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JOHN BARRYHe always talked about the game, but few knew that he and his nine brothers were a small part of baseball history.
ST. PETERSBURG - Martin Stanczak always batted cleanup. But at the end of his 92 years, who knew he was the last of the 10 Stanczaks, the "1929 World Brother Champions" of baseball? Who knew their photo hangs in Cooperstown (the name on their uniforms misspelled)?
A funeral Mass for him Thursday at St. Jude's Cathedral was attended only by his daughter Donna, her husband, Joe, and their two children. Stanczak, who had outlived his fans and friends, died on Monday at Bay Pointe Nursing Pavilion. His Mass was celebrated by freshly ordained Father Robert Cadrecha, a rookie, who had never met him.
The lector for the Mass used to bring communion to Stanczak's home after the ballplayer's arthritic knees had given out. "Everyone has something inside them," Steve Tyrrell said of the shut-ins he visits. "I just wait until they want to talk."
Stanczak wanted to talk baseball: The barnstorming across the Depression-ravaged Midwest. The time he and his brothers played a young Lyndon Johnson. The priest on the team. The unhitable spitball. The Brothers World Championship series.
None of that was mentioned at the Mass. Stanczak was not eulogized. No one even knows where the uniforms went. Or what became of the gloves and balls.
It had been a game. It had all been just for fun.
"Marty had three famous words for everything," said his nephew, Lawrence Stanczak, 89, who traveled with the team as a scorekeeper and occasional substitute player.
"Marty always said, "What the heck.' "
Stanczak's daughter Donna wasn't born until her dad was 40 and working as a machinist for the Johnson Outboard Motor Co. near Waukegan, Ill., so she knows only a little about the baseball days.
She remembers her father not as an all-around athlete who could play outfielder and shortstop, but as a gentle man who "gave me anything I wanted and followed my mother around like a little puppy."
Lawrence is the only surviving Stanczak who really knows the story. He rode a rented bus with the team of brothers all over the Midwest during the Great Depression and witnessed the championship series.
The Stanczaks began calling themselves a baseball team just before the Great Depression fell in on them in North Chicago, near Waukegan. The oldest brother was nearly 20 years older than the youngest. Martin was next to last. They were good, but there were a lot of good semipro teams. One thing they had that made them special was a great pitcher, second-oldest brother Bill, whose strikes were widely known for their toppings of Slippery Elm Chewing Tobacco.
"His spitball was a sight to behold," Lawrence says on the phone from Waukegan. "Guys were swinging at air." They also had a Catholic priest in the lineup - brother Michael, whom they all called Father Mike. Family lore has it that Father Mike was the one Stanczak "the ladies of the night hit on" in a bar in Cheyenne, Wyo., after a game one night. "He was just sitting there enjoying his beer and sandwich," Lawrence says, "but he never lived it down."
The spitball and a player who had God's home phone number made them a good team, but it took a manager to make them famous, or semifamous, since they never earned enough money to pay for more than "a good barrel of beer and sandwiches," as Lawrence puts it.
Their manager, Nick Keller, a one-time state representative "who knew how to butter up people," somehow got the Stanczaks into something called the World Brother Championship series. They played the Marlatt Brothers in Cheyenne, Wyo., in 1929. The Marlatts fell in four straight.
The Stanczaks went on to defend their title against other brother teams, including the Deikes of Houston, who turned out to be only 8/9s Deike. "Lyndon Johnson played first base," Lawrence says. (Lawrence did not later vote for LBJ. "Democrat was a bad word for me back then," he says.)
After the team fell apart in the late '30s, brothers Martin and Louis got tryouts with the Cincinnati Reds. The family remembers they got to swing a bat and throw a ball before they were dismissed. Both went to work for Johnson motors back home. Everybody did okay. John ran a bowling alley. Ed supervised barbers. Joe owned a cab company. Father Mike became a pastor. Bruno even became a district attorney.
It may have been Bruno's lawyerly assertiveness that brought the brothers immortality. "I think he sent the team picture to the baseball hall of fame," Lawrence says. The Stanczaks were inducted in 1966 as the best 10 brothers to ever play baseball.
Exactly how they got into Cooperstown is a story the 10 brothers have taken to their graves. When the last living brother talked baseball, he talked only hits and runs. He could remember almost any score, but "Marty was no braggart," Lawrence says.
"Baseball was his whole life," explains Joe Steplyk, Donna's husband. "But he never said they were the greatest. This was a matter-of-fact family. They just did it. They just loved doing it."
In retirement, Stanczak was left widowed in St. Petersburg after his wife, Genevieve, died in 1993. He kept a condo near St. Jude's, where he attended daily Mass, until he could no longer walk. His last two years were in a nursing home.
Two weeks ago, the ballplayer told Lawrence he was sick of a wheelchair and "ready to go."
"I said, "Come on, Marty, you still got time to go.' "
"He said, "What the heck.' "
- John Barry can be reached at 727 892-2258 or jbarry@sptimes.com