9-22-48: 5 swings, 5-for-5 for "The Man"

Stan Musial tied the record for most five-hit games in a season with four when he went 5-for-5 in the St. Louis Cardinals' 8-82 victory Sept. 22, 1948, over the Boston Braves. Conserving his cuts at the ball because of two sore wrists, Musial needed only five swings to get his five hits.

By Phil Ellenbecker

  "It just takes one" is a saying you may hear coming from the stands at a Little League ballpark near you. It means that no matter the count on the batter, he or she always stands a chance as long as they have one more pitch coming.

  "It just takes one" took on a whole new meaning when Stan Musial came up to bat for the St. Louis Cardinals on the raw, windy Wednesday afternoon of Sept. 22, 1948.

  Musial swung the bat only five times that day. In five at-bats. And he connected each time. And got a base bit each time.

  Five at-bats. Five swings. Five hits. "It just takes one," indeed, for 5-for-5 for the man they called "Stan the Man."

  Musial's 5-for-5 with three runs scored and two RBIs led the Cardinals to an 8-2 victory before 10,937 at Braves Field.

  Musial fell a triple shy of hitting for the cycle with a homer, a double and three singles. He topped a 17-hit St. Louis attack in which the Cardinals got a hit from every spot in the batting order.

  Musial's every-swing-counts day wasn't a happy accident. He had jammed his left wrist while making a catch in a game Sept. 17, and the next day the Brooklyn Dodgers' Carl Erskine banged a pitch off his right wrist. He kept on playing but was somewhat handicapped entering the game Sept. 22. He'd gone 0-for-4 the day before. But the wind was blowing out at Braves Field, and the Cardinals hadn't quite been eliminated from National Legue pennant contention. So "The Man" played on, and he was determined to make every precious swing count.

  In an article for the Society for Baseball Research Games Project, Glen Sparks told of Cardinals beat writer Bob Broeg hinting at the potential for a hitter's day. Musial was somewhat dubious.

  “A great day for the hitters, Banj,” Broeg said before the game, as told in "Musial, the Man's Own Story," calling Musial by another one of his nicknames.

  “Yeah, but I can’t hit like this,” Musial said, referring to his heavily taped-up wrists.

  So off came the bandages as he stepped into the batter's box in the first inning, and off on a hitting spree went Musial. It started with a looping, opposite-field single to left field in the first with two out off Hall of Fame left-hander Warren Spahn. Continuing to look just to hit the ball where it was pitched, he went the opposite way again against Spahnie two innings later for a double with one out, arching a high, outside fast ball over left fielder Mike McCormick's head. Enos Slaughter drove him in with a single, giving the Cardinals a 2-0 lead.

 St. Louis' lead had increased to 5-0 and Spahn was gone when Musial came up in the fourth. He got around and got the ball up in the air this time, pulling a Red Barrett change-up into the right-field bullpen for his 38th homer of the season, a two-run shot with Red Schoendiest aboard. "The pain was terrific," Baseball Heroes magazine reported of the home-run swing.

   (Musial hit more homers off Spahn, 17, than any other pitcher he faced in his 22-year career.)

  Musial dragged a single off Clyde Shoun past a lunging shortstop Al Dark in the sixth, and he scored the Cardinals' final run on Ron Northey's double, making it 8-1.

  Musial pulled an outside fastball to right for a single in the eighth off Al Lyons, the Braves' fifth pitcher, on a 2-0 pitch. Informed before the at-bat he had a chance to break a record for five-hit games in  a season, Musial wasn't about to wait Lyons out, expanding the strike zone and punching a hit through the first  base-second hole.

  “When the first two pitches were balls, I was afraid he was going to walk me, and I really wanted that last chance,” Musial told Broeg in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

   That gave Musial his fourth five-hit game of 1948, tying the major-league record set by Ty Cobb three times in 1922, when he posted the last of his three .400 seasons at .401.

  It was that kind of year for Musial. Known for his year-in, year-out consistency, "The Man" outdid himself in 1948,  falling one homer short of a Triple Crown with a final total of 39 but leading the league in batting average (.376), slugging average (.701), on-base percentage (.450), runs scored (135), hits (230), doubles (46), triples (18), RBIs (131) and total bases (429). He won his third National League MVP award, the first in the NL to do so.

Don Lang went 3-for-5 with two doubles in the St. Louis Cardinals' 8-2 win over the Boston Braves on Sept. 22, 1948. Lang's hits and doubles were single-game highs in a two-year major league career split between 1938 and 1948.

  Somewhat overshadowing Musial's performance Sept. 22 was a career day of sorts for Cardinals third baseman Don Lang, who went 3-for-5 with two doubles. The three hits and pair of doubles were both career highs. Lang had an unusual two-year big league career. He played 21 games for Cincinnati in 1938 and batted. 260, then disappeared into the minor leagues until playing 117 games and batting .269 for the Cardinals in 1948. And that was it.

  Nippy Jones went 2-for-5 for the Cardinals, while Phil Masi and Clint Conaters each went 2-for-4 for Boston.  

  All the hitting from Musial and his mates made it a breeze for Cardinals pitcher Al Brazle, although he didn't really need that much help. He improved his record to 8-6 with a complete-game six-hitter, allowing two runs, both earned, while walking only one and striking out four.

  Spahn fell to 15-11 after giving up six hits and three runs, two earned, in three innings.

  Much has been made of how much Braves manager Billy Southworth relied on Spahn and Johnny Sain this season -- "Spahn and Sain and pray for rain," the saying went. That wasn't the case this day, though, as Southworth pinch hit for Spahn, who hit the third-most homers among pitchers in the game's history, in the bottom of the third with the Braves trailing 3-0.

  (The "Spahn and Sain" refrain was misleading, anyway. Sain had 25 wins this season, but Spahn finished at 15-12, just two more wins than Bill Voiselle and four more than Vern Bickford. And the Braves had four other pitchers with at least five wins. Sain and Spahn accounted for 44 percent of the team's wins in 1948.)

  Southworth's move paid off momentarily as Bobby Sturgeon tripled in Spahn's place and scored on a ground out by Dark.

  But it backfired when the Cardinals scored four in the fourth off Barrett, capped by Musial's homer. Brazle helped himself with an RBI single and Marty Marion added a sacrifice fly.

  That turn at bat ended on a downer for the Cardinals, though. After Musial hit his homer, Enos Slaughter drew a walk and Nippy Jones hit a hard smash toward second that hit Slaughter in the face. Besides getting called out for the third out of the inning, Slaughter, who had been trying to steal second, had to leave the game on a stretcher. He had broken his nose and also had a black eye.

  Slaughter, who joined Musial and Schoendist as future Hall of Famers in the Cardinals' lineup this day, didn't play for the rest of the season. “Country” was hitting .321 with 11 home runs and 90 RBIs.

  That might have cost the Cardinals a shot at maybe challenging the Braves down the stretch for the National League pennant. They were seven games behind the Braves in second place following their win this day with a 79-66 record, moving just ahead of Brooklyn. That's about where they stayed, finishing in second, 6 1/2 back with an 85-69 record.

  But it's doubtful it would have made a difference as the Braves, who'd won eight straight coming into Sept. 22, were sailing through the month, winning 21 of their final 28 games to finish at 91-62. They were in first place from Sept. 2 on as they won their first pennant since the Miracle Braves' shocking defeat of the Philadelphia Athletics in the 1914 World Series. The Braves had been 15 games out of first place on July 4 that year.

  No world title was in the offing for the 1948 Boston Braves, though, as they lost 4-2 to the Cleveland Indians in the Fall Classic. And the team wasn't long for Boston. Despite drawing a league-leading 1,455,439 to Braves Field in '48, their best showing ever, the Braves moved to Milwaukee for the 1953 season in the first franchise shift in major league baseball in more than half a century.

  Meanwhile, while the Cardinals weren't going anywhere, they were headed south in the win-loss column after winning four pennants and three World Series earlier in the decade. Ironically, three of those pennants and two world titles came from 1942 through '44 under Southworth, a future Hall of Famer who moved on to the Braves and substantially more pay in 1946.

  After 1948, except for runner-up finishes in 1949 and 1975, the Cardinals placed between third and seventh until reclaiming the pennant, and a World Series title, in 1964 -- the year after Musial retired.

  But Musial kept going for the most part continually through 1963, his swing steady as a metronome. With his lifetime numbers of .331 average, .417 on-base percentage, .559 slugging percentage, 3,630 hits, 725 doubles, 177 triples, 475 homers, 1,949 runs and 1,951 RBIs, he's the only player to finish his career in the top 25 in all these categories. He's second on the list in total bases, third in doubles and fourth in hits.

  How steady and consistent was he?  He had 1,815 hits at home and 1,815 on the road; he hit .336 at home, .326 on the road;  of his 475 home runs, 252 came at home, 223 away.

  "It all gives the impression that Musial didn't care who was pitching or where he was hitting: He just hit," Sparks wrote.  

   And he always showed up ready. He played in all 155 games in 1948, and later would launch a consecutive-game streak that would reach an NL record 895 on August 27, 1957, ending only when he tore a muscle and chipped a bone swinging at a pitch in the fourth inning of a game. From 1942 to 1956 he never played in less than 140 games a season.

  So valuable and durable was Musial that despite his sore wrists he moved to center field Sept.22 to give Terry Moore a rest. And in the Cardinals' next game two days later, he was still at it, going 2-for-3 with two RBIs in a 4-1 win over the Chicago Cubs.

  A closer look at the numbers reveals how remarkable his 1948 season was. His .702 slugging percentage was the highest figure since Hack Wilson's .723 for the 1930 Chicago Cubs. His 103 extra-base hits fell four short of matching Chuck Klein’s NL record set in 1930 with the Philadelphia Phillies, and he came within 16 total bases of tying former Cardinal Rogers Hornsby’s league mark of 445 in 1921.

  And while his 39 homers fell one short of Johnny Mize and Ralph Kiner, according to some reports, Musial knocked a round tripper in a rain-canceled game earlier in the season, so that one didn't count.

  “I’d actually had a piece of several great hitters’ best seasons,” Musial wrote in his autobiography.

  And come Sept. 22, Musial made sure to get a good piece of every offering he saw from Braves pitchers.

Sources:

Play-by-play:  https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1948/B09220BSN1948.htm, https://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/september-22-1948-stan-man-swings-five-times-gets-five-hits and Baseball Heroes magazine, Whitestone Publications, 1958 issue

1948 Braves season:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Boston_Braves_season  

Don Lang:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Lang_(third_baseman)
Additional background came from various sources on the Retrosheet and Society for American Baseball Research's Biography Project and Games Project websites, as well as baseballreference.com.