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Pasquel offered him $75,000 cash to sign (and double the salary he was getting with the Cardinals). Stan promptly made a date with Cardinal Owner Sam Breadon to say goodbye. But Eddie Dyer, in serious danger of becoming a manager without a ball club, saw Musial first. Stan stayed around, led the league with a .365 batting average, helped win the pennant and the World Series, was elected the league's most valuable player.
Besides managing the Cardinals, Businessman Dyer, 48, has his fingers in a lot of pies. In Houston, he is vice president of the Canada Dry Bottling Co. (where Pitcher Ted Wilks works in the off-season), general manager of an insurance company (which employs Pitcher Pollet part time), co-owner of a realty company and a director of the North Side State Bank.
One of Dyer's fondest hopes is that he will be able to offer a job to any of his ballplayers who want to work after they are through in baseball. There is small chance, however, that Stan The Man, with at least five good years of baseball left in him, will ever wind up working for his current boss.
Stan already has his own business. As new co-owner of Stan Musial's & Biggie's Steak House in St. Louis, he strolls among the restaurant's potted palms every evening that he is free, smiling shyly at his guests. Even if the restaurant business should fail, he could always go back and become lord mayor of Donora, where special scoreboards keep the home-town faithful posted on every hit Stan Musial makes every day.
"Don't Get Me Wrong." The home-towners aren't the only ones who keep solicitous tabs on Musial. Two weeks ago in Chicago, Third Baseman Tom Glaviano of the Cardinals said to Stan at breakfast: "I prayed for you last night. I got down on my knees and prayed." Impressed, Musial said he didn't realize Glaviano thought that much of him. "Don't get me wrong," explained Glaviano, "I was thinking what I could do with all that World Series dough."
With September's 30 days looming ahead, Stan Musial cannot afford to let his big bat cool off. Although the Cardinals have the best of the schedule (they begin a long home stand while Brooklyn embarks on a perilous western trip), they could very easily blow the pennant if Marty ("Mr. Shortstop") Marion's ailing sacroiliac doesn't behave. Solid, knowledgeable Marty Marion is the steady man who holds the Cardinal infield together.
Marion's bad back worries Eddie Dyer as much as the team's hitting and pitching. If all three stay in the groove, Dyer's only worry will be which American League club—the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox—they will play in the World Series. Naturally, Dyer hopes it will be New York because the park there holds twice as many cash customers as Boston's, and that means the fattest possible World Series cut for the manager and his players.
<FOOTNOTE*-Another of Doc Weaver's maneuvers for luck has been familiar to Cardinals over a span of 22 years. It is the "double whammy," a ceremonial manipulation of the hands which is supposed to bring misfortune to opposing teams.