Note: This was adapted from my obituary post for Stan, on January 20, 2013.
Ken Griffey Jr. Great ballplayer. Batted .284 lifetime, 2,781 hits including 630 home runs, 1,836 RBIs, 13 All-Star Games, 10 Gold Gloves, the 1997 American League Most Valuable Player award. And yet, he's only the 2nd-best player born in Donora, Pennsylvania.
Stan remains the Man.
November 21, 1920, 100 years ago: Stanisław Franciszek Musiał -- later anglicized to Stanley Frank Musial -- is born in Donora, Pennsylvania, a town on a bend of the Monongahela River, 25 miles south of Pittsburgh. He was a son of a miner, a Polish immigrant. Which means...
* He was the greatest baseball player of Polish descent -- better than Al Simmons and Carl Yastrzemski.
* He was the greatest athlete ever to play for a St. Louis-based team -- better than George Sisler, Bob Pettit, Brett Hull and Marshall Faulk; and better than any St. Louis Cardinal, including Grover Cleveland Alexander, Rogers Hornsby, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock or Albert Pujols.
* He may have been the greatest baseball player to come from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Honus Wagner may still be ahead of him. But Christy Mathewson is not. Nor is Reggie Jackson.
In his 1st 4 full seasons with the St. Louis Cardinals – minus 1941, when he had a late-season callup and the Cards just missed, and 1945 when he was in the Navy for World War II – they won the World Series in 1942, the National League Pennant in 1943, the World Series in 1944, and the World Series in 1946.
They never won another Pennant with him -- coming close in '47, '48, '49, '57, and in his final season, '63 -- but that didn’t stop him. He was the NL Most Valuable Player in 1943, 1946 and 1948, and finished 2nd in the voting in '49, '50, '51 and '57 – winning Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year award that year.
He batted lefthanded, and had a weird stance, called a "corkscrew stance." Hall of Fame shortstop Luke Appling said, "He looks like a kid, peeking around the corner, to see if the cops are coming." But that stance led to 3,630 hits, 1,599 walks, and 53 times getting hit by a pitch -- meaning that Stan Musial reached base 5,282 times.
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His lifetime batting average was .331, his OPS+ a whopping 159. Of all players, ever (nearly 20,000), he ranks 16th. Taking out players who've used steroids, 14th. Counting players from 1900 onward, 11th. Counting players from his era forward, 5th -- behind Ted Williams, Mike Trout (for the moment), Mickey Mantle and Hank Greenberg Albert Pujols. Counting lefthanded hitters (keeping in mind the Mick was a switch-hitter), only Ted is ahead of him.
They never won another Pennant with him -- coming close in '47, '48, '49, '57, and in his final season, '63 -- but that didn’t stop him. He was the NL Most Valuable Player in 1943, 1946 and 1948, and finished 2nd in the voting in '49, '50, '51 and '57 – winning Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year award that year.
He batted lefthanded, and had a weird stance, called a "corkscrew stance." Hall of Fame shortstop Luke Appling said, "He looks like a kid, peeking around the corner, to see if the cops are coming." But that stance led to 3,630 hits, 1,599 walks, and 53 times getting hit by a pitch -- meaning that Stan Musial reached base 5,282 times.
The Stan Stance
His lifetime batting average was .331, his OPS+ a whopping 159. Of all players, ever (nearly 20,000), he ranks 16th. Taking out players who've used steroids, 14th. Counting players from 1900 onward, 11th. Counting players from his era forward, 5th -- behind Ted Williams, Mike Trout (for the moment), Mickey Mantle and Hank Greenberg Albert Pujols. Counting lefthanded hitters (keeping in mind the Mick was a switch-hitter), only Ted is ahead of him.
He led the NL in batting 6 times (topping out at .376 in 1948), hits 6 times, runs 5 times, doubles 8 times, triples 5 times, and RBIs twice with 10 100-RBI seasons.
He hit 725 doubles, 2nd all-time to Tris Speaker; 177 triples, and 475 home runs, not counting what we would now call a walkoff homer in the 1955 All-Star Game in Milwaukee. Speaking of which, because of the 2 ASGs played per season from 1958 to 1962, he played in 24 of them, a record that would be tied by Willie Mays and Hank Aaron, but not broken.
He was once the NL's all-time hits leader with 3,630 – 1,815 at home, 1,815 on the road. You cannot make this stuff up. He was once the all-time leader in both extra-base hits and total bases, until surpassed by Aaron.
Someone once asked him why he was always so happy. He said, "If you had a .331 lifetime batting average, you'd be happy, too!"
Curt Flood, who was his teammate toward the end of his career, asked him for advice on hitting. Stan told him, "You wait for a strike, and then you knock the shit out of it." To which Flood later said, "Baseball was as simple as that for Stan Musial."
Legend has it that his nickname came from Brooklyn Dodger fans. He hit so well at Ebbets Field that Dodger fans would look at the schedule, see that they would have to play the Cards, and say, "Uh-oh! Dat man is back in town! Here comes dat man again!" And from then onward, he was Stan the Man.
Al Kaline, Rocky Colavito and Johnny Callison all selected uniform Number 6 in Stan's honor. Tony Oliva is another possibility, but since he grew up in Cuba, he is less likely to have chosen 6 for Stan.
When Mickey Mantle was asked who his baseball hero was when he was growing up in northeastern Oklahoma, where the closest major league team was the Cardinals (but not that close: It's 311 miles from Commerce to the site of Sportsman's Park), he said Stan.
So when the Yankees gave him Number 6 when he came up in 1951, it seemed a natural -- both for Stan, and because it was the next number in the line of greatness: Babe Ruth wore 3, Lou Gehrig wore 4, and Joe DiMaggio wore 5. But Mickey struggled, was sent down to the minors, and when he was promoted back, 7 became available, and he took it, saying that 6 never felt right for him.
Stan spanned the generations. His 1st game was on September 17, 1941, a 3-2 home win over the Boston Braves: He batted 3rd against Jim Tobin, played right field, popped up to 3rd base in the 1st inning, doubled home 2 runs in the 3rd, singled in the 5th, and flew to center in the 8th.
Stan spanned the generations. His 1st game was on September 17, 1941, a 3-2 home win over the Boston Braves: He batted 3rd against Jim Tobin, played right field, popped up to 3rd base in the 1st inning, doubled home 2 runs in the 3rd, singled in the 5th, and flew to center in the 8th.
His last game was on September 29, 1963. It was also a 3-2 home win, over the Cincinnati Reds: He batted 3rd against Jim Maloney, played left field, struck out in the 1st, singled in the 4th, singled home a run in the 6th, and was replaced by a pinch-runner, Gary Kolb, and came off the field to a standing ovation.
In between:
* 1941: The Cardinals were baseball's southernmost and westernmost team. 1963: MLB had extended to the former Confederacy (Houston) and the West Coast (Los Angeles and San Francisco).
* 1941: MLB was all-white. 1963: There were now lots of black players, and several Hispanics. Jackie Robinson had already been elected to the Hall of Fame.
* 1941: 1920s stars Lefty Grove, Jimmie Foxx and Ted Lyons were still active; legends such as Hugh Duffy, Cy Young, Connie Mack, Nap Lajoie, Roger Bresnahan, Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, Eddie Collins, Walter Johnson, Tris Speaker, Zack Wheat, Fred Merkle and Fred Snodgrass were still alive. 1963: Musial's last hit went under the glove of a rookie 2nd baseman named Pete Rose, who would surpass his all-time NL record for hits, and Cobb's all-time MLB record for hits; while 1980s and '90s players now in the Hall of Fame such as Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken had been born.
* 1941: World War II was underway, the Allies were losing, and the U.S. was 3 months away from entering it after the attack on Pearl Harbor. 1963: The Cold War was well underway, people were beginning to learn about a place called Vietnam, President John F. Kennedy had just gone to Berlin to explain freedom's superiority to Communism and its Wall, and was 2 months away from being assassinated.
* 1941: The NFL was an afterthought, the NHL was a regional sport, and while professional basketball existed, the NBA, as yet, did not. 1963: The NFL was growing, the NHL was preparing to expand, and the NBA may never have been better, with stars like Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Jerry West and Oscar Robertson. The Boston Celtics won the NBA title, with the retiring Bob Cousy and a rookie named John Havlicek.
* 1941: Radio was the dominant medium, television was still experimental, and computers were just an idea. The idea of sending a man into space was the stuff of comic books and movies. 1963: Television had become pervasive, although hardly anyone had a color set, and hardly any programs were being broadcast in color; and computers were being shrunk from the size of an entire floor of a city office building to just a wall of one room. And the Space Age and the race to the Moon had begun.
* 1941: The heavyweight champion of the world was Joe Louis. 1963: It was Sonny Liston, but a young man was coming for him. His name, at the time, was Cassius Clay, but we would come to know him as Muhammad Ali.
* 1941: The widow of Theodore Roosevelt, who became President on September 14, 1901, 40 years earlier, was still alive. 1963: Barack Obama, who was sworn in for his 2nd term as President the day after Stan died, 54 years after Stan's last game, had been born.
* 1941: Big Band or "swing" music was the most popular form of music, led by Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller and the Dorsey Brothers, Tommy and Jimmy. Bing Crosby was huge. Frank Sinatra was at the beginning of his career. There was no rock and roll, or even rhythm and blues. 1963: Rock and roll was now dominant, Elvis Presley was still really popular, doo-wop was the path of most inner-city singers, Motown was helping R&B make the transition to soul, Bob Dylan had exploded into the national consciousness, and the Beatles were the biggest thing in Europe, and were about to become the biggest thing in America -- but, as yet, not one American in a million knew who they were.
* 1941: There were still lots of living people who remembered the American Civil War and the Wild West. 1963: The people who were making the world what it is today were either children, or not born yet.
So Stan the Man's career spanned that much.
Three Presidents paid public tribute to him:
* At the 1962 All-Star Game in Washington, when he was 41 and already a grandfather, the 45-year-old JFK told him, "They said I was too young to be President, and you were too old to play baseball. I guess we showed them."
* Bill Clinton grew up in Arkansas as a Cardinal fan (but his hometown of Hope, Arkansas was 462 miles from Sportsman's Park, significantly further away than even Commerce, Oklahoma), and Stan was the 1st non-politician he invited to the Oval Office in 1993.
* And in 2010, on the occasion of Stan's 90th birthday, Barack Obama -- who may live in Chicago, but had to run for Statewide office in Illinois, and that meant he had to understand the needs of Southern Illinoisians, most of whom are Cardinal fans -- awarded him the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Stan was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in his 1st year of eligibility, 1969. He was named to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team in 1999. That same year, The Sporting News (based in St. Louis) ranked him 10th on their list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players.
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Once, at a Hall of Fame induction weekend, Stan, the greatest National League hitter of his generation, was talking with his American League counterpart, Ted Williams. Afterwards, Ted's son, John Henry Williams, asked his father, known for wanting people to call him the greatest hitter who ever lived, "Dad, do you think Musial was as good a hitter as you were?" Ted said, "Yes, I do."
If Ted, who understood hitting better than any person who has ever lived, was willing to accept this as his opinion, then, indeed, Stan was The Man.
Stan was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in his 1st year of eligibility, 1969. He was named to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team in 1999. That same year, The Sporting News (based in St. Louis) ranked him 10th on their list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players.
His Number 6 was the first number retired by the Cardinals, or any St. Louis sports team for that matter. A statue dedicated outside Busch Stadium (now standing outside the new ballpark with that name) is inscribed with words delivered by then-Commissioner Ford Frick at Stan's 1963 retirement ceremony: "Here stands baseball's perfect warrior. Here stands baseball's perfect knight."
Stan's statue, outside the current Busch Stadium
When Albert Pujols became the Cardinals' big hitting star at the dawn of the 21st Century, fans nicknamed him "El Hombre," Spanish for "The Man." Albert went out of his way to say that he appreciated the gesture, but that Stan was still The Man.
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Stan died on January 19, 2013, at his home in Ladue, Missouri, in the suburbs of St. Louis. He was 92. It had been less than a year since the death of his wife, Lillian. They had been married for 72 years; if that's not a record for a ballplayer, it's got to be close. They had 4 children: Son Richard, and daughters Gerry, Janet and Jeanie. Stan was buried in Bellerive Heritage Gardens in the St. Louis suburb of Creve Coeur, Missouri.
Lillian and Stan Musial, Busch Stadium, 2011 World Series
Stan died on January 19, 2013, at his home in Ladue, Missouri, in the suburbs of St. Louis. He was 92. It had been less than a year since the death of his wife, Lillian. They had been married for 72 years; if that's not a record for a ballplayer, it's got to be close. They had 4 children: Son Richard, and daughters Gerry, Janet and Jeanie. Stan was buried in Bellerive Heritage Gardens in the St. Louis suburb of Creve Coeur, Missouri.
On February 9, 2014, a new bridge was opened for Interstate 70 over the Mississippi River, connecting St. Louis with East St. Louis, Illinois. It was named the Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge.
Also known as "The Stan Span."
Once, at a Hall of Fame induction weekend, Stan, the greatest National League hitter of his generation, was talking with his American League counterpart, Ted Williams. Afterwards, Ted's son, John Henry Williams, asked his father, known for wanting people to call him the greatest hitter who ever lived, "Dad, do you think Musial was as good a hitter as you were?" Ted said, "Yes, I do."
If Ted, who understood hitting better than any person who has ever lived, was willing to accept this as his opinion, then, indeed, Stan was The Man.