Free Stan Musial by George Vecsey Page B

ballpark.
    The trains ran regularly from Donora to downtown Pittsburgh and were not expensive. People from Donora went “up” to Pittsburgh on a daily basis for one thing or another. But Lukasz was not a baseball fan, and once he had made his way from Poland to the west bank of the Monongahela, his peregrinations may not have gone beyond factory and ethnic clubs and the trudge home up the hill.
    Parents can loom large in their children’s memories. Twenty years after his father’s death, Musial may have been trying to portray Lukasz as a man with big dreams, the way Judy Collins did in her classic song “My Father,” about a miner who promises his daughter that someday they would live in France.
    Sitting in the bleachers in doomed Forbes Field, Musial may have been indulging in a touching bout of wishful thinking.
    THE BOY’S journey began with the rudimentary baseballs Mary Musial manufactured with spare rags and strings, and the few minutes of catch she could muster just outside the house.
    As the two Musial boys began to roam around Donora, other adults were often willing to act in loco parentis.
    “We all had ‘relations’ in any part of town who would whip your ass if you were doing wrong, which you can’t do today,” Ed Musial said in 2000. “Anybody was allowed to take care if you was up to no good … so you had to be good, because somebody’s going to see you.”
    There was no Little League in those days, so boys played ball wherever they could. Flat land is precious in Donora. The steel mills had priority, laid against the Monongahela River, sending their precious product downriver to Pittsburgh. A block or two from the river, the Appalachian hills rise steeply.
    The boys played at Weed Field, an odd name for such a dusty flat patchon the hillside. Nothing grew there because of the plumes of smoke from the American Steel plants directly below.
    Stash’s training at the Polish Falcons’ gymnastics classes had made him comfortable with his body, instantly adept in this most American of sports. He was a natural left-handed hitter who could hit the ball farther than anybody else, and his long drives to right field would go bouncing down the arid, rocky gully.
    “You had to wait five minutes for the outfielder to get the ball,” Musial recalled with a laugh many years later.
    Right field was out of bounds, so the young man tried to hit the ball to center or left, where there was more space.
    From his gymnast’s training, he discovered a coiled stance—right hip facing the pitcher, head tucked down behind his right shoulder, weight back.
    The young man also learned to pitch from watching the men. With the same superb timing and selectivity he would develop at bat, young Stash found his first mentor—Joe Barbao, who had played minor-league ball and now lived for baseball in his hours away from the mill.
    Barbao allowed the Musial boys, both lefties, to play catch on the sideline while he was working out with his buddies, and he would teach them the game. Because Stan was two years older than his brother, he was first to serve as batboy for the team Barbao managed, the Donora Zincs. Stan was slender, in the manner of the Depression, when Americans visibly had ribs and sternums, but anybody could see the boy was an athlete, had a competitive drive.
    One day the Zincs were playing Monessen and their pitcher ran out of gas early. Barbao asked the skinny batboy if he would like to pitch. According to Musial’s memory, he pitched six innings and struck out thirteen, but even if his stint was a little less spectacular, he pitched well enough to retire grown men. He also managed to annoy some of the Zincs, who grumbled that he was not an employee of the mill and had not paid his club dues. Eventually Barbao smoothed it out and soon Musial was a regular with the Zincs, one time breaking Barbao’s ankle with a hard foul to the coaching box at first base.
    Ed also was a hitter and soon earned a spot on the