Stan Musial Read Online Free PDF Page A

standing facing the stands, the crowd is going crazy,” Frey recalled. “And he kind of ducks down into the dugout and he says, ‘Lefty, they all come. They love to see Stanley hit.’
    “It was so funny. When he talked about himself, it was almost like he was talking about somebody else.”
    Frey would never play a major-league game. Years later, as the manager of the Royals and Cubs, he loved talking about the man who called himself Stanley.
    “There are a few people in the world who love being themselves,” Frey said. “And I think Stan Musial is one of them.”
    Most of all, he loved being Stanley. It was his stage name, self-perpetuated. To others he was Stan or Stash or Stan the Man. (A woman of a certain age on the Main Line in Philadelphia told me recently that as a teenager she thought of him as Stanley the Manly; she liked his, um, batting stance, the way he wiggled.) However, in his finest moments he referred to himself as Stanley.
    Stanley the magician. Stanley the harmonica-playing virtuoso. Stanley the batting guru (“Aw, hell, Curt, just hit the ball”). Stanley the restaurateur. Stanley the guild greeter, shocking some rookie on the other team by welcoming him to the big leagues.
    Later in life he would chat with a pope, refer to a president as “my buddy,” travel overseas with a famous author. His nom de baseball allowed him to get past his modest beginnings as the poorest kid in town. With a bat in his hands, he became Stanley.
    THOUSANDS OF people have their Stan Musial story, about his spontaneous generosity of heart and wallet. I call them Musial Sightings. He was a man of action rather than reflection, a man of anecdote rather than narrative. He had a way of appearing at some appropriate moment, making people laugh, followed by the clattering hooves as the Lone Ranger rode off into the sunset. Who was that masked man?
    These sightings are not a string of miracles, to be used as documentation for canonization. He was not without ego. He smoked for a long time. He drank a bit. He could shatter pomposity with a timely obscenity. Late in life, he broke off at least one long friendship over a business disagreement.
    He was no activist, no crusader, no saint, but twice, when baseball wasbeing integrated, Musial was a benignly positive presence, a man who spoke little but who was there.
    For the postwar generation, when baseball was still America’s favorite sport, Stan Musial was its happy face. He was picked by
Life
magazine as the Player of the Decade from 1946 through 1955, ahead of Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and Jackie Robinson. He exuded endless optimism, a one-man GI Bill, grateful to be working at his trade, which in his case was being one of the greatest hitters the game has ever known. And then, somehow, Stanley was obscured.

    5    
THE STANCE
    S TANLEY WAS no fool. When he was out in public, he would move into that familiar batting position—twisting sideways to his left, peering over his right shoulder, addressing his right hip to an imaginary pitcher.
    The stance was his signature, his trademark, and demonstrated why he was a successful entrepreneur. He knew how to brand himself.
    In his later years, from his place in time in long-ago America, Musial knew innately that this was the best way to present himself to people who still remembered him—people who might order memorabilia from Stan the Man, Inc., or pay for his autograph at a collectors’ show.
    The crouch was his essence, the thing that made him Stanley Hits. He performed it in the Vatican, at the Colosseum, for throngs at the Kentucky Derby and Wimbledon, on the streets of Warsaw or Tokyo or Dublin.
    Strangers would see an older gent contort himself halfway into a human pretzel, shake his rear end, flap his right elbow, and wonder,
Who is that man, and why is he coiled up like that?
Others would smile contentedly and say,
Stan the Man
.
    As long as he could go out in public, this would be his ultimate way of