'It took so long for our people to learn the value of fitness.

'The President's Council was going around the country in the 1960s, trying to promote fitness to youngsters,' he said. In 1999, The Sporting News placed him 10th on the 100 Greatest Baseball Players list.Īfter Musial retired in 1963, President Lyndon B. In 1968, a statue of Musial was erected outside Busch Memorial Stadium in St. Sports Illustrated named Musial its Sportsman of the Year in 1957, and The Sporting News honored him as Player of the Decade 1946-56. He was selected National League Player of the Year three times and The Sporting News' Major League Player of the Year twice.

300 his first 17 seasons in the major leagues and ending up with a career average of. Musial won seven National League hitting championships, batting over. Louis Cardinals before retiring in 1963, and was inducted into baseball's exclusive Hall of Fame in 1969. He played for his high school team and then, in 1941 and at the age of 20, he joined the major leagues.

Musial said he did not remember a time when he didn't play baseball. One of Musial's early childhood chores was to crawl into a pit in his backyard to get coal for the kitchen stove. Musial was the fifth of six children, a brood that required his mother to bake 10 loaves of bread at a time. His parents were immigrants, his father from Poland and his mother from Czechoslovakia, who met while working at the Donora wire mill. Stan Musial was born in 1920 in Donora, Pennsylvania.

Stanley musial