September 10, 1963: New grandfather Stan Musial makes home-run history with surging Cardinals

More than 70 former major-league players gathered for Old Timers’ Day at Busch Stadium on September 10, 1963, giving a Tuesday night crowd plenty of grandfathers to root for. And while the 1½-inning exhibition game undoubtedly delighted fans,1 the 13,883 patrons on hand really wanted to see the newest grandfather of them all – Stan Musial of the red-hot St. Louis Cardinals.

The weary 42-year-old – feeling exhausted, yet exuberant – had become a grandfather only about 15 hours before slugging the first pitch he saw from 27-year-old Chicago Cubs veteran Glen Hobbie onto the pavilion roof in right field, making his 474th career home run one to remember and opening the floodgates on an 8-0 victory that kept the Cardinals in the thick of the pennant chase.

“I can’t ever remember a major-league grandfather hitting a home run,” said 51-year-old Cardinals manager Johnny Keane, who broke into professional baseball in 1930. “What a way to celebrate a grandson.”2

One night earlier, Musial collected a single in three at-bats as the Cardinals shut out the Cubs 6-0 in a game that ended around 10:30 P.M. Afterward, Musial and his wife of 23 years, Lil, anxiously kept each other company in their modest ranch home on Westway Road in the St. Louis Hills neighborhood. They awaited a long-distance phone call from their son, Richard, an Army lieutenant stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas. The couple knew that call would most likely let them know they had become grandparents, so going to sleep did not seem like a viable option, even for an aging ballplayer weeks away from retirement. But as the clock ticked in slow circles and the phone never rang, the Musials eventually relented and went to sleep around 1:30 A.M. A few hours later, something – a premonition, perhaps – abruptly woke them both.

“Lil and I awakened with a start at exactly the same time – 4:40 A.M. – and got up, troubled,” Stan said. “As she brewed coffee, I paced the floor. Suddenly, the phone rang. Son Dick was calling from Fort Riley, Kansas. Sharon had given birth to a boy. When? Just two minutes after Lil and I woke up.”3

The Musials eventually fell back asleep after digesting the news of a 7-pound 15½-ounce baby boy named Jeffrey Stanton, but Stan’s body likely would have preferred more sleep before trotting out to first base that night to face the Cubs again. Luckily, he secured a quick nap at the ballpark, and adrenaline seemed to kick in before home-plate umpire Vinnie Smith yelled, “Play ball!” on another crucial matchup in the Cardinals’ last-season pennant push.

St. Louis had fallen seven games behind the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League standings on August 30, but with an 11-6 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies that night, the Cardinals started an incredible stretch that eventually pushed them to within a game of their West Coast rivals. With triumphs in 12 of 13 games prior to September 10, St. Louis turned to right-hander Bob Gibson, now in his fifth season, to keep their winning ways intact against the Cubs. Chicago countered with the surging Hobbie, who had pitched 18 straight scoreless innings dating back to August 30 and had allowed only a single run in his past 27 1/3 innings.

Lou Brock, then a 24-year-old outfielder in his second season with Chicago, led off the game with a single, but the next three batters could not get the ball out of the infield – a sign of how much of the night would go for the Cubs. In the bottom of the first, Dick Groat slashed a one-out single to bring Musial to the plate. Musial, who hit the first home run Hobbie surrendered in the majors on April 17, 1958, had struggled against the right-hander in the years since, collecting only 8 hits in 43 at-bats between 1959 and ’62. But the excitement of the pennant chase and his expanding family seemed to light up Musial’s eyes, and he knocked Hobbie’s first offering into right field for a home run that Sports Illustrated suggested was proof that Musial was “even a perfectionist in his manner of celebration.”4

“That one,” Musial recalled of the first known major-league home run ever hit by a grandfather, “was for Jeffrey Stanton Musial.”5

In the second, the Cardinals looked to strike again as Curt Flood singled and George Altman walked before Gibson stepped to the plate with a chance to aid his own cause. Gibson drove one of Hobbie’s pitches to the first row of the left-field bleachers for his second home run in eight days to open a 5-0 lead. The rally, however, would not be complete until Grandpa Stan got back into the action.

Groat, who had returned to the lineup for the first time since getting hit by a pitch in the ribs on September 6, hit a two-out double6 and scampered home when Musial greeted reliever Jim Brewer with an RBI single. Tim McCarver scored on Altman’s sacrifice in the third, and with that 7-0 lead, Keane felt comfortable removing both the grimacing Groat and the bleary-eyed Musial from the game after they batted in the fourth inning.

“I was a tired, but happy grandfather as I passed the cigars in the clubhouse that night,” said Musial, who shared his postgame celebration with 25-year-old September call-up Corky Withrow.7 That morning, Withrow’s wife, Barbara, had given birth to a son in Owensboro, Kentucky.

St. Louis continued the onslaught in the fifth, as Ken Boyer led off with a double and moved to third on Bill White’s single. After Flood lined into an unassisted double play to first baseman Ernie Banks, McCarver poked an RBI single to give St. Louis an 8-0 advantage. Cubs reliever Jack Warner, making his first appearance since Chicago recalled him from the Salt Lake City Bees, finally cooled the St. Louis offense, holding the Cardinals without a hit over the final three innings.

Chicago threatened in the seventh after Jimmy Stewart and Brock singled and doubled in consecutive two-out at-bats, but Gibson induced a grounder to end the inning. That marked the only time the Cubs got a runner to third base as Gibson improved his career-high win total to 17 and tallied his second shutout of the season.8

Gibson’s effort also helped mark the second year in a row that the Cardinals had shut out the Cubs in consecutive games, after also sweeping a doubleheader on June 27, 1962. And the torment did not stop there, as Ray Sadecki and Ron Taylor combined for a shutout the next day, and the Cubs did not score in the following game until the seventh inning for a 33-inning scoreless stretch. They had not suffered three straight shutouts since July 1950, while St. Louis had not shut out an opponent in three consecutive games since 1944.9

The Cardinals improved to 85-61 after earning their 13th win in 14 games but could not gain any ground on the Dodgers, who picked up a 4-2 win at Pittsburgh to protect their three-game lead in the standings. St. Louis’s run of success eventually resulted in 19 wins in 20 games by September 15.

“The Cardinals’ streak was the most incredible of my 22 years in the majors, not for sustained play as in 1942, but for spectacular results over a three-week period,” Musial recalled. “Day after day, game after game, we’d rock the opposition at the outset so that they had to try to play catch-up. … St. Louis was pennant happy, and I know I felt like a kid.”10

As the streaking Cardinals romped to a four-game sweep of the Cubs,11 nerves fluttered inside Dodgers fans who feared their team would lose a late-season lead for a third straight season.

“Every year, the Dodgers lead the pack quietly into September, and when they turn around, there’s always somebody on the stairs with a crooked grin silently patting a coffin and pointing. ‘For you,’ the specter says,” wrote Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray. “It was the Reds in ’61, the Giants last year. This year, it might be Stan Musial, of all people.”12

The Cardinals, however, lost eight of their final 10 games, spoiling the chances of sending Musial out in style, but he still had a remarkable finish to his career. From the date of Jeffrey’s birth until the end of the season, Musial hit .341 with 2 home runs over 16 games.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted the Baseball-Reference.com, Stathead.com, and Retrosheet.org websites for pertinent materials and box scores. He also used information obtained from news coverage by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and the Chicago Tribune.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/SLN/SLN196309100.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1963/B09100SLN1963.htm

Photo credit: Stan Musial, SABR-Rucker Archive.

Notes

1 Hank Arft, a 41-year-old former St. Louis Browns first baseman, slugged a grand slam as the squad of American League players won, 4-1. Other players in action included former Cardinals Terry Moore, Ray Sanders, Joe Medwick, and Heinie Mueller – a right fielder within days of turning 64.

2 Tom Pendergast (Associated Press), “Gibson Helps With Slugging,” Springfield (Missouri) Leader-Press, September 11, 1963: 22.

3 Bob Broeg, Stan Musial: “The Man’s” Own Story as Told to Bob Broeg (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1964), 238.

4 Theodore M. O’Leary, “Last Time Around With Stan,” Sports Illustrated, October 7, 1963: 20.

5 Broeg, 238.

6 At the time, Groat (.330) led Milwaukee’s Henry Aaron (.324) and Los Angeles’ Tommy Davis (.323) in the batting race. By season’s end, Groat’s average settled at .319 in his first season with the Cardinals, falling shy of Davis (.326) and Pittsburgh’s Roberto Clemente (.320). Groat, the runner-up to Sandy Koufax in MVP voting, led the NL with 43 doubles, a career-high total.

7 Broeg, 238.

8 Gibson finished 1963 with a career-best 18-9 record, though he exceeded that win total in six of the next seven seasons.

9 The Cardinals shut out the Boston Braves three straight times on July 8 and 9, 1944, on the way to the World Series championship.

10 Broeg, 239.

11 Those losses sent Chicago to its longest losing streak of the season – six games. The Cubs finished seventh in standings at 82-80.

12 Jim Murray, “Ghostly Echoes,” Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1963: 47. Despite the concerns, the Dodgers never lost their lead in the standings and swept the New York Yankees to win the World Series.