The Brat

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The batter, narrow-eyed and tightlipped, leaned in toward the plate, and crouched to make a smaller target of his stocky little frame. He wriggled, fidgeted with his cap, hitched up his belt, got his feet dug in, began waggling his bat. Just as the pitcher started his windup, he let down the bat, stepped out of the box and elaborately wiped an imaginary speck out of his eye. The pitcher waited, ball clutched in his throwing hand. With a swagger, the batter walked over to the rosin bag, picked it up, dusted his hands and wiped them on the seat of his pants. Then he stepped up to the plate again. Just as the pitcher got set, the batter called "time," once again stepped out of the box and knelt to tie a shoelace, while the stands hooted and cheered.

Finally, the exasperated pitcher managed to get through his motion. As the ball whipped toward the plate, the batter's cool blue eyes examined it with icy intentness. The ball, a hairbreadth outside the strike zone, plopped into the catcher's glove. Not until the umpire called "ball," almost resignedly, did Eddie ("The Brat") Stanky allow himself the small grimace that, during a game, passes for a satisfied grin.

The canniest lead-off batter in baseball's history was busy at his favorite pastime: getting a free trip to first base. For 17 years in baseball, Stanky's hook-or-crook motto has been: "I don't care how I get on base." When an umpire once warned him against crouching too low at the plate in an effort to minimize his "strike zone," Stanky snarled: "Are you trying to tell me my business?"

The Intangibles. Stanky's main business, until recently, has been to get on base. No one in baseball does it better. Though pitchers often give a power hitter an intentional base on balls--in order to pitch to an easier batter--no one ever walks Stanky intentionally. His .269 lifetime batting average is no great threat to a pitcher, but he holds the National League record for drawing walks: 148,* or nearly one a game.

This talent prompted Branch Rickey to make a classic evaluation of Stanky, then Brooklyn's second baseman: "He can't field. He can't hit. And he can't outrun his grandmother. But I wouldn't trade him for any second baseman in the league." When the New York baseball writers voted a special award to Eddie Stanky, they were stumped when the time came to define just what the trophy was for. Stanky, with a grin, helped them out. "Thank you," he said, "for appreciating my intangibles."

Last week, as the baseball season got under way, Eddie Stanky was lending his intangibles, for an estimated $40,000 a year, to a new allegiance and a new kind of job. He is the new manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, once the scourge of the National League, but more recently its most promising also-ran. Long gone are the rowdy old days of the Cardinals' famed "Gashouse Gang"--Pepper Martin, Frankie Frisch, Leo Durocher, Dizzy Dean, et al. But the fiercely loyal St. Louis fans, who learned to look on Stanky with a sort of affectionate loathing when he played on rival clubs, are cheered when Stanky says: "I have always been the Gashouse type."

Designed to Annoy. Because he is the Gashouse type, because he gives and asks no quarter, because he has been involved in countless loud-mouthed hassles, Eddie Stanky has probably been on the receiving end of more Bronx cheers, boos and jeers than any major-league player since Ty Cobb. His legs are scarred from knee to heel from high-flying spikes. He has also left his mark on many a rival second baseman and shortstop. He is a past master at breaking up a potential double play by hurtling his stocky (5 ft. 8 in., 165 Ib.) frame into a pell-mell slide and dumping the would-be thrower into the dust.

When he cannot win according to the rules, Stanky furiously figures out new ways to irritate the opposition. Once, to distract batters, he began wigwagging and semaphoring at the plate from his second base position. This particular device brought on a free-for-all brawl and got him kicked out of the game. It also brought forth a special ruling from National League President (now Baseball Commissioner) Ford Frick: "Umpires have been instructed to eject any player who engages in antics . . . designed or intended to annoy or disturb opposing batsmen."

Quit is a word that Stanky does not understand. When Cincinnati's Ewell Blackwell, pitching against the Dodgers, was on the verge (one out in the ninth) of his second consecutive no-hit game, it was Stanky's single, in what was plainly a lost cause, that spoiled Blackwell's bid. In last year's World Series, running down toward second on a hit & run play that backfired, slow-moving Stanky was thrown out by a clear 15 feet. Yankee Shortstop Phil Rizzuto confidently waited to tag Stanky out. But Stanky went into a desperate, dust-raising slide. Instead of aiming at the base, he aimed at Rizzuto and neatly kicked the ball out of the startled shortstop's hand. The ball trickled out into centerfield, and before the Yankees could recover, Stanky had picked himself up and scampered on to third base. The Giants' Manager Leo Durocher called it the key play of the game. It kept a Giant rally alive, and the Giants won. Strictly speaking, the kick was not quite cricket, but to Eddie Stanky it was baseball.

The boos and jeers that Stanky gets are merely a challenge to make the fans eat their words. Usually they do. The hatred turns to grudging admiration for the scrappy, sandy-haired little man, who, by his own admission, "got further with less talent", than anyone else in the game. Admiration, in turn, grows into downright affection. After one fist-flying misunderstanding during a minor-league game, Stanky found himself stuck with a $100 fine. The fans took up a collection to pay the fine, and collected so efficiently that Stanky pocketed a profit.

A Permanent Chip. The belligerent Stanky temperament is the result of both heredity and environment. He was born in the workingman's Kensington section of Philadelphia on Sept. 3, 1917, of German-Russian parents. His father, a leather glazer, was a frustrated semi-pro ballplayer. By the time Eddie could sit up, he was rolling a baseball on the floor. His mother recalls a pickup game on a nearby sandlot, when Eddie was still only a shaver. He was the catcher, and, overeager as usual, he crowded so close to the plate that he was knocked cold when the batter swung. Mother Stanky, an unperturbed spectator, said: "Just throw a bucket of water on him. He'll be all right." Eddie got up and finished the game.

Eddie grew up with a permanent chip on his shoulder. One schoolmate recalls that "he would fight at the drop of a hat --just for the hell of it." Another remembers: "I never saw him in the summer without a baseball glove, or in the winter without a soccer ball." (He was the high-scoring star of Northeast High School's championship soccer team.) Lester Owen, Eddie's high-school gym teacher, was impressed by the Stanky single-mindedness: "It was baseball that Eddie came to high school for. He said he was going to be a pro baseball player. That was that. No one doubted him. He wasn't conceited. He was an ordinary boy with extraordinary ambition."

Ups & Downs. His driving ambition got him a contract with Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics. He was 18, cocky and confident. But after a few weeks on the Greenville (Miss.) Class C farm club, Infielder Stanky was not so sure he wanted to be a major leaguer after all. Homesick and desperately unhappy, he wrote to his parents for money to come home. After ten anxious days he got a terse refusal from his mother. The letter ended: "We don't want any quitters in our family."

So Stanky stuck it out through eight years in the minors. Three of them, happily, were spent under Manager Milton Stock, now a Pittsburgh Pirates coach, who was part owner of the Macon, Ga. team in the Sally (South Atlantic) League. Stanky recalls his minor-league experience as an unending series of brawls (35 fist fights) and rows with umpires ("I got tossed out of 15 or 20 games a year"). Stock, Stanky now says, "taught me to control my temper." This may be giving Stock too much credit, but he did teach Stanky that being thrown out of games hurts the team's chances.

Stock also appraised Stanky's natural talents at the plate--a wondrously accurate eye but no power--and taught him to be a lead-off batter. Appraising Stanky's future, Stock even consented to let Eddie marry his only daughter, Dickie, even though Eddie's baseball earnings that year were exactly $1,500. Dickie, a striking brunette, turned out to be quite an inspiration. Eddie was sold to Milwaukee of the American Association and hit the jackpot with a .342 batting average. He ended the 1942 season by being voted the A.A.'s most valuable player.

Brooklyn Blossom. It meant the end of the minors for Eddie and Dickie, but not the end of Stanky's spring-legged struggle for recognition. He was sold to the Chicago Cubs in 1943 and was beaned in his first game. It was the third time Stanky had stopped a fast ball with his head. The first time was the worst: he got a fractured skull, and the hearing in his left ear was so impaired that he was rejected for military service. Even in that war year with the Cubs, he hit only a lackluster .245. The next season, warming the bench, he made a tight-lipped demand of Cub Manager Charlie Grimm: "If you can't play me, trade me." Grimm traded him to Brooklyn for Pitcher Bob Chipman in a deal that attracted very little attention. It was a deal that made Eddie Stanky.

Under the smart handling of Old Mahatma Branch Rickey, who had spotted Stanky when he was a minor leaguer, and under the constant needling of Manager Leo Durocher (a player of small talents himself), Stanky blossomed in Brooklyn. He set his bases-on-balls record in 1945. He sparked Brooklyn to its first pennant in six years in 1947.** The Brooklyn fans made Eddie an idol (along with Dixie Walker), tabbed him with such affectionate nicknames as "The Brat," "Gromyko" (because he walked so much), "Stinky," and "Muggsy."

But by the spring of 1948, Stanky was a fallen idol in Rickey's eyes. Rickey had broken baseball's color line with the importation of hard-hitting Jackie Robinson, and, as it happened, Robinson was a better second baseman than Eddie Stanky. The Boston Braves jumped ($100,-ooo worth) at the chance to get Stanky, hoping that his "intangibles" would perk up a team perennially in the shadow of the glamorous Red Sox. Before leaving Brooklyn, Eddie broke with his good friend Durocher, who had taken Rickey's side against Stanky in a salary dispute. Durocher," Stanky cried, "knifed me in the back."

Strictly Bush! In Boston, after a particularly bitter exchange with Durocher during one tight game, Stanky loosed his famed insult: "Durocher, you've been a busher all your life, and you'll always be a busher." When asked to comment on Durocher's book, The Dodgers and Me, Stanky was ready with a brief, stinging literary criticism: "Just like the author. Strictly bush!"

Teaming with Rookie Shortstop Alvin Dark in Boston, Stanky was well on his way to his best major-league season (batting average: .320) when he broke his leg sliding into third and spiking Dodger Catcher Bruce Edwards. By the end of the season, with Stanky intact again, Boston won its first pennant in 34 years. Meanwhile, in the switch that baffled baseball, Durocher left Brooklyn to manage the Giants. In his first important trade to build "my kind of team," Durocher got Stanky and Dark from Boston. Old feuds were forgotten. Baseball's two "holler guys" were together again.

Durocher, to everyone's surprise, named Shortstop Dark as the Giant captain. Stanky, his broad face set in an expression of sadness, pounded into Durocher's office and said: "Leo, that's fine for Al, but don't you think I had it coming? After all ... I'm your kind of ballplayer. You've always said so." Durocher told Stanky to cool off. Then he carefully explained that he was trying to instill some of Eddie's aggressiveness into Dark by giving him added responsibility. Stanky was flattered and placated.

"You Gotta Win." The Giants soon lost a tough game, io. As Durocher, a lover of the historical present tense, recalls the clubhouse scene: "Stanky comes into the clubhouse after the game and starts throwing things, taking it out on the furniture about those lucky bastards winning that one. He finally takes a kick at the water cooler and the bottle falls and breaks and the ice goes all over the floor and there's a hell of a ruckus. Now Al Dark has a good day that day. As I remember it, we get six hits and he got three or four. But nobody could score him. Well, one of those newspaper guys comes in and stops by Dark and says, 'Anyhow, Al, you did all right with that stick today.' Dark whirls around and hollers, 'What the hell do you mean all right? We didn't win, did we?' I knew right then I didn't make any mistake making him the captain." Stanky, a team player first and still Durocher's guy, agrees.

Last year, this time in Stanky's second season with a new club, the Giants won the pennant in one of the most dramatic finishes baseball has ever produced. Bobby Thomson's home run clinched the pennant, but 156 games had already been played, and Stanky had worked mightily in 145 of them. Durocher tells of Stanky's role: "To win a pennant you gotta win the tight ball games. And to win those tight ones, those one-run games, you gotta have guys who won't quit till they've won. And you've always gotta have one guy to lead those other guys. Eddie Stanky was my guy and their guy. He hated to lose. Eddie Stanky was the big difference in tight ball games . . . We wouldn't have won the pennant without him."

Stanky turned down the offer of a relatively secure job with the Giants for the new dubious job as Cardinal manager, a position that has seen more hiring & fir ing (nine changes in the past 26 years) than any other club in baseball. Eddie, who has been "preparing for this kind of job for five years," talked it over with Dickie. Said she: "Let's take it on."

Midgets & Managers. The job is, in a sense, the biggest challenge in baseball. Some people maintain -- and attendance figures bear them out -- that St. Louis cannot support two major-league teams. For years, the American League Browns, winners of one pennant (1944) in 50 years, have barely kept out of the red. Rival American League teams, including such drawing cards as the New York Yankees, lose money on the trip to St. Louis. Last year, after effervescent Bill Veeck (rhymes with heck) bought the doormat Browns, things began to change. Using the showman stunts that brought fans out in droves when he owned the Cleveland Indians, Veeck shot off fire works before games, imported jitterbugs and contortionists, selected grandstand managers to help run the team, handed out free drinks, and even sneaked a midget into the Browns' lineup (he drew a base on balls).

Fan interest began to perk up under Veeck's Barnum & Bailey tactics, not because the Browns were going anywhere in the pennant race (they finished last, 46 games behind the Yankees), but because the fans wanted to see what Veeck would do next. Cardinal Owner Fred Saigh (rhymes with high), whose club has drawn over a million fans every year of the five Saigh has owned it, countered by placing ads in the St. Louis papers extolling the Cardinals as "a dignified St. Louis institution." The struggle for fans was on.

Veeck, a flamboyant gladhander, relishes the feud. Publicity-shy Saigh prefers to let his team do the talking. After Veeck hired hard-bitten Rogers Hornsby, an old Cardinal favorite, to manage the Browns, Saigh felt forced to retaliate by getting baseball's most colorful character. Saigh fired Manager Marty ("Mr. Shortstop") Marion and hired Eddie Stanky. Veeck, who refuses to be topped, quickly hired Marion as a player-coach.

More Hit & Run. As the Cardinals wound up their spring-training barnstorming tour,*** some of the evidence was in on the new Stanky regime. Always the realist, Stanky knew that he could not remake a team of veterans and rookies into the old Gashouse image. Veterans like Outfielder Enos Slaughter, Second Baseman Red Schoendienst and Third Baseman Billy Johnson already play the game to the hilt. Stan ("The Man") Musial, baseball's best, summed up the new Cardinal feeling: "We'll be more aggressive . . . We'll play more hit & run ... We'll steal more."

Stanky, choosing his words carefully, says: "The men will play up to the fullest of their capabilities ... I do not plan to let anyone take advantage of me ... I am not a martinet--and I am not a sucker." A manager's first task, Eddie says, is "getting the players to believe in you. I do not care if players like or dislike me. Naturally, I want them to like me. But if all of them believe I know what I am doing, I am on the happy road."

Family Man. Manager Stanky was on another happy road last winter: he made a good-will tour of the Cardinal farm chain from Ontario to Omaha. Gregarious and earnest, he loved every minute of it, even though it meant being away from his winter home in Mobile, Ala. A devout Catholic family man, Stanky would have preferred to spend the winter golfing or horseback riding with Dickie, or hanging around the house playing with his three children: Georgia Ann, 8%, Beverly Mary, 2%, and Michael Edward, nine months. Off the field, Stanky is a model of decorum, temperance and propriety. He never took a drink until he was 27, still drinks sparingly, smokes only an occasional pipe, watches his diet carefully. "I'm sometimes hard to live with at home," he says with a grin. His wife backs him up to a certain extent: "Only when he loses. Then we just cancel our plans for the evening."

Problems & Pros. How many games will the Cardinals lose this year? Stanky is too cagey to make many predictions: "We have a strong pennant contender, with the Giants, Dodgers and Phillies in the same category. If I have a problem, and I don't like to recognize problems, it's pitching." The Cardinals have two proven starters in Gerald Staley (19-13) and Cliff Chambers (14-12), and Stanky is counting heavily on Wilmer ("Vinegar Bend") Mizell, acclaimed as "the left-handed Dizzy Dean." Mizell, the Cardinals' clown, was the strike-out king last year of the Texas League, where his Houston record was 16-14. Stanky also intends to revive sore-armed Cloyd Boyer (2-5) and Joe Presko (7-4), along with veteran (33) George ("Red") Munger (4-6). For bullpen duty, and for off & on starts, he has two old (37) lefthanded standbys, lanky Alpha Brazle (6-5) and stringy Harry ("The Cat") Brecheen (8-4). Del Rice is the No. 1 catcher.

The outfield is solid enough with Musial, the National League's leading batter (.355), Slaughter (.281) and Wally Westlake (.266). In reserve: Harry ("Peanuts") Lowrey (.303) and Hal Rice (.254). The infield is not airtight, nor is it porous. Hulking (6 ft. 1 in., 230 Ibs.) Steve Bilko, up for his third try in the majors, is at first base, where his big bat may make up for his slow feet. Red Schoendienst, a slick-fielding switch-hitter (.289), is the second baseman as he has been for the past five years. Shortstop Solly Hemus, who hit .344 last year after taking over Marty Marion's job as a regular, is considered by Stanky to be "the most improved player on the team." Johnson, at third, is a former Yankee star with a rifle arm and a fair (.262) bat. This is essentially the same team (excluding Bilko) which finished third, 15 1/2 games off the Giant pace last year. And where does Stanky fit in?

"I hope, eventually, to be a bench manager," says Stanky. "But all of these fellows will need a rest now and then [the average age of the Cardinals makes them one of the oldest clubs in baseball], and I expect to play plenty." One guess, if Bilko does not make it this time: Stanky will be on second and Second Baseman Schoendienst ("He can play anywhere") will move to first. Otherwise, Stanky expects to be yapping and howling in the third-base coaching box. His basic strategy, says Eddie, is bunt, run, squeeze: "We have paid too much attention to the home run. The time has come to return to primary weapons."

Old (66) Doc Weaver, who has seen nine changes in Cardinal managers since Branch Rickey hired him 26 years ago to ease the aches & pains of Cardinal athletes, sums up Stanky's managerial qualifications: "If a club owner wants a man that's all business, a real all-out go-getter, then he's got the right fellow." Branch Rickey, in a tone of deep respect, says it another way: "He's Gashouse."

* American League record: 170, set in 1923 by Babe Ruth, who got most of his because pitchers were afraid of his home-run power.

** The year that Durocher sat on the sidelines at the order of Baseball Commissioner Happy Chandler.

*** Players call it the ulcer circuit

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