The Manager Who Tried to Get Rid of Stan Musial

Williamson, West Virginia, 1938 and 1939: the two summers before Stan Musial became The Man, and the letter his manager wrote asking the Cardinals to let him go.

On July 15, 1939, the manager of the Class D Williamson Red Birds in Williamson, West Virginia sat down and wrote to the St. Louis Cardinals about one of his pitchers. The pitcher was 18, left-handed, and at that point in the season had lost only two games. The manager, Harrison Wickel, recommended that the Cardinals release him anyway. In the report as it has since been quoted, he called him "the wildest pitcher I have ever seen," then added, almost as a courtesy, that the kid had good habits, was a fine boy, and could hit a little. Nobody outside the Cardinals' front office read it at the time; four years later, when the wire services were writing the player's rookie-of-the-year profiles, none of them knew the letter existed. It stayed in the Cardinals' files until the pitcher told the story on himself, years later.

The pitcher was Stan Musial.

The Cardinals did not take Wickel's advice, and this is the story of the summer in Williamson that came before that letter, the one the letter interrupted, and the winter in between, told mostly through the paper in the next town up the river from his house.

Musial was from Donora, Pennsylvania, a zinc-mill town on the Monongahela south of Pittsburgh. He had learned the game from a neighbor, Joe Barbao, a former minor league pitcher who managed the Donora Zincs company team in the Mon Valley League and had put Musial on the club at fifteen. The Cardinals had been watching him since June 1937, when scout Andrew J. French filed a report calling him a green kid with a good arm and a good curve, and he signed with them while still in high school. Then, for a while, nothing happened.

On May 22, 1938, Musial was still pitching for the Zincs, and while coaching first base, Barbao took a Musial foul ball off the ankle. Barbao finished the game on it. The X-ray two days later showed a broken bone, and the man who put Stan Musial in baseball spent the next three weeks on crutches. The Monongahela Daily Herald reported in June 1938 that the rumor mill had sent him first to Albany, Georgia and then to Greensburg, forty minutes from home, and that in the meantime he had been working out with the Pirates at Forbes Field during batting practice. St. Louis, the paper said, had been slow to communicate. Three years later, at a testimonial dinner in Donora, Cardinals scout Pop Kelchner would boast of stealing Musial out from under the Pirates' noses. Whatever chance the Pirates had was before the 1937 signing; by June 1938 they were letting another organization's property take batting practice in their park while that organization figured out where to send him.

Musial finally left for Williamson in the third week of June, well after the Mountain State League season had started, to join a rail town on the Tug Fork about 250 miles from Donora. There was only one familiar face in town and that was Walter Sessi, an outfielder from Finleyville, just up the road from Donora.

One reason offered in Musial's biographies for going to Williamson over Greensburg is that Greensburg was managed by Ollie Vanek, the man who had signed him, and Musial's mother never forgave Vanek for the size of the contract. The other reason is simpler: if he failed, Williamson was far enough away that nobody at home would see it.

He was paid $65 a month, which works out to roughly $1,400 in today's money. By his own later account, he was homesick for most of the first summer.

His first manager was a man worth a paragraph of his own. Nat Hickey was a 36-year-old player-manager who hit .319 for the 1938 Colts while running the club, and who had spent his winters as one of the Original Celtics, the barnstorming basketball team that more or less invented the professional game. Ten years after Williamson, coaching the Providence Steamrollers of the Basketball Association of America, Hickey put himself into two games a few days short of his 46th birthday. He is still the oldest man ever to play in what became the NBA. Stan Musial's first professional manager is in a basketball record book.

Musial's own 1938 line was ordinary. As a pitcher he went 6-6 with a 4.66 ERA in 20 games. The numbers underneath the record were the problem: 114 hits and 80 walks in 110 innings against 66 strikeouts. When he was not pitching, he played some outfield and hit .258 in 26 games. Nobody wrote a scouting report about the bat. The Colts finished third in the six-team Mountain State League.

After the season, Musial went back home for his senior year of high school. In December the WPIAL, which governed high school sports in western Pennsylvania, ruled him ineligible for Donora's basketball season because Williamson had paid him to play baseball. Donora's coach, Jimmy Russell, told the paper he had lost the best boy he had. The school pleaded that Musial's parents were needy and that the money had gone to support them. The ruling stood. Within the week Frank Pizzica, the Monongahela car dealer who sponsored the Valley's best independent basketball team, signed him for the Monongahela Garagemen, and in January the Daily Herald was reporting Stan Musial, 22 points, in a 71-27 win at the Monessen Armory.

The best boy I had and the best in the Big Six.

Donora coach Jimmy Russell, Monongahela Daily Herald, December 12, 1938

Musial spent the spring at home too, and he spent it busy. By spring, for reasons the paper never gave, the ruling was no longer keeping him off a ball field, and he played his senior baseball season for Donora High. On May 19, 1939 he hit a three-run homer that won the Section VIII championship 11-8 at California. In between school games he pitched for the Zincs. On May 10 he beat the crosstown Hilltops 17-3 and hit a triple. On May 17 he lost to the Monongahela Merchants 3-2, allowing four hits in six innings and walking eight. Two months before Wickel sat down to write, the problem was already visible from Pennsylvania.

Things were different in Williamson before he arrived, and he arrived late for the second year in a row; he was still in a Donora uniform on May 19. The Colts had become the Red Birds, and Wickel, a Cardinals organization man who had already won a Class D pennant at Caruthersville, had replaced Hickey. As he later told it, Musial missed his own high school graduation in Donora to report. His girlfriend Lillian Labash, whom he married that November, walked across the stage and collected the diploma for him.

On the mound, he was better and worse at the same time. He finished 9-2 with a 4.30 ERA in 92 innings, and gave up only 71 hits, which was real progress. He also walked 85 batters, essentially one for every strikeout, and that is the statistic Wickel was looking at in July. The Cardinals were running more than 30 farm clubs that year. A scatter-armed left-hander at the bottom rung was the most expendable kind of player in the system.

What kept him in Williamson was an injury to somebody else. By Musial's own account, when a Red Birds outfielder went down, Wickel put Musial in left field on days he was not pitching, and the results were not subtle. He hit .352, 25 hits in 71 at-bats, with three doubles, three triples, and a home run. The Red Birds won the regular-season pennant at 76-51, beat Huntington in the first round, and lost the final to the Bluefield Blue-Grays three games to one. The one hint in the batting line that he was still green: 16 strikeouts and a single walk. He had not yet learned to wait.

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Musial came home to the Garagemen to play basketball for a second winter. In December 1939 the Herald, previewing the team's opener against Duquesne University, called him the likely star of the club, six foot one and the youngest man on it, and added that next summer he would go to Asheville, North Carolina, a Class B club, as a pitcher. That did not happen either. He ended up going to Daytona Beach, Class D, where in August 1940 he dove for a fly ball, landed on his left shoulder, and his pitching arm was never the same. What was left was the bat. He reached St. Louis in September 1941, hit .426 in a dozen games, and did not have a season below .300 for the next seventeen years. He retired in 1963 with 3,630 hits, seven batting titles, and a .331 average, and went into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot.

Wickel, for what it is worth, kept his job. He won the Mountain State League championship with Williamson in 1940 and later managed the Decatur Commodores in the Triple-I League. He was also, in fairness, right about the pitching.