'Put him in the outfield and see if he can hit.' So when Rickey heard talk that sore-armed Stanley ought to be released, he ordered the kid sent to the Cards' Class C affiliate in Springfield, Mo. 'He stays at second.' The Mahatma thus launched Maz on a career that turned him into a fielder baseball historian Bill James has called 'probably the greatest defensive player of all time.' 'Don't move him,' Rickey told Maz's coaches. He saw the kind of potential in young Musial that he one day would see in Jackie Robinson, when he was general manager of the Dodgers and sought to integrate baseball in a minor league outfielder in Montreal named Roberto Clemente, whom he shamelessly picked from the Dodgers' pocket after he left Brooklyn for Pittsburgh and in an aspiring young shortstop named Bill Mazeroski, whom he saw turn a few plays at second base, also when he was general manager of the Pirates. No one in the annals of the game knew young talent like the Mahatma, as Rickey was known. Musial's arm never did completely heal but at the end of camp, when Rickey heard some sentiment among coaches to send the kid packing, he waved those voices away. This turned out to be, for the Cards as a team and baseball in general, a wonderfully propitious moment. As fate would have it, on a day Cards legendary general manager Branch Rickey was watching an intrasquad game in Hollywood, Fla., Musial himself hit a ponderous home run over the right-field fence.

He later remembered throwing one pitch to his boyhood idol, Cards star center fielder Terry Moore, and then hearing the crack of the bat and watching the ball carry out of the park.ĭiscouraged as he was, the young man did not quit. With his shoulder injured, he lost the pop on his fastball, and Cardinals hitters began teeing off on him. He fell hard on the point of his left shoulder, the one to which his pitching arm was attached. His prospects grew only darker in August 1940 in Orlando, Fla., when he was chasing a fly ball in the outfield and his cleats got caught in the turf. Musial, who died Saturday at the age of 92, had come up as an erratic, wild-throwing southpaw - so wild, in fact, that a scouting report at one point urged his release - in the Cards' minor league system in 1938. Louis Cardinals' spring training camp with an aching arm and diminishing hopes that he would ever fulfill his youthful dream of making it to the big leagues. You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browserīack in the late winter of 1941, a skinny, 20-year-old pitcher named Stan Musial showed up at the St.

Stan musial