Stan
the Man has died and, alone, I shed some significant tears this morning because
he was The Man!
by Charlie
Leck
“Here stands
baseball’s perfect warrior. Here stands baseball’s perfect knight.”
It was there in
the newspaper this morning. I opened the local paper’s electronic version on my
computer and browsed the front page. There, at the bottom, was the link to a
story on the sports page: Stan the Man
Musial Dies! [Sports, Page 3]. Appropriately, the story was filed out of
St. Louis by the Post-Dispatch.
I’ll tell you
this, I didn’t hit the link real quickly. I sat looking at the little headline
and I said something like this to myself, “Hmph!”
And then, in the
silence of a Minnesota winter morning, in my deathly quiet house with only the
sound of a distant dog bark, I heard Stan
the Man himself. It was unmistakable.
“What’aya say?
What’aya say!”
I think Stan had
the little greeting copyrighted. It belonged to him. He owned it. Or perhaps it
owned him. It was the way he greeted people – strangers, old friends, a handful
of people or a crowded room.
He always fell
back on it. He wasn’t a handy speaker. He was edgy around lots of people. He
was awkward about his fame and stardom. That little “what’a ya say” seemed to
help him out.
It was always
said with a broad smile and bright, sparkling, slightly nervous eyes!
Those of us who
loved him simply called him “The Man.”
Feeling pretty
glum, I turned to page 3 in sports section and there was the page headline: So Long to the Man!
They gave him
the name in Brooklyn. The Dodger fans there had one of the most beautiful
love/hate relationships you could ever imagine. Musial used to come into Ebbets Field and tear the place up. He
was so good in that ballpark that the fans of the home team gave him a ton of
grudging respect.
“Who dat?”
“Dat? Dat’s Stan
the Man.”
I was at Ebbets Field one night when the Dodgers
were playing the Cardinals. Musial was my man. I loved him! I followed him as
closely as I could, watching him on TV as often as I could, listening to his
games on the powerful radio station from St. Louis – picking up the
static-filled play by play of his games all the way back in New Jersey. Well,
that night in Brooklyn, Musial came to bat in the middle of the game somewhere
and the crowd gave him the usual friendly boo-job. The Man just smiled in a friendly,
happy way and crouched in the batter’s box in his usual and very unique stance.
Somebody (maybe big Don Newcome) fired a fastball in on The Man and he swung
gracefully, but with enormous bat speed and caught the ball flush. It was a
high, hard line drive to right field and it kept climbing. It crashed into the
big screen that protected Flatbush Avenue up there at the top of the big
scoreboard. Both the center fielder and the right fielder rushed to the spot
where it might fall to the ground, but no ball game down. The two outfielders
looked at themselves and then looked up toward the screen. There it was! He
struck it so solidly that it hit the screen so hard and jammed itself right
there in the diamond-shaped opening of the mesh screen.
The fans hooted
and hollered and the umpires stopped The Man at second base with a “ground rule
double.” The laughter around the stadium was immense when the ground crew
brought out a giant extension ladder and hoisted it up to where the ball was,
thirty or forty feet above the ground. They clapped and howled while a guy
carefully climbed the ladder and pried the ball out of the screen. They
applauded him wildly when the ball released and he climbed down like a
victorious champion as they cheered him. He waved the ball joyfully at the
crowd as he and the rest of the crew left the field. Musial stood on second
base laughing and jawing it up with the shortstop, Pee Wee Reese.
The Man owned
Brooklyn. They loved him! And so did I.
I’m not going
into all his enormous records and achievements here. I’ll tell you this: Stan
the Man was one of the four or five greatest hitters of all times. He’s right
there with guys like Ty Cobb and Ted Williams. He played in every All Star game
in each of his full seasons in Major League Baseball. And here’s an odd
statistic for you. In his career he got 3,630 hits – and 1,815 of them were at
home in St. Louis and 1,815 of were on the road, in other ball parks. If he was
anything, he was consistent. He had a career batting average of .331.
And, he was also
a purely nice guy. Umpires loved him, opposing players loved him and the fans
of the game loved him. Pitchers? Well, not so much! Sal Magly, the great
pitcher for the NY Giants during the Musial years called him the best hitter he
ever went up against and “also the nicest guy I ever knew.”
One time, as a
little leaguer, at our season ending banquet, Tom Gorman, a great major league baseball
umpire, was the guest speaker. One of the questions was about the best hitter
Gorman ever saw. There was no hesitation. Gorman said that Musial “was
something special.”
“I’ll tell you,”
Gorman said, without hesitation, “if Stan Musial took a pitch with a 3 and 2
count, as an umpire, you knew it was a ball. No question! He had the finest set
of eyes of any ball player in my career.”
In St.
Petersburg, in 1972 (I think it was), the company I was working for booked me
into Stan Musial’s hotel in that city. I checked in and went to the elevator to
take it to my room. A few people gathered behind me and moved into the cabinet
of the elevator when the doors slid open. At the back of the elevator, I turned
around to face forward and I saw him sliding in with the rest of the people. I
gasped.
“Stan Musial,” I
stuttered, like a small boy, overwhelmed by the site of my incredible hero. He
heard me and looked me in the eye.
“What’a ya say?
What’a ya say!” He stuck out his hand to shake mine.
Somehow,
stuttering and shaking, I let him know how much I had loved watching him play
and what an immense fan I was.
“You checkin’ in?”
“Well, yes, sir!
We’re having sales meetings here this week!”
“Good, good,” he
said. “Put your bags in your room and come on up to the penthouse and have a
drink with me.”
I looked at him
in amazement.
“Really! Just
take the elevator to the top floor and knock on the only door up there. Great
view! We’ll chat for a little while.”
And, I did. The
great man introduced me to his lovely wife, poured me a drink, pushed some
pretzels out across the bar and came around and sat on a stool next to me. We
chatted for fifteen or twenty minutes about the ballgames I’d seen and how I
idolized him. Stan loved his fans. He got out a photograph of himself, in his
batting stance ,in his Cardinal uniform, and he autographed it and gave it to
me. It hangs on the wall near this desk and I can see it as I write this.
I saw him a
number of years later, too, when we were guests of Augie Busch at a Cardinal
World Series game against Milwaukee. I flew down there with one of the boys. We
had first row box seats very near third base. Musial, in a bright (cardinal)
red blazer came walking along the track, shaking hands with folks in the
boxseats. When he got to me and we shook, he looked at me as if he remembered
something.
“Maybe ten years
ago! In your suite in St. Pete,” I said. “We had a couple of beers together.”
His eyes
brightened and he, at least, pretended to remember.
“What’a ya say?
What’a ya say!”
He shook my hand
again and then moved on down the field.
I’m no youngster
with stars in his eyes, but, I’m here to tell you, that I loved that man – The Man
– like no other figure in the entire sports world. And, today, I’m a bit sad.
But, you all
know how I feel about this. He’s got the best seat in the house now! Out there
among those stars, he’ll watch it all and he’ll be smiling widely.
Way to go Stan!
Way to go!
In 2011, at the
White House, President Obama presented Mr. Musial with the Presidential Medal of
Freedom, the highest honor bestowed upon a civilian.
Upon his
retirement in 1963, the Commissioner of Baseball, Ford C. Frick, said of
Musial: “Here stands baseball’s perfect warrior. Here stands baseball’s perfect
knight.”
"What’a ya say,
Stan! What’a ya say!”
_________________________
Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a
follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and
establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a
new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing,
here's Google's
explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to
post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email
if you’d like.
