Baseball World Loses A "One of a Kind"
Stan Musial
Growing up on the "north side" of Chicago qualified me as a Cub fan.
Plain and simple...the Chicago Cubs were MY TEAM, not the White Sox who belonged to the "south siders."
...and I was one of the luckiest kids in the world, because the first 18 years of my life, I grew up near "the friendly confines" of Wrigley Field, the home of the Cubs.
Way too often, it wouldn't take much for some of my friends to convince me to "get sick" and catch a Cub game when I should have been in school; and over the years, I had a number of "kool-aid" stands in front of my folks apartment trying to save the 60 cents for the grandstand general admission.
We'd get there at 11:00am (there were no night games at Wrigley until 1988) to catch batting practice in hope of catching a ball.
We lived only a mile from the park, so we actually walked there to save the Clark Street 25 cent bus fare, stopping at the Waveland Bowl to get a 10 cent hot dog to stick in our pockets, rather than spend the quarter being charged in the park.
My neighbor, Mikey, who lived in the first floor apartment beneath us, was from St. Louis, and if you're from the City of Chicago, other than the constant arguments between the Cubs and Sox fans, there was, and is to this very day, a common Cub enemy....the St. Louis Cardinals.
Mikey was a Cardinal fan, and obviously, I was a Cub fan.
...but there was one day, May 13, 1958, when even I became a Cardinal fan. It was a Tuesday, and the Cardinals came to town.
...and that meant Mikey and I had to somehow get to Wrigley Field.
The Cubs were winning 3-1 at the end of the 5th inning. Cub pitcher Moe Drabowsky was pitching a "beauty" and things were looking pretty good for us Cub diehards. Even better, their star, Stan Musial, was being benched, sitting on 2,999 major league hits.
...and then...in the top of the sixth...it happened...
With a runner at second base, out he came....Stan the Man Musial...to pinch hit.
Number 3000
What? Why? They were going back to St. Louis in another day and there wasn't a person in the park who believed the "sacred" 3000 hit wasn't going to be saved for his hometown fans.
But not The Man. Winning was a team effort, more important than joining the elite baseball 3000 hit club to Stan Musial, and as he came out of the dugout, I witnessed something never before seen in Wrigley Field....
People were cheering for him...a CARDINAL...and...The Man...didn't disappoint.
The bat hit the ball, and a rocket double to left center field !
We had seen baseball history at Wrigley Field that afternoon, and watched a man who eventually entered the Hall of Fame, an unselfish man who really was The Man, exemplify the meaning of sportsmanship.
Never did I ever see Stan Musial refuse an autogragh...even to us Cub fans. He was gracious, a true professional, and a CLASS ACT.
We lost him on Saturday, January 19th at the age of 92, a ripe old age.
But nevertheless, we lost a legend, a man, THE MAN, who throughout his career, demonstrated the wholesomeness of a sport, untainted in the 50s by drugs or corked bats, an age when you knew who played left field or second base for any team...a time of growing up...a time when we had heroes...who deserved to be called heroes.
So, though you might have broken our Cubby hearts more often than not over the years, Stan, we loved and admired you, not just for how you played each day of your career, but for the wholesomeness you brought to us kids in our youth and a role model kids today NEED SO BADLY.
...and thank you God, for allowing me to cut school that day, and experience one of the greatest moments in the history of Chicago sports...even though the Cubs eventually lost that afternoon !
Dick Arendt
My husband, Bob is quite the Baseball fan, a huge Cub fan as are you. Hard to believe since he grew up on the "Sout Side". Did he ever tell you that when he owned the Oakbrook Tobacco Shop, he did live commercial-spots during the Cub games with Vince Lloyd and Lou Boudreau? He also was a pitching coach for his alma matter, Purdue, way back when.
ReplyDeleteOne other baseball quip comes to mind...when Bob a little boy, his dad would take him to the neighborhood bar (remember those?) and set him up on the bar and tell the "boys at the bar"...ask him anything about baseball and if he gets it right, you buy me a drink. Bob has (kinda fading in the past few years) an unbelievable memory for dates, scores, names, etc. He has told me, that as a little boy, he pitched every Cub game into his mom's front-room stuffed chair, as he listened to it over the radio.
Thanks for the tribute and memories of Stan the Man.