56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports Read online

  Benton threw and DiMaggio swung, and the result, the far too familiar result these days, was a softly struck roller to the left side. Eric McNair, playing third base for Detroit, picked up the ball and threw out DiMaggio, who’d hustled to make it close. Henrich couldn’t move off second.

  DiMaggio turned and jogged quickly back to the dugout. When he was feeling right he would knock that pitch right back through the box. When he was really right he’d put it into the gap or over the wall. Still, there was just one out, and maybe Keller could get the winning hit, or Gordon after him. At least maybe I helped Tommy get on track today, DiMaggio thought passingly; earlier that afternoon he had loaned Henrich one of his bats. DiMaggio clacked down the dugout and strode to his place on the bench. When he turned to look toward home plate the Tigers catcher, Birdie Tebbetts, was standing up.

  What? They’re walking Keller? DiMaggio felt stunned. Pitched to me and now they’re walking Charlie Keller! What, now he’s the hitter that scares them?

  This never happened to DiMaggio. He was always the batter the other team avoided. Teams had even put him on base to get to Gehrig—though that was in the final, quixotic stage of Gehrig’s career when he had gradually and then seemingly all at once lost his strength. In one game, Opening Day of 1939, the Red Sox had twice walked DiMaggio in order to face Gehrig, and both times Lou had hit into double plays. Gehrig kept his head straight up, refusing to look beaten, knowing that before this weakness had come on he would never have let a pitcher get away with that. You were not supposed to walk guys in front of Lou Gehrig. And in 1941 you certainly were not supposed to pitch to Joe DiMaggio and then put the fine but mortal slugger Charlie Keller on base.

  Ball one.

  Baker was a smart manager, though. DiMaggio knew that. Crafty, and unrelenting in his search for an edge. He was about as good a sign-stealer as there was in baseball; they said Baker got his guys five extra hits a year by telling them what was coming. So what did he see in going against the book, in risking victory to take on DiMaggio, who’d already knocked a couple of singles in the game? Baker had seen DiMaggio slumping in Detroit a couple of weeks back, grounding the ball weakly time and again in the Tigers’ three-game sweep. Maybe too, Baker had talked with Fred Haney, the Browns manager who’d just left town. Haney could have told him that DiMaggio wasn’t out of it yet, that his 3 for 3 the other day wasn’t as good as it looked on paper and that afterward DiMaggio hadn’t done much in the rest of the series, just a double in one game, a single in the next.

  Haney would have been happy to share information if it would help the Tigers beat the Yanks. Any manager would have. “I’hm in favor of kicking the Yankees in the teeth when they’re down,” Dykes had said not long before—giving voice to a feeling his peers all shared. The Yanks were too good, too advantaged, to be liked. After New York had won its fourth straight World Series in 1939 the American League had proposed a rule stating that the league’s “championship club may not make any trades” for an entire season except for picking up a player off waivers. The idea was to stop the rich from getting richer. More precisely the idea was to slow the Yanks. When the league’s eight teams voted on the rule it passed 7–0. The Yankees abstained.

  Yes, the Tigers were themselves the defending American League champions now, having lost to the Reds in the 1940 Series. But nobody expected them to repeat, and far less so now that Hank Greenberg was gone, the first big-name ballplayer drafted into the service. (The less formidable Hugh Mulcahy, a Phillies pitcher, had entered in March.) Greenberg had clubbed two home runs in his last game, May 6 against New York, then hung up his jersey on the hook of his locker-room stall and headed to Michigan’s Fort Custer for a new uniform, Army issue. Since then the Tigers were a shell of themselves, sliding in the standings and destined, it seemed, to slide further still. But that didn’t mean that Del Baker wasn’t trying to win every game he could. And apparently he’d thought the best way to win this game was to take his chances and pitch to DiMaggio. For the Tigers, so far, so good.

  Ball two.

  DiMaggio looked out past the outfield, past the half-empty bleachers to the Burma-Shave billboard, and another for Philip Morris tobacco. Soon, he thought, he’d have a smoke. There were about 10,000 fans in Yankee Stadium. How many of them understood that this walk to Keller was a slight to him? He hated the thought of that, hated the idea of being anything less than perfect in the public’s eye. That’s why he took things so hard when the crowd booed him over the money. “I only want to get what I’m worth,” he had said during one salary standoff, thinking that might help people understand. “I only want what’s fair.”

  The holdout in 1938 had led to the worst of the jeers, and if the Yankees’ championships and the brilliance of DiMaggio’s play in the seasons that followed had surely eased that hostility there were still those who wouldn’t forget, especially when he was struggling at the plate, and especially because he’d fought again for better pay, though less stridently, in ’39 and ’40. Missing the start of training camp had become an annual ritual, but it wasn’t as if DiMaggio didn’t want to be with the team; really, that’s all that he wanted—just for the right price.

  By the time he and the Yankees’ general manager Ed Barrow had settled on his 1941 salary in March—$37,500, nearly triple the big league average but less than Greenberg or Indians’ ace Bob Feller were set to make—the rest of the Yankees had already reported to spring training. Joe and Dorothy drove off from San Francisco and headed for Florida that very day and so hurriedly that he’d gotten a speeding ticket before they were out of California, stopped by a state patrolman for going 70 miles an hour on the Golden State Highway.

  When he’d arrived in St. Petersburg, DiMaggio played with a determination unlike anyone else’s. Even in the exhibition season. Before the Yankees broke camp he had hit safely in 19 straight games, a run that would continue for eight more after the regular season began. There was never a question, then or ever, of DiMaggio’s effort, his self-imposed insistence on doing whatever it took to win. That intractable drive could at times seem almost cruel—no one slid harder into a base—but over time revealed itself as a simple, cold judgment: that on the baseball field the need to win subjugated all else. That’s how DiMaggio would always play and how he always had, since his sandlot days. He just wanted to be paid fairly for bringing home those Yankee titles, for helping to put people in the seats.

  He knew well how hard times had been. His father made a living catching fish off a little boat in San Francisco Bay. Try feeding nine children that way, even when the country was flush. The DiMaggios always had to count pennies back home. And in the ’30s, even as he was beginning to make good money playing ball, Joe had seen the people on the streets hocking their things. He’d seen baseball players come home as teams folded on the West Coast, and he’d heard about pro leagues where pitchers were getting paid by the inning, 30 cents for every three outs.

  Still, what did that have to do with his own contract? Get whatever you can get. Isn’t that what every worker wanted, DiMaggio reasoned, whether you were cutting metal parts in a factory, or running a barbershop, or making house calls with a doctor’s kit in your hand?

  No one else seemed to see things quite that way. Not even McCarthy. DiMaggio had never quite forgiven his manager for siding with the Yankees brass in ’38, for saying that the team could get along without DiMaggio and that the $25,000 offered to him by the club seemed fair. “Well maybe McCarthy knows what he’s talking about, maybe he doesn’t,” DiMaggio retorted before he’d given in. He was in a spot when it came to money, and he knew it. Guys in the service were making $21 a month. And to the fans, baseball wasn’t really a job, wasn’t really work. Nothing was being built or farmed or produced. No one was being healed. These were grown men playing a game. The people in Yankee Stadium didn’t care about how much profit team owners might be making on ticket sales or on bags of peanuts, they only knew that they would do anything just to wear pinstriped flannel for a
day. Why, I’d play for free if I could, they thought.

  Ball three.

  And yet baseball mattered. The day’s games were splashed on the front page of the newspaper. A headline would read YANKEES BEAT SOX, 6–5 and then below that—in larger type, but still, below—ROOSEVELT DEFIES NAZI BRIGADE. You’d see the box score from the Yankees’ game, or from the Giants’ or the Dodgers’ right beside news of a looming subway strike. So you couldn’t say that baseball was irrelevant, that the players’ work didn’t have impact. President Roosevelt believed that the game was vital for the country’s morale. DiMaggio never forgot that every day millions of people were watching and judging: baseball, the Yankees, him.

  Ball four. Keller was on.

  This DiMaggio slump, and these Yankees’ troubles, gave fodder to many of those judging millions, the baseball fans who in precincts across the country—a soda shop in Cleveland, a newsstand in Philadelphia, a hotel bar in St. Louis—debated the issues of the game. Would you rather have a great shortstop or a great catcher? Was the White Sox’ Thornton Lee now the best lefthanded pitcher in the game? Did Feller throw harder than Walter Johnson had? Were the Brooklyn Dodgers at long last for real? Discussion would inevitably turn to determining the greatest player in the game, and DiMaggio’s name would always emerge, his virtues enumerated and extolled until, “Mize is better” someone would blurt out, and the argument would ensue.

  Cardinals slugger Johnny Mize had broken in the same year as DiMaggio, had led National Leaguers in batting in 1939, in home runs and RBIs in ’40. If his batting averages over the years, typically about .340, were less than DiMaggio’s, well, Mize played in the National League where all the hitters’ averages were down compared to the American League. And Mize, who would stand on deck swinging three bats in hand, who crushed low pitches better than anyone alive, never had a lineup around him like DiMaggio did.

  DiMaggio could drive the ball, sure, but not, someone would invariably point out, as majestically as Jimmie Foxx, the Beast, a man so big and burly that he had to turn sideways to get through a doorway. Foxx had a vicious, compact swing and, at 33, he still hit home runs so far that his Red Sox teammates knew even as they were watching the ball soar to incomprehensible heights that they would be called liars when they retold the tale. Four times Foxx had led the AL in home runs; three times he’d won MVP; in 1938 he’d knocked in 175 runs. And in his eight full seasons with the Athletics, and through his five in Boston, Foxx never had much of a lineup around him either.

  This kind of baseball talk provided daily sustenance for the teams at the Bellefair, the brightly lit ice cream and sandwich shop on Junction Boulevard in Queens where Commie Villante and several other members of the Jackson Heights Hornets now sat in booths, pulling on their malteds. The school day was done and dusk was coming on. Saturday, and a big ballgame against the Corona Hawks over at Aces Field, was a couple of days away. Now Richie Cassata was talking. “I still say Mel Ott.”

  Commie rolled his eyes. Cassata was the one nutso Giants fan in the group. Commie and the rest of the DiMaggio guys, among them Squeaks Tito who could and would recite more Joe DiMaggio statistics and trivia than anyone else would care to remember (“Didja know he hit .398 his last year in the Pacific Coast League but still missed the batting title?”) pointed out that Ott, at 32, had been fading some, and that anyway the short rightfield fence at the Polo Grounds, a playground-like 258 feet down the line, was the real reason why he’d been the National League’s best home run hitter in five different seasons. “That’s where he always hits ’em,” said Commie, “and they’d just be fly outs anywhere else.”

  Commie and Squeaks didn’t protest against Cassata too much, though, not really wanting to change Richie’s stance. His mom was the one who took the raffle money and got the Hornets’ uniforms every year, which meant that Richie had first crack at whatever number he wanted. Like his idol, Richie was a lefthanded hitter and an outfielder, so he always took Ott’s number 4, leaving in play the digits of all the Yankee heroes: number 15 for pitcher Red Ruffing, say, or number 8 for catcher Bill Dickey; number 6 for Gordon, or the most coveted, DiMaggio’s number 5.

  If Cassata’s Ott argument fell somewhere between cute and specious, Commie knew that Gimpy Moskowitz at least had a case when he said he believed that Greenberg was the best player in the game. Gimpy, whose sprained ankle years before had secured his nickname in perpetuity, played ball for the Hawks, and lived on the other side of Roosevelt Avenue. But he was a Bellefair regular, munching now his tuna salad on white. Gimpy made Commie laugh with the jokes he told and all the Hornets liked him fine. Gimpy wasn’t the only Greenberg booster around either. There were reasons that Greenberg earned baseball’s highest salary—$55,000 a year—and his 183 RBIs in 1937 was one of them. His 58 homers in ’38, tied with Foxx for the most ever by a righthanded hitter, was another. His 1940 MVP trophy was a third. And just look at how the Tigers had fallen apart this season without him. In New York, a city of two million Jews where Greenberg’s following was as strong as anywhere but Detroit, the newspapers occasionally floated, even advocated, the potential benefits of a DiMaggio-for-Greenberg trade, just to get folks talking.

  The glass door at the front of the Bellefair swung open and a few of the Bettes came in, walked toward the rear of the seating area, waved and took a booth of their own. Commie and Squeaks waved back and called out greetings—Commie was sweet on a Bette named Janette—and in that pause Harry the Hawk jumped in. “Fine, Gimpy, but what about his fielding? Joe’s out there pulling down balls better than anyone in centerfield. Greenberg’s just bumbling around at first.”

  For his part Harry the Hawk manned the outfield, or the second sewer in the stickball games, like a statue; he’d gotten his nickname not for any swiftness or sharp eye but because of a strange sound he sometimes made when calling for a ball. But Harry had a point. The allusion to defense was valid enough to dismiss not just Greenberg but first basemen Mize and Foxx as well.

  DiMaggio covered the vast meadow of the Yankee Stadium outfield with long easy strides, a gorgeous gallop that on any day might lead to a game-changing play. Once, with Spud Chandler on the hill in a lopsided late-season game against Detroit at Yankee Stadium, DiMaggio took off after a high, colossal drive from Greenberg himself, racing on and on, out past the centerfield monuments and the flagpole, and deep into the graveyard, as the players called it, before catching the baseball more than 450 feet from home plate, two strides before the wall. DiMaggio had never even turned around, just looked up once, then flicked out his glove and snared the ball. Greenberg, envisioning an inside-the-park home run, was already at second base when DiMaggio made the catch, that’s how high and far the ball was hit; Greenberg just put his hands akimbo and stared mutely into the outfield.

  The crowd wouldn’t shush for five full minutes after that ball came down. The play immediately became The Greatest Catch I Ever Saw for all of the Yankees and all of the Tigers and for the 13,000 more who were at the Stadium that day, and for the tens of thousands of others who were not at the Stadium that day but who later said they were. “I couldn’t make a better one,” DiMaggio said afterward. Joe would have doubled the Tigers’ Earl Averill off of first base too on the play if only DiMaggio hadn’t paused a moment before throwing the ball in, almost surprised himself, and even then if Crosetti’s relay throw hadn’t hit Averill in the back as he hurried to return to first base.

  There were other DiMaggio catches, many, many others, improbable essays to render the uncatchable caught. Whenever a ball was hit deep, Gordon at second base or Crosetti at short would turn from the infield and see DiMaggio already with his back to the plate, already in full stride, his number 5 smoothly and swiftly receding. Then, though they’d seen it before, the infielders would nonetheless let out a soft and awestruck gasp, right along with the roar of the crowd, as DiMaggio turned and raised his weathered glove and casually plucked the baseball from mid-air like some upstate schoolboy taking an apple off a tree.<
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  Yet even that defense was not above reproach. Late in the summer of 1939, Tris Speaker, the peerless centerfielder who’d gone into radio after ending his 21-year playing career in 1928 and whose spot in baseball’s alltime greatest outfield was secure between Ruth and Cobb, got ornery, saying that “Joe DiMaggio is good. Understand that, please. But he is not great … and he plays too deep.” DiMaggio, after all, had had a season in which he’d made 17 errors, another in which he’d made 15. Speaker alleged that he could name 15 outfielders better than DiMaggio—though that was a claim he would retract. Later, when Speaker was asked to choose between DiMaggio or the gap-hitting Cardinals leftfielder Ducky Medwick as the finer all-around player, Speaker’s response was curt: “I’d take Medwick.”

  Other players got support too—lately people were saying that the skinny young kid with the big bat in Boston, Ted Williams, could one day wind up the greatest hitter of all. But deep down everyone, and certainly all the guys in Jackson Heights, even Gimpy, now putting on their club jackets and leaving their nickels on the table and getting up to walk out of the Bellefair and wend along the yellow-lit city streets to their boyhood rooms, knew that if they had to pick one player for their team, it would be DiMaggio. Finally, the numbers game fell his way: 691 RBIs in his first 686 big league games, two straight batting titles, and although he played in a ballpark so phenomenally spacious as to emasculate a righthanded batter, a season in which he hit 46 home runs. DiMaggio struck out a total of 71 times from 1938 through 1940. That was half of Mize’s total in that time, a third of Foxx’s. Greenberg typically struck out about 100 times in a single season.