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picked up Musial’s bat, the M159 model.
    “I said, ‘Stan, it’s got a very thin handle,’ ” Kranepool recalled. “He said, ‘Ed, I don’t hit ’em with the handle.’ ”
    Stanley honed the bat handles even thinner using sandpaper in the clubhouse, thereby validating the shop classes he took back at Donora High.
    Or was it the stance?
    Ed Mickelson, who was briefly a teammate of Musial’s and later a prominent high school coach in the area, tried to break down what happened after the man went into that temporary crouch.
    “I have a theory why Stan’s bat showed ball marks only closely aligned in a small area on the sweet spot of his bat,” Mickelson wrote. “No ball marks on the end or on the handle. I believe it had to do with the placement of his front foot as he would stride toward the ball.”
    Mickelson made a drawing of what Musial did with his feet. The marks looked like something out of an old-fashioned learn-to-waltz diagram.
    For the outside pitch, Musial’s front (right) foot would move toward the plate.
    For the inside pitch, Musial’s front foot would open up slightly, toward the outside of the batter’s box.
    For the pitch over the plate, Musial’s front foot would move straight ahead.
    This consistency of ball marks on the bat indicated excellent discipline,
    control, balance, eyesight, reflexes—a command of the body that probably went back to his days in the Falcons gymnastics drills.
    Amateur prestidigitator that he was, Stanley seemed to be hiding his secrets. According to Joe Garagiola, Curt Flood, at the time buried deep on the Cardinals’ bench, once asked Musial the secret of his hitting.
    “Curt, all you can do is when you see the ball just hit the hell out of it,” Musial said, thoroughly mystifying the young player.
    The closest Musial ever came to explaining himself was to Roger Kahn, who had built a rapport with him over the years.
    “Do you guess?” Kahn asked Musial in 1957.
    “I don’t guess. I know,” Musial replied.
    “You know?”
    “I can always tell, as long as I’m concentrating.”
    Some hitters say they read the rotation of the ball, but Musial said his edge came even earlier.
    “I pick the ball up right away. Know what I mean? I see it as soon as it leaves the pitcher’s hand. That’s when I got to concentrate real hard. If I do, I can tell what the pitch is going to be.”
    That meant, in the clubby days of the eight-team National League, that Musial had a feel for the repertoire of approximately seventy pitchers at a time.
    “Every pitcher has a set of speeds,” he told Kahn. “I mean, the curve goes one speed and the slider goes at something else. Well, if I concentrate real good, I can pick up the speed of the ball about the first thirty feet it travels.”
    Perfectionist that he was, Musial said that approximately twenty or thirty times a season he found himself not concentrating. Imagine what he could have hit if he’d paid attention.
    Just consider the pitchers he victimized for the most home runs: Warren Spahn, 17; Preacher Roe, 12; Johnny Antonelli, 11 (all three of them lefties, thereby defying the general rule that lefty pitchers are tough on lefty hitters); Newcombe, 11; Murry Dickson, 11; Bob Rush, 10; Robin Roberts, 10. All these double-digit victims ranged from Hall of Fame level to very good starters. Of course, a pitcher would have to be pretty good to last long enough to give up that many homers to one man.
    Stanley hit his homers without causing animosity. Roberts, who gave up505 career home runs, remained socially friendly with Musial, often meeting him in Florida after they were retired.Roberts said he had exactly one photograph of an opposing player in his home—Stan the Man.
    Everybody liked the way he referred to himself as Stanley, creating a character in his own personal video, much the way latter-day superstars refer to themselves in the third person—
Michael Jordan doesn’t do garbage time
, or whatever.
    But