May 19, 1948: Stan Musial solidifies ‘The Man’ moniker with second 5-hit game of season

The night of May 19, 1948, Stan Musial strolled six times to home plate at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. Most of those among the announced crowd of 32,888 fans in the ballpark loved their Dodgers.

Likely all of them respected The Man.

They probably collectively launched a sigh of relief when he simply drew a walk in the fourth inning. The five other trips, Dodgers pitchers managed to get to two strikes against Musial. Each time, Musial prevailed – three singles, a double, and a triple.

“I have one philosophy,” Musial once said in an interview. “I expect to get a hit every time I go to the plate.”1

Some years later, writers including Bob Broeg of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Ray Gillespie of The Sporting News, and Joe Reichler in Sport magazine identified Ebbets Field as the site that launched Musial’s nickname – probably sometime in 1946.

Every time he came to bat, Reichler wrote in 1954, the fans nearby would say: “Oooh, oooh, here comes the man again. Here comes the man.”2

Dodgers fans had ample reason to summon special respect for Musial early in his career. He faced them for the first time on May 3, 1942, in a doubleheader in St. Louis. The 21-year-old tattooed them with four hits, including two doubles, and swiped two bases in five at-bats.

By the time the 1948 season began, Musial owned Brooklyn pitching with a .348 batting average in 110 games. In addition to his 140 hits – 58 for extra bases – Musial had drawn 79 walks against the Dodgers and had compiled a 1.048 OPS.

That success included a .324 batting average for Musial at Ebbets Field – and that’s where he and the Cardinals headed in the middle of May 1948.

Three days earlier the Cardinals had completed a tremendously successful 12-game homestand before embarking for New York. They won nine of those games, including a three-game sweep of the Pittsburgh Pirates to close the stretch at Sportsman’s Park that actually crossed 16 days off the calendar.

One of those triumphs was a 5-4 squeaker over the Dodgers on May 4 that featured a sixth-inning homer from Musial off Ralph Branca and a solo homer in the eighth inning by Enos Slaughter. Alas, the next two scheduled games against Brooklyn were rained out.

Musial didn’t have a bad homestand – .311 batting average, with a couple of triples and a couple of homers while driving in six runs – but he had managed only five hits in his past 20 at-bats as he prepared to head east.

Overall, the team was riding a wave of momentum. A .500 club at the end of April, the Cardinals now sported a 13-7 record and topped the National League standings, 1½ games ahead of the second-place New York Giants and 3½ in front of the sixth-place Dodgers.

That gap increased to 4½ games after the series opener on May 18. Branca went the distance for the home squad and yielded eight hits, with three walks. Musial had a single and double in four at-bats and scored twice, including in the sixth inning on Slaughter’s two-run homer. That put the Cardinals ahead 4-2, and Red Munger kept the lead en route to a 4-3 complete-game victory.

So the Cardinals had won 10 of their 13 previous games and carried a four-game winning streak into the second game of the Brooklyn series. The home team tried to play some mind games with the Cardinals before the actual game began; St. Louis had to take pregame batting practice in twilight because the Dodgers refused to turn on the ballpark lights until just before the teams took the field. Turns out that didn’t affect the Cardinals – other than to get their competitive juices flowing.3

The Dodgers’ starting lineup featured six players who appeared in the 1947 World Series, which Brooklyn dropped in seven games. That included starting pitcher Rex Barney, a mere 23-year-old who had made eight big-league starts at the age of 18 during the World War II season of 1943.

Six players in the Cardinals’ starting lineup had appeared in at least 100 regular-season games in 1946, when they knocked off the Boston Red Sox in a seven-game World Series. Onto the mound against Brooklyn stepped 34-year-old lefty Al Brazle, who hadn’t reached the big leagues until the age of 29. He had worked almost seven innings of ineffective relief of an even-less-effective Howie Pollet in Game Five of the 1946 Series but was a vital part of the staff in 1947 as a combo reliever-starter and again in 1948.

Alas, the youngster Barney and the more senior Brazle combined to get a total of nine outs in this matchup.

In the top of the first, Erv Dusak reached on a one-out bunt single and went to second when Musial pulled a single into right field. Slaughter’s double to right brought Dusak home, and Musial was safe at the plate when Brooklyn catcher Bruce Edwards muffed the relay throw. The Dodgers eventually got out the inning trailing only 2-0 when Edwards tagged out Slaughter trying to steal home.

The lead didn’t live long. Brazle got Eddie Miksis to line out to center to open the bottom of the first, then gave up a single to Pee Wee Reese, a walk, a bases-loading single, and Edwards’ two-run double. Manager Eddie Dyer pulled Brazle and called in reliever Jim Hearn. Pinch-hitter Dick Whitman greeted him with an RBI base hit. Hearn walked Spider Jorgensen to load the bases, then walked Preston Ward to put the Dodgers ahead 4-2.

They made it 5-2 when Carl Furillo’s double scored Pete Reiser in the second inning.

The Cardinals knocked out Barney with a pair of runs in the third. They loaded the bases on back-to-back singles from Dusak and Musial and a walk to Slaughter. Whitey Kurowski’s fly out sent Dusak home. Musial scored his second run on Nippy Jones’s fielder’s choice groundball. Reliever Clyde King got the third out of the inning.

King retired only one more Cardinals batsman. He issued consecutive one-out walks to Dusak, Musial, and Slaughter in the fourth inning. Reliever Hugh Casey took over and the Cardinals treated him rudely: A walk to Kurowski forced in one run, Jones’s double chased home three runs, and Ralph LaPointe’s double scored Jones. Suddenly, the flying-high Cardinals were back on top, 9-5.

Musial’s biggest stroke of the day came in the fifth. After Red Schoendienst and Dusak drew inning-opening walks, Musial lined an opposite-field triple to left field against reliever Erv Palica. He eventually scored for the fourth time in the game, and by inning’s end the Cardinals enjoyed a 13-5 lead.

Three Musial hits and a walk against three different pitchers in only five innings. His two closing hits on the historic night came against Brooklyn’s fourth reliever – Preacher Roe, in the first of his seven seasons with the ballclub.

Once explaining how he approached pitching to Musial, Roe said: “I throw him four wide ones and try to pick him off first base.”4

Musial and Roe faced each other in 184 plate appearances during their careers. As that day indicates, The Man generally came out ahead of the Preacher with his career .372 batting mark and .437 on-base percentage against him.

In this particular meeting, Musial pulled a single to right in the sixth inning off Roe, then he yanked a double into right in the eighth. Cleanup man Kurowski soon singled Musial home to put the Cardinals ahead 14-7.

With his five runs scored and two RBIs, Musial had accounted for half his club’s runs. That was Musial’s second five-hit game of the season. He would have two more before it ended.

“I’ll never get over the way those Brooklyn fans cheered me,” Musial said. “I thought for a moment I was back at Sportsman’s Park.”5

Sources

The author accessed Retrosheet.org and Baseball-Reference.com for pertinent information, including box scores, play-by-play, and other statistical data.

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1948/B05190BRO1948.htm

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/BRO/BRO194805190.shtml

Photo credit: Stan Musial Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 Author interview with Stan Musial in July 1992, as the author conducted interviews and research for a series of stories in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch commemorating the team’s 100 years in the National League.

2 Joe Reichler, “Stan Musial’s Ten Greatest Days,” Sport, November 1954: 12.

3 Ray Gillespie, “Two Birds Hit, One Spilled at Ebbets Field,” The Sporting News, May 26, 1948: 7, 14.

4 Joe Posnanski, “Musial,” MLB.com/Blogs, November 21, 2012. https://medium.com/joeblogs/musial-637c8d9fee2f.

5 Ray Gillespie, “Hats Off,” The Sporting News, May 26, 1948: 17.