Stan the Man

Today would have been Stan "the Man" Musial's 100th birthday. The following is adapted from a post I wrote elsewhere when Musial received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that can bestowed upon an American civilian. 

 

"Here stands baseball's perfect warrior. Here stands baseball's perfect knight."

-- Ford C. Frick, former Commissioner of Baseball.

Growing up a a baseball fan in St. Louis, we were blessed to have many Cardinals greats as heroes. But there was one hero who stood out above them all, and that one, of course, was Stan Musial. Even for someone like me, who was born after Musial retired, he was still unquestionably "The Man."

One of the greatest baseball players ever, he was perhaps even just as renowned for his ubiquitous smile and his propensity to pull out a harmonica for an impromptu rendition of Take Me Out to The Ballgame.

Once I was at a breakfast meeting for work. After we had ordered our food, in walked Stan the Man, who sat down at the table next to us. His food came almost immediately, a good five minutes before ours. Nobody minded.

I actually got to spend a little bit of time with him on another occasion. I had my mom's old 45 RPM record (if you're under the age of 35 or 40, ask your parents what those are) of the 1961 song Stan the Man by Steve Bledsoe and the Blue Jays. You can listen to the song below and that of course is the 45 shown above, pictured with a postcard of Musial's Hall of Fame plaque.

I had always thought it would be great to get the 45 autographed. Though he quite often signed in public for no charge, he eventually set up a company named Stan the Man, Inc. through which he sold autographs. I called them one day and asked about getting the record signed. When they said I could mail it to them, I was leery about sending it, so I asked if I could drop it off. They agreed that this would be no problem, and since it wasn’t far from my office, I headed over there one day during my lunch break.

When I got there, the guy I spoke with said, "Stan's actually in back signing things. Why don't you just come back and have him sign it now?" To say that I was thrilled would be an understatement! He turned out to be every bit as kind as his reputation suggested, and we spent about fifteen minutes talking, mainly about the Cardinals' season which had just finished. The event will forever be a cherished memory.

Of course, Stan Musial was not just a great guy. He was also one of the greatest baseball players of all time. He possessed my favorite statistic in all of sports: Of his 3630 career hits (fourth best of all time), exactly 1815 were at home, 1815 were on the road. What a testament to his consistency! When he retired, he held 17 major-league records, 29 National League records, and nine All-Star Game records. Many of those records have since been eclipsed, but to Cardinal fans, he will always be "the Man."

Bonus Musial Trivia: Musial's final hit was against the Cincinnati Reds. It was a single past the Reds' rookie second baseman, one Peter Edward Rose. Nearly two decades later, Rose would break Musial's National League record for hits in a career.

More Bonus Musial Trivia: Not only does Musial share a birthday with fellow Hall of Famer, Ken Griffey Jr., but (amazingly!) they were both born on November 21st in Donora, Pennsylvania, a town with a population of less than 5000 people.

Here’s the song on the 45, which (erroneously) pegs Stan the Man’s birth as being in 1921! Not sure if it was poetic license or just bad math, but it does make the rhyme work!

Grandma's Autograph Book

My grandmother's autograph book

The roots of my existence as a Cardinals fan date back (at least) to my grandmother. She grew up in St. Louis and tells stories of her memories as a member of the Knothole Gang in the late 1930s. In this program, students were allowed to attend summer weekday games for free. My great-grandmother would give her a quarter on occasion, and she would spend ten cents to ride the streetcar to the game and ten cents to ride it home. That would leave her with a nickel that she would alternately spend on either a snow cone or a scorecard. And on at least some of those occasions, she would seek out autographs from her baseball heroes, collecting their signatures in her autograph book.

My grandmother on the Cardinals Cruise

In January of 2004 my grandmother went on the trip of a lifetime: the annual Cardinals Cruise. And sixty-five years after her days in the Knothole Gang, she took her old autograph book with her, added to it signatures of the Cardinals who were on the cruise. Recently she gave me that old autograph book, knowing what a big fan (and collector of autographs) I was.





The following autographs were in it from the Cruise:

Bo Hart was a rookie second baseman with the Cardinals in 2003. He burst onto the scene, batting .489 in his first nine games, ultimately finishing the season with a very respectable .277 average. The following season though, he only came to the plate 14 times before being sent back to the minors at the end of April, never to return to the bigs.

A St. Louis native, Kerry Robinson played for five teams in his seven-year MLB career.The only stop that lasted more than one season was with the Cardinals, for whom he played outfield from 2001 to 2003. He is perhaps most remembered for a game-winning home run against the Cubs that was chronicled in Buzz Bissinger's book, Three Nights in August.

Before he was the Cardinals' manager, Mike Matheny was a four-time gold-glove award winning catcher, including three times with the Cardinals. Even as he has faced mounting criticism from many Cardinal fans, my grandmother still is a steadfast supporter, in no small part due to her time spent with him on the cruise some 13+ years ago!

Tom Herr came up with the Cardinals in 1979 and was a mainstay at second base for the better part of a decade. His best season was unquestionably 1985, when he had 110 RBIs despite hitting only eight home runs. He batted .302 and stole 31 bases while only being caught three times, finishing fifth in the MVP voting.





Bob Gebhard pitched 31 innings in the early 1970s, but he was on the Cardinals Cruise because he served as an assistant to Cardinals GM Walt Jocketty from 2000-2004. Before that, he was the original GM for the Rockies, serving there from 1992-1999 and being responsible for building that team from the ground up.








Another person who came to St. Louis from the Rockies was Wayne Hagin. Hagin had the unenviable task of replacing a legend. Jack Buck manned the mic for nearly half a century. After he passed away in 2002, Hagin had served as a radio play-by-play man in Colorado since their inception in 1993, but he only lasted four years in the Cardinals' booth. That notwithstanding, my grandmother has very fond memories of his kindness.





Remember though, that the autographs my grandmother got on the Cruise were not the only autographs she gave me. She also had gotten the following 65 years earlier:

Buzzy Wares played for the old St. Louis Browns in 1912 & 1913. Two days after he made his MLB debut though, a new manager took over for the Browns. His name: Branch Rickey. Rickey must have been impressed with the baseball acumen of Wares, even if his playing ability was unspectacular, because when he was the Cardinals' GM in 1930, he hired Wares as a coach. Over the next 17 years, the Cardinals would win seven NL pennants and five World Series. Wares would coach a total of 23 seasons in all for the Cardinals, remaining on their staff through the 1952 season.

Don Padgett came up with the Cardinals in 1937 and hit .288 with them over five seasons (including a 1939 season when he hit .399 in 233 at bats). He served in the military from 1942 to 1945 and then finished his career with a couple seasons in which he played for the Dodgers, Braves and Phillies.

I'm frankly not sure who this autograph belongs to. My grandmother thinks it must have been from either the 1938 or 1939 season, and when I inspected those rosters, my best guess was that it was Micky Owen. I'm reasonably certain it's not his autograph though because...

...THIS is Micky Owen's autograph. Owen came up with the Cardinals in 1937 and played the first four seasons of his 13 year career in St. Louis. After being traded to the Dodgers, he put up four consecutive All Star seasons, but he is most famous for dropping a third strike with two out in the ninth inning of game four of the 1941 World Series. Tommy Heinrich reached base safely and the Yankees would go on to win both the game and the Series.

Hall of Famer Enos Slaughter played for the Cardinals from 1938-1953 (excepting the three seasons he served in the military during World War II). He is best known for his "mad dash" from first base to score the winning run in game seven of the 2946 World Series. He would also play parts of six seasons with the Yankees as well as spending time with the Braves and the A's, but his greatest success was in St. Louis where he was an All Star in all 10 seasons he played between 1941 and 1953.

Hall of Famer Johnny Mize played the first six seasons of his career, and held the franchise record for home runs in a season (43 in 1940) until a fellow named Mark McGwire donned the Birds on the Bat. Mize hit .329 with 19 HR and 93 RBIs his rookie year of 1936. He followed this up with five straight season in which he finished in the top twelve of the NL MVP voting.

Despite having averaged 26 HR, 109 RBIs and a .336 batting average, he was traded to the Giants after the 1941 season. This move seems like a terrible one, considering the minimal return the Cardinals received. It turns out though, that this trade opened up a spot in the lineup that would be filled in 1942 by a rookie from Donora, Pennsylvania named Stanley Frank Musial.

Grandma and Fredbird

Day 7...Cooperstown

Outside the Hall

Sunday morning we woke up, had a hearty breakfast of Hostess powdered sugar donuts and Sunny Delight, I put on my Headfirst Hudler t-shirt honoring one of my favorite players, and we made the seven mile trek down the road to the Hall of Fame.

Cooperstown was once reputed to be the birthplace of baseball with Abner Doubleday having created the game in 1839 in what was Elihu Finney's cow pasture (and what is now Doubleday Field). Historians have since debunked both of these claims, but as the home of the Hall, the village remains central to the game. It is an idyllic little town that revolves around baseball. Card and memorabilia shops line Main Street, and other businesses play off the fact that they know the vast majority of people who come to Cooperstown come to visit the Hall. In many senses it has the feel of a bygone era, which makes it perhaps the perfect location for a museum that celebrates history.

Just inside the front door, we were greeted by a life-size replica of Babe Ruth, adorned in his Yankee pinstripes, bat in hand, ready no doubt to hit one of his 714 career home runs. The Babe has always been a larger than life figure, and he was no different for us as he definitely drew our attention throughout the museum. 

There were of course other players in whom we were interested as well. Cardinals legends like Stan Musial, Bob Gibson, and (my personal favorite) Lou Brock were among those who we wanted to see how the Hall had honored. And among contemporary heroes of that day, Nolan Ryan loomed as large as any in our minds, even as he played his penultimate season at the age of 45. Though he of course wasn't yet inducted to the Hall, there was no shortage of artifacts from his amazing career.

This was my second trip to Cooperstown, having visited with my family six or seven years earlier. On that occasion, we met up with Scott Bloomer, a friend of mine who was on his annual summer trip to visit his grandparents in Cooperstown. He directed us to Sal's Pizzeria, just a block down Main Street from the Hall. I enjoyed it enough on that occasion that I made sure to make a return visit this time with Eric for lunch. 

After lunch we visited a couple shops, including the gift shop at the Hall. I hadn't worn a ballcap that day because I knew I would want to buy one there. After looking around and considering a number of different options, I settled on a white St. Louis Browns cap (1946-49) with a brown bill and orange letters. The Browns left St. Louis for Baltimore after the 1953 season, and I looked forward to wearing the hat to the game in Baltimore the next week when we visited Camden Yards.

Cooperstown is the type of place where baseball fanatics like us, who love the history of the game, could truly spend days. Unfortunately we only had one day to spend there, so after looking through the museum for the rest of the afternoon, we had to call it quits, and be satisfied with what we'd seen.

Before heading back to our campsite for the night, we stopped off at a local bar & grill in town for dinner. While there we watched the Bulls finish off the Blazers in the NBA Finals. Trailing 79-64 headed to the 4th quarter, Chicago outscored Portland 33-14 to secure their second of the three straight NBA titles. Little did we know at the time that in less than 16 months, Michael Jordan would retire from basketball (for the first time), and switch his attention and efforts to baseball. In the summer of 1994, I actually made a trip to Birmingham to see him play...but that's a story for another day.

There was one other thing I should mention about our time in Cooperstown. I remember being awed at the beauty of Doubleday Field where the Hall of Fame Game was annually played. It seems odd now, even as I look at my photo of the field and notice nothing all that special about it. I'm not sure that it's any nicer than many of the fields my son's high school team now plays on. But back then, almost all of the baseball I had seen in person had either been on the Astroturf of Busch Stadium or the dirt fields of my youth. Even when I played in high school, almost all of the fields we played on were dirt infields. Here was a crisp, clean, nicely manicured ballfield, perfect in its simplicity, and natural as God intended when he created baseball. The further we got into our trip, the more I loved this game.

Miles Driven Today: 15

Total Miles Driven: 1,446

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Greeted by the Babe, just inside the door

Eric and the Babe

The Babe calls his shot

Stan Musial, Rex Hudler & me. One of us is still in the Hall.

Eric and me with one of our favorites, Nolan Ryan

Doubleday Field