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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."