331 while playing in the outfield and at first base, and was the fourth player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. Musial played on three World Series championship teams, won three Most Valuable Player awards, had a career batting average of. He simply tattooed National League pitching. His Cardinals were far removed from the coastal media centers, and he shunned controversy. He did not have the mystique of Joe DiMaggio, the tempestuousness of Ted Williams, the electrifying presence of Willie Mays, the country-boy aura of Mickey Mantle. When admirers approached him, he chatted them up with his familiar “whattayasay, whattayasay.”īut he otherwise had little of the glamour of the other stars of his era - from the World War II years to the early 1960s - when baseball was the undisputed king of sports. A gentlemanly and sunny figure - he loved to play “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on his harmonica - he was never ejected from a game. Musial was renowned for his concentration at the plate, and for his patience: he struck out only 696 times in 10,972 at-bats in his 22 major league seasons, all as a Cardinal. “There is only one way to pitch to Musial - under the plate,” Leo Durocher, the manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants teams that Musial often victimized, once said. And his power could be explosive: he set a major league record, equaled only once, when he hit five home runs in a doubleheader. He drove in 1,951 runs and scored 1,949 runs. He had 1,815 hits at home and 1,815 on the road. Swinging from that stance, Musial won seven batting championships, hit 475 home runs and amassed 3,630 hits. The stance was likened to a corkscrew or, as the White Sox pitcher and Dodgers coach Ted Lyons once described it, “a kid peeking around the corner to see if the cops are coming.” The Cardinals said he died at his home in Ladue, Mo., surrounded by family.Ī signature Musial image endures: He waits for a pitch in a left-handed crouch, his knees bent and close together, his body leaning to the left as he peers over his right shoulder, the red No.

Louis Cardinals - the player they called Stan the Man - died Saturday. Stan Musial, one of baseball’s greatest hitters and a revered figure in the storied history of the St.

Ted williams stan musial