Stan Musial Read Online Free PDF Page B

source of his strength.
    “The only real good hitter I can think of with small hands was Stan Musial. Little bitty hands. But you couldn’t find a better hitter,” said Bob Gibson, who never pitched to Musial in a game but studied him to see what made him work.
    “Stan Musial will twist around so he has to peek over his shoulder,” Gibson said, but then he got to the main point about the Stanley Stance: “In the end, we’re all fundamentally similar, even if we arrive at our release points by different routes.”
    Gibson figured out the secret of Stan Musial: he was an illusionist. In his early years, Musial had a friend named Claude Keefe, who taught him a few magic tricks, just enough to make him the Second Worst Magician in the Sporting World, behind only Muhammad Ali—not bad company when you think about it. Ali always said his faith demanded he explain his tricks, so he did; Musial kept the secrets, such as they were.
    The stance was part of the act—an intermediate step, to make himselfcomfortable but also to confuse the rubes sixty feet away. By and by, the smart ones figured out what Musial was doing.
    “I never thought his stance was that unusual,” said Ralph Kiner, the Hall of Fame slugger, beloved broadcaster for the Mets, and great admirer of Musial.
    “He did two things,” Kiner said. “With that stance, he was coiled and back with his bat and his body, and he would push off and spring.” In other words, what really mattered was what Musial did afterward.
    “Every time I see Stan now at an autograph show or out to dinner, he says, ‘I kicked your ass, didn’t I?’ and I say, ‘Yes, you did, you wore me out,’ ” said Don Newcombe, the great Brooklyn pitcher who beat back alcoholism to became a valuable member of the Dodgers’ front office.
    “But ask him who won the games,” added Newcombe, who had a 16–6 career record against the Cardinals, despite Musial’s .366 average against him.
    Newcombe insisted the Musial stance was just a charade: by the time the ball was pitched, Musial had already unlocked his hips and was in a forward motion, able to hit the ball to any part of the field.
    No less an authority than Branch Rickey, the master builder of the Cardinal farm system, explained the Musial stance. “The preliminary movement he has is a fraud,” Rickey boomed. “No batter’s form is determined by his preliminary stance. When the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand, that is the time when you take a picture of a batsman to get his form. Before the ball is pitched doesn’t mean a thing. If you want to see a proper stride, a short stride, a level swing bat full back, a coin wouldn’t drop off the top of the bat. He is ideal in form.”
    Musial agreed with Rickey.
    “Stance is not so important,” he once said, adding that he found his way into that stance because of his desire to meet the ball in his early years in the majors.
    “At St. Louis, I always wanted to hit .300,” he said, adding, “My stance is very comfortable.” In one way, hitting is more complicated than people think, Musial said, in that a good hitter learns to adjust to the pitcher, the count, the situation, the weather, the field. The main thing is to have a good level swing, and to learn to hit to the opposite field.
    In the same interview, he made himself sound like a lucky stiff to have played at Sportsman’s Park, shared by the Cardinals and Browns for most of his career, a place whose lumpy infield was so baked by the sun and worn by constant usage that players called it “Hogan’s Brickyard.”
    “I got a lot of hits through the infield,” Lucky Stanley insisted.
    BALLPLAYERS TRIED to analyze Musial, pin down his secrets.
    Was it the bat itself?
    In 1962, the Mets signed a brash teenager named Ed Kranepool, straight out of the Bronx. He was not in awe of anybody, not his manager, Casey Stengel, and not his esteemed opponent, forty-one-year-old Stan Musial. Around the batting cage one day, Kranepool