That Man
(See Cover)
The Hatfields and McCoys of baseball were at it again; for the fifth time in nine years, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Brooklyn Dodgers were in a slambang fight for the National League pennant. The hopes of the other six clubs were as dead as Abner Doubleday's grandfather.
As the National League lead seesawed through August, fans who lived far from Brooklyn or St. Louis began to take sides. The Midwest, from Chicago to the Ozarks and down into Texas, was Cardinal country; the Dodger cheering section was centered east of the Alleghenies. The two teams had almost monopolized the National League pennant since 1940--the Cards won it four times and the Dodgers twice--and it was clear to all but the die-hards of mathematical chance that one of them was going to do it again. As far west as San Francisco last week, Dow-Jones tickers carried the inning-by-inning score to boardrooms, and fans clustered around radio sets as St. Louis, nursing a two-game lead, came face-to-face with the Dodgers in a three-game series in Brooklyn.
With a Bicycle. At Ebbets Field, a restless buzz rose from the crowd as the first two Cardinals took their turns at bat. Then a slender young man, wearing No. 6 on his back, stepped to the plate. Stan ("The Man") Musial was at bat and the crowd really let go. A hard-bitten minority booed, but they were drowned out by the cheers. It was Brooklyn's sportsmanlike tribute to one of the greatest players in the game. Stan Musial is the highest salaried (at $50,000 a year) and most feared batter in the National League--and especially devastating in Brooklyn, where he has batted well over .500 this season. When Musial grounded out that first time UD, Ebbets Field breathed more easily. But on his next trip to the plate, Brooklyn groaned. "The Man" had lined up on an inside pitch and hit it squarely.
The ball cleared the right-field screen, sailed across Bedford Avenue and came to earth in a parking lot about 415 ft. from home plate. The Cardinals won, 5-3, and there was no joy in Brooklyn. There was still less in the first inning of the second game that day when Musial belted another homer to give St. Louis a two-run lead. Things looked black in Brooklyn, but it turned out to be the darkness before dawn. The desperate Dodgers got down in the dirt, clawing and scratching, and won the second game, 4-3.
In the rubber game, Brooklyn's big Negro righthander, Don Newcombe, silenced Cardinal bats (6-0) with the help of outfielders who chased fly balls like men on bicycles and made "impossible" catches. One smash from Musial's bat would have been a triple if Outfielder Luis Olmo had not bounded high into the air against the left-center-field wall and made the catch-of-the-month.
Brooklyn had managed to beat the Cards two straight; it was more than anybody else seemed able to do. While the Dodgers were breaking even against the Chicago Cubs and winning one from the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Cards moved across the river to the Polo Grounds and took three out of four from the Giants (with the help of three Musial homers); then they went to Boston, took two more from the Braves, with Musial clouting a homer and a triple.
After six days, the Cards were still leading (by 2 1/2 games), and Outfielder Musial had raised his batting average to .321, hit six home runs (27 for the season).
With a Waggle.Steady-eyed,thin-faced Stanley Frank Musial, 28, has been the National League's most consistently spectacular hitter since Melvin Ott of the New York Giants was in his prime. He is also one of the most unorthodox.
Before squaring off on the left side of the plate, he limbers up with a hula-like motion, bat held above his head, hips and shoulders waggling. It looks a little ridiculous, but it helps loosen him up and opposing pitchers do not laugh. Before the pitch, he goes into a crouch in the far outside corner of the batter's box, stands motionless as a statue, his feet close together, knees bent, body slanted forward.
In his stance, Musial is the antithesis of the American League's great left-handed slugger, Ted Williams, a stand-up hitter who crowds the plate and hits so consistently to right field that opposing clubs shift most of their defense to the right side of the field when he bats. Musial's striding swing brings him diagonally forward in what is almost a flank attack on the ball. He can reach an outside pitch and send it lining into left field, or rifle it through the pitcher's box; he can meet a close-in pitch and thump it to right. Nobody pulls the "Williams shift" on a man who can spray his hits around the full 90DEG arc of the playing field.
Almost as unusual as his famous crouch is Musial's disposition. If he has an iota of fire and imagination, he succeeds in keeping it veiled behind his deadpan Slavic features. "I hate to calla bad one on him," says Umpire Bill Stewart. The umpires know that Musial has a deadly eye and that he can separate the balls from the strikes more accurately than most. They are also disconcerted when Musial makes his strongest protest: a calm, open-mouthed stare that seems to say, "How can you be so wrong?"
Such placidity makes him the despair of sportwriters who follow the Cards all season and dig in vain for Musial "color," but there is color in every move he makes on the field. He is the fleetest man afoot on the 1949 Cardinals, and he is versatile enough afield to play right field (his regular position), fill in at center field or do a turn at first base.
"Thin Red Line." It took eight years in the big leagues, three batting championships (in 1943, '46, '48) and three awards as the league's "Most Valuable Player" (same years) before a trace of inconsistency showed in the placid professional life of Outfielder Musial. This year he started the season determined to be the home-run king, in addition to everything else. By trying too hard to hit the ball out of the park, he upset his delicate timing and skidded into a bad slump. By May 20 the Musial batting average, a booming .376 in 1948, was a dismal .253.
The decline of Stan Musial, the baseball wiseacres figured, would finish the Cardinals for 1949, especially since this was not supposed to be a St. Louis year anyway. The Cards were due for rebuilding. What was left of the talented crew that had won .four pennants and never finished worse than second in eight years was spoken of in sepulchral tones as the "thin red line of heroes."
Veteran Whitey Kurowski was through as a third baseman. The once potent pitching staff was plagued with dead arms and question marks. No one knew how long aging (33) Leftfielder Enos Slaughter, the hustle guy, would last with all his aches & pains. The experts picked the club to finish fifth, and when the season was a month old the Cardinals were sixth.
Manager Dyer, an old Cardinal pitcher who once starred as a halfback for Rice University, got out his whip. Said he to
Pitcher Howie Pollet: "You've started your last game until you start throwing the damn ball hard." Pollet, who had been babying his arm because of an elbow operation, went to the bullpen and he stayed there until he found that throwing hard was not going to ruin his arm. By last week his record was 16 wins, eight losses.
On the club's first eastern swing, Dyer yanked old Enos Slaughter from the lineup for poor hitting. Such a thing had never happened to Slaughter before. After a week of stewing on the bench, he came back with a rookie's enthusiasm and began knocking the cover off the ball. His average last week: .326.
Meanwhile the Cardinals began to show signs of having a pitching staff after all--not only Howie Pollet, but George Munger, Al Brazle, Harry ("The Cat") Brecheen and Relief Pitcher Ted Wilks began to win. Manager Dyer did a little rebuilding as he went along. He brought up Infielder Eddie Kazak and Centerfielder Chuck
Diering from the Cardinals' vast farm system, and found a pair of serviceable first basemen in Nippy Jones and Rocky Nelson. Best of all, Stan Musial began to hit like Stan Musial. By July 4, the Cardinals had fought their way up to second; by July 24 they were leading the Dodgers by half a game and the great feud was on.
Sleep & Pinochle. The 1949 Cardinals bear only a slight resemblance to the famed "Gashouse Gang" Cardinals (Frankie Frisch, Leo Durocher, Pepper Martin, Dizzy Dean, et al.) who carved a bizarre and prankish baseball swath through the '305. The Gashousers loved to drop water-filled paper bags from hotel windows, and once a group of them dressed in workmen's clothes and disrupted a dignified banquet at Philadelphia's Bellevue-Stratford Hotel on the pretext of repairing the ceiling. Eddie Dyer's proper ballplayers disdain such pranks. They also have no counterparts to Pitcher Flint Rhem, who used to stray into bars, and Grover Cleveland Alexander--who was rarely out of one unless he was on the mound.
In uniform, the 1949 Cardinals look angular and weatherbeaten enough to have just stepped off a threshing machine. In street clothes, the hayseed look disappears. They dress expensively and in good taste; some of them go in for $25 shirts and $7.50 Countess Mara ties. On the road, they do almost no lobby-lounging and there is no public skylarking. In order of preference, they kill their off-the-field time in i) sleeping, 2) moviegoing, 3) playing pinochle, 4) shopping. They spend hours in automobile salesrooms inspecting new models, and generally know more about what makes the engine go than the salesman does.
"Stop Falling Hair?" They are a hard bunch to live with when they lose. Last month, after losing a tough game in Philadelphia, a couple of Cardinals made the mistake of singing Moonlight and Roses while the team was riding the bus to the station. Said Eddie Dyer sharply: "If you've got to sing, wait until I get off this bus. I don't see anything to sing about." Things were different after they had taken a game from Cincinnati and learned that Brooklyn had blown one to Boston. They gave Doc Weaver, the club trainer, a rousing cheer for being the last man to board the bus. "Know what will stop falling hair?" someone asked. "No, what?" said Doc, and the whole bus howled when he got the answer: "The floor." Everything seemed funny.
Among their other antics, the old Gas-housers had their famed Mudcat Band, whose incidental effect was to disturb the sleep of hotel guests. Eddie Dyer's Cardinals have no band, but they like music. A phonograph continually grinds out cowboy dirges, swing and sometimes bebop in the clubhouse when they are in St. Louis. It is the successor of an old hand-winding Gramophone that Doc Weaver brought into the clubhouse 22 years ago. The music box helped them win the 1942 pennant, with Pass the Biscuits, Mirandy the theme song. In 1946, in another hot pennant race, Doc Weaver scoured record shops until he found another record of Mirandy--and the Cardinals kept it spinning while they tied Brooklyn for the pennant, beat them in a playoff and won the World Series.*
This season, the Cardinals haven't gotten together on one song. Freckle-faced Infielder Red Schoendienst, Musial's roommate and constant companion, is soothed by Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life and Indian Love Call. Musial is a boogie-woogie bug. Pitcher Pollet likes Brahms and Beethoven, never hears either in the clubhouse. North Carolina-born Pitcher
Max Lanier likes guitar tunes with mournful titles such as I Pass the Graveyard at Midnight and There's a Chill on the Hill Tonight. Says Max: "If I could hear my music while I'm pitching, the bastards would never get a loud foul off me."
Little Left-Hander. It is now a matter of deep mortification in Pittsburgh that Stan Musial originally dreamed of being a Pirate. Unfortunately for Pittsburgh, the Pirates never dreamed of Stan Musial until it was too late. Stan was born in Donora, Pa. (about 25 miles southeast of Pittsburgh), where his father, Lukasz Musial, a Polish immigrant, worked at the zinc mill to support a wife and six kids.
The Musial residence was,a lackluster frame house two doors from the home of Joe Barbao, a semi-pro pitcher who worked nights in the zinc mill. Joe played catch with the kid he called "the little left-hander," taught him how to hold a ball to throw a curve. It was Stan Musial's ambition to be another Lefty Grove.
By the time he was 15, Stan had a steady girl (now Mrs. Stan Musial) who was the daughter of the neighborhood grocer and had some standing in the community as Donora High's star pitcher. He was also bat boy during the summer for the zinc works' semi-pro team, managed by Joe Barbao. One day, with his club shorthanded and his pitcher wilting before the Monessen (Pa.) sluggers, Joe sent Bat Boy Musial to the mound. The rest of the team thought it was a joke until Musial struck out a batter: he wound up by striking out 13 men in six innings.
For the next two seasons Joe Barbao tried to get the Pirates to watch Stan play. A Cardinal scout got there first. Although he was shy about most things, 17-year-old Stan had seen enough poverty to be hardheaded about money, and he signed the contract with misgivings: the Cardinals had a reputation for paying their help poorly. In 1938, when the late Judge Landis decreed that 91 Cardinal farmhands (including Musial) were free agents, Stan sat back again and awaited a call from Pittsburgh. Instead he had a personal visit from Eddie Dyer. After a long apprenticeship as a minor-league manager, persuasive Eddie Dyer had become a supervisor of Cardinal farm clubs. After listening to Dyer for an hour, Stan said: "If I were your kid brother, what would you advise me to do?" Said Dyer: "I'd sign with the Cardinals." Stan signed.
For the next two seasons, he pitched for the Cardinal farm team at Williamson, W.Va., winning 15 games and losing 8. At Daytona Beach, Fla. the following year, he won 18 games and hit so well (.352) that he was used as an outfielder when he wasn't pitching. In a chase after a fly ball at Daytona, his career was set for him: he took a header and landed on his left shoulder. His throwing arm never felt the same after that. So Pitcher Musial, as Pitcher Babe Ruth did 22 years before him, became a full-time slugging outfielder.
Mexican Gold. In the last two weeks of the 1941 season, after bombarding the fences at Springfield, Mo. (26 home runs) and Rochester, 20-year-old Outfielder Musial was called up to the Cardinals.
At that time, there was no hint of the famed Musial batting crouch. He began leaning forward a trifle in 1942, his first full season in St. Louis, and hit a respectable .315. His salary did not figure to make him rich, but he remembered one of the reasons why Eddie Dyer advised him to become a Cardinal--the possibility of a share of World Series money. His first two years in big-league baseball, thanks partly to Musial, the Cardinals won the pennant. His shares amounted to $10,513.
In 1946, when Musial rejoined the club after 14 months in the Navy, Eddie Dyer was the new manager of the Cardinals. In Mexico, Jorge Pasquel was spending big money to lure U.S. big-leaguers into his Mexican Baseball League, and he was making the biggest eyes of all at the Cardinals. With the clink of gold, he signed up three of themf and he had the Adam's apple of a fourth bobbing like a pogo stick. The fourth man was Stan Musial.
Pasquel offered him $75,000 cash to sign (and double the salary he was getting with the Cardinals). Stan promptly made a date with Cardinal Owner Sam Breadon to say goodbye. But Eddie Dyer, in serious danger of becoming a manager without a ball club, saw Musial first. Stan stayed around, led the league with a .365 batting average, helped win the pennant and the World Series, was elected the league's most valuable player.
Besides managing the Cardinals, Businessman Dyer, 48, has his fingers in a lot of pies. In Houston, he is vice president of the Canada Dry Bottling Co. (where Pitcher Ted Wilks works in the off-season), general manager of an insurance company (which employs Pitcher Pollet part time), co-owner of a realty company and a director of the North Side State Bank.
One of Dyer's fondest hopes is that he will be able to offer a job to any of his ballplayers who want to work after they are through in baseball. There is small chance, however, that Stan The Man, with at least five good years of baseball left in him, will ever wind up working for his current boss.
Stan already has his own business. As new co-owner of Stan Musial's & Biggie's Steak House in St. Louis, he strolls among the restaurant's potted palms every evening that he is free, smiling shyly at his guests. Even if the restaurant business should fail, he could always go back and become lord mayor of Donora, where special scoreboards keep the home-town faithful posted on every hit Stan Musial makes every day.
"Don't Get Me Wrong." The home-towners aren't the only ones who keep solicitous tabs on Musial. Two weeks ago in Chicago, Third Baseman Tom Glaviano of the Cardinals said to Stan at breakfast: "I prayed for you last night. I got down on my knees and prayed." Impressed, Musial said he didn't realize Glaviano thought that much of him. "Don't get me wrong," explained Glaviano, "I was thinking what I could do with all that World Series dough."
With September's 30 days looming ahead, Stan Musial cannot afford to let his big bat cool off. Although the Cardinals have the best of the schedule (they begin a long home stand while Brooklyn embarks on a perilous western trip), they could very easily blow the pennant if Marty ("Mr. Shortstop") Marion's ailing sacroiliac doesn't behave. Solid, knowledgeable Marty Marion is the steady man who holds the Cardinal infield together.
Marion's bad back worries Eddie Dyer as much as the team's hitting and pitching. If all three stay in the groove, Dyer's only worry will be which American League club--the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox--they will play in the World Series. Naturally, Dyer hopes it will be New York because the park there holds twice as many cash customers as Boston's, and that means the fattest possible World Series cut for the manager and his players.