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By the time he was 15, Stan had a steady girl (now Mrs. Stan Musial) who was the daughter of the neighborhood grocer and had some standing in the community as Donora High's star pitcher. He was also bat boy during the summer for the zinc works' semi-pro team, managed by Joe Barbao. One day, with his club shorthanded and his pitcher wilting before the Monessen (Pa.) sluggers, Joe sent Bat Boy Musial to the mound. The rest of the team thought it was a joke until Musial struck out a batter: he wound up by striking out 13 men in six innings.
For the next two seasons Joe Barbao tried to get the Pirates to watch Stan play. A Cardinal scout got there first. Although he was shy about most things, 17-year-old Stan had seen enough poverty to be hardheaded about money, and he signed the contract with misgivings: the Cardinals had a reputation for paying their help poorly. In 1938, when the late Judge Landis decreed that 91 Cardinal farmhands (including Musial) were free agents, Stan sat back again and awaited a call from Pittsburgh. Instead he had a personal visit from Eddie Dyer. After a long apprenticeship as a minor-league manager, persuasive Eddie Dyer had become a supervisor of Cardinal farm clubs. After listening to Dyer for an hour, Stan said: "If I were your kid brother, what would you advise me to do?" Said Dyer: "I'd sign with the Cardinals." Stan signed.
For the next two seasons, he pitched for the Cardinal farm team at Williamson, W.Va., winning 15 games and losing 8. At Daytona Beach, Fla. the following year, he won 18 games and hit so well (.352) that he was used as an outfielder when he wasn't pitching. In a chase after a fly ball at Daytona, his career was set for him: he took a header and landed on his left shoulder. His throwing arm never felt the same after that. So Pitcher Musial, as Pitcher Babe Ruth did 22 years before him, became a full-time slugging outfielder.
Mexican Gold. In the last two weeks of the 1941 season, after bombarding the fences at Springfield, Mo. (26 home runs) and Rochester, 20-year-old Outfielder Musial was called up to the Cardinals.
At that time, there was no hint of the famed Musial batting crouch. He began leaning forward a trifle in 1942, his first full season in St. Louis, and hit a respectable .315. His salary did not figure to make him rich, but he remembered one of the reasons why Eddie Dyer advised him to become a Cardinal—the possibility of a share of World Series money. His first two years in big-league baseball, thanks partly to Musial, the Cardinals won the pennant. His shares amounted to $10,513.
In 1946, when Musial rejoined the club after 14 months in the Navy, Eddie Dyer was the new manager of the Cardinals. In Mexico, Jorge Pasquel was spending big money to lure U.S. big-leaguers into his Mexican Baseball League, and he was making the biggest eyes of all at the Cardinals. With the clink of gold, he signed up three of themf and he had the Adam's apple of a fourth bobbing like a pogo stick. The fourth man was Stan Musial.