Stan Musial, Jackie Robinson, and the Strike Heard ’Round the League
This article was written by Nick Malian
This article was published in Stan Musial book essays (2025)
Stan Musial stands with three of his National League teammates in the 1949 All-Star Game at Ebbets Field. Also pictured are Gil Hodges, Jackie Robinson, and Raph Kiner. (SABR-Rucker Archive)
The story goes that Cardinals President Sam Breadon had heard rumblings about some of his players planning to strike in defiance of Robinson’s ascension to the National League. Upon hearing this, Breadon hastily flew to New York and contacted NL President Ford Frick for fear of reprisal. At the same time, the Cardinals’ team doctor, Robert Hyland, got wind of the strike and shared the story with a friend and sportswriter, Rud Rennie, over many libations. Not wanting to out his friend as a source, Rennie gave the tip to his boss, Stanley Woodward, who published the scoop in the New York Herald Tribune on May 9, 1947.1
Immediately after the story was published, Cardinals manager Eddie Dyer denied the rumors of a boycott. Enos Slaughter, a Southerner from Roxboro, North Carolina, vehemently denied any plans for a strike. Reigning NL MVP Stan Musial said, “There was definitely racist talk, but it wasn’t going to amount to nothing.”2
Whether or not a boycott was planned has been discussed elsewhere.3 While Cardinals pitcher Freddy Schmidt later recalled a letter being shared around the clubhouse advising players to boycott,4 other accounts from Cardinals officials and players, including the 26-year-old Musial, suggest that the talk among players could have been interpreted as setting the groundwork for a strike.
After the story was published, Musial’s immediate reaction to the boycott allegation is difficult to find.5 However, he reflected on it later in life, documented in an interview conducted by Roger Kahn in 1993 and later in George Vecsey’s biography of Musial, published in 2011.
Vecsey dedicates a chapter to the alleged strike and does a good job of summarizing the accounts and timelines. He includes a 1997 quote from Musial denying the allegations: “We never had a meeting. We never talked about having any organized boycott. … We’ll all tell you; we never had any thoughts in that direction, whatsoever.”6 Musial added that the preconceptions New Yorkers had about St. Louis (they were the closest “Southern” team in the National League) and having Southern players may have led to the assumption that a boycott against a Black player could have been planned by the Cardinals. “I think they felt that we were, you know, we’re a Southern town in a way.”7 Musial further said, “You (might have) heard some mumbles before that about playing against Robinson, but when the time came to play, why, everybody played, and it was really nothing. We didn’t have any special meeting, or anybody give us any special talk.”
In the interview with Kahn, Musial was more open about the alleged strike and admitted that he heard “rough and racist talk” in the clubhouse and justified it as a byproduct of baseball at the time. “First of all, everybody has racial feelings. We don’t admit it. We aren’t proud of it. But it’s there. And this is big league baseball, not an English Tea, and ballplayers make noise. So, I heard the words, and I knew there were some feelings behind the words, but I didn’t take it seriously. That was baseball.” He went on to say that the thought the racial talk was “just hot air.”8
Musial and Robinson’s relationship seemed to be amicable, despite their bitter National League rivalry.9 In the Kahn interview, Musial empathized with Robinson about his immigrant father and second-generation American mother who sought after the same economic opportunity in the United States as Robinson did for Black Americans.10 And despite positing that “everybody has racial feelings,” Musial was not considered a racist. “I had no trouble myself with integration,” he told Kahn in the interview. Musial grew up playing integrated sports in Donora, Pennsylvania, and was proud of it.11 According to Vecsey, Ford Frick said that a “prominent player” (read Musial) on the Cardinals told him that “he did not care if Robinson was white, black, green, or yellow.”12
But when push came to shove, Musial admitted to Kahn that it was out of the question to express to his teammates his feelings on race, Robinson, and integration of baseball being long overdue. “Saying all that would have been a speech, and I didn’t know how to make speeches. Saying it to older players, that was beyond me.”13 This suggests that his role in any alleged strike was more nonparticipatory than that of a staunch opposer.
There is a case to be made that the alleged strike by the Cardinals was unsubstantiated and nothing more than vile locker-room threats. If a strike had been really planned and carried out, Musial would have likely opposed it but may not have stopped it. What appears to have been a mix of hasty escalations by the Cardinals brass and claims from eager sportswriters morphed into another stain on major-league baseball’s sordid past.
lives with his wife, daughter, and son in LaSalle, Ontario, where he was born and raised. Growing up in a border city, he idolized Detroit Tigers greats Cecil Fielder and Alan Trammell. However, as an impressionable 12-year-old, his allegiance shifted to the New York Yankees after their 1996 World Series victory. Nick is a pharmacist by day, an amateur chef by night, and found time to earn an Executive MBA degree at the Ivey Business School in London, Ontario, Canada.
SOURCES
In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-reference.com.
NOTES
1 Stanley Woodward, “Views of Sport,” New York Herald Tribune, May 9, 1947, reprinted in The Sporting News, May 21, 1947: 4
2 Roger Kahn, The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 56
3 Warren Corbett, The ‘Strike’ Against Jackie Robinson: Truth or Myth?” SABR Baseball Research Journal, Spring 2017, https://sabr.org/journal/article/the-strike-against-jackie-robinson-truth-or-myth/, accessed April 2024.
4 George Vecsey, Stan Musial: An American Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011), 155.
5 Musial was being treated for acute appendicitis at the time.
6 Vecsey, 156-157.
7 James Giglio, Musial: From Stash to Stan the Man (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 154. This argument continued into the 1990s and culminated in an argument between Cardinals beat writer Bob Broeg and Roger Kahn at a dinner with Musial. Kahn believed that Broeg was not sensitive enough to racial matters and that the Cardinals did not do enough to support Robinson. Broeg contended that the situation was not black and white.
8 Kahn, 56.
9 Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, A Biography (New York: Random House, 1997), 178. There is scant documentation about their relationship. In one instance, Robinson once referred to Musial as “a very fine fellow” during an interview with Jack Buck in 1962. And Rampersad in his biography of Robinson wrote that Musial was always friendly with Jackie Robinson. Robinson told Kahn that Musial was a nice guy but when it came to Robinson breaking the color barrier, Musial did not hurt nor help him.
10 Musial’s mother was born in New York to Austrian-Hungarian parents and his father was born in Poland.
11 He played against Buddy Griffey, father and grandfather of Ken Griffey Sr. and Jr.
12 Vecsey, 155.
13 Kahn, 56.