Stan Musial: An American Life

Great bat, no personality is the conclusion in this genial biography of the St. Louis Cardinals slugger. New York Times sports columnist Vecsey (Baseball: A History of America%E2%80%99s Favorite Game) insists that the Hall of Famer%E2%80%99s 475 homers and .331 lifetime batting average put him in the company of hallowed contemporaries Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams. Alas, where the aloof Yankee Clipper and the cantankerous Splendid Splinter shared a prickly charisma, Stan the Man%E2%80%94even a stolid nickname%E2%80%94was "the boring one." Vecsey chronicles Musial%E2%80%99s enormously successful if oddly uneventful career, his nonracist (though not outspokenly so) behavior as baseball was desegregating, his kind and self-effacing manner, his happy marriage, his cordial relations with umpires, even his lawn-mowing. A coiled, crouching, butt-waggling batting stance is his only eccentricity. A sportswriter to the bone, Vecsey clothes his subject%E2%80%99s colorlessness in stirring metaphor and world-historical allusion: if DiMaggio and Williams were "the stormy Himalayas," Musial was "the weathered Appalachians," he rhapsodizes, and caps his account of the Cards%E2%80%99 1946 World Series victory with the news that "less than two hours later, ten Nazi leaders were hanged." Unfortunately, no amount of manful writing and extraneous anecdote can redeem the basic dullness of Musial%E2%80%99s story. Photos. (May 10)