Whipped Cream Difficulties

Stan Musial died yesterday. NYT. St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

“There is only one way to pitch to Musial — under the plate,” Leo Durocher, the manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants teams that Musial often victimized, once said.

There are some other things I like from the various obits:

A gentlemanly and sunny figure — he loved to play “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on his harmonica — he was never ejected from a game.

Take that, Earl Weaver.

The Dodgers’ Don Newcombe, major league baseball’s first black pitching star, recalled hearing taunts from some Cardinals players, but never from Musial or Schoendienst, Musial’s longtime roommate.
“We’d watch ’em in the dugout,” Newcombe told George Vecsey in “Stan Musial: An American Life.” “Wisecracks, call names. I could see from the mound when I got there in ’49. You never saw guys like Musial or Schoendienst. They never showed you up. The man went about his job and did it damn well and never had the need to sit in the dugout and call a black guy a bunch of names, because he was trying to change the game and make it what it should have been in the first place, a game for all people.”

And:

“A lot of times we would go visit kids in hospitals whenever we were on the road,” [Red] Schoendienst [Musial’s former teammate and roommate – DB] once said. “He didn’t want publicity for it, and he didn’t do it to seek recognition or humanitarian awards. He just did it because he thought it was the right thing to do. He enjoyed making other people happy and maybe give them a small ray of sunshine to brighten up their lives.”

The Post-Dispatch website says that today’s physical paper will include a “14-page special section” devoted to Stan The Man. I’m trying to think of a single Houston sports figure who would get the same treatment on their passing, and I can’t.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2013 at 8:59 am and is filed under Clippings, Obits, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.