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January 18, 2013headline deleted per content below
January 22, 2013
Randy Shaw, publisher at San Francisco’s Beyond Chron, one of my old stomping grounds, has a thoughtful piece looking a little deeper at baseball great Stan Musial, who died over Martin Luther King Birthday weekend. In “Stan Musial’s Other Legacy,” http://beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=10881, Shaw probes the idea that while “baseball’s perfect knight” of the 1950s (words of baseball commissioner Ford Frick, which are engraved on a statue outside Busch Stadium in St. Louis) was a benevolent influence during the post-Jackie Robinson integration of our national pastime, Musial was not an active one. Shaw’s bottom line is that this all must be seen in the context of King’s assessment “that the biggest obstacle to justice for blacks was not the ‘violence of white bigots’ but the ‘silence’ of moderates who favor order over justice.”
These observations hit home, since I’m a native St. Louisan and a well-documented denizen of the Cardinals’ disaspora. I’m even quoted — irresponsibly, as I complained to the author — in Jane Leavy’s bestselling biography of Sandy Koufax, about a confrontation with anti-Semitism while Koufax shut out my hometown heroes to seal the 1963 National League pennant for the Los Angeles Dodgers. More recently, in 2010, I wrote a piece for Beyond Chron — which includes a remembrance of attending Musial’s last game — about the dismaying participation of Tony La Russa and Albert Pujols at a Glenn Beck rally that attempted to co-opt King’s legacy. See http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=8465.
(Being that most craven of creatures, a fan, I must confess that I proceeded to slide back into getting caught up in the excitement of the Cardinals’ World Series run the next year.)
As is often the case, the most sensible points on Musial were made to me a few years ago by my son Nate, now 22. I’ve repeated them to many family, friends, and journalists, including George Vecsey, the retired New York Times columnist and author of a bestselling biography of Musial, which somewhat corrects the historical short shrift Musial has gotten vis-a-vis his more colorful contemporary baseball legend Ted Williams. Paraphrasing Nate:
We all know that Musial was a prince of a guy and Williams was a jerk. I mean, we just know it. But consider this: Williams did two tours of military duty, in both World War II and Korea, flying dangerous combat missions in the latter war, in the process taking years off the prime of his baseball career, which almost certainly kept him from breaking what was then Babe Ruth’s lifetime home run record. Williams also used his 1966 induction speech at the Baseball Hall of Fame to make an impassioned plea for due Hall recognition of the African-American baseball greats with whom he’d played on offseason barnstorming tours in the thirties and forties, and who never got a chance to show their wares to a wider public before Branch Rickey signed Robinson and promoted him to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.
Like just about everyone from St. Louis — otherwise known as the Mecca of western civilization — I loved Musial’s baseball performances. I admired Stan the Man’s grace, dignity, and human touch on and off the field. I appreciate that in his own way, the total package gently eased racial reform and other good causes.
But I also recommend Randy Shaw’s essay as an antidote to hagiography.
Irv Muchnick