Goold: La Russa spreads the word of Musial

As Goold spreads the words of Posnanski.

The St. Louis Cardinals arrived this morning to their clubhouse at Roger Dean Stadium to find a later start time for their workouts and an article waiting for them at their lockers.

Before he shooed them out onto the field to stretch, manager Tony La Russa explained his gift.

“It’s about Stan Musial,” he said. “I want you to read it.”

La Russa explained later that he sensed not enough members of the current roster knew enough about the Cardinals’ Hall of Famer, Stan “The Man” Musial. He wanted to share a snapshot of the Cardinals’ icon, the player who Bob Gibson once said established the “identity for the organization” and what it means to be a Cardinal for all of the players who followed him. This winter, La Russa received an email containing just the story to capture that.

It was written several years on one of the best baseball blogs out there (OK, OK, the best baseball blog out there): Joe Posnanski and his “curiously long posts”. (He has a post up about Ryan Howard and Albert Pujols today, and, yes , it does include the phrase “internal discussions”.) Posnanski’s profile on Musial, which has gone viral since its publishing, begins:

  Stan Musial never got thrown out of a game. Never. Think about this for a moment. Musial played in 3,026 games in his career, or about as many as his contemporaries Joe DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky played combined. He played across different American eras — he played in the big leagues before bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, and he retired a few weeks before Kennedy was shot. He played when Jimmy Dorsey and Glenn Miller ruled the Top 40 charts, and he played when Elvis was thin, and he played when Chubby Checker twisted. He played before television, and after John Glenn orbited the earth. And he never once got thrown out of a baseball game.