Stan Musial (3 page)

No DiMaggio. No Williams.

T
IM MCCARVER
was called up in the summer of 1961, nineteen years old and filled with warnings from his father. One of them was: “You don’t want to lose your money gambling.”

Naturally, on his first road trip, McCarver gravitated to the lounge in the back of the old DC-6B the Cardinals used to charter, which had a card table for about eight players. A rookie could lose his four-dollar-a-day meal money very quickly.

Among the Cardinals who would slide into the semicircle of seats was Stan Musial, now forty-one years old.

“Stan was a horrible poker player,” McCarver recalled. “He’d admit that today. Horrible.”

If Stanley needed a six, and three of them had already been drawn, “most good players would have folded,” McCarver said. “But not Stan. He would get the last six and he won money off it. Guys would laugh about it. That’s just Stan.”

“It always stood out that if you were against Stan, you were going to lose,” McCarver added.

Musial could not explain his formula for poker just as he could never explain his corkscrew batting stance which set him off from almost every batter who ever lived. He just, ha-ha, did it.

“Jack Buck used to laugh about it,” McCarver said. “I never played golf with Stan, but Jack said Stan would mishit the ball and the ball would hit the flag and fall next to the hole.”

Just like Yogi, I said.

“Yeah, exactly,” McCarver said. “God’s chosen people. Just like that.”

I remembered flying with the Yankees or Mets on charters in the early sixties, when the weather grew turbulent and we were slipping and sliding somewhere over a major American city, wondering how the pilot was going to find the airport. I would glance around the DC-6B and see the Mount Rushmore profile of Casey Stengel or the distinctive features of Yogi Berra and I would be reassured that nothing bad could ever happen to either of them, and therefore nothing bad could happen to anybody lucky enough to be in their company. Apparently, it was the same with Stan the Man.

“Anytime Stan Musial was around, you got the feeling that everything was gonna be all right,” McCarver said. “And there are very few people that you run into in life that you can say that about. A man who can captivate a room without even anyone knowing that he’s there, you could feel him in a room and, and a lot of great men I hear are like that. But with Musial it was very, very special.”

One time the Cardinals played in Philadelphia on a Sunday and headed back to St. Louis after the game. With a day off Monday, Musial had permission to go to New York to be honored at a charity dinner.

“Guys were saying, ‘Stan’s not on the flight, uh, I’m not too sure I want to get on the flight.’ And sure enough, we take off and you could look out the left wing and see the propeller. It’s kind of a frightening sight when you’re five thousand feet off the ground and your propeller’s not going.

“Well, guys are saying, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have gotten on this flight, Musial wasn’t on the flight.’ We had to return to the airport, they repaired the plane or they got a new plane, I forget which, but the fact that Stan wasn’t on it meant that things weren’t all right with the Cardinals as a ball club.”

McCarver thought about it some more and suggested that Musial’s lucky touch stemmed from being a churchgoer.

“If you believe in the afterlife strongly, you know that he is one of God’s chosen people,” McCarver said. “And his whole life’s been that way.”

McCarver paused and added:

“Never underestimate Stan. As long as I’ve known him, I’ve learned. Never underestimate him. That’s a serious mistake.”

S
OMETHING WAS
causing people to downsize Stanley. In 1986, Bill James wrote:

The number crunchers, the baseball geeks, professional or amateur, put Musial much higher than the fans did. In the computer age, baseball surely has too many newfangled indices for measuring ballplayers. Stanley did not need printouts of pitchers’ tendencies; he knew what they were going to throw. Billy Martin won a lot of games without computer printouts of statistics. Hell, Billy would say (no doubt flinging the printed report against his office wall), he knew all that damn stuff.

Still, sometimes it is helpful to walk on the wild side into the dense world of baseball stats. For example,
Baseball-Reference.com
came up
with several new ways to compare hitters.
One was the Black Ink test, first formulated by Bill James, which awards points for leading the league in major hitting categories. After the 2009 season, Musial was behind only Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. Another comparison was through the
so-called Gray Ink test, which ranks players by appearances in the top ten in various batting categories. In this one, Musial was third, behind Cobb and Henry Aaron.

James himself contributed to Musial’s slippage. Once upon a time, James listed Musial as the best left fielder of all time, but in 2000 James somehow flipped Musial with Williams. Had Teddy Ballgame been working on his fielding? Had he suddenly begun hitting to left field?

James’s revision came before Barry Bonds became the all-time leader in home runs in one season and in a career. It also came before Bonds became suspected of using steroids during the Balco scandals. Bonds was so good, with or without the juice, that he was competition for Stanley and Teddy, but his dirty image is going to hold him back for a long time.

In 2001, James ranked the top one hundred players in history, starting with Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Willie Mays, Oscar Charleston, Ty Cobb, Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, Walter Johnson, Josh Gibson, and Musial.

By putting Musial in this company, James certainly rebutted the apocrypha that Musial is ignored because he was not all that interesting. All I can say is that the fans who saw Stan Musial play—
play
being the operative word—in New York are convinced he was one of the best players who ever wore a gray road uniform in Ebbets Field or the Polo Grounds. Or anywhere.

Fact was, in Musial’s first full nineteen seasons, the Cardinals visited New York and Brooklyn for eleven games in each ballpark each summer, mostly day games, which created ample attention to number 6 in the next day’s newspapers, of which there were nearly a dozen. Because of the great history of the Cardinals, the team itself was the subject of numerous articles during spring training, particularly since the Cards trained in the same sleepy town as the Yankees. New York–based columnists would take themselves over to Al Lang Field and interview that great player and most accommodating of superstars, Stan Musial. All season, every season, there was a forest’s worth of articles.

Woody Allen, growing up in Brooklyn, loved the writing of Jimmy Cannon,

the sports columnist with the good old
New York Post
back in the fifties. Decades later, Allen could recall Cannon raving about Musial’s “
serene dependability.”

Many other odes to Musial were written by New Yorkers and printed in
Sport
magazine, based in New York:

• “Mr. Musial Marches On,” by Arthur Daley (sports columnist,
  New York Times)
  , 1947
  
• “The Man: Stan Musial Is Baseball’s No. 1 Citizen,” by Roger Kahn (later the author of
  The Boys of Summer
  , about the Brooklyn Dodgers), 1958
  
• “Stan Musial’s Last Game,” by Arnold Hano (New York– and California-based writer), 1964
  

The New York papers could not get enough of Musial. In 1951, Musial was hired by the
World-Telegram and Sun
to write a daily critique of the Dodgers-Giants playoff and the Yankees-Giants World Series. Under Musial’s byline was his identification: “Baseball’s Greatest Player.”

Musial also “covered” the 1953 World Series for the Newspaper Enterprise Association and was identified in the
World-Telegram and Sun
as “Six Time Batting Champ.” He was treated as visiting royalty by Joe Williams of the
Telly
, godded up by Red Smith of the
New York Herald Tribune
, lionized by Frank Graham of the
Journal American
, flattered by Jimmy Cannon (Woody Allen’s favorite) of the
Journal American
and later the
Post
, and adulated by Joe Reichler of the Associated Press.

“Musial must come perilously close to being the best-liked ballplayer of his generation,” wrote Arthur Daley of the
New York Times
in his August 16, 1962 piece, “Salute to a Man.”

After coping with the moody DiMaggio and the irascible Williams, writers adored Musial as a player and accessible superstar. Sports columnists are easy. We love stars who talk to us. That simple. Of course, most fans in St. Louis did not know how much ink Stanley received in Big Town because, in those pre-Internet, pre-cable years (some of us call them the good old days), they were, most of the time, going about their business in St. Louis and did not know how well Musial was treated way out there on the East Coast. But Musial knew. All I’m saying is, don’t blame us.

MUSIAL SHOWS
up at the very core of his sport. Not long ago I was writing a short history of baseball, trying to jam nearly two hundred years of the American game into sixty thousand words, from the dubious myth of Abner Doubleday to the suspect muscles of Barry Bonds.

Somehow, the way writers do, I meandered into a prologue about teaching my grandson how to hit during an impromptu dusk lesson on his family’s front lawn somewhere out there in America. Having coached youth baseball when my son was little, I always tried to turn youngsters into the coiled Musial stance. Start back there and then hit the ball. I realized Stanley knew exactly what he was doing.

After doing this little riff on Stanley’s stance, I found myself coming back to Musial in the main narrative, not just because I had idolized him as a kid but because of his links to the past and the future.

Almost by accident, I postulated that Musial was the classic example of baseball’s six degrees of separation. He was the heart of the game. He had personal connections backward to Branch Rickey and George Sisler and Dickie Kerr; he matched his contemporaries DiMaggio and Williams; when Jackie Robinson arrived in 1947, Musial let everybody know that he fully intended to show up for work; his batting stance was once used as a teaching tool for a young Japanese prospect named Sadaharu Oh.

He also met every president from Truman through Obama, except, for no particular reason, Dwight D. Eisenhower, for whom he apparently voted twice. Over time, Musial has come to be seen as the epitome of the Eisenhower years, from 1953 through 1960, a time now ridiculed for its—what? Complacency? Stability? Normalcy? In this age when yappers spout nuttiness over the airwaves and nihilists fly airplanes into buildings, normalcy is looking good.

In kinder times, Musial even united political opponents. For many years, Victor Gold, a prominent Republican, and
Frank Mankiewicz, a prominent Democrat, ran the Stan Musial Society of Washington–Cardinal fans in the capital. Sometimes Musial showed up for the banquet, and played his bipartisan harmonica well into the night.

Musial is not the first or last public figure to suffer from the short attention span of the vox populi. Even presidents come and go in the power ratings.

With his deceptively transparent smile, Eisenhower—as in “I Like Ike”—won two elections handily, but after he was out of office Ike was often depicted as a mediocre fuddy-duddy.

Early in the twenty-first century, Ike began making a comeback. To demonstrate the contrast to a certain inarticulate president of more recent vintage, David Letterman displayed videos of Ike’s clearheaded warning about the “military-industrial complex.” Ike was looking better all the time. Maybe Stan the Man’s time would come around again.

Artists are also susceptible to shifting tastes. I asked Michael Kimmelman, the arts correspondent of the
New York Times
, to name an artist whose career is comparable to that of Stan the Man in terms of losing critical or public acclaim after his peak. Kimmelman suggested Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), the French painter of quotidian lunch and midday sunlight and his wife in her boudoir.

“
It has taken a while, but the art world has come to its own ‘a-ha’ moment with Bonnard,” Kimmelman wrote in 2006. “His self-effacement, his reticence, his inclination to see both sides of an issue and to let others perceive him as painting away in his little house, indifferent to the debates of his day, permitted critics after his death, especially those in Picasso’s competitive and devouring orbit, to dismiss him without ever grasping what he had tried to accomplish.”

Asked to name a performing artist who had been somewhat ignored and then rediscovered, Kimmelman—himself a concert pianist—came up with Dinu Lipatti (1917–1950), the Romanian pianist who died at thirty-three of Hodgkin’s disease. I have heard a couple of Lipatti’s clear, haunting performances on vinyl; they give the impression of a man who senses he does not have much time.

“He’s the pianist’s pianist and remains known to the pros and aficionados,” Kimmelman wrote to me. “Both he and Bonnard are stylish, understated virtuosos of beauty.”

Composers? I come up with Antonin Dvořák (1841–1904), so easy to stereotype with his love of Czech and American folk music, but as a dozen CDs in my collection confirm, Dvořák is layered, lush, diverse. He endures. Sam Cooke, Dave Brubeck, Nina Simone, Johnny Cash—every generation needs to discover, and rediscover, the old masters.