Stan Musial, one of baseball’s greatest hitters and a revered figure in the storied history of the St. Louis Cardinals— the player they called Stan the Man— died at the age of 92.
The Cardinals said he died at his home in Ladue, Missouri, surrounded by family.
A signature Musial image endures: he waits for a pitch in a left-handed crouch, his knees bent and close together, his body leaning to the left as he peers over his right shoulder, the red Number 6 on his back. The stance was likened to a corkscrew or, as the White Sox pitcher and Dodgers coach Ted Lyons once described it: “a kid peeking around the corner to see if the cops are coming.”
Swinging from that stance, Musial won seven batting championships, hit 475 home runs and amassed 3,630 hits. His brilliance lay in his consistency. He had 1,815 hits at home and 1,815 on the road. He drove in 1,951 runs and scored 1,949 runs. And his power could be explosive: he set a major league record, equaled only once, when he hit five home runs in a doubleheader.
“There is only one way to pitch to Musial: under the plate,” Leo Durocher, the manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants teams, that Musial often victimized, once said.
Musial was renowned for his concentration at the plate, and for his patience: he struck out only 696 times in 10,972 at-bats in his 22 major league seasons, all as a Cardinal. A gentlemanly and sunny figure— he loved to play Take Me Out to the Ball Game on his harmonica— he was never ejected from a game. When admirers approached him, he chatted them up with his familiar “whattayasay, whattayasay.”
But he otherwise had little of the glamour of the other stars of his era— from the World War Two years to the early 1960s— when baseball was the undisputed king of sports. He did not have the mystique of Joe DiMaggio, the tempestuousness of Ted Williams, the electrifying presence of Willie Mays, the country-boy aura of Mickey Mantle. His Cardinals were far removed from the coastal media centers, and he shunned controversy.
He simply tattooed National League pitching.
Musial played on three World Series championship teams, won three Most Valuable Player awards, had a career batting average of .331 while playing in the outfield and at first base, and was the fourth player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.
He was the most cherished Cardinal of them all in a city that witnessed the exploits of Grover Cleveland Alexander and Rogers Hornsby, Dizzy Dean and the Gashouse Gang, Enos Slaughter, Marty Marion, Red Schoendienst, Ozzie Smith, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Mark McGwire, and Albert Pujols.
Pujols, the slugger from the Dominican Republic, was sometimes saluted as El Hombre as he neared the end of his time in St. Louis. “I don’t want to be called that,” he told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2010. “There is one man that gets that respect, and that’s Stan Musial. I know El Hombre is The Man in Spanish. But he is The Man.”
A frail Musial wearing a Cardinal red sport jacket, went to the White House in February of 2011 to receive the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, from President Obama, who called him “untarnished, a beloved pillar of the community, a gentleman you’d want your kids to emulate”.
There is one Gateway Arch in St. Louis, but two statues of Stan the Man. Both are outside the Cardinals’ Busch Stadium, the earlier one engraved with the words of Ford Frick, the baseball commissioner at the time, speaking at a ceremony before Musial’s final game, on Sunday, 29 September 1963, at home against the Cincinnati Reds: “Here stands baseball’s perfect warrior. Here stands baseball’s perfect knight.”
Stanley Frank Musial was born on 21 November 1920, in Donora, Pennsylvania, a zinc and steel mill town some thirty miles from Pittsburgh, where smokestacks sent grime aloft around the clock. He was the fifth of six children of Lukasz Musial, a Polish immigrant who worked at a steel and wire company, and his wife, Mary, a New York City native of Czech descent. His father had no interest in the frivolity of baseball, but the young Musial competed in gymnastics at a Polish sports club, developing his athleticism, and he played baseball with balls that his mother sewed from rags and string. His family and friends called him Stashu, the diminutive for the Polish name Stanislaus.
His high school didn’t have a baseball team, but he excelled in American Legion play as a left-handed pitcher, and he could hit as well. The Cardinals signed him to a minor-league contract for the 1938 season. Musial was pitching for the Musial farm team at Daytona Beach in the Florida State League in 1940 when he injured his left shoulder diving for a ball while playing the outfield part time. He was converted to a full-time outfielder, and his batting prowess brought him to the Cardinals in September of 1941.
Playing left field in a superb outfield with Terry Moore in center and Slaughter in right, Musial hit .315 in 1942, when the Cardinals staged a furious pennant run to overtake the Dodgers, then defeated the Yankees in the World Series.
Musial hit .357 in 1943, winning his first batting title, but the Cardinals lost to the Yankees in a repeat World Series matchup. He batted .347 in 1944, when the Cardinals were again pennant-winners and defeated the St. Louis Browns in what was known as the Streetcar Series.
Musial spent 1945 in the Navy, which assigned him to play baseball for its ball clubs to entertain servicemen. When he returned to the Cardinals, he picked up where he had left off, winning his second battling title with a .365 average in 1946 and helping to propel the Cardinals to the pennant, which they won in a playoff with the Dodgers. They also won the World Series, defeating the Boston Red Sox.
That Series was the last in which blacks were kept from playing. By the spring of 1947, Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier with the Dodgers.
That did not sit well with some Cardinals players, according to reports, which said they had talked about refusing to take the field in protest when the team was scheduled to play Brooklyn in May. But the truth of those accounts remains murky, and the Cardinals did, in fact, play against Robinson.
Musial did not speak out on racial issues, but he showed no reluctance to face black players. He liked to tell of how he once played baseball with blacks in his hometown, among them Buddy Griffey, the father and grandfather of the outfield stars Ken Griffey and Ken Jr.
The Dodgers’ Don Newcombe, major league baseball’s first black pitching star, recalled hearing taunts from some Cardinals players, but never from Musial or Schoendienst, Musial's longtime roommate.
“We’d watch ’em in the dugout,” Newcombe told George Vecsey in Stan Musial: An American Life. “Wisecracks, call names. I could see from the mound when I got there in ’49. You never saw guys like Musial or Schoendienst. They never showed you up. The man went about his job and did it damn well and never had the need to sit in the dugout and call a black guy a bunch of names, because he was trying to change the game and make it what it should have been in the first place, a game for all people.”
The Cardinals did not have a black player until 1954.
Despite Musial's consistent brilliance, the Musial fell in the standings during the late 1940s and ’50s, when the Dodgers of Robinson, Newcombe, and Roy Campanella and the Giants of Mays and Monte Irvine dominated the National League.
Musial thrived at the Dodgers’ Ebbets Field, plastering the right-field scoreboard and hitting home runs over it, and winning the grudging admiration of the notoriously tough Brooklyn fans. “I did some phenomenal hitting there,” he told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “The ballpark was small, so the seats were close to the field and you could hear just about anything anybody said. Then I’d come to the plate and the fans would say: ‘Here comes that man again.’ And a sportswriter picked it up and it became Stan the Man.”
The nickname, attributed to Bob Broeg of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, stayed with Musial as he piled up hits, combining his talent with intense concentration at the plate. “I’m always set for a fastball,” Musial told The Saturday Evening Post in 1958 when he got his three-thousandth career hit. “When I’m concentrating up there, I know that pitcher’s best fastball. When he lets the ball go, if that ball jumps out in front of me there about thirty, forty feet, I know it’s got to be a fastball. If he lets that ball go and it doesn’t come up that quick, then it’s going to be a change or a curve. I never watch the spin of the ball. I watch the ball in its entirety, and what it’s doing, and how fast it’s reacting to me. And then I try to adjust from there.”
Musial was durable as well. He once held the National League record for consecutive games played, a streak that ended at 895 when he hurt a shoulder in August of 1957. He won his seventh and last batting title that season, hitting .351. The following year, he became the first National League player with a $100,000 contract.
Musial retired after the 1963 season, having played in two dozen All-Star Games. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1969.
After his playing days ended, Musial became an adviser to the Cardinals as a senior vice president. The team ended an eighteen-year pennant drought in 1964 and beat the Yankees in the World Series, having finally fielded outstanding black players like Gibson, Brock, Curt Flood, and Bill White.
Musial succeeded Bob Howsam as the Cardinals’ general manager in 1967, but the team was set to contend when he took the job, and he made no major personnel moves. That team, managed by Schoendienst, went on to defeat the Boston Red Sox in the World Series. Musial stepped down from the post after the season to pursue his business interests, notably the St. Louis restaurant popularly known as Stan and Biggie’s. He had been greeting guests there as an owner since 1949, when he bought into a steakhouse run by Julius Garagnani, known as Biggie, a product of the Italian-American Hill section of St. Louis.
Musial is survived by his son, Richard; his daughters Gerry Ashley, Janet Schwarze, and Jeanne Edmonds; eleven grandchildren; and twelve great-grandchildren. His wife, Lillian, whom he married in 1940, died in May of 2012 at 91.
St. Louis did not forget Musial At the 2009 All-Star Game there, he received a huge ovation as he rode onto the field in a golf cart and handed President Obama a baseball for his ceremonial first pitch. And Musial did not forget the Cardinals. He visited with them during the 2011 playoffs and World Series, when they defeated the Texas Rangers in seven games.
Musial was appreciated even by rival players. “Stan was such a nice guy that I was probably happy for him when he homered off me,” Johnny Antonelli, a leading left-handed pitcher of the 1950s, told Danny Peary in the oral history We Played the Game.
Musial had an explanation for his good nature. “Maybe one reason I’m so cheerful is that, for more than twenty years, I’ve had an unbeatable combination going for me: getting paid, often a lot, to do the thing I love the most,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1963. “The love is important, but let’s not pretend; so is the money. My old Cardinals coach, Mike Gonzales, used to say to me: ‘ Musial, if I could hit like you, I’d play for nothing.’ Not me. But I wouldn’t play for the money without the fun.”
Rico says it must've been a wonderful life...
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