The Victory Season Page 19
Then Pirates owner William Benswanger got involved, browbeating his players into rejecting the outside agitation. Some players, with little education and no entitlement history to fall back on, were reticent to challenge ownership too strongly, despite their strong feelings about the financial situation they were in and the odiousness of the Reserve Clause. Baseball culture had conditioned them to revere the owners as proud, if stern, fathers.
Al Lopez, the team captain, liked what he heard from Murphy, but his response captured the mind-set of most players, who simply weren’t mentally prepared to recognize themselves as being taken advantage of. “I thought Murphy’s ideas made sense,” Lopez told Baseball Digest in 1951, “but I also knew Bill Benswanger, our boss, was a thoroughly good guy.” The contradiction between “boss” and “good guy,” with its implicit understanding that a nice man wouldn’t take advantage of the players, was the gulf that Murphy had to leap. Besides, as everyone told them, “you should have seen the old days.” “The Pasquels got us thinking about big money,” said slugging Pirates rookie Ralph Kiner, “but none of us ever thought we would get out of baseball law [the Reserve Clause].”
Murphy was confident that he had made enough inroads with the team to win a strike vote, though, and set a date—June 6, which happened to be two years to the day after the invasion of Europe began. Twenty-four hours before the strike date, Murphy met with Pirates management. The team tried to convince Murphy to kick the issue until the end of the season, when they could properly hash things out. Murphy was having none of it. “Letting this thing slide isn’t going to help us one bit,” he snapped. “By that time, half the players might be in Peoria.” The meeting grew heated, and nothing was settled. On his way out, Murphy snarled that he was looking forward to telling the players “just what kind of bosses they’ve got.” Some observers thought Murphy himself was to blame for the lack of progress. Red Smith, who strongly believed that the players were being taken advantage of, called the union organizer “red faced, inclined to belligerency, and equipped with a sneer that must be the envy of all sneerers.”
At the last moment, the team voted to play on the sixth, putting off a potential strike for twenty-four hours. Murphy upped his vitriol. “I guarantee that there will be a strike tomorrow night unless the club comes across. We’re going to get tougher. If it goes another day, we’re not only going to ask for recognition, we’re going to start making actual demands. If a club can change a contract and not the players, what kind of contract is it?”
Back in 1912, when Cobb had been suspended for his psychotic rampage into the stands, the Detroit Tigers were faced with a sympathy strike by Cobb’s teammates before the next day’s game. To avoid a forfeit, the Tigers fielded a squad of replacements, including a forty-eight-year-old coach, a boxer who happened to be in town, and several local university students. Needless to say, they lost to Philadelphia 24–2.
Thirty-six years later, the Pirates prepared with a similar strategy. In case of a strike, they would field a team consisting of the team’s two “loyalists,” pitcher Rip Sewell and infielder Jimmy Brown, along with a whole bunch of local sandlot players. Manager Frankie Frisch told reporters he would “play second base myself. And I’ll put Honus Wagner [seventy-two years old at that point] in at third, too.”
The Congress of Industrial Organizations in Pittsburgh supported a strike, as did a majority of fans polled by newspapers in the city. Many others, however, were far too wearied by the country’s unceasing strikes to get behind ballplayers walking off their “jobs.” President Truman was asked if he planned to nationalize the Pirates, as he had threatened to do with the rail workers (which had the effect of settling the paralyzing walk-off after forty-eight hours). “Then I could have two good teams in St. Louis,” he laughed, writing off the Browns, as most people did.
Come game day, no one knew for sure which way the team would vote. Murphy urged the players to act. “Fellas, we strike tonight!” he yelled before he was kicked out of the clubhouse. (Benswanger had insisted the team ban him from the voting process.) For two long hours, the Pirates talked strike in the clubhouse, while Murphy waited outside. In the stands, fans bought beer and hot dogs, adding to Benswanger’s take even as the possibility was strong the scheduled game was about to be replaced by farce. The Giants warmed up, not knowing if they would be facing scheduled starter Ed Bahr, or some yokel plucked from the stands at the last moment.
Suddenly, the clubhouse door flew open, and out came the Pirates, dressed for action. The strike vote had been twenty for, sixteen against, several votes shy of the needed two-thirds majority. The team was back in the baseball business. They raced to the field, no one even looking at Murphy. One Pirate told a reporter “the strike is over for keeps.”
Although no one knows precisely what was said in the clubhouse, apparently Sewell and Brown had convinced enough of their peers to avoid a walkout. Years later Sewell said that at a crucial moment, he stood up and said simply, “We all have signed contracts, and it is my night to pitch. I’m going out to pitch.” (It wasn’t and he didn’t, actually—Sewell didn’t take the mound but did enter the game as a pinch runner and scored a run. Jimmy Brown had 3 hits and 2 RBIs.) The Pirates beat the Giants that night, 10–5, and strike talk was shelved for good. Although they got to see the regulars, the crowd wasn’t totally thrilled with the vote. Sewell and Brown were booed throughout the game, and Brown was knocked around in the parking lot after the game by some union toughs. Murphy approached Sewell after the game. “He told me he was going to get somebody to do something or beat me up,” Sewell remembered. “I said ‘you’d better see that you do a damn good job of it, because if you don’t buddy, you know what you’re going to get.’” Happy Chandler, by contrast, sent Sewell a gold watch in thanks.
“We played a dirty trick on Murphy,” admitted Pirates third baseman Lee Handley afterward. “We let him down, and I was one of those who did it. We are not radicals. We don’t want to be affiliated with any labor organization.”
Murphy vowed to press on. “The mere fact that the Pittsburgh members of the Guild did not choose to use an economic weapon does not mean that we shall not continue to fight here and elsewhere,” he insisted. The truth was, his call for a strike vote without the sure knowledge that it would carry revealed his inexperience, both in baseball and as a labor organizer. “He was ignorant of, or overlooked, sound union technique,” wrote Paul Gould in The New Republic. Still, Gould had to concede that “Murphy has made a definite contribution toward bettering the ball player’s lot.”
That was mainly due to concessions won through his efforts. One, a per diem for the players during spring training, when they usually had to shell out for themselves, is still called “Murphy Money” even today. And his talk of a pension plan fired up interested players to arrange one on their own.
But Murphy’s failure would have a lasting impact on the players, who were somehow surprised when they found themselves continuing to grumble at the unfair advantage management held over their lives. Any unwritten promises to change things were conveniently forgotten. “The country was in such an uproar, maybe we were too distracted to do anything,” remembered Freddy Schmidt. Just four years later, the duplicity of ownership was apparent for all to see, moving Dick Young to write an essay calling for “another Bob Murphy” in Baseball Digest. One was “certain to pop up and haunt major league moguls, unless they quickly restrain their dollar-squeezing greed. He won’t be named Bob Murphy, perhaps, but he’ll find a more sympathetic audience among ballplayers than did the ill-fated organizer.”
Murphy told the AP that he was hardly finished, and indeed, planned “to do something for hockey players” over the winter. Alas, he rapidly faded from memory, his efforts to unshackle the players from bondage and earn them a greater share in baseball’s massive profits tossed aside for a generation, until another outsider with a labor background, the late Marvin Miller, picked up Murphy’s mantle and changed the game forever.
Chapter 21
Here Comes “The Man”
In early June, Stan Musial reported to Sportsman’s Park a few hours before first pitch, and was surprised to find a first baseman’s glove in his locker, rather than his usual outfield mitt. It was Dyer’s passive-aggressive method of telling his superstar that a position change was in the offing.
The kid, Dick Sisler, wasn’t working out at first base, hitting .270 with just a single homer and a puny .668 OPS through the end of May. “Sisler stuttered when he talked,” said Schmidt, “so he had trouble communicating with the other infielders. And he dropped a lot of balls at first. So Terry Moore went to Dyer and told him we wouldn’t win with Dick at first.” Just as his best pitcher and starting second baseman had gone AWOL, Dyer was faced with another crisis. He loathed to break up the game’s best outfield, but it made sense to move Musial to first and play Harry Walker in left, even though Walker had started slowly and Dyer didn’t particularly like the Hat or his quirks. Other options at first base weren’t good. So Stan took some grounders, broke in the new glove, and pronounced himself ready to watch the game unfold from a whole new angle.
It was typical of the game’s least Type A superstar. Musial seldom made a fuss over anything.
Musial’s unlikely path from Donora, a typical western Pennsylvania steel mill town, to the top of the baseball pyramid is well chronicled. The son of a Polish father and a Czech mother, he was born Stanislaw, and his name was only anglicized when he enrolled in school. Most folks around Donora called him “Stash” throughout his childhood. He was a local boy through and through, marrying the daughter of the neighborhood grocer, Lillian “Lil” Labash. He was also a dominating pitcher, once striking out thirteen adults at the age of fifteen in semipro ball. That got him signed by the Cardinals, and in the minors Musial would play outfield when he wasn’t pitching. One August afternoon in 1940, he fell heavily while going for a line drive and injured his shoulder. His resulting dead arm sidetracked his pitching career, and he was dumped down to Class C Springfield. For a while it appeared Musial would be just another washout.
But his manager at Springfield, Ollie Vanek, saw potential in his hitting, and encouraged Musial to forget the slab and concentrate on being a full-time position player. He set about destroying the Western Association, hitting .387, and was quickly promoted to Rochester, the Cards’ top farm team. He was so good that he was called up late in the 1941 season, as the Redbirds chased Brooklyn for the flag, which the Dodgers would win by 2½ games. Many Cardinals players complained afterward that if Musial had been brought up sooner, they would have won the pennant.
He batted with a peculiar, soon-to-be iconic stance, a peek-a-boo over his shoulder with his back almost square to the pitcher. “He looked like a kid peeking around a corner to see if the cops are coming,” said Hall of Fame pitcher Ted Lyons. Author Tom Meany described it thusly: “The bent knees and the crouch give him the appearance of a coiled spring, although most pitchers think of him as a coiled rattlesnake.” “Once Musial timed your fastball,” thought Warren Spahn, “your infielders were in jeopardy.” The word “automation” was coined in 1946 by an engineer at Ford Motor Company named Delmar Harder. He was talking about the Ford assembly line that cranked out an engine every fourteen minutes, but he might just as easily have been describing Musial’s robotic lashing of line drives.
Stan and Lil had a son, Dickie, so Stan was exempt from the early stages of the war. It wasn’t until 1945 that he finally had to go. Pete Reiser tried to talk Musial into joining the army and Pistol’s Fort Riley team. “I told Pete, ‘Naw, I’m going into the Navy,’” Musial told author Frederick Turner. “I just liked the Navy for some reason—the water and all. You know where a lot of those guys wound up who were at Fort Riley? At the Battle of the Bulge.” Musial wasn’t likely to have been sent to that frozen forest, given his ballplaying status, but his navy hitch still cost him, at least in the lifetime numbers department. Musial would have been a cinch for 500 homers and 2,000 RBIs had he not missed the season.
But there was a serendipitous benefit to his service. While in the navy, Musial tried to hit more home runs to give the swabbies and gyrenes watching something to remember. He crept closer to the plate to do so. When he returned to action, Musial found that he was standing closer to the plate, whereas before the navy, he had stood uncommonly far back in the box. He was thus less susceptible to outside pitches, and he would always smile when remembering his navy days as a result.
Smiling was Musial’s default setting. Unlike so many superstars of his time and earlier, there wasn’t a trace of cantankerousness to Stash. Post-Dispatch photographer Louis Phillips had to deal with just about every player in the majors in his long career taking snaps for the paper. The rotund and bespectacled shutterbug mostly hated the job, but he loved Musial. “He’s not like the hammerheads of other years,” Phillips said in a P-D profile in mid-’46. “Those other players always gave me a pain in the neck. Like as not, when I’d ask them to pose, they’d say ‘what’s in it for me?’ But this guy Musial is different. He smiles and asks ‘what kind of pose do you want?’”
His idea of rowdiness was to shake hands and leave a fake thumb behind in the palm of the startled handshakee. He studied magic in his off hours, thanks to a local insurance man named Claude Keefe, who had gotten him hooked. He was a big sports fan, talking about boxing and football with anyone who’d listen, but he also kept abreast of world affairs and enjoyed arguing politics on long train rides. He loved bowling, and would go on to own a number of lanes in St. Louis, and he surely noticed the invention in 1946 of the automatic pin spotter, which revolutionized Tuesday-night bowling leagues across America and led to the dismissal of thousands of pin boys.
He and Lil had had a second child, daughter Geraldine, in ’44, and the family had finally moved full-time to St. Louis after years of splitting time between there and Donora. Now that he had actually squeezed a raise out of Breadon, a move to first base seemed like the least he could do. Aside from the team’s struggles so far that season, and a twitchy knee he had banged on the sandy dirt of Waterfront Park that spring, all was good in his world.
The training home of the Cards had an iffy reputation in terms of field worthiness, but it was just a spring camp. Sportsman’s Park, home to the Cardinals and the AL Browns, on the other hand, was the worst field in the majors. The infield was lumpy, the outfield a haven for rocks, the pitching mound unkempt and scarcely higher than the batter’s box. The old barn had terribly unsanitary conditions and virtually no parking spaces.
The two-tiered pile sat on the corner of Grand and Dodier, several blocks west of downtown, where the major urban renewal projects that erected Busch Stadium and the Gateway Arch were still two decades away. Baseball had been played on the location since at least 1866. The grounds were turned into a proper baseball park by a saloonkeeper named Chris Von Der Ahe in 1882, and the place had retained a speakeasy vibe ever since. During Prohibition, a nightclub, complete with striptease acts, operated just beyond the outfield wall. A goat was used to trim the grass during the Depression.
In 1946, there was a new penthouse for swells to watch the game, built by new Browns owner George Muckerman, who channeled a bit of Larry MacPhail’s mojo. But it was tough to class up this joint. Under the stands, the scene resembled a county fair, a “garish midway” with dozens of booths selling all manner of goods, from fried dough to shoe shines. The main concessionaire was named Blake Harper. Red Smith totted up his offerings before a game in ’46:
Hamburgers, hot dogs, innumerable brands of beer, spring water, pop, pennants, mini hats, plastic baseballs bearing Cardinals autographs, record books, a history of the Cardinals, peanuts salted in the shell, peanuts salted outside the shell, peanuts unsalted, pop corn, crackerjack, cigars, cigarettes, milk, coffee, orange juice, candy, Red Bird rattles and other noise makers, mechanical pencils—but no beefsteak. However, Mr. Harper recommends his beef, veal, and pork “super hot dog” whose
ingredients, he says, come from Syria, Australia and Canada and are individually “tenderized 48 hours in pineapple juice.”
Vendors also sold cushions, and repeat customers carried their own into the park, as the seats were uncomfortable at best. The twelve-foot-high outfield wall was unpadded, and a scoreboard towered over it in left. In right field, a thirty-three-foot-high screen prevented cheap home runs and favored lefties with uppercut swings. There was no hitter’s background, so when the stands were full, it was tough to pick up pitches—a handicap that seldom bothered AL visitors, as the Browns rarely sold out.
The center field seats were particularly hard to sell in summertime; they were in direct sun for afternoon games, roasting in temperatures over one hundred degrees. Upper grandstand seats were the sole province of Negro fans, as Jim Crow laws remained in effect at Sportsman’s Park until the 1960s. Advertisements sold Grieselbeck Beer (“No Finer Beer In All The World”) on the right field fence, while Lifebuoy Soap dominated the center field wall. “After the Game Enjoy A Lifebuoy Bath. The Cards and Browns Do. Stops B.O.” Sportsman’s Park was the only stadium to have ad space on top of the visiting dugout, and the only spot in the majors where sponsors shilled their goods over the stadium loudspeaker.
When Cards superfan Mary Ott, a leather-lunged shrieker nicknamed the “Horse Lady of St. Louis” for her braying screams, was at full cry, even the loudspeaker was drowned out. Ott was a Sportsman’s Park fixture for twenty-five years, wrecking the eardrums of opposing players and umpires with her bloodcurdling shouts. “I like scientific rooting,” she said in describing the method to her mayhem, “something that helps the home boys win and makes the other guys sore. I figure if I really work on ’em, I can knock a lot of them pitchers out of the box in three innings.” “Her vocal cords lubricated with countless bottles of beer,” wrote William Nicholson of the raucous Ms. Ott, “she particularly enjoyed making afternoons hideous for the Dodgers.”