The baseball community suffered two huge losses today: Cardinals slugger Stan “The Man” Musial, who was universally acclaimed as the nicest man in baseball, and Orioles manager Earl Weaver, who was not. By anyone. Ever.
Both had unusual careers, staying with one team for the duration, and having almost uniform success until the end. (Weaver was coaxed out of retirement to try to rescue a sinking ballclub for a dismal season and a half; he’d retired after finishing tied for first but losing a one-game playoff to Harvey’s Wallbangers.) Both played with great intelligence, Musial having an encyclopedic knowledge of National League pitching, and Weaver being a master strategist and judge of talent.
Weaver is usually ranked among the top managers in baseball history, a peer with John McGraw, Joe McCarthy [1], Connie Mack, and Casey Stengel. Musial is oddly forgotten these days, I think because he doesn’t have a hook like the other great outfielder of the past: not a freakishly talented man-child like Ruth, nor a heroically troubled soul like Williams, nor a universal athletic genius like Mays. Nor is there a simple statement of what mad him special as a player (more home runs that the rest of the league, last man to hit .400, five-tool player without a single weakness.) One thing I’ll remember about him is this: St. Louis was the closest thing to a southern city in baseball in 1947, and there were rumblings that the Cards would refuse to play against Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers. These ended immediately when their biggest star openly supported Robinson’s right to play.
[1] Not that Joe McCarthy. And no politics.
Stan was a true great who certainly didn’t and doesn’t get his due, but is certainly deserving of whatever accolades are sent his way. And probably more.
A minor quibble on Mays: While you are correct that the narrative surrounding him was often about his unique athletic abilities, it frustrates me when we reduce players such as he to JUST athletic marvels, as if they are merely the result of winning the genetic lottery and their success is not a function of hard work and study. That we do this overwhelmingly to black athletes is even more troublesome. I don’t mean to put this on you, Mike, as you are commenting on existing narratives and not forming them yourself. But all of the guys you mentioned were both phenomenally talented and remarkably hard workers. You don’t do what any of them did without excelling in both areas.
I once read a story that Mays used to spend hours in the outfield shagging fly balls but with his back to the batter before contact was made. He apparently did this to learn the different sounds that balls hit different ways and distances made, so that he had one more bit of information on how to track a ball hit his way. To me, that is pretty ingenious.
Wholly agreed about Mays. I’ve quoted this before:
Wertz hits it. A solid sound. I learned a lot from the sound of the ball on the bat. Always did. I could tell from the sound whether to come in or go back. This time I’m going back, a long way back, but there is never any doubt in my mind. I am going to catch this ball. I turn and run for the bleachers. But I got it. Maybe you didn’t know that, but I knew it. Soon as it got hit, I knew I’d catch this ball.
But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was Lary Doby on second base. On a deep fly to center field at the Polo Grounds, a runner could score all the way from second. I’ve done that myself and more than once. So if I make the catch, which I will, and Larry scores from second, they still get the run that puts them ahead. All the time I’m running back, I’m thinking, ‘Willie, you’ve got to get this ball back to the infield.’
I run fifty or seventy-five yards–right to the warning track–and I take the ball a little toward my left shoulder. Suppose I stop and turn and throw. I will get nothing on the ball. No momentum going into my throw. What I have to do is this: after I make the catch, turn. Put all my momentum into that turn.
To keep my momentum, to get it working for me, I have to turn very hard and short and throw the ball from exactly the point that I caught it. The momentum goes into my turn and up through my legs and into my throw.
That’s what I did. I got my momentum and my legs into that throw. Larry Doby ran to third, but he couldn’t score. Al Rosen didn’t even advance from first. All the while I was running back, I was planning how to get off that throw. Then some of them wrote, I made that throw by instinct.
But it’s also true that Mays added to hard work and intelligence every physical ability a baseball player needs, all five tools at A+ levels. He also took such good care of himself that he had one of the greatest seasons anyone’s ever had at 34, and was a genuinely great player through 40. The man was born to be a baseball player, the same way that Bill Clinton was born to be a politician,
I think the other 2 things holding Musial back in the public consciousness is that St. Louis even back then, was off the main national media axis, and that he simply played so relatively long ago, he was in his prime even before the *parents* of today’s working level sportscasters were born.
He always got a lot of ink in the sports books I read as a kid.
Not sure about the second point. Musial and Ted Williams were almost exact contemporaries and of similar value as players, but there’s no question who’s more famous today,
Well, like you say, Williams had some singular accomplishments that lend themselves to factoids. And Boston is closer to America’s national media axis (both then and now). Williams has also been dead for some ten years now, the fact the The Man was still alive until very recently may have been part of the reason his Q-quotient was diminished – a decent, retired man has no interest in generating ‘buzz’ when he’s still alive.