Stan Musial (35 page)

“
My mom said, ‘Your father was pretty inconsolable,’ ” Gerry reported.

Lil told her daughter, “I tried to reason with him, saying, ‘You are getting older.’ But looking back, I shouldn’t have told him that.”

It was probably not a good thing to tell a superstar who was dealing with rumors and sitting on the bench at the same time. Everybody agreed the Berra rumor was foolish, and Busch once again affirmed that Musial would never be traded. Busch also called him out to Grant’s Farm to ask whether Hemus should be fired.

“I said, ‘I think Solly deserves a little more chance of being the Cardinal manager,’ ” Musial said in the late nineties. “As I look back, I probably
could have ended Solly’s career at that time. He was thinking of firing him, but I gave Solly a vote of confidence. I thought maybe Solly’d let me play the next year. But I didn’t play much. So he let him manage the next year, and about halfway into the next season they got rid of him.”

The front office did agree that Musial would not play much the rest of the season, to give younger players a chance. Asked about reports of coolness between himself and Musial, Hemus tried to make a joke out of it: “I’d better not go to his restaurant anymore. I’ll probably get nothing but tough steaks.”

He was still joking about it in 2010. “
His kids hated me, of course. They wouldn’t talk to me,” Hemus said.

“
Please tell him that was not the case, at least for me,” Gerry Ashley said, recalling how the Musial and Hemus women got along during that time. Marguerite Hemus and her daughter, Peggy, drove to spring training in a caravan with Lil and Gerry—a major responsibility, since Lil had not started driving until she was thirty and was still not comfortable with high speeds and long distances. Gerry remembered the drive as fun, with no sense of rancor.

“Dad never brought any problems home,” Gerry said.

Hemus could joke about it years later, but he was under intense pressure to do the right thing by Stanley. Bob Broeg said he urged Hemus to give Musial more of a chance, reminding the manager how Musial had tipped him to use a lighter bat earlier in his career.

It was true, Hemus admitted in 2010. He had hit 16 homers in five years in the minor leagues, but in 1952 and 1953 he hit 15 and 14 home runs, respectively.

“
He gave me a lot of good tips on hitting,” Hemus admitted. “Getting out in front on the ball. He’s a great baseball man. Unless you ask him, he wouldn’t bother. A lot of ballplayers don’t want a lot of advice. They want to go down the road themselves. I wasn’t like that. I was looking for anything I could get.”

Broeg told Hemus he owed Musial more patience, but Hemus used him in only 115 games and Musial wound up hitting .255 in 1959, by far the worse average of his career. Friends suggested it might be time to retire, but he shrugged them off.

He did acknowledge the miserable year by accepting the maximum pay cut allowable under union rules, twenty percent, from $100,000 to $80,000. In his Broeg-written autobiography, Musial adopts the passive voice—“
I took a pretty good cut without complaint”—but in the
Sporting News
article, his quotes suggest he initiated the cut: “
The Cardinals have been generous to me the past few years, so I thought I’d be kind to them.” Needless to say, the Cardinals obliged his sporting gesture.

In the same winter, he worked out under the noted physical educator, Walter Eberhardt of St. Louis University, along with other players, and when Musial reported to spring training in 1960 he looked five years younger.

He still did not hit. This time Hemus did not deny that Musial was being benched rather than merely rested. That fall, while campaigning for John F. Kennedy, Musial told his new friend James A. Michener that the Cardinals had tested his eyesight.

“
Stan Musial, who functioned longer than most, told me a bittersweet story,” Michener wrote. “ ‘One of the saddest days of my life was when I found out about my eyes. Before age forty I hadn’t felt the slightest loss in seeing. Then my eyes started to go bad. The ball looked so much smaller than it used to. First base seemed to be actually farther away. So the Cards sent me to the top eye doctors, and they examined me for a while with the latest machines, and at the end they gave me the bad news. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with your eyes.” I was just getting older, like everybody else.’ ”

Hemus made the benching worse by misleading Musial. On May 14, he told Musial he would play in the second game, but when he made out the lineup card, Musial was not on it. Musial questioned Hemus about it in the clubhouse, maybe the first time he had ever been heard to openly challenge a manager.

Things got worse. On May 16, Hemus used Musial as a pawn, sending him up to pinch-hit with first base open, an obvious invitation to the opposing manager to walk Musial on purpose. By that strategy, Hemus bestowed the responsibility on Carl Sawatski, a backup catcher who would hit .229 that season. Sawatski promptly made Hemus look like a genius by stroking a game-winning sacrifice fly—no surprise to Solomon.

Hemus did make two good moves that season, sending Curt Flood to center field and restoring Bill White to first base, the natural positions for both. However, for much of the season left field was patrolled by a cast of thousands. As the fans fretted, Busch summoned Musial, Hemus, Bing Devine, and the brewery official Richard A. Meyer to Busch’s estate, and the Cardinals publicly confirmed that Musial was being benched indefinitely.

While Musial was observing the open tryout in left field, he came as close to leaving the Cardinals as he ever would. When the Pirates were in St. Louis in June, Les Biederman of the
Pittsburgh Press
quoted a “friend” of Musial’s as saying: “You don’t take a player who has starred for nineteen years and stick him in the corner of the dugout and let him die.”

The “friend” continued: “You know, I believe there’s only one team Stan would play for aside from the Cardinals. I mean, the Pirates. I sort of think he’s going to say his farewell going down the stretch with a pennant contender from his old home town.”

Biederman, as beat reporters do, promptly asked Danny Murtaugh, the manager of the Pirates, about the possibility of acquiring Musial, and Murtaugh was quoted as saying, “You know, I do believe we might be able to find a place for a fellow like Stan Musial.” Murtaugh was also quoted as saying, “But heck, Stan never would leave the Cardinals.”

Many years later, Broeg confirmed he was indeed the friend, but said Joe L. Brown, the general manager of the Pirates, had told him, “As much as we’d like to have Musial, we won’t make an offer for him. I just can’t do it to Bing Devine, a fine man. Sure, if Musial were released, we would grab him in a minute.” Busch was not about to give Musial away, and the Pirates could not afford him. But for a few days, the option was there.

In late June, Bob Nieman, who had played very well in Musial’s absence, was injured, and Musial was back in the lineup, quietly seething, going on a 20-for-41 tear. Totally by statistical accident, he happened to murder the Pirates the rest of the year, as they won the pennant.

“
By then, when I’d go home to Donora to visit my mother, even friends and neighbors were giving me a hard look. They were happy I was hitting, but not when I beat their Bucs.”

In 1964, Musial and Broeg would come out with Musial’s autobiography,
which mildly criticized Hemus for benching him. Hemus, by then the third-base coach in Cleveland, put out a statement:

Musial got through 1960 the same way he had outlasted Trader Lane. He hit .275 in 116 games with slightly more power, and the Pirates wound up winning the World Series without him.

It probably worked out for everybody. Moving to his home region might have smacked of a mercy move, and Stanley had a good thing going in St. Louis. His basic instinct was,
Do not disturb
.

S
TANLEY RAN
with a different crowd in the fall of 1960. Instead of traveling with Red and the other Cardinals, he was part of a merry band that romped around the middle of the country, campaigning for John F. Kennedy for president.

By now, Musial had been out and about, had met a lot of celebrities, and was not in awe of much. In his own Stanley way he fit right in with temporary teammates like Byron (Whizzer) White, a former professional football player and later a Supreme Court justice; James A. Michener, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author; Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the writer; Ethel Kennedy and Joan Kennedy; and Hollywood stars Jeff Chandler and Angie Dickinson.

“
Oh, my God, he was always funny,” Dickinson said about Musial in 2010. “Of course, he wasn’t funny when we were giving speeches but funny when we hung out together. We all ate dinner together after our rallies and he was the life of the party. Such a dear guy.”

They all bonded quickly, like an all-star team thrown together for a short time, eager to hear one another’s shop talk. They were united in support of the young senator from Massachusetts, who was forty-two at the time, three and a half years older than Musial.

Musial often told how he had been recruited after meeting Kennedy on a street corner in Milwaukee in September 1959. The senator sought out the ballplayer while he was touring Wisconsin, preparing for his presidential run, and was told the Cardinals were outside their hotel, waiting for the team bus.

“They tell me you’re too old to play ball and I’m too young to be president, but maybe we’ll fool them,” Kennedy said.

Musial, who had favored Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican moderate, in the 1952 and 1956 elections, was already kindly disposed toward the energetic young senator, through Musial’s partnership with Biggie, who was active in Democratic politics.

The Kennedy “vigah”—as people pronounced it in those days, imitating the family Boston accent—also won Musial over. The Kennedys were Roman Catholic as well, which undoubtedly touched a nerve in Musial.

The young senator was having a hard time in many midwestern and western states, facing questions about whether he would be loyal to his religion, to a foreign pope, rather than to the United States. The Kennedy people wanted to flood some Republican states with familiar names and faces, and
apparently White suggested Musial, who had never been politically active. Musial agreed to go along for the last week of the campaign in Michigan, Illinois, Nebraska, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, Indiana, and Kentucky.

The group was flown from rally to rally in the private plane of Jerold Hoffberger, the president of the National Brewing Company and principal owner of the Baltimore Orioles, who was between Musial and Kennedy in age. It was summer camp.

“
No time was designated for meals or washing up. There were speeches, short plane hops, more speeches, long plane hops, more speeches, and a distant hotel in which to flop,” wrote Michener, who had been active in Democratic politics in the Philadelphia area.

“Each day saw four or five meetings, interviews with press and television, impromptu talks to clubs or boys’ houses or supermarkets, and an endless procession of local political aspirants who hoped that we would say something to further their candidacies. It was as grueling a tour as could have been devised.”

All the campaigners turned out to be troupers, already used to the rigors of the road. Musial, who had slept in the bunks of trains, seemed energized by the campaign, fitting in with academics and actors.
Michener called him “one of the most hilarious characters I have ever met,” and he added: “I was constantly astonished at how the men in the cities we stopped at would crowd the airports to see Stan Musial. He seemed about
fifteen years younger than he was, and men who were now quite old remembered him as a beginner in the big leagues.”

Musial’s campaign style was straight and simple: see ball, hit ball. He would make a brief baseball allusion and then a quick plug for Kennedy. Michener described his talk in Denver: “
I played in Denver once about ten years ago. I struck out three times.” When the laughter subsided, Musial said, “Tonight I’m not here to play baseball. I’m here to ask you to vote for Senator John F. Kennedy.”

A lifelong friendship was developing from this first meeting between Michener and Musial. Everybody saw the outgoing side of Musial, but in this long road trip through America, Michener saw the serious side, too, as Musial expressed his remorse about the declined (and perhaps mythical) basketball scholarship to Pitt.

On one ride, Musial told his new friend why he was campaigning for the young Democrat who talked of a more just society. “All that I have I got because older men helped me. That’s why I’m for Kennedy.” It was an acknowledgment of the Barbaos and Russells, the Dudas and Pizzicas, who had directed him toward this time, when he could stand in front of crowds and ask them to vote for a Roman Catholic from back East.

Michener also praised two Kennedy wives—Ethel, the wife of Robert F. Kennedy, and Joan, then the wife of Ted Kennedy—as good speakers with strong and impeccable political instincts.

And Michener was totally taken with Angie Dickinson. What man would not be? He described her as “
a strikingly beautiful young woman with golden blond hair, dark eyes and a truly gamin manner.” (That description matches the very same breathtaking young actress I spotted in a box seat on my first visit to Dodger Stadium in 1962.
So this is Los Angeles
, I thought.)