What should have been one of he best days of my life, April 13, 1954, was turning out to be one of the worst.

I was the starting rookie centerfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals. As a boy in northeastern Arkansas, I’d grown up a Cardinal baseball fan, dreaming of one day playing alongside the heroes of my youth.

The reality of that dream-come-true hadn’t had much of a chance to take hold. As I stepped to the plate for my fist major-league at-bat in the home half of the first inning of the first game of a new season, I was greeted with a torrent of verbal castigation and denunciation from seemingly every corner of the ballpark.

For many in attendance that day, I was already the team villain, and I hadn’t said or done a thing.

I hadn’t struck out with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth inning. I hadn’t dropped a routine pop fly to cost my team a critical game. I hadn’t been caught stealing a base or with a woman other than my wife, nor had I ingested a substance stronger than a wad of tobacco to enhance my performance on the field.

I was a well-mannered, well-educated, and God-fearing twenty-four-year-old husband and father. I just wanted to pay the game to the best of my ability.

After four years in the minor leagues, I convinced the St. Louis Cardinals to give me a serious look. I made the most of the opportunity. I played hard in preseason camp and I played well. I kept my mind open and my mouth shut. My wife and I mixed in well with the team’s top stars and their families.

Still, on Saturday, April 11, 1954, in the finale exhibition game before the start of the regular season and in front of an enthusiastic St. Louis gathering at Sportsman’t Park, I was nothing more than a late-inning substitute for the great Enos “Country” Slaughter, a fixture fsince 1938 in both the Cardinal’s outfield and the National League’s all-star lineup.

Slaughter had been one of the baseball heroes of my youth.

With the regular-season opener just two days away, all I’d gotten from team management regarding my future with the club was a half-hearted, “We’ll see.” My lack of playing time in recent spring-training games did not bode well for my future with the club.

After the final out of our final exhibition outing against the minor-league Kansas City Blues, I purposefully took my time leaving the field, fearing it might be my last afternoon on the big-league stage. Inside the clubhouse, I slowly pulled off my number-twenty jersey and held it tightly in my hands before tossing it into the dirty laundry pile.

I had come so close.

One of the locker room attendants came up to me. “Stanky wants to see you,” he said.

A few teammates looked toward me as I got up to make my way to the manager’s office. In their minds, I might have been a dead man walking toward his baseball doom.

At least that’s how I felt at the time.

My wife Bettye and I had discussed my options if the Cardinals chose to send me back to the minor leagues. We had a young son also named Wally, and supporting my family was proving difficult on a minor-league paycheck. Fortunately, I had a college degree–two in fact–and with my masters in education I could teach and coach, which is what I had done during the off-season the year before to supplement my meager baseball earnings.

My heart and head seemed to be of one accord, and Bettye was in full agreement. If I didn’t make the Cardinals’ opening day roster, I’d give up the dream and devote myself full-time to a career in education.

As I headed to learn my fate, I could picture myself back in a Lake City, Arkansas, classroom teaching my students how sometimes things just don’t add up.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath as i knocked and then opened the door to Cardinal manager Eddie Stanky’s small office. For the previous two years, Stanky had served as player-manager for the team, injecting his hard-nosed band of baseball into a franchise that had grown moribund in the post-war years. Beginning with the 1954 season, Stanky would focus all his efforts on running the club.

Leon Durocher once said of Stanky, “He can’t hit, can’t run, and can’t field. He’s a no-nice guy. All the little SOB can do is win.”

Closing the door to Stanky’s office, I turned to find ‘The Brat,” as he had been known since a rough-and-tumble childhood in Philadelphia, and team general manager Dick Meyer sitting side by side. Neither had a smile on his face.

I expected the worst possible news.

“Wally,” Stanky said, pausing to find what I assumed would be the simplest words to end my baseball career, “you’ve made the team.”

I was shocked and confused, but also elated. I’m certain I must have let out a whoop of jubilation, a habit I had picked up in college at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, today known as Texas A&M. My confusion stemmed from both Stanky’s and Meyer’s demeanor. In relaying good news, there was nothing upbeat about their countenance.

Stanky nervously shuffled papers on his desk and looked briefly to Meyer. I struggled to understand the climate in the room.

“Thanks, Eddy,” I finally said, breaking an awkward silence “I won’t let you down.”

Stanky mumbled a profanity as he slowly leaned backward from his desk, his chair emitting a mournful and prolonged cry. He looked to the ceiling and continued to avert my gaze. Finally, he leaned forward in his chair, folded his hands on his desk, and looked me in the eye.

“We’ve traded Slaughter,” Stanky said. “You’re taking his pace in the starting lineup.”

“We’ll have a contract ready for you to sign sometime tomorrow,” Meyer added. As the club’s general manager, Meyer was responsible for its business affairs. He was new to baseball after.a lengthy career with Anheuser-Busch, Inc. which had led him into the company’s executive ranks. The brewery had purchased the Cardinals prior to the 1953 season, and in his GM role, Meyer served as the eyes and ears for the man atop both organizations: August A. Busch, Jr., known to one and all as “Gussie.”

In addition to buying the club, the brewery also bought Sportsman’s Park from the financially strapped St. Lous Browns. The name was changed to “Busch Stadium,” ostensibly for the business and not the man. Since not one but two more Busch stadia have been erected in St. Louis over the sousing years, for the purposes of clarity here, the home of the Cardinals throughout my time in St. Louis will be referred to by its original name.

I looked from Meyer back to Stanky and saw Eddie’s face buried in his calloused hands, What I did not know at the time was that it had fallen to Stanky to inform Slaughter, a longtime teammate and friend, of the deal, and the veteran Redbird had not taken the news well.

“That’s it,” Stanky said to the top of his desk, his gaze averted downward. Finally, he looked up at me. “Congratulations,” he sighed.

As I waked back into the locker room, a silence fell over the players gathered there. By now, everyone knew what I had just learned. Several of my new teammates offered congratulations, but the mood was anything but celebratory with the collective realization the club would head into a new season without one of its most proven performers.

It was reported that when Musial and Slaughter met outside the ballpark later that evening, the two men embraced and cried.

An interloper had entered into the mix.

In my day, trades usually took place during baseball’s off season, when ballparks were empty and players dispersed to their off-season lives. Back then, before salaries ballooned into the millions of dollars, most ball players held second jobs, supplementing incomes and keeping idle minds–both young and old–usefully engaged.

It was during the off season that deals involving big names usually took place, out of courtesy to the players and their reputations as much as anything else. It’s better that way. A team’s collective psyche can adjust to new additions and subtractions. Fans also have time to consider the positive and negative ramifications of each transaction.

Of course, this was long ago, in a time known as ‘before free agency” and before the Internet facilitated social-media storms.

The Cardinals chose not to deal Enos Slaughter in the dead of winter, when time would help heal emotional wounds. Instead, the team traded Slaughter for prospects Bill Virdon and Mel Wright in the literal light of day and on the eve of a new season.

The day after the trade, I made my first official appearance as a Cardinal, and it was an inauspicious debut to say the least.

Each year, St. Louis welcomed the new baseball year with a parade along the streets of the downtown area. With the Browns’ departure to Baltimore following the 1953 season, the Cardinals became the only game in town, and a large turnout for the ’54 parade was anticipated.

I wasn’t certain what sort of reception I would receive, given the stories about Slaughter’s departure in the St. Louis newspapers. That morning’s final edition of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat carried a banner headline across the front page: “CARDINALS TRADE SLAUGHTER.” The story was accompanied by a photo showing Slaughter weeping into a large handkerchief as he sniffled his way through a farewell press conference with the local media.

The newspaper accounts no doubt stirred the Cardinal faithful into a collective frenzy. Hundreds took to the streets along the parade route to make known their displeasure with the deal. The city would have been in no less an uproar had Charles Lindbergh, after making is historic solo flight across the Atlantic, resold the naming rights to his famous little airplane and taken “The Spirit of Chicago” onto a nationwide barnstorming tour.

While the rest of my teammates rode in convertibles sporting names and numbers on banners affixed to the sides of the vehicles, I took some solace knowing I would be chauffeured in an unmarked car since there had been no time to prepare signage bearing my name.

As the motorcade revved to a start, it was now official before God and thousands of Cardinal fans; I was the player designated to fill the spiked shoes of the legendary Enos Slaughter. To be honest, as i sat atop the back seat of my ride, trying to shield my eyes from the late-morning sun, I felt, at least a little, like I was being led to slaughter.

It didn’t take long for fans along the parade route to determine my identity. Perhaps someone had placed my photo in the post office, proclaiming me to be “Public Enemy Number One.”

As the caravan moved slowly ahead, I tried to win over the crowd with my easy charm. Given the circumstances and my distance from the throngs assembled along the city’s sidewalks, winning over displeased fans was harder than hitting a knuckleball. While Slaughter was known as “Country,” I wanted to proclaim that I, too, had a rural background, had picked cotton in my youth. I presented my most wining smile and friendliest wave of hand, but it was mostly a futile endeavor.

The response was overwhelmingly negative, sometimes mean, and occasionally obscene. Fortunately, no one threw anything at me or the car in which I was riding. Cardinal fans just aren’t wired that way. Back then, as now, St, Louis partisans carried a reputation as being among the best fans in baseball.

As difficult a journey as the parade was for me, the experience paled in comparison to the steps I took the next day in making my first regular-season trip from the on-deck circle outside the Cardinals' dugout to home plate.

There has been speculation through the years that many Cardinal fans protested the Slaughter trade by boycotting he Redbird’s 1954 season opener. No one knows for sutra if that really happened. The team’s performance in ’53 wasn’t cause for great optimism in ’54. For whatever reason, fewer than 18,000 of the 30,000 seats at Sportsman’s Park were filled for an occasion in which ball clubs usually draw a capacity crowd.

Prior to the game, as I took batting practice or warmed up elsewhere on the field, I heard frequent catcalls from hecklers in the stands. Teammates told me to pay no attention and focus on doing my job. “There’s only one person with whom your performance has to measure up,” Stan Musial told me, “and that person is you.”

Stanky placed me into the number-two spot in the Cardinal batting order. Musial would be hitting third. That meant I would be getting mostly good pitches to hit as teams were averse to putting men on base in front of “The Man.”

On the mound for Chicago that afternoon was Paul Minner, a big 6’5” left-hander who had led the Cubs with a dozen wins the year before. “Tall Paul,” as Minner was known, retired Rip Repulski to lead off the bottom half of the first inning. That brought me to bat with one out and no one on base.

The crowd did not go wild with my appearance at the plate.

I stepped into the batter’s box, looked to the mound, and took a couple of practice swings to loosen up before my first big-league at-bat. Minner peered in for the sign, affirmed the pitch selection from his catcher Clyde McCullough, and began his windup.

His curve ball missed the outside corner. “Ball one,” home plate umpire Jocko Conlan cried out.

The crowd responded: “WE WANT SLAUGHTER! WE WANT SLAUGHTER!”

My heart sank.

Even though I was making my first big-league plate appearance, no doubt the Cubs recalled from our spring trading encounters that I was a fairly good fastball hitter. What the scouting report probably didn’t say was that I had become a good situational hitter, too, thanks to Musial’s hitting advice. On top of my God-given physical ability, Musial reinforced the idea that a hitter needs to mentally understood the importance of staying patient at the plate. As a result, I repeatedly reminded myself to wait fo the pitch with which I would have the best chance to be the most productive.

Minner’s second delivery, another off-speed pitch, was not one for me. I took it as it veered outside the strike zone for ball two.

“Take the bat of your shoulder, rookie!” someone shouted from somewhere in the stands.

Startled by the remark, I stepped out of the batter’s box, placed my bat under an arm, and leaned over to grab a fistful of dirt. Standing up again, I took another in a series of deep breaths–it’s a wonder I hadn’t hyperventilated by this point–closed my eyes, and slowly tuned out the crowd.

I focused hard on the task at hand. Now, finally, all was silent in my head.

Minner owned a five-inch height advantage on my six-foot frame. At the time, the pitcher’s mount lifted him another eighteen inches off the ground. Though the Cub hurler towered before me, I begin to relax. Despite the cacophony around me, I felt at home at home plate, growing comfortable with the task at hand.

Minner initiated his next delivery with a windup much lengthier and more involved than the compact pitching motions of today. With a 2-0 count, I expected a fastball and Minner did not disappoint.

I had the pitch I wanted. I swung and a connection was made.

The most picturesque of swings and the hardest of hit balls aren't’ guarantees of baseball success. Perfect contact can engineer imperfect results. Anything hit close to a skilled defender usually leads to failure in the form of a putout.

Stan Musial was one of the best hitters in the history of baseball. His career average for twenty-two seasons of pay was .331 Simply put, in his great career Musial failed at a rate of more than two out of every three times he held a bat in his hands.

With the piece of tooled Pennsylvania white ash lumber I held in my hands that sunny spring afternoon, I swung and sent the speeding sphere of corked material tightly wound by some 400 yards of yarn and encased by two pieces of bleached cowhide sewn together with exactly 216 red stitches, soaring skyward along a parabolic arc toward the right-field confines of Sportsman’s Park.

As the ball rocketed heavenward, I sprinted out of the batter’s box. I did not watch the flight of the ball, but instead picked up my coach at first base, Johnny Riddle. As i neared the bag, he shouted, “Go, go, go!” I rounded the corner and dug hard for the possibility of an extra-base hit.

Barreling toward second, I knew to determine the location of the ball through the positioning and attitude of the middle infielders. A defender poised ready over the base indicated a throw from the outfield was imminent.

My survey of the scene found the Cubs’ young shortstop, Ernie Banks, standing several feel from the bag and frozen in his tracks. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw second-base umpire Frank Secory. His arm was lifted skyward, making a circular motion wit the extended index finger of his hand.

I was free to touch them all. On the first swing of my big-league baseball career I had gone yard.

I slowed my frantic dash and assumed the obligatory home-run trot. Not until I rounded third and receive a congratulatory handshake from Cardinal coach Mike Ryba did the roar of the assembled crowd come to my attention.

This time, and for good reason, they were on my side.

My home run gave the home team an early lead and gave the home fans a dash of opening-day excitement. My blast had bounced off the roof of the right-field pavilion and landed somewhere along Grand Avenue outside the park.

In The Natural, one of the greatest baseball movies ever made, the protagonist, played by actor Robert Redford, saves the day with a gargantuan home run that ignites a series of dramatic and cinematic explosions. As the aging rookie rounds the bases, the field is bathed in a cascade of sparks before a mysterious and surreal darkness falls onto the surroundings. In shattering one of the outfield lights, his blast triggers a complete blackout, a perfect expression of the moment at hand.

My first-at-bat home run was hit in broad daylight. Unfortunately, the storybook element of the moment failed to last.

Our lead was short-lived. Chicago bounced back with two runs in the second, two in third, and six in the sixth inning. I did not pick up another hit, although a ground out brought in another run, one way failure in baseball can equate to success. My two RBI accounted for half our run output for the game.

Minner went the distance on the Chicago mound throwing a complete game. In the ninth, he hit his own home run, a three-run shot. Cards fans went home unhappy as the Cubs prevailed on opening day 13-4.

Although our team lost, the day was not a complete loss for me. From that afternoon forward, St. Louis fans held me in much higher esteem, a condition, I’m pleased to report, which remains to this very day.

My opening-day, first-at-bat home run equaled Enos Slaughter’s total during his injury-plagued season with the Yankees. I finished with twelve home runs, 106 runs scored, and a .306 batting average, thus affirming–I hoped–the wisdom in replacing an aging star for a younger pair of legs. Slaughter was 38 when he was traded. As the season opened that year, I was just ten days removed from my 24th birthday. The fact I made considerably less money than Slaughter played in my favor, too.

I went on to be named National League Rookie of the Year in 1954. I outdistanced a couple of good young talents in the voting: future Baseball Hall-of-Famers Henry Aaron and that young Cub shortstop, Ernie Banks.

I’ve always considered myself to be an upstanding and likable fellow. As a young man, I had polite manners and a good head on my shoulders. I’d like to think I still do, but you'll probably need to ask Bettye about that.

Being the most despised player in baseball, even if it was for less than forty-eight hours, was no fun at all for a guy like me.

I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.