watching the game

Living on the Lawn

 

 "Jefferson is the only president of the United States who was also a great artist.   Other presidents have noodled at the keyboard or daubed at easels.  But Jefferson was a building architect of large ambition and achievement, as well as a landscape architect and an interior designer.  There are no exact parallels, at least in Western culture, for this combination of political and aesthetic prominence.  To combine the prose of power and the poetry of art, at a high and continuing level, is something no one else did.

His greatest artwork was the cluster of buildings in Charlottesville that he called his 'academical village.'

As his own body's fabric was disintegrating, he poured his spirit into a physical expression of intellectual activity."

                                                          - Garry Wills, Mr. Jefferson's University

 

 

                                                                Davenport Field.   Charlottesville, Virgina

 

When it comes to watching the College World Series on television in our house every June, we're always amused to hear the distinctive voice of Robin Ventura.  From year to year we remember him fondly, my son and daughter and I, not so much for his big-league career with the White Sox, Mets, and Yankees, nor for the prestigious Golden Spikes Award he won in 1988, his Dick Howser trophy, and the impressive stats he recorded as a student-athlete at Oklahoma State.  Every June we remember him affectionately and with laughter, thanks to a certain conversation that took place between Ventura and his colleague in the broadcast booth at Rosenblatt Stadium during the summer of 2009.

Providing the color commentary during the second round of CWS play, losers bracket, Mike Patrick commended one of Virginia's players for his high GPA, meaningful acts of community service, leadership experience, keen intellect, and strong character.  The dialogue went something like this:

". . . and he lives on the Lawn."

"Uh-huh." Ventura responded opaquely and seemingly in agreement, though it was obvious that the full import of his co-anchor's comment had eluded him.  A few moments of confused silence ensued.

And then:  "He lives on the lawn?"

The Oklahoma State legend paused to imagine a scene:  the kid was living for free in somebody's front yard; or maybe he liked the game of baseball so much and spent so many of his waking hours at the field, he figured he might as well sleep there too, heck just camped out in shallow center field every single night in spring; or perhaps he had opted out of dorm living and erected a tent somewhere on campus, Greenpeace-style and short on cash; maybe he'd had no luck finding space in an apartment on Wertland or 14th, where so many other third- and fourth-year students chose to live.

As the 'Hoos pitcher threw over to first, Mike Patrick briefly described UVA's historic Lawn and its venerable significance, whereupon Ventura realized that the sorry habitats he'd conjured for this ballplayer were off the mark.  "Oh, I thought you meant he pitched a tent somewhere on campus and lived in it."  

Broad rectangles of terraced Virginia land flow outward, generously and invitingly, from the grand steps of Jefferson's Rotunda.  The public lawn is bordered by ten masterfully designed, imperfectly symmetrical pavilions graced with colonnades, an elegantly curving serpentine wall of antique brick (the laws of physics dictate that it must curve since it is only one brick thick), and a delightful variety of shade trees and enclosed gardens.  Numerous honors students and outstanding young individuals compete for the coveted rooms that open onto the university's magnificent expanse of grass.  

"Thomas Jefferson designed the University of Virginia's first buildings to mirror his vision of higher education. As he conceived it, the college experience should take place within an 'academical village' where shared learning infused daily life. He developed plans for ten pavilions—stately faculty homes with living quarters upstairs and classrooms downstairs—attached to two rows of student rooms and connected by an inward-facing colonnade. Each pavilion was identified with a subject to be studied and inhabited by the professor who taught that subject"  (virginia.edu).

Students and faculty at The University of Virginia do not refer to their surroundings as a "campus."  The academic buildings, together with the surrounding Lawn, pavilions, gardens, and open spaces are known reverentially and almost mystically as "grounds."  Although the mention of Thomas Jefferson's name may not instantly elicit an attitude of unqualified awe as it once did, the artistic and intellectual vision of America's third president is palpable when one walks the grounds and contemplates the deeply satisfying realization of one man's ideal.   To stand on this Lawn is to inhabit a venue in which philosophical and aesthetic promise have been passionately executed and fully realized, its maker's spirit enduring and ever present.  

In lieu of a school chapel, Jefferson wanted the grand Rotunda - and the library housed within it - to be his university's center.  To this day, students symbolically face the domed building during Convocation exercises that mark the beginnings of their university education.  In fitting contrast, the full academic procession of Commencement moves in the opposite direction:  students descend the Rotunda steps and walk the entire length of the Lawn, heading south toward Old Cabell Hall, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the world beyond, leaving their undergraduate years symbolically behind them.

In a popular list of "100 things to do before you graduate," students are unofficially encouraged to streak the entire length of Mr. Jefferson's lawn.  Three o'clock in the morning during the month of December is probably a good time to attempt this activity.

Undergraduates and professors who live on the Lawn are among the university's most distinguished leaders and scholars, the community's elite.  "I could not find anyone, male or female, who regretted having bid for the honor of living where they do for one (their senior) year.  To win a place, they must submit applications to a screening board, presenting their academic qualifications and their record of service to the university.  There is an extraordinary camaraderie among those who take the lodgings 'Mr. Jefferson' designed for them.  This is felt not only by those living on the Lawn at any one time.  It is a social tie felt across generations," writes Garry Wills, who came to regard the magnificent design as a true reflection of Jefferson's "entire personality, its naive flaws as well as its towering strengths."

UVA students consider the Lawn to be "the soul of the place."  Indeed, just as we are moved when experiencing our nation's most important monuments, hallowed shrines, and even its loveliest ballparks, visitors may feel in the Lawn and its environs something mysterious yet palpable that can only be called "a soul."

Students' quarters are at once elegant and rustic, each offering a charming brick entryway, weathered rocking chairs, tidy piles of wood, working fireplaces, high ceilings and elegant moldings, inspiring views of the Lawn, but no plumbing and limited privacy, since all rooms open directly onto the common ground which continues to be the scene of spontaneous play, outdoor classes, admissions tours, anti-war protests, concerts, and many public gatherings both formal and informal.  

 

Ballplayers, a capella singers, student government leaders, legacies, poets, all ethnicities (black students were admitted to these rooms before women were invited to apply, the latter delayed thanks to inadequacies of plumbing).   Students must travel outdoors and in public when accessing shared bathroom facilities.  In one sense, a Lawn room is just one step up from living in a tent or cabin; on another level, however, it affords students a quality of life redolent with elegance, charm, architectural greatness, and living history.

While pulling for the Cavaliers (a.k.a. 'Hoos) in this year's College World Series, we've enjoyed laughing about Robin Ventura's misconception of the Lawn, but it's all in good fun.  I imagine him today, sitting in the broadcast booth with a perfect view of the field.   He surveys a meticulously groomed lawn, a brand new state-of-the-art facility with its underground cooling system, gleaming stainless steel, and immense standards of lights that eclipse constellations.  From his seat high above, he looks down upon the coach named O'Connor who has turned a struggling college program around, nurturing talented young players like Ryan Zimmerman, who himself then turned around and gave a quarter of a million dollars back.  Ventura looks out toward left field and notices a few young men clowning around.  He sees the number 2 pick and seven others recently selected in the 2011 first-year player draft.   The kids are stretching and sprinting on the lawn.

A college player once told me that the whole concept of student-athletes is a joke.  Admittedly, these individuals are expected to maintain a ridiculous schedule, an unrealistic balance of work and play.  But I like to think that on some level he was wrong about the entire thing being a joke, NCAA violations notwithstanding, and that something of an ideal remains.  Otherwise, why college ball?  Why college?  Why Omaha?

TD Ameritrade Ballpark in downtown Omaha, Nebraska is located a considerable distance from Jefferson's Rotunda and the blue hills of Virginia.  1157 miles to be exact.   The stadium does not yet qualify as an historic landmark or national shrine, just as Charlottesville's Davenport Field cannot claim to be a component of Thomas Jefferson's original academical vision, though both facilities speak to who we are as a culture and a nation of educated people.  Nor, I daresay, did Jefferson ever contemplate the possibility of a few young scholars standing on a small diamond of grass, shouldering a rubber hose and preparing their lawn for a really big game of catch.  

Those who play in the so-called losers bracket of the double-elimination NCAA Division I Baseball Championship are hardly losers.   Sure, baseball is ultimately about winning and losing, but the special beauty of Omaha is that it represents the culmination of a long journey that blends academics with athletics, however imperfectly.  The joy comes in lessons learned both on and off the field, in friendships forged through victory and loss, and in the privilege of representing a beloved school in a city far from home. 

Once upon a time there was a ballplayer who lived on the Lawn, just as he played to his heart and mind's delight on another stunning expanse of grass a mile from where Thomas Jefferson once marked fertile ground for a new university.    In the grand scheme of things, it strikes me that these two very different expanses of grass are part and parcel of the same Edenic dream or longing that is at the heart of our restless souls, at the core of what we sometimes call the human condition.

I can write only what I seem to know in my own soul.  From whatever direction I approach it, walking the Lawn at the University of Virginia is an experience that takes my breath away in the very same way that a ballpark transports me to a higher plane of being.

 

This post is dedicated to the 2011 University of Virginia baseball team, now 2-1 in the losers bracket at Omaha, and to my daughter, who graduated from Virginia this past May.

 

                                                     Pavilion V, Academical Village, panoramio.com

 

 

 

 

Fathers and Daughters

 

Please enjoy this post from my 2010 archives while I man the grill.    

Happy Father's Day!

 

It's not even a complete sentence.   No command or question, no declarative statement, no imperative verb, no main verb at all.   Just a phrase with an -ing participle (maybe a gerund) which indicates some type of action ongoing between two select people.

Fathers playing catch with sons:  the lovely, familiar phrase may not be a complete sentence, but perhaps that's one reason why the words resonate poignantly for so many.

"Everybody that plays major league baseball, I promise you, had a dad that played catch with him."  That's  what Don Nava had to say last Saturday at Fenway Park after watching his son's first major-league at bat:  a grand slam delivered by 27-year-old rookie Daniel Nava on an 0-0 count.   What an amazing way to break into the big leagues after an unpromising eight-year journey; what an important moment for father and son.

My dad played catch with my brother almost every single day at lunchtime in a bygone era when kids walked home from school for their midday meal, then returned to their classrooms an hour later.  Kind of like Jem and Scout and Atticus Finch.  Like Atticus with his children, my dad made it his business to join my brother for a sit-down lunch in our small kitchen, and that quick lunch was usually followed by an unhurried game of catch in the front yard.   

The only boy in our family following three sisters, my brother went on to become an outstanding player in our town's youth league.   One spring weekend I rode a Greyhound bus home from college  just to see him pitch.  Working efficiently and striking out almost every batter in the lineup, my kid brother threw a complete game that Saturday afternoon.  Mowed them all down with blazing fastballs and pinpoint control.  He was just nine or ten years old at the time, but something about his consistency and confidence on a hill of dirt made him seem much older.  I had left home, and my youngest sibling had grown up overnight. 

My dad didn't play catch with me very often. 

I never really coveted or envied the baseball times that my brother enjoyed with our dad, however.  Truth be told, I didn't particularly want to play catch with my father.  There was something else I wanted even more.

I just wanted to watch the game with him - wanted to watch baseball every single night. 

There we sat, just my dad and I out on the screened porch, gliding side by side in the soft breeze of a sultry July evening, listening to Ralph Kiner, Lindsey Nelson, and Bob Murphy, and watching the New York Mets.  Together we enjoyed the primitive, grainy images that brought baseball to life on a small black-and-white RCA television topped with skinny rabbit ears.

It's a miracle that we chose the Mets in 1963, but that's what we did.  A team of losers  (51-111) felt like a win to me, because I had just fallen in love with baseball, and I loved every single part of it.

When my father came home from work, the game began to assert itself as language, and that is how baseball felt most real to me.  Its magical sounds, metaphors and idioms, syntax and rhythm,  its diction both poetical and crude became integral pieces of our evening conversation, a comfortable mode of speech and thought, a language that I loved.  While learning to speak English in increasingly complex ways in grades three and four, I simultaneously acquired the splendid vocabulary of baseball, as if it were an important part of the curriculum.  The game felt like something basic and essential - as normal, natural, and necessary as speech itself. 

Baseball took shape for me as language not as sport, partly because the man who nurtured my early love of the game was a Protestant minister.  Using few words and allowing for long periods of silence, he taught me baseball, both its fundamentals and its poetry.  In my mind's ear, an amazing vocabulary became inseparably entwined with familiar Biblical passages, both deeply embedded in my young psyche, and both becoming an essential part of who I am:  "3-2 count,"  Love is patient and kind,   "in the cellar,"  my rock and my Redeemer,  "6-4-3 double play."    And the Word was made flesh ... and dwelt among us,  full of love and peace.

Many years have passed since those summer days and nights, but I can still hear the ever-modulating commentary, the sweet sounds of a televised broadcast, a soft breeze and buzzing in the trees, the gentle words of my father out on the screened porch once upon a quiet New Jersey evening.   I was a lucky girl, because when hearing my dad's voice and while listening to the comforting music of a play-by-play, I knew for certain that I was safe and deeply loved.

I have always associated baseball with happiness and love.   Thank you, Dad.   I love you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Man

 

"There is only one man in this town."

                                                   -  Albert Pujols (a.k.a.  El Hombre)

 

 

               canvas by John Falter,  National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum  

 

 

No act of biology automatically turns a boy into a man.  There’s no set chronological age – say, 18 or 21 – at which a male launches with certainty into maturity; no cultural rite, be it wedding, bar mitzvah, boot camp or high school graduation, that turns a kid into a mature person.   Is there?

The counterparts hold true for girls and women.   I once taught an English seminar, “Heroines in Literature”  (Twelfth Night, Emma, Washington Square, To the Lighthouse, Their Eyes Were Watching God), and in my classroom full of girls I loved asking an introductory question:  When does a girl become a woman?  After voicing that question, I’d pause for a long time.

We then spoke quite personally about various conditions and human situations that might turn a girl into a woman:  physiology and hormones, loss of virginity, wedding day, birth of a child, an academic or professional title, a corner office.  My students laughed at some of this, and I did too; the word woman felt so big, so serious.

We all knew that it was politically and biologically correct to address girls of a certain age as women or young women (sometimes annoyingly as “ladies”), less and less as “girls.”

At what point in your life did you feel that the term woman or man actually fit you?    

“You make a good cup of coffee, woman.”   I took those words as a compliment, because they were voiced with satisfaction, vigor, and no trace of condescension.  If spoken admiringly or suggestively, woman has a certain fullness that connotes desirability.    Voiced in a duller tone, however, the term sounds matronly, boring, middle-aged, and ill-fitting to those of us who sometimes feel a lively girl within.

 “Don’t you love being with a real man?”  My friend voiced her happy question in a dimly-lit café while nibbling on sweet potato fries.   “You know, the kind who says aw, stay and have a beer, pops the cap off a cold one, offers you the same, puts his legs up on the kitchen counter, and is happy to have you stay and watch the game with him?”

A “real” man:  the definition is more a matter of taste, jest, opinion, and circumstance than absolute truth.   I picture a Harley, leather, and tattoos - is that what a man is?  Then other images start colliding until I am confused:  intelligent conversation, shelves and shelves of great books, an advanced degree, a bottle of fine wine; muscles; a Marlboro man; baseball on television or radio and a frosty summer ale; a good father who is respected by his children; a man in uniform, baseball or military; a kind person.

Ballplayers often seem to be a species of men unto themselves, and we know from Roy Campanella and George Will that “there has to be a lot of little boy in a man who plays baseball.”

Just watch any Little Leaguer or young adolescent.   Kids swagger and spit just as grown men do, adeptly imitating every idiosyncratic move.  You see miniature Jeters at the plate, Becketts and Halladays on the mound.  The reverse is also true:  watch any so-called grownup on the bench or in the pen and he’s blowing bubbles, cracking seeds, laughing til his sides hurt at something that’s just been said about a girl.   Or woman.

What is it to be a man, anyway?

Is Stan “The Man” Musial more a man than that other ballplayer nicknamed “The Kid?”   And if so, why? 

In that realm of imagination where you are allowed to choose, would you prefer to spend time with a nice fella sporting a red blazer or a complicated s.o.b. who lectures you colorfully on the science of hitting while gracefully casting a fly rod?

The Man.  Though secularly christened with an honorable nickname by adversaries who admired his talent and power even as they competed hard against him at Ebbets Field, what I’ve been hearing lately is that Stanley Musial’s “boring” life off the field doesn’t make for a very compelling biography.  The concept of goodness isn’t sexy.  It’s better for an athlete to be hot than good.  Such is the general consensus among reviewers who have taken an appreciative look at  Stan Musial: An American Life, by George Vecsey.

 

 

 “Compelling” and “sexy” are qualities our current age has come to demand of stories; the terms are now almost synonymous.  Compelling means “you have to buy this book.”   “Sexy” indicates “you have to read this story  (because it will make up for some of the excitement your own life is lacking).”  Audiences want fireworks; they really like fireworks.   Many show up at the ballpark because of the post-game fireworks, suggesting that the quiet action of baseball isn’t quite enough. 

Stan Musial is like a ballgame without the fireworks.  “He makes a better statue,” Bill James asserted in a 1986 abstract.   I find those words to be untrue and incredibly sad.

“Even in matrimony, Musial was the boring one,” writes Vecsey.   With all due respect to a longtime sportswriter, I wonder how any outsider can possibly render a judgment on another man’s personal life, especially one so private?   Who knows what goes on behind the closed doors of a good man, especially if the door doesn’t open readily to fans who feel entitled to an intimate account or compelling psychological drama.

Nice, gracious, opaque, boring:  these adjectives present to the biographer an artistic and intellectual challenge.   There’s the added philosophical predicament that many individuals - athletes, celebrities, ordinary people just like us - are fundamentally unknowable, except perhaps to closest family and friends. 

Among the most important truths of Stan Musial’s life are his baseball stats.   Height:  6’0.”  Weight:  175 lbs.   One hundred seventy-five?   A 24-time All Star (tied with Willie Mays); 3,630 hits; winner of 3 MVP awards; first major leaguer ever to record 5 home runs in one day; 3 World Series rings; Hall of Fame 1969, first ballot inductee.   Speed.   Versatility.   Quick reflexes.  That coiled stance.   Explosive energy.  Small hands for a .331 hitter.  A wiggle.  The ripple of muscles on his back that helped generate power.   Never thrown out of a game.

What more do we need know?   Why read any book?     

Stats and traits make us yearn for more.  We need numbers entwined with words, disparate facts shaped neatly into narrative.   We want to understand what's beyond that curious stance and cheerful red blazer, some clues to thought and feeling.  What were you thinking?  Can you tell us what it means?  How did you feel?  Such questions are now routinely asked of ballplayers as if to ensure that when the time comes for biography or enshrinement, plenty of psychological and emotional content will be there for the taking.  What was in your head?   What was in your heart?

Stan Musial played the harmonica.   He married Lil.   He enjoyed a few drinks now and then.  Faithfully attended Catholic mass.  Co-owned a steakhouse in St. Louis.  Carried baseball cards with pre-signed autographs.  Missed one season of professional baseball while serving in the Navy during World War II.  Showed up at Mickey Mantle’s funeral and sat alone, off to the side in a ray of sunlight.  Received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  These are among the truths of one man’s existence.

As he crafts Stan Musial’s achievements into a richer human story, Vecsey’s methodology initially seems disjointed and almost haphazard, as if a straightforward, linear chronology would only make an already prosaic story even duller.  The author rearranges time and juxtaposes geographic locations, bringing narrative complexity to a life that wasn’t on the surface very complicated.   For some reason we want things to be complicated.

Readers expect continuity and momentum in biography, not unlike what a ballgame provides, but this is not what you will find in The Man.  At various points along the way, Vecsey interrupts the direction of his tale, circles back to past events, jumps ahead, moves around in time and place, punctuating denser chapters of sustained narrative with quicker anecdotal sections that are nonetheless worthy in their brevity.

Occasionally there’s a jolt.   “Skip ahead nearly two decades to 1958,” he commands his narrative to jump forward in a disorientating change of gears.  There’s a method in the telling, however.  What might strike the reader as a flaw in design ultimately makes sense.    Stan Musial was, after all, “a man of action rather than reflection, a man of anecdote rather than narrative.”   

The gentleman in the red blazer might chat with you for a moment or two, and then he’s gone.  He’s accommodating and kind, yet private and “opaque,” guarding what few flaws he may have; welcoming, yet protective of his private life.  Similarly, his biographer offers quick glimpses of the man’s world and his cheerful persona.   Wunnerful, wunnerful and hey-hey, whaddayasay, whaddayasay  capture Musial’s upbeat essence, but they are also a cloak, leaving the deeper psychological stuff untapped.  The Man has not provided his biographers or critics with an abundance of quotable lines.

The words of others bring him to life, including those of Ted Williams reflecting on the question “Was Musial really as good as you?”  The Kid offered a remarkable answer:  “Yes, I really think he was.”  Williams went on to say, “He was a better all-around hitter than Hank Aaron.   He was a quiet leader on the field and in the clubhouse and was one of the most universally respected ballplayers of our generation.   He wasn’t the biggest guy in the world but he was a lithe six-one and 175 pounds, and he was whippy.”

“Lithe” and “kind” are words that appear frequently in Vecsey’s biography of Musial.   “Whippy,” as I recall, is uttered only once.

 “All he ever wants to do is talk about hitting,” are the words Musial offered when speaking of Ted Williams in return.    “I don’t say he doesn’t know about anything else, but that is always the first thing he wants to talk about.”   There’s a critical and  competitive edge to these words, a tone not entirely “gracious.”  It strikes me as one of the most curious sentences in the book.

After considering the relative greatness of two hitters, Vecsey jumps abruptly back in time to 1948 and Musial’s hometown of Donora, Pennsylvania, the same working-class community that produced high school football hero Buddy Griffey, father of Ken Sr.   “Donora was known for its fogs, thick and brown and vile-smelling, but this was like nothing they had ever seen or inhaled.   The air kept getting worse.”   The reason for this disruptive flashback gradually becomes clear:  “Zinc is one of those elements that the body needs in very small doses in certain forms, but zinc can be poisonous in larger amounts.”  Stan Musial’s father died in December of 1948, a sad event that temporarily summoned the athlete back to a former existence well after he had been catapulted into fame. 

Mickey Mantle had Oklahoma’s bleak chat piles to call home, while Musial could claim fluorospor and zinc as his native territory.  Both young men would welcome the opportunity to gravitate elsewhere, leaving behind misfortune and entering the world of Toots Shor, Coupes de Ville, and steaks on the grill outside Al Lang Field, as baseball set them free.

Unlike the palpable raw material of Mickey Mantle’s life, the stuff of Musial’s background seems more resistant to close analysis.  While the imagery of Donora becomes vivid, the character of Stan Musial’s father is less so. “Lukasz never took his son to a game at Forbes Field,” Vecsey writes, “and Musial often said it was his mother who had played catch with him.”

The relationship of father to son does not yield much in the way of specifics that tell a psychologically riveting story, and one can only speculate about the degree to which the elder Musial’s form of employment, probable alcoholism, emotional distance, and reluctant attitude toward the business of baseball affected the trajectory of his son’s career and the content of his character.  Musial’s mother emerges as the stronger presence in the narrative, though she appears more as mythical figure than fully developed personality:   “he would always tell how his mother had stitched rags into a makeshift baseball and played catch with him between chores.  When he told that story, he would weep, and so would she.”  Clearly it was Stanley’s mother who understood the legitimacy of a baseball vocation more vividly than Lukacz Musial.

When envisioning a future for himself, young Stan gravitated to his first and only sweetheart partly because her family enjoyed a life of relative security and stability:  “The girl I was going to marry, Lillian, her father owned a grocery store.   No matter what happened in baseball, I knew I could always get a job in the store.”  One pauses to wonder about the serendipity of relationships and our reasons for choosing as we do, leaving much to loyalty and good luck.

George Vecsey's story of a ballplayer's life offers some delightful phrases that you can "lift your hat to," as Emily Dickinson might say (though probably not about baseball).  Good writing doesn’t simply arise out of strong content; it isn’t a matter of vocabulary alone.  There's the cadence at a chapter’s end:  “Stanley the homebody sent everybody home.”   Or the elegant and emphatic balance in an opening that urges one forward:  “He had always been a hitter.  In 1948, Musial became a slugger.”

Rhythm is just as important:  “St. Louis was loyal and highly undemanding psychologically.  He did not have to fulfill everybody’s psychic needs.  All he had to do was just hit the ball.  Run out of the batter’s box.  Smile when he slid into second.  Sign autographs.  Just say whaddayasay-whaddayasay and the people were charmed.”

Vecsey checks these sentimental visions of ballpark life, however, when faulting the Cardinals organization for its “paralysis toward black players” in an era when other teams took steps to diversify their rosters.   Bitter comments voiced by Lou Brock and Bob Gibson (who described 1961 as “the year I got out of prison”) challenge Musial’s outlook on America’s game and its “wunnerful” opportunities.   

Spring training for the integrated Cardinals initially brought white players to the Vinoy Hotel by the glittering bay, while athletes of color were housed in black neighborhoods further inland.  Management finally broke with this short-lived tradition in 1962 when it filled two hotels with a newly integrated team and brought all players together, including wives and children.  Lil and Stan moved from their waterfront bungalow on Tampa Bay to the team motel where the family shared a single room.  Bob Gibson's cheerful description of the outdoor scene captures a free and easy, oasis-like atmosphere that many still associate with spring training, his words suggesting a spirit of victory over cruelty and injustice:  “People would drive by just to see all these black and white guys swimming and grilling steaks together.”

What may strike the reader as peculiar is Musial’s reserve in the midst of profound change, his remoteness at critical times when he might have been more outspoken on behalf of teammates.  “Nice guy, I guess,” Bill White would recall in 2009.  “He was a good player, but I don’t know him.  I don’t think any white guys knew him either.”

Many biographers rely heavily on the testimonials of others.   In writing about Mickey Mantle, for example, Jane Leavy consulted over 500 individuals in seeking to understand the complexity of her boyish hero.  Similarly, Vecsey counts on hundreds of others to provide insight into Stan Musial’s life on and off the field, but one seldom hears the voice of the man himself.   

It takes a fine reporter to elicit poignant tributes such as that voiced by Jim Frey:  “There are a few people in the world who love being themselves.   And I think Stan Musial is one of them.”  A lengthy chapter is devoted to Musial's “very private family life” and the degree to which Stan and Lil adapted to relative affluence, while maintaining a relatively normal existence.   “You go to his home and you step on kids everywhere," observed Ben Vanek, son of former player-manager Ollie Vanek.  “That’s what my home is for,” Stan is reported to have said.  “It’s for kids, yours and mine.”

Vanek laments the fact that “we have elevated professional athletes much higher than they used to be.  I mean, if you saw Musial’s house, it was not a mansion.   It was a house among other houses.  Neighbors right next to him.   No security fence out front.  You probably could walk up, paperboy or something, walk right up to the door, get paid, give him change, stuff like that.”

A tenuous line separates the man who knows greatness and fame from those who resume a so-called ordinary existence.  Stan himself once faced considerable odds:  a father who didn’t particularly want him to sign; an unimpressive beginning as a pitcher; a few seasons of bouncing around in the minor leagues.   He may very well have become that  “player to be named later.”   But somehow talent reveals and asserts itself.  Boys turn into men as they make their choices for better or worse, take their licks, and enjoy their good luck and the blessings of good health together with a few magic ingredients and intangibles whereby an ordinary existence becomes extraordinary, and all the fans show up in red.

In his epilogue George Vecsey explains that he never formally interviewed Musial during the writing of his biography.   This revelation doesn’t undercut the credibility of his narrative, because the author has already achieved a satisfying  fullness in the telling.

It’s an odd feeling to hold a book in your hands and feel as if you know a man, to the extent that anyone can be known through words.  You come to understand some particulars of his personal life, however tame those facts may be.  You sense his few imperfections and simplicity of character against the backdrop of which athletic feats gleam brightly.  You spend time in his company; share a steak medium rare; travel with James Michener and Angie Dickinson; meet Pope John Paul II and John F. Kennedy and Lech Walesa; enjoy a slice of life off the field in a Florida motel where black and white families vacation together in a scene that the man named King has not yet prophesied.

In the end you may not know much more about the mind of Stan Musial, if that’s what you look for in biography or baseball writing; but you may come to appreciate something of the world that shaped him.   His stats are there for the taking; the matters of his personal life remain largely private.

Stan Musial:  An American Life offers its readers the opportunity to spend time with a baseball man.   This is, after all, what we want, isn’t it?   It’s not unlike what we hope for during those few seconds it takes a ballplayer to sign his name.  We enjoy a brief conversation and  the impression that the man is our friend.  

Perhaps there is an untold and more complicated story beyond the coiled stance, distinguished Hall of Fame numbers, and the smooth curve of an athlete's signature.  But in the end the reader may be content, as was his biographer, to be in a gentleman’s presence and feel the warmth of his hand.  

 

 

Click here to watch Stan Musial live on  "What’s My Line."

To watch Stan Musial on and off the field, please click here.

 

 

 

 

Once Upon a Time

 

June 4, 2011

Fenway Park

Red Sox 9 - Athletics 8

W:   Aceves  (3-1)      L:  Moscoso  (2-1)

14 innings

 

 

Baseball is the ultimate story.  One inexorable and seemingly timeless plot - full of many subplots over which we have no control - drives to an uncertain but ultimately sure conclusion.  We don't know in advance who the main characters will be, and every cameo appearance holds a promising significance.  Apparent losers suddenly become heroes and vice-versa.  For all our knowledge of stats and scouting reports and pre-game hype, we have no way of predicting when the dramatic climax or game-winning moment will come, or what form it will take.   This is a truth we know only in retrospect.   

Unlike stories told in books, we cannot turn to a final page, read its closing paragraph, and understand on some level how the narrative will end.    

Yet when all is said and done, once we know the outcome of a baseball story, the box score is there for the taking as a work of art (just as images linger in our memories), serving as an outline after the fact, retelling the drama that some of us may have witnessed live in all its curious and tantalizing ups and downs.   The box score and play-by-play read to me like a poem, time once unhurried and unmeasured but now compressed; a sensation entirely different from the action itself; a satisfying pattern of words and numbers, bringing the game back to us for good.

 

June 4, 2011.   Fenway Park.      Boston vs. Oakland

Weather: 60 degrees, sunny.
Wind: 15 mph, In from RF.
T: 5:17.
Att: 37,485.