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Veteran Whitey Kurowski was through as a third baseman. The once potent pitching staff was plagued with dead arms and question marks. No one knew how long aging (33) Leftfielder Enos Slaughter, the hustle guy, would last with all his aches & pains. The experts picked the club to finish fifth, and when the season was a month old the Cardinals were sixth.
Manager Dyer, an old Cardinal pitcher who once starred as a halfback for Rice University, got out his whip. Said he to
Pitcher Howie Pollet: "You've started your last game until you start throwing the damn ball hard." Pollet, who had been babying his arm because of an elbow operation, went to the bullpen and he stayed there until he found that throwing hard was not going to ruin his arm. By last week his record was 16 wins, eight losses.
On the club's first eastern swing, Dyer yanked old Enos Slaughter from the lineup for poor hitting. Such a thing had never happened to Slaughter before. After a week of stewing on the bench, he came back with a rookie's enthusiasm and began knocking the cover off the ball. His average last week: .326.
Meanwhile the Cardinals began to show signs of having a pitching staff after all—not only Howie Pollet, but George Munger, Al Brazle, Harry ("The Cat") Brecheen and Relief Pitcher Ted Wilks began to win. Manager Dyer did a little rebuilding as he went along. He brought up Infielder Eddie Kazak and Centerfielder Chuck
Diering from the Cardinals' vast farm system, and found a pair of serviceable first basemen in Nippy Jones and Rocky Nelson. Best of all, Stan Musial began to hit like Stan Musial. By July 4, the Cardinals had fought their way up to second; by July 24 they were leading the Dodgers by half a game and the great feud was on.
Sleep & Pinochle. The 1949 Cardinals bear only a slight resemblance to the famed "Gashouse Gang" Cardinals (Frankie Frisch, Leo Durocher, Pepper Martin, Dizzy Dean, et al.) who carved a bizarre and prankish baseball swath through the '305. The Gashousers loved to drop water-filled paper bags from hotel windows, and once a group of them dressed in workmen's clothes and disrupted a dignified banquet at Philadelphia's Bellevue-Stratford Hotel on the pretext of repairing the ceiling. Eddie Dyer's proper ballplayers disdain such pranks. They also have no counterparts to Pitcher Flint Rhem, who used to stray into bars, and Grover Cleveland Alexander—who was rarely out of one unless he was on the mound.
In uniform, the 1949 Cardinals look angular and weatherbeaten enough to have just stepped off a threshing machine. In street clothes, the hayseed look disappears. They dress expensively and in good taste; some of them go in for $25 shirts and $7.50 Countess Mara ties. On the road, they do almost no lobby-lounging and there is no public skylarking. In order of preference, they kill their off-the-field time in i) sleeping, 2) moviegoing, 3) playing pinochle, 4) shopping. They spend hours in automobile salesrooms inspecting new models, and generally know more about what makes the engine go than the salesman does.