After His Greatest Season, Stan Musial Faced Challenges in 1949

Stan Musial completes his swing on this 1948-49 Leaf trading card. (SABR-Rucker Archive)

 

Stan Musial came into 1949 after what would turn out to be the best season in his Hall of Fame career. In 1948 he won his third (and, as it turned out, final) Most Valuable Player Award after leading the league in nearly every significant offensive category, including batting average (.376) and RBIs (131), and falling one homer shy of the Triple Crown as his 39 round-trippers ranked second, behind Johnny Mize’s and Ralph Kiner’s 40. In the statistical categories where Musial came out on top, many were by significant margins. His batting average was 43 points higher than that of runner-up Richie Ashburn; his .702 slugging average bested runner-up Johnny Mize by nearly 140 points, while his 1.152 OPS was nearly 200 points above that of runner-up Mize.

The historical significance of Musial’s season becomes even clearer if we consider Wins Above Replacement, as Musial’s 11.3 WAR was the 11th-best of any player in baseball’s Modern Era to that point, a total exceeded only by Babe Ruth (who topped that mark six times), Rogers Hornsby, Lou Gehrig, and Honus Wagner.

Beyond postseason honors, Musial’s season earned him a nearly 40 percent raise for 1949, from $36,000 to $50,000, and the Cardinals further rewarded him with a two-year contract, something rare at a time when baseball’s reserve clause gave owners no practical reason to strike multiyear deals with their players.

Less than a month later, however, tragedy struck. In the last week of October, a thick chemical fog from zinc factory smokestacks settled over Musial’s native Donora, Pennsylvania, resulting in more than 20 deaths and, according to some estimates, sickness in roughly a third of Donora’s 15,000 people.1 Because his mother, Mary, was among those who faced respiratory problems from the smog, Musial moved his parents to St. Louis, but two months later, his father, Lucasz, suffered his second stroke in less than a year and died at the age of 59.2

One other event that occurred in the offseason bears reporting simply because of its oddness: In February, as Musial was on his way to Florida for spring training, a 24-year-old Texan named Richard Edward Brame checked himself into a luxury resort in Mississippi under Musial’s name, telling everyone he was the star player, giving interviews in which he promised to hit .400 and planned to make a visit to a VA hospital wearing his uniform.3 When a reporter learned that Musial was then actually in Albany, New York, he alerted police and Brame ended up serving 10 days in jail for vagrancy.4

Musial’s trials carried over onto the field as he struggled to hit in spring training. While there are no comprehensive statistics for Grapefruit League games, news reports from Florida paint a bleak picture. On April 4, after a loss to the Yankees, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported, “Stan Musial went hitless again and is in his longest slump of the spring.”5 Two days later, as the Cardinals broke camp and moved north for a series of exhibition games before the season started, the St. Louis Star and Times headlined a story: “Musial in Slump as Club Leaves Florida.”6 A little more than a week later, he was still not hitting well; the same newspaper commented, with an allusion to a restaurant business he had recently invested in, “Musial isn’t hitting the size of one of his restaurant steaks, although a year ago on the way home ‘The Man’ was clearing fences.”7

Musial continued his funk even after the season got underway, going 1-for-7 in the team’s first two games in Cincinnati, both losses. It was so bad that when he came to bat for the first time in the Cardinals’ home opener on April 22 that fans heckled him for his .143 batting average.8 He responded with a massive home run that an Associated Press reporter suggested meant he had “found his batting eye” after his “utterly ineffective” start.9

The writer, however, was premature as Musial managed only 9 hits in 37 at-bats through the Cardinals’ 10 games in April, and he closed out the month hitting .243. There was one bright spot, however, as three of those hits were home runs. Acknowledging that projecting season’s totals with such a small sample size was foolish, St. Louis Post-Dispatch sports editor J. Roy Stockton nonetheless observed that Musial was on pace for 77 home runs. He went on, “Talking to Musial … it would make him very happy to hit scads of home runs. He’s been the most valuable player … three times and has led the league in virtually every phase of offensive baseball. … There aren’t many new honors left, but wouldn’t it be something to … lead both leagues in four-baggers?”10

Then, even the power vanished. Musial touched .300 with a 3-for-3 day on May 1, but over the next three weeks was 16-for-63 with no homers and only one extra-base hit, a double, closing out May 21 with a .250 batting average and an anemic .380 slugging percentage. During that span, especially with the team also in the doldrums, at 11-16 and sitting in seventh place, Cardinals manager Eddie Dyer contemplated benching Musial but decided against it because, he told reporters, it might not do any good.11 Star and Times writer Sid Keener blamed the two-year contract the team had given Musial, suggesting it was “unsound business … [as] the incentive to get out and hustle for more money on the following year is not there at the start of the first campaign.”12

Finally, to pull himself out of his funk, Musial, and teammate Enos Slaughter, who was also struggling, hitting only .264 and slugging .403, held a session of private batting practice on May 16. There, Musial seemed to diagnose his own problem. At one point, while Slaughter watched him “hammer ball after ball to faraway places,” Musial stepped away from the plate and declared, “I know what’s been my trouble. I’ve been pressing too hard. I want to get going so much that I’ve been swinging at bad balls instead of picking out the good ones.”13

The two kept at it for an hour, stopping only when Slaughter’s hands started bleeding.14 Musial came to see that he was overstriding and that, as hurlers figured out his new approach, they were pitching him outside more often and his insistence on pulling the ball was resulting in weak grounders to second. He began making the necessary adjustments and hit .321 with a .429 OBP and .528 slugging average from then until the end of May. In early June, Post-Dispatch sportswriter Bob Broeg, declared, “Musial again is Musial. And that means free-swinging, earth shaking destruction.”15

Musial remained hot at the plate, hitting .339 for the month, briefly flirting with .300 for the season in the last week before going into a brief cold spell. Still, he earned a spot in the starting lineup for the National League All-Star team, in center field; in the balloting, fans gave him the third highest vote total of any player, behind only Jackie Robinson and Ralph Kiner. Musial went 3-for-4 and hit his second All-Star Game home run, though it was not enough to push the NL to a win, as they lost 11-7, in part because of five errors.

Musial went 2-for-4 in the opener on July 22, including a home run off Preacher Roe in the first inning, as the Cardinals won 3-1. While he went hitless in the second game, he walked twice, including leading off the ninth inning to start a rally that pushed St. Louis to a 5-4 victory. In the third game, he went 4-for-5, hitting for the cycle in a 14-1 romp that moved the team to first place. In the final game, which ended in a 4-4 tie, Musial went 3-for-4 with a double, a triple, and an RBI. When it ended, his average stood at .304 and would never dip below .300 the rest of the year.

Still, by the standards Musial had set for his career since he came into the league in September 1941, his numbers were unimpressive. He was far below his lifetime average of .348 and was only the third-best hitter on his own team, behind Slaughter’s .322 and Red Schoendienst’s .320. Beyond this, any hopes of repeating as batting champion seemed remote, as he trailed Jackie Robinson’s league-leading average by nearly 60 points.

Once the calendar turned over to August, Musial set about trying to close both gaps, as the Cardinals also went to work to widen what was, at the end of July, a 1½-game lead over Brooklyn. By the end of the first week, when Musial went 13-for-27, his average was up to .313, as the Cards went 5-2. While Musial gained slightly on Robinson, who went 12-for-35 that week, the Dodgers were even hotter than St. Louis, going 7-1, moving back into a tie for first. By the end of the month, the Cardinals regained their 1½-game lead and Musial cut the distance between him and Robinson for the batting race nearly in half. Musial’s 46-for-120 month had pushed his average to .321, while Robinson stood at .350 after going 37-for-120.

As it turned out, both chases came down to the season’s final week, which began with the Cardinals leading the Dodgers by a game and Musial trailing Robinson by only 6 points. Both The Man and his team fell short by time the curtain rang down on the 1949 season. The Cardinals ended up dropping four of their final six games, while Brooklyn went 4-2, clinching the pennant with a 10-inning 9-7 victory over Philadelphia on the final Sunday. As for the Cardinals, their final-game 13-5 shellacking of the Cubs was not enough, after the team had dropped the first two contests against Chicago. If there was one key moment that might at least have pushed the club into a playoff with Brooklyn, it came in the fifth inning of the next to last game. With the Cubs leading 3-1, the Cardinals had runners on second and third with no outs after an infield single by Lou Klein, and a double by Musial. After Slaughter popped out to short, Chicago walked Steve Bilko intentionally, loading the bases, but Marty Marion popped to short and Del Rice popped to first, ending the threat.

As for Musial, although he outhit Robinson in the final week – he went 12-for-27 while Robinson collected 6 hits in 18 at-bats – it was still too little, as Robinson ended up winning the only batting title of his Hall of Fame career, with a .342 average, while Musial was runner-up at .338. (Musial’s partner in the semiprivate batting practice earlier in the year, Slaughter, ended in third, at .336.) Musial did lead the league in on-base percentage (.438), hits (207), total bases (382), and doubles (41), while finishing second in home runs (36), behind Kiner, who had 54. Robinson also took home the Most Valuable Player Award (the only one in his career), while Musial was runner-up.

Reflecting on the season, and his disappointment in failing to repeat as batting champion – something no one in the league had done since Rogers Hornsby nearly a quarter of a century earlier – Musial focused on his poor start, which he blamed on trying to hit the long ball after just missing out on the Triple Crown the season before.

“There’s no doubt I threw myself off stride by swinging for home runs in the spring,” he told The Sporting News for a November retrospective on his season. “I lost my timing, the pitchers began getting me to nibble at bad pitches and it wasn’t until the second half that I got back in the groove.”16 After acknowledging that it was only when he began “meeting the ball on the nose and driving it to all fields,” he vowed, “That’s the way I’m going to approach this hitting business next year. … I’m not the hottest spring hitter, I know, but I’m hoping to get a good start to build an early average for a big season.”17

As it turned out, Musial made good on that pledge: No longer striving for home runs, he hit over .400 for the first two months of 1950, flipping the script on Robinson and winning the batting title over the Dodgers great. He went on to repeat in 1951 and 1952, and won his last batting title in 1957. Sadly, however, the 1949 season was the nearest Musial and the Cardinals came to winning the pennant over the last 14 seasons of his career.

JOE SCHUSTER is the author of the baseball novel The Might Have Been, which was a finalist for the CASEY Award for 2012. He has published more than 500 articles, essays, and reviews in national and regional magazines as well as in metropolitan newspapers, and has contributed nearly 30 articles to several SABR publications, including One-Win Wonders, One-Hit Wonders, 20-Game Losers, and Sweet 60: the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates, among others. He retired from Webster University in 2018 after teaching for a third of a century. Married, he is the father of five children and three grandchildren – all of whom live and breathe Cardinals baseball.

 

SOURCES

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author referred to Baseball-Reference, Stathead, and the SABR BioProject.

 

NOTES

1 “4218 of Donora’s 15,000 Persons Affected by Smog, Survey Shows,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 7, 1949: 1.

2 “Stan Musial’s Father Dies at St. Louis,” Pittsburgh Press, December 20, 1948: 26.

3 “Texan Charged with Impersonating Musial,” St. Louis Star and Times, February 10, 1949: 28.

4 “Stan Musial Poseur Released from Jail,” Biloxi (Mississippi) Sun Herald, February 22, 1949: 8.

5 J. Roy Stockton, “Wind Aids Yankees in 3-1 Victory,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 4, 1949: 3B.

6 W. Vernon Tietjen, “Stan Musial in Slump as Club Leaves Florida,” St. Louis Star and Times, April 6, 1949: 26.

7 W. Vernon Tietjen, “Cards Appear ‘Tired of It All’ as Exhibition Tour Ends,” St. Louis Star and Times, April 14, 1949: 32.

8 W. Vernon Tietjen, “Cardinals in Night Debut Hope to Keep Cubs in the Dark,” St. Louis Star and Times, April 23, 1949: 6.

9 “Cardinals, Back Home, Win Game,” Mount Vernon (Ilinois) Register-News, April 23, 1949: 8.

10 J. Roy Stockton, “Meet the New Musial, He’s the Slugger Type,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 27, 1949: 18.

11 Bob Broeg, “Cards-Dodgers Game Postponed; Young Players Give Birds a Lift,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 10, 1949: 12.

12 Sid Keener, “Musial’s Slump,” St. Louis Star and Times, May 18, 1949: 25.

13 Ray J. Gillespie, “Musial and Slaughter, Desperate for Hits, Hold Their First Batting Practice,” St. Louis Star and Times, May 17, 1949: 20.

14 Gillespie.

15 Bob Broeg, “Musial, Pollett Win One at Midnight,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 3, 1949: 32.

16 Bob Broeg, “Stan Lost Batting Title in Pennsylvania Parks,” The Sporting News, November 16, 1949: 4.

17 “Stan Lost Batting Title in Pennsylvania Parks.”