” Musial said that year, probably knowing that his six-figure salary would arrive eventually. And if not, he was a businessman. He would catch up.

ONE THING
the Big Three had in common was that all three were subject to itchy trade impulses. Musial blew up a proposed trade for Robin Roberts in 1956. And nine years earlier,
in April 1947, Tom Yawkey, the owner of the Red Sox, woke up with the vague recollection of having traded Williams for DiMaggio a few hours earlier in Toots Shor’s. Yawkey rang up Dan Topping of the Yankees, and they agreed to forget all about it. Alka-Seltzers all around.

That late-night trade would have given fans a laboratory experiment, since both DiMaggio and Williams would have moved to parks ideally structured for them.

“If we had traded Williams for DiMaggio, do you have any doubt at all that the Yankees still would have won those pennants and we still would have finished second?” asked Joe Cronin, the Red Sox’ manager through 1947 and general manager through 1958.

Given the proximity of Athens and Sparta, Williams and DiMaggio could not help being in contention with each other—the kind of personal comparison Musial hardly had to deal with in far-off St. Louis.