SUMMER READING: Joe Posnanski — the best in the business

It seems fitting to begin the “summer reading series” with a piece on Stan “The Man” Musial.

The word “underrated” gets tossed around far too often in this era’s sports discussions, but in Musial’s case, it’s completely warranted. For reasons that have yet to be properly explained, the legendary Cardinals’ slugger rarely gets brought up in those “greatest hitter alive” conversations.

However, Musial might have been the most consistently excellent hitter to ever swing a piece of lumber. Anyone who ever saw him play will say exactly that.

With All-Star weekend taking place in St. Louis, the game will pay tribute to the greatest player in Cardinal history.

The most entertaining Musial-related piece I’ve read comes from the wonderful Kansas City Star and Sports Illustrated columnist, Joe Posnanski. He is America’s most entertaining newspaper columnist, regardless of genre.

Our baseball columnist, Andrew Kneeland, put together a piece for us in today’s issue about the trials and tribulations of the Kansas City Royals. Posnanski has been detailing that subject for the better part of a decade, and has remained one of the lone bright spots every summer for that area’s baseball community.

At this time last year, Posnanski posted a piece simply titled “Musial” on his blog at JoePosnanski.com. Even though Posnanski never saw “The Man” during his playing days, his piece perfectly illustrates why players and fans from that era speak of Musial in such reverential tones.

“Stan Musial never got thrown out of a game. Never,” Posnanski writes in his opening paragraph. “Think about this for a moment. Musial played in 3,026 games in his career, or about as many as his contemporaries Joe DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky played combined. He played across different American eras — he played in the big leagues before bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, and he retired a few weeks before Kennedy was shot. He played when Jimmy Dorsey and Glenn Miller ruled the Top 40 charts, and he played when Elvis was thin, and he played when Chubby Checker twisted. He played before television, and after John Glenn orbited the earth. And he never once got thrown out of a baseball game.”

To read Posnanski’s full article, go to http://joeposnanski.com/JoeBlog/2008/07/19/musial/.

This weekend, I salute two of the best in their respective professions — “The Man” and “The Poz.”

More Joe

There are plenty of places to find the excellent work of Joe Posnanski.

His books “The Good Stuff: Columns about the Magic of Sports” and “The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America” can be found at Amazon.com.

A full archive of his most recent columns can be found at http://www.kansascity.com/sports/columnists/joe_posnanski/ or at CNNSI.com.

His blog can be read at JoePosnanski.com.

My all-time favorite Posnanski column was published May 30, 2007, where he put into words what it was like to watch baseball’s closest equivalent to Superman — Bo Jackson.

nprevenas@gvnews.com | 547-9747