Stan Musial (33 page)

With those back muscles and reflexes, Musial could have been a contender, at the very least. But there is no record of him ever hitting anybody.

Musial also displayed righteous anger in New York in the mid-fifties on a cab ride up to the Polo Grounds. One of his teammates noticed a Jewish name on the cabbie’s placard and starting speaking in a crude version of a Jewish accent. Musial told the teammate to cease and desist, making for a rather uncomfortable ride. When they got to the ballpark, the teammate tried to pay for the ride, as if to make amends, but Musial insisted on paying, and then he warned the teammate to never get in a cab with him. Ever. But there were no fisticuffs, and certainly no shin kicking.

That little episode outside Wrigley goes down in history as one of nature’s mysteries, but affirmative in its own way. Stanley was human. Thank goodness for that.

A
FTER YEARS
of unstable ownership, St. Louis finally got an owner with deep pockets and civic stature. Gussie Busch, from the old brewery family, bought the Cardinals for $7.8 million on February 20, 1953.

“
My ambition,” Busch said, “is, whether hell or high water, to get a championship baseball team for St. Louis before I die.”

Fortunately, Busch had good genes for longevity, if not for patience. His arrival was also a sign that the Cardinals had outlasted their longtime landlords, the Browns. Bill Veeck had tried to reach the large but passive segment of Browns fans by hiring icons like Rogers Hornsby and Marty Marion as managers and indulging in gimmicks like having a midget pinch-hit. But Veeck was forced out after 1952 and the Browns moved to Baltimore in 1954. Meanwhile, the Cardinals and their fans could count on the deep pockets, if short fuse, of August Anheuser Busch Jr.

Known as Gussie to the public and Gus to friends, Busch was used to getting his own way; the French expression
droit de seigneur
(the right of the lord) comes to mind. He would wed four times, produce ten children, and generally demand his way in beer, baseball, and life itself. He had a lot of toys, now including a baseball team.

Joe Garagiola recalled Busch and George Vierheller, the longtime director of the St. Louis Zoo, playing pepper, with Stanley tapping the ball “so softly that if it had been an egg he wouldn’t have cracked the shell,” Garagiola said, and Schoendienst “playing like he was the bodyguard.”

Normally, the players bet sodas when they frolicked at pepper. Tommy
Glaviano, a Cardinal infielder, watched the quartet and shouted, “Hey, Stan, what are you playing for, a keg of beer or a tiger?”

Playing pepper was the least of Busch’s activities. As a young adult, to cheer up his ailing father, Busch once rode his horse right up the central stairway of the family mansion, straight into the bedroom where his paterfamilias was confined.

And on the day Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the thirty-four-year-old scion drove an old-fashioned beer wagon straight down Pennsylvania Avenue to deliver a keg or two to the White House. President Roosevelt’s support of repeal earned the permanent loyalty of Busch, who said, “I’ll be damned if I’ll bite the hand that fed me.”

He had so much fun making his beer run in the nation’s capital that he began hitching the ornate beer wagons to eight-horse teams of powerful Clydesdales, which were quartered in handsome stables at the family estate, Grant’s Farm.

The stables were air-conditioned; the clubhouse at Sportsman’s Park was not.

In later years, for special games, Busch would hitch up the Clydesdales and drive the wagon onto the artificial turf of the second Busch Stadium, entering the field to the jingle-jangle tune of “Here Comes the King,” which sounded like an old Bavarian drinking song but was merely an advertising ditty created for his product.

When Good King August waved his white cowboy hat, he gave the impression of a powerful landowner inspecting the serfs. Then the grounds-keepers would come out with shovels and brooms to clean up after the Clydesdales, after which Ozzie Smith would trot out and perform his stylized back flip at shortstop. Play ball!

From the beginning, Busch became one of the signature owners in American sport, inflicting his outsized will and corporate stamp on the Cardinals, giving them more operating capital than they’d ever had before, even in their best of years.

He tried to rename Sportsman’s Park for the company’s leading product—Budweiser—but that did not sit well with the commissioner, so he called it Busch Stadium, which at least was the family name.

Revamping the team itself was a bit more difficult. On April 11, 1954, the Cardinals traded Enos Slaughter to the Yankees for outfielder Bill Virdon,
in an attempt to get younger and quicker. This was a wake-up call for Musial: Slaughter was only four years older than he was.

Musial hit .337 in 1953 and .330 in 1954 as the Cardinals finished sixth, twenty-five games behind Willie Mays’s Giants. In 1955, the Dodgers won their first World Series and the Cardinals finished seventh. Despite his homer to win the All-Star Game and his .319 average with 33 homers, Musial would call it “
The Year of the Big Minus.” Mandolin-playing Doc Weaver, who had spooked the Yankees with voodoo signs during the 1942 World Series and helped create the pension plan, died of a heart attack.

After playing for Billy Southworth and Eddie Dyer in his first eight seasons, Musial began to experience a more typical turnover. Marty Marion did not work out in 1951. Eddie Stanky, Leo Durocher’s intense protégé, lasted from 1952 into 1955. Harry Walker took over in the middle of 1955 but pushed the Cards with midday drills in the summer heat, and when the team finished seventh, Walker was not retained.

In 1956 the Cardinals brought in Fred Hutchinson, the burly and competitive former Detroit Tigers pitcher, who once punched out the overhead bulbs in the corridor behind the dugout after being taken out of a game. He was, in the vernacular, a ballplayer’s manager.

However, the new general manager in 1956 was not a favorite of the players. Frank Lane, known as “Trader Lane,” never met the man he could not dispatch somewhere.

Lane’s first act was to get rid of the two cardinals (two male cardinals, to be precise, although their cheery togetherness did not seem to be the reason Lane scuttled them) that had been perched on a bat on the front of the home jersey since 1922. The fans grumbled all year, so the two birds made a comeback in 1957. But the fashion note was a warning: this man would get rid of anybody or anything.

Bob Broeg, Musial’s confidant, once described Lane’s need to trade people as almost lascivious, like a sexual charge. “The thrill of the trade was paramount,” Broeg said. “It’s ridiculous, but, you know, the guy, when he was under restraint, he was great,” Broeg added.

Lane’s next move was to send Virdon to the Pirates on May 17, 1956, thereby leaving a huge gap in center field for the rest of the decade. Athletes are pragmatic out of need. Their survival depends on knowing what
is real, what works. If they think a manager or general manager is a wrongo, they tune him out.

Lane pronounced that Stan and Red were among the five “untouchables” on the Cardinals, but he undoubtedly sensed that the core of the team did not respect him. Schoendienst had the impression that Lane could not actually see what his players were doing on the field.

“
We would be taking batting practice and he’d hear the crack of the bat and say things like, ‘There’s a fine ballplayer,’ ” Red would write in his autobiography. “He had no idea who was batting but he was able to get away with statements like that.”

Lane knew only one way to make the Cardinals his team. With the trading deadline of June 15 approaching, Musial received a call from Biggie, who said the
Sporting News
was
investigating a rumor that Lane was preparing to trade Musial to the Phillies for Robin Roberts.

After talking to Musial,
Biggie promptly called a brewery official and said, “Well, if it’s true, I’ve got news for you. The kid won’t report. He’ll quit.” The “kid” always maintained that Biggie had acted on his own, but this is surely another example of Stanley’s division of labor: he did the hitting, and Biggie did the phoning.

The brewery walls quivered as the news worked its way up toward Gussie Busch. Meanwhile, Musial fumed. He and Red lived a few blocks from each other, often driving together to the ballpark, which allowed Lil and Mary to drive together later.

“
I’m picking up Stan this particular day, and he comes out of the house, you know, and I could see there’s something wrong with him,” Schoendienst recalled. “He wasn’t the same old Stan. And I says, I thought maybe they had a big argument or something at home. And I says, ‘What? What’s wrong, Stan?’ And, and he says, ‘That darn Frank Lane, he wants to trade me, and I ain’t going,’ he said, like that.”

Red tried to cheer Stan by saying Busch would never allow the trade.

“That’s one time I’ve seen Stan upset. And he couldn’t understand why he wanted to trade him,” Red recalled. “He says, ‘Well I’m not gonna go,’ and he says, ‘I’m gonna talk to Mr. Busch—to the boss.’ So evidently he did.”

Musial and Busch were friendly, socializing together in Florida and St.
Louis. The impulsive beer baron had not hired Trader Lane to send away the popular star who helped sell beer all over the country.

After a day or two, Lane put out a statement that said: “August A. Busch, Jr., and myself are in complete accord that Musial will not be traded.”

What the statement did not say was that Lane was finished trading. He had to trade people. Otherwise, what was the point?

Red began to wonder: if Trader Lane could not get his charge by trading Musial, whom could he trade? The answer was suddenly apparent: “I guess I’ll be next, because that’s the way Lane was. Trader Lane. And I was. I was gone the next day.”

On June 14, 1956, Lane traded Schoendienst to the Giants, theoretically to get a shortstop, Alvin Dark, who was well past his prime. Red found out about it over the radio before Lane’s secretary bothered to call Red’s house with the news.

Mary Schoendienst, a St. Louis girl, wrote a letter to the papers thanking the fans for their support of Red, and people from Red’s hometown in southern Illinois never changed the road sign:
WELCOME TO GERMANTOWN, HOME OF RED SCHOENDIENST, ST. LOUIS CARDINALS
. They must have known something.

Musial’s memory of that awful day: “The rest of us got the word that Red had been traded just as we were boarding a train out of St. Louis for an eastern trip. It was the saddest day of my career. I slammed the door to my train berth shut and didn’t open it for a long time.”

“
Yeah, boy, he didn’t like that at all,” Red said. “I didn’t either.”

Long after Red was sacrificed, Broeg finally found the nerve to ask Stanley if he actually would have quit baseball rather than be traded.

“Musial just laughed,” Broeg recalled. “He says, ‘I wouldn’t report? I got to report, you know?’ ” Broeg said Musial would have been “crushed” to go to another team, but as Broeg put it, “He wasn’t gonna walk away from his career.”

Red was pretty miserable in New York, but the trade worked out for him. A year and a day after leaving the Cardinals, he was traded to Milwaukee, and soon some of the Braves would sidle up to Musial at the batting cage and whisper that his buddy was even better than they could have imagined. Red was the missing link, the professional who helped Henry
Aaron and Eddie Mathews win pennants in 1957 and 1958. Schoendienst then contracted tuberculosis, fought his way back, and rejoined the Cardinals in 1961. By that time, Trader Lane was long gone.

One consequence of the Schoendienst trade was that Busch brought the hammer down on Lane, making him clear all trades with the brewery. But Lane was nothing if not brazen, seeking an extension of his contract. Busch clarified matters by sending Lane a telegram containing three little words: “Kiss my ass.”

Lane took the hint and moved on after the 1957 season. While working in Cleveland, he would trade Rocky Colavito, one of the most popular players in the history of that franchise. He would even trade managers in 1960, swapping Joe Gordon for Jimmy Dykes, still the only time two managers have ever been traded.

Stanley was not perceived as a vengeful man, but he had his moments. In 1967, he would inherit Lane’s old job as general manager, with the prodigal Red as the manager. One day the two old friends were sitting up front in the team bus that was about to leave the hotel when Trader Lane hopped on board, hoping to hitch a ride to the ballpark, a courtesy sometimes extended to baseball friends.

“
I never saw Stan move so fast in my life,” Red said. “He sprang up from his seat and walked to where Lane was sitting. ‘Get the hell out of here,’ he ordered Lane. ‘Get off our bus.’ ”

Red added: “I wish Stan, or somebody else, had the authority to tell Lane what to do in earlier times. Then maybe I wouldn’t have been headed to New York becoming a member of the Giants.”

AT LEAST
Red helped win two pennants. Stanley was mired in a stagnant organization, not getting any younger. Hutch was not the problem; his gruff credibility enabled him to move Musial, once again, from the outfield to first base, telling reporters that Musial did not “cover the ground that he used to. He doesn’t get the ball to the infield as quickly. I thought he would be better off at first base because we do need a first baseman.”

Although Musial hit .310 in 1956, Hutch dropped him from third to fifth in the lineup. True to his code, Musial did not gripe about it. He was still having his moments.

One moment came at the 1956 All-Star Game in Washington, D.C., after Williams hit a homer and the public-address announcer told the crowd that Williams had just tied Musial for All-Star home runs with his fifth. In the next inning, Musial hit a homer off Tom Brewer, prompting the revised announcement that, ladies and gentlemen, Musial has just passed Williams.

Upon turning thirty-six, Musial gave up cigarettes for the most part, although not the occasional cigar or cigarillo. His reward was his seventh and last batting championship, with a .351 average, 102 runs batted in, and 29 homers in 1957.