Nolan Arenado was 10 games into his major league career when he arrived in St. Louis for the first time in May 2013. The young slugger already had three home runs to his name, and as he prepared to face Cardinals starting pitcher Shelby Miller, all-star shortstop Troy Tulowitzki sidled up alongside the rookie with […]
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Just a few days away from his 90th birthday, Stan Musial picked up the phone at his office at Stan the Man Inc. On the other end of the line was a White House representative, calling to tell him that he was being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian award.
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Tony La Russa had yet to manage a game for the St. Louis Cardinals, but his Oakland connections were already paying dividends. On February 13, 1996, the A’s traded Dennis Eckersley to St. Louis for minor-league reliever Steve Montgomery, making Eckersley the fourth former Athletics player alongside Mike Gallego, Rick Honeycutt, and Todd Stottlemyre to
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More than 43 years after he helped the St. Louis Cardinals win their first World Series championship, Jesse Haines was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee at age 76. It wasn’t a bad achievement for a pitcher whose former minor-league manager with the Tulsa Oilers expected him back in
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A little less than four years before John Stuper won Game 6 of the 1982 World Series, the Cardinals obtained him in a minor-league trade that wasn’t even mentioned in either the St. Louis Post-Dispatch or the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. In the deal, the Cardinals sent infielder Tommy Sandt to the Pirates in exchange for Stuper,
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In his final year on the National Baseball Hall of Fame ballot, Joe Medwick finally got the call he had been waiting 20 years to receive. On January 23, 1968, Medwick woke with a swollen jaw from a toothache that would require a trip to the dentist in the afternoon. Before that, however, he went
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When Stan Musial was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot in 1969, the question wasn’t whether the three-time National League MVP Award winner would earn his place in Cooperstown. The real question was what the 23 voters who didn’t mark Musial’s name on their ballots were thinking. In his
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On January 20, 1942, Rogers Hornsby, the greatest right-handed hitter in baseball history, was getting his hair cut when he received the official word that he had been elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. “Wait’ll I get out of here and to the ballpark,” he said. “That’s the place to talk about this.”
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On January 18, 1938, Grover Cleveland Alexander, the hero of the Cardinals’ 1926 World Series championship, became the lone player elected to that year’s Baseball Hall of Fame class. Alexander spent just 3 ½ seasons with the Cardinals as part of a 20-year career, but he made them count. In 1911, Alexander debuted with the
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The 1981 Hall of Fame ballot was stacked with stars who would one day receive their day in Cooperstown. Joining Cardinals pitcher Bob Gibson among the candidates were future Hall of Famers Don Drysdale, Gil Hodges, Harmon Killebrew, Juan Marichal, and Hoyt Wilhelm. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch even ran a story noting that all six
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