Stan Musial Read Online Free PDF

being himself. The crouch became a self-caricature, a way of identifying himself without showing too much, without getting too deep into politics or social issues. The personal stuff he handled with a smile, all part of the package, but the crouch was for all seasons. Nonverbal was the way to go.
    Perhaps he used the whaddayasay-whaddayasay to cover up the trace of stammer he had picked up in elementary school when teachers madethe left-handed boy write with his right hand. His script would remain beautiful and his accent would remain somewhere between western Pennsylvania and Missouri.
    The crouch was sui generis, not an act, not some mannerism he had picked up. It was who he was. It was the source of his .331 batting average, so he treated it with great respect and incorporated it into the act, defending it with great passion.
    When Fay Vincent was commissioner, he loved to study the Hall of Fame ballplayers to try to discover the source of their greatness, what made them themselves—the whiteness of the whale, as Melville put it. One time Vincent engaged Musial in serious conversation.
    “I said, ‘My question is this, if you came along in high school or American Legion baseball, did anybody try to change that?’ I thought that was a legitimate question, but he looked at me and said, ‘Commissioner, why would anybody want to change my stance? I was always hitting .500.’ I thought, from his point of view, he’s absolutely right.”
    Musial probably always contorted himself into some version of the stance, from the first time he picked up a bat in Donora. He was blessed with a lithe body that had been trained in gymnastics classes at the Polish Falcons club.
    When he morphed from sore-armed pitcher to desperate hitter in the low minor leagues, he naturally twisted into a defensive stance, probably because hitting was going to be his ultimate chance to be a professional ballplayer, or maybe to be anything. He could not afford to fail. Make contact or go home. So he waited back on the pitch, then struck, letting his reflexes take over. Power was incidental at first. The important thing was,
Don’t let them send me home
.
    The result was the Musial crouch—feet parallel, knees bent, right hip showing, bat back, eyes peering over his shoulder. Most hitting stances are personal expressions, and there are thousands of them. Bill James has called Musial’sthe Strangest Batting Stance.
    Musial’s stance actually became more pronounced after the war, but it always lent itself to jests, to description. Baseball is such a verbal sport, with its dugout full of drugstore cowboys, making observations on the passing scene.
    Ted Lyons, an older pitcher, spotted Musial in his early years in the majorsand quipped that he looked like “a small boy looking around a corner to see if the cops are coming.”
    And Buzzy Wares, a first-base coach for the Cardinals in those simpler times before designated hitting coaches, was impressed with Musial’s selectivity at an early age and urged him to keep twisting into his unique stance, the prewar version.
    “Musial reminds me of a housewife choosing tomatoes at a market,” Wares was known to say. “She picks up one, feels it and puts it down. She squeezes another, pinches a third and then—ah!—here’s the one she wants. That’s the way Stan sorts out pitches.”
    How’s this for discipline: in 1943, his second full season in the majors, Musial struck out only 18 times in 701 plate appearances. Our behemoths today would be ashamed of such a statistic, as an indicator of lack of manliness.
    Musial was never a big man for his sport—six feet, 170 pounds. Nowadays he would be turned back at the tryout gates “unless you can”—
wink-wink
—“put on some weight, son.” His ribs showed. He had a parlor trick of sucking in his stomach until it seemed to be touching his spine, but when he took off his shirt anybody could see he was blessed with powerful, rippling back muscles, the