The Man Gets His Hits

There is a number attached to Stan Musial that sounds invented, and it is not. He retired with 3,630 hits, and he collected exactly half of them at home and exactly half on the road. Same total on both sides, 1,815 and 1,815. You could not build a hitter more indifferent to where he happened to be standing.

The road stops did not rattle him. One of them practically adopted him. Musial hit so well in Brooklyn that the Ebbets Field crowd, a group not famous for flattering the opposition, took to murmuring "here comes the man" every time he stepped in. A St. Louis writer overheard it, and one of the great nicknames in the sport was born in a rival's ballpark. Musial hit better than .350 there for his career.

Everything else fit the pattern. Seven batting titles, three MVPs, three championships, a .331 average across 22 seasons, all of them in one uniform. He never hit in 56 straight games or homered in his final at-bat. He just showed up for two decades and hit everyone, everywhere, the same quiet way.

Walk the perimeter of Busch Stadium today and you will find 3,630 bricks in the sidewalk, split evenly around his statue, labeled home and away. It might be the only monument in baseball that doubles as a stat line. Stan Musial did not care where the game was played. He was going to get his hits.