Monday, January 21, 2013
Posnanski: Stan Musial lived to make people happy
(www.sportsonearth.com)
posted on January 21, 2013 at 12:50 AM by Esoteric throws a 'hard slider' to cardinals, hall of fame, obituary, role model, st. louis
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9 comment(s)
Shakespeare said the evil that men do is what lives on after them, with the good oft being interred with the bones. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t thinking about Stan the Man when he wrote that.
But this zeal to make people happy did not end when he stopped playing. Every single day, when Stan Musial left the house, he would tuck his harmonica into his pocket. Every single day, at some point, he would run into someone, and he would pull out that harmonica, and he would play “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Musial would say he learned to play the harmonica because he did not like speaking in public, did not feel comfortable doing it, and the harmonica gave him a voice. It made people smile. [...]
“We all disappointed someone from time to time,” the Hall of Famer Robin Roberts said when we talked about kids and autographs. “Well, all of us but one.”
“Who was that?” I asked.
“Musial,” he said in a voice that indicated I should have already known.
A number of the anecdotes found in Posnanski’s obit originally hail from his classic 2010 Sports Illustrated profile of Musial, but there’s a lot of new material as well. RTFA.
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1. Bitter Calculus Instructor posted on January 21, 2013 at 02:56 AM # hit 0 | hit 0Seriously though, great article. Of course.
Signed,
National League pitchers, 1941-63
And Williams and Cobb and . . .
This statement implies that he hit the most doubles plus triples in baseball history, but Cobb and Speaker come to mind as players who had more.
Sorry for the quibble. Posnanski really does write very well.
Noticed that, oddly enough (since it was probably the first things of Simmons' I'd read in at least a year; in general, he really does need to be beaten with a blunt instrument early & often). I take a back seat to no one (well, other than Gaelan, I guess, & probably Ray, too) in thinking that Posnanski disgraced himself irredeemably over the whole Paterno mess, but in fairness any "rushing" was done by his publisher, no?
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