Posnanski: Stan Musial lived to make people happy

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.