Stan Musial: An American Life Review

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Stan Musial: An American Life ReviewI first started following professional baseball as a boy in 1969, six years after Stan Musial, Cardinal outfielder, first baseman, and hitter extraordinare, retired from the game. But as I listened to Pirate games on the radio, the Pirate announcers would still occasionally talk about Stan Musial whenever the Bucs would play the Cardinals, in respectful ... almost reverential tones. As I continued to learn about the game and some of its past heroes, Stan Musial, in my young mind, achieved near-mythical status, similar to Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Honus Wagner, and others. It also didn't hurt that he was also from Pennsylvania, only an hour or so from where I grew up.
As such, he's always been one of those ballplayers that I wanted to know more about. I knew about his statistics ... 3630 hits, .331 lifetime batting average, 475 home runs (in an era when 400 home runs really meant something), 3 Most Valuable Player awards, and so on, but I wanted to learn more than just the stats. So, I was happy to see this biography, "Stan Musial, An American Life", by George Vescey (a well known New York sportswriter, and the older brother of NBA analyst and sportswriter Peter Vescey).
The book isn't quite what I was expecting. It fully covers Stan's life from birth until today, and is full of anecdotes from his friends, families, and quotes from Stan, and attempts, with great success, to show how the boy he was developed into the man he is, warts (surprisingly few) and all. Where the book differed from my expectations is that while baseball is a central theme in the book, there is surprisingly little descriptive baseball in it. By that I mean, Mr Vescey will spend a page talking about a season and whether it was a good year or a bad year for Stan, and perhaps any salary discussions, but it doesn't often talk about specific games or series, or baseball minutia. Mr Vescey instead has anecdotes about Stan's life both inside and outside of baseball, anecdotes from competitors from that timeframe, and/or quotes from friends and family. As such, this book is more a straight biography than a sports biography, and once I realized that, I found that I enjoyed the book even more.
Mr Vescey is clearly a great admirer of Stan Musial, and has done an outstanding job of capturing, describing, analyzing, and summarizing his life. He notes early on that, unlike some of the other stars from Stan's era (Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio, to name two), Stan's stature and accomplishments seem to be receding from popular memory rather than growing, and surmises that it may be because Stan was so accommodating and gracious ... he wasn't a surly, yet supremely talented hitter, like Ted Williams, and didn't marry movie stars and act distant to the world like the great Joe DiMaggio. Stan was approachable, genuinely caring about his fellow man, and so remarkably consistent as a ballplayer, that he wasn't perhaps as interesting to a populace that seems to prefer flawed heroes.
If you're looking to learn more about Stan the man (pun intended), I highly recommend this book.
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