The Man Among Men takes matters into own hands

By Bob Ryan, Globe Staff, 07/11/99

Everyone knows that Stan "The Man" Musial has always been a nice guy who has been eager to please teammates, fans, and managers.

And in addition to being a nice guy, he was a great hitter who sometimes seemed so good he appeared to be able to hit on cue. So when St. Louis manager Harry "The Hat" Walker, a coach for the 1955 National League All-Star team, begged Musial to get the game over with as he went to the plate to open the bottom half of the 12th inning, The Hat was sure his wish would be granted. "Let's end this now," said The Hat. "I'm getting hungry."

It only took one pitch. Catcher Yogi Berra wanted a fastball in. The 6-foot-7-inch Red Sox righthander, starting his fourth full inning of work, threw a fastball, but it wasn't in. "It wasn't what Yogi called," Frank Sullivan would later say. "It was a lousy pitch."

It was, in fact, right down Broadway, and The Man deposited it in the right-field bleachers to give the comebacking National League a 6-5 victory in a game it had once trailed, 5-0.

It was the fourth of Musial's six All-Star Game homers, and it is the one everyone remembers. It also made a surprising winner out of Gene Conley, Mr. Happy Go Lucky himself. The 6-8 Milwaukee righthander, then in between stints with the Boston Celtics, had picked up the victory after striking out Al Kaline, Mickey Vernon, and Al Rosen on 14 pitches in the top half of the 12th.

"I was just throwing mostly curveballs and trying to keep the ball low, " shrugged Conley, who had been the hard-luck loser in Cleveland the year before when Nellie Fox hit a bloop two-run single to give the AL an 11-9 victory.

This was Milwaukee's first All-Star Game, and the baseball-mad residents of Wisconsin were very proud to have it. The game start was delayed by a half-hour in order that baseball dignitaries could attend the funeral of Arch Ward, the editor of the Chicago Tribune. Ward had conceived the idea of the All-Star Game 22 years earlier.

The delay was well worth the show of respect. The fans were treated to a dramatic comeback victory by the home team, which found itself down by a 5-0 count after the American League had abused Philadelphia ace Robin Roberts, whose selection as the starter struck many as a curious deviation from the Leo Durocher norm.

On any list of the most sentimental 100 million people drawing a breath on the planet at any given time, Durocher would have ranked no higher than 99,999,999. But the acerbic Giants mentor explained his choice of 13-7 Roberts over the 14-1 Don Newcombe by saying that he wanted Roberts to tie Lefty Gomez for the most All-Star Game starts with five. He also said he thought everyone should play, and he came within one man (St. Louis pitcher Luis Arroyo) of fulfilling his pledge.

Roberts always had a great propensity for dispensing home run balls, and so it should not have come as any great shock when Mantle jumped on a Roberts offering and hammered it into downtown Oshkosh for a three-run homer that gave the AL a 4-0 lead in the first. "This sort of thing has happened to me before," reminded the genial Philadelphia righthander.

Trailing by a 5-0 score entering the seventh, the Nationals pecked away at Yankee standout Whitey Ford for a pair. In the top of the eighth, AL manager Al Lopez did a very curious thing. With his team leading by a 5-2 score, with the bases loaded and two away, with five panting pitchers in the bullpen and with a reasonable roster of available pinch hitters (this was, after all, an All-Star Game), he allowed Ford to hit for himself, and against a lefty?

There were worse-hitting pitchers than Ford (.173 lifetime, with three homers), but who could explain this? Lopez would soon regret the decision. A grateful Joe Nuxhall, in the midst of some stellar long relief, fanned Ford and the Nationals promptly tied the game with three in the eighth off the Yankee lefthander, who had retired the first two men in the inning. But singles by Willie Mays, Ted Kluszewski, Randy Jackson, and Hank Aaron, mixed in with a disputed Al Rosen error (he claimed that a throw from Kaline had hit Jackson), produced the three runs.

Mays had already made his presence deeply felt. Ted Williams thought he'd be making the home run trot when he smashed a ball to deep right-center in the seventh. But Mays, having entered the game as a replacement for starter Duke Snider, made a leaping catch of a ball that had already carried over the fence.

As for Musial, prior to the 12th inning he had done nothing. The game had begun with The Man on the bench. Musial was a first baseman that year, and the starter was Cincinnati's hulking Kluszewski, who would drive in 113 that year while leading the league in hits. Durocher got around that by sending Musial up to hit for left-field starter Del Ennis in the fourth and then leaving him there for the rest of the game.

For seven innings, Musial did nothing to justify the tribute, striking out his first time up before grounding out twice.

Sullivan had relieved Ford in the eighth, and skipper Lopez must have liked what he was seeing because he never came out. He was even allowed to hit for himself off Nuxhall with a man on first in the 10th.

Nuxhall was a pretty good story himself. He will always have a place in baseball history as the youngest player ever to perform in a big league game (he was 15 years 10 months old when he pitched two-thirds of an inning for the 1944 Reds), but after that he faded out of sight, not resurfacing in a big league uniform until 1952 and then performing in the relative anonymity of Cincinnati, an out-of-sight-out-of-mind franchise in the early '50s. But he had a major breakthrough in 1955, earning his way onto the squad at age 27 en route to a 17-12 season.

But he was an unknown in the American League, so much so that this very newspaper ran a follow-up story to his three innings of scoreless ball with the headline, "WHO IS JOE NUXHALL?" The American League thought it had broken through in the 11th. There were two out and two on when Berra bounced one over second. Red Schoendienst made the play, throwing across his body to get Berra at first as the speedy Bobby Avila was scoring from second. Or did he? Berra sure didn't think so. But National League umpire Dusty Boggess did, and nothing else mattered.

With the crowd still buzzing from that bit of excitement, Musial digested Harry The Hat's orders as he walked to the plate. Billy Hoeft, Bob Turley, Jim Wilson, Dick Donovan (pride of Wollaston, Mass.), and Lopez's own rookie fireballing sensation, Herb Score, were all available to pitch, but Frank Sullivan was still out there. No one will ever know why.

Musial exchanged pleasantries with the notoriously chatty Berra, telling Yogi that he was tired.

"Yeah," replied Berra, "ain't it tough, trying to see with all them shadows?"

Yogi wagged his index finger. Sullivan threw the pitch. Musial swung. There was no suspense. It was gone the instant it left the bat. The tired man could jog around the bases.