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

  Chapter 7

  A Pair Of Sox

  BUGS WERE EVERYWHERE, dancing around the hot rectangular banks of lights that shone down upon Griffith Stadium. In quiet moments you could hear them, a gleeful swarm of gnats, moths and mosquitoes who seemed to believe that all this gorgeous brightness had suddenly appeared—oh sweet mystery of life!—for their pleasure, rather than to illuminate the first night game in Washington Senators’ history, a game now in its middle innings with the Senators up a few runs on the Yankees. From centerfield, DiMaggio glanced up at the insects. He felt sluggish. Maybe it was the heat, still clinging after a stifling afternoon in which the thermometer had reached 97°—a record for D.C. in May. At times the Yankee players had sought refuge in the air-conditioned ballroom at the hotel.

  The day had seemed strange and surreal. The newspapers and the radio shows were chock-a-block with the politicians’ reactions to the President’s address the night before—“A ringing call to duty and service for all Americans,” proclaimed one senator; “Roosevelt has turned the Atlantic Ocean into a Pan-American lake” said another. DiMaggio had a dull, stiffening pain in his neck.

  He didn’t go for night games. Seeing the ball wasn’t the problem, the way it was for some guys. Under the kind of lights that big-league teams sprung for—the Senators had spent $120,000 on theirs—he could pick up pitches better than he sometimes could when he was at bat in the half shadows of a late afternoon. The trouble was that night games upset his routine. Typically, he liked to finish breakfast by 11 o’clock or so, for a 3 p.m. start. Black coffee, a couple of eggs, toast. Sometimes at home he’d get up a little earlier and Dorothy would make him an omelet and he’d lounge a while, let her talk about her parents or her sisters, or something funny that Lou Costello—she just called him Lou—had said in the news. He’d have a third cup of coffee, another smoke, read through the papers and then step out onto the balcony and look uptown toward Gomez’s apartment 20 blocks away. DiMaggio would wave a white or yellow towel and if Lefty saw it from his window he would wave a towel wildly too, and that was signal enough. The two of them would drive up to the ballpark together. DiMaggio liked to get there early.

  He wouldn’t eat again until later, a nice dinner an hour or two after the game. Same thing when the Yankees were on the road, a late breakfast in the room, sometimes his postgame dinner there too. But for night games, DiMaggio had to eat differently. He couldn’t go hungry all afternoon. Today he’d gotten something light at the Shoreham at about 4 o’clock, but he still felt off, and his throat was swollen, when at 8:30 p.m. the retired Walter Johnson, the greatest Senator of all, strode out to the mound and with his long right arm threw a fastball through a narrow beam of light to trigger the stadium floodlights and the dawn of night baseball in Washington.

  At 53 years old and 14 seasons removed from his last game in uniform, the Big Train still put some zip on the ball. The old-timers said he’d been the fastest pitcher ever, faster than Grove, faster than Feller. In Johnson’s day the umpires didn’t change the game balls so much and if something got stuck onto the stitches or the hide of a ball—a little swatch of mud, say—batters could actually hear the baseball buzz past when Johnson let go of a high hard one. Really, the old-timers said. No bull.

  After Johnson’s ceremonial pitch, there were now only three American League teams remaining that did not play night games in their home park: the Red Sox, the Tigers and the Yankees. New York’s position on the matter was set by their hidebound president and general manager, 73-year-old Edward G. Barrow. “I do not believe in night baseball,” Barrow would sniff when the subject came up, just as he dismissed the idea of allowing Yankee home games to be broadcast over the radio. Elsewhere in the league, teams embraced playing at night and club governors in cities such as Cleveland were pushing the commissioner’s office to add to the limit of seven night games that each team was allowed to host per season. Barrow was among those on the league board who voted that proposal down. He didn’t give a damn that night games lifted attendance for many clubs that needed it; the Yankees, when it came to ticket revenue, were doing fine.

  In Washington, D.C., the nighttime novelty had lured about 25,000 to Griffith Stadium, not the sellout that team owner Clark Griffith had hoped for but three times as many fans as had shown up the previous afternoon. The Yankees were having trouble with the Senators’ tall right-hander Sid Hudson, who kept dropping his hard curveball over the plate, knee-high. McCarthy had sent out the rookie Steve Peek, himself a curveballer, believing the curve was the pitch that would be toughest to read in the artificial light.

  Washington held a 3–1 lead with one out in the top of the eighth inning when DiMaggio, hitless until then, drove a triple against the high rightfield wall, shaking the torpor from his own body and from the Yankees. The next three men reached base and then George Selkirk—most often called Twinkletoes for his running style, heels-up in a kind of prance—lofted a convincing grand slam, the white ball disappearing past the mist of insects and into the night, all but sealing the Senators’ 10th consecutive loss.

  Throughout the three days in Washington, including the afternoon after the night game when he singled in the fourth inning of what would be a rain-shortened 2–2 tie, DiMaggio endured that swollen throat, as well as the rigidity in his neck that traveled down through his trapezius and into his shoulders. He could barely turn to the side to talk to someone. Looking up for a fly ball required uncommon effort. At night, Gomez grinned and cracked an off-color joke when he saw DiMaggio wrapping heat pads on his neck as he got into bed. DiMaggio didn’t want to tell the reporters about his pains, didn’t want to tell McCarthy either. This would pass. Whatever it was, he’d had it before. He always had something; for DiMaggio injuries were a curse. Back in 1934 he’d torn up his left knee in the Pacific Coast League, delaying his Yankees’ debut by a full year. Then in his rookie season, ’36, a left foot injury and a burn from a heat lamp kept him out until early May. DiMaggio had tonsillitis in ’37. In ’39 he’d torn muscles in his legs. In ’40 he had problems with his right knee and his ankles.

  Now DiMaggio just wanted to ignore his wretched neck and stay in the lineup. Especially because he’d been hitting a little better lately, and because the Yankees, still in third place, needed him, and because the team was now going into Boston to play a doubleheader against the Red Sox, Dominic and Ted Williams.

  Williams. What a fuss everyone made over that kid, a hero in his third season. They all talked about his power, the way the ball flew off his lefthanded swing with a force that belied Williams’s beanpole frame. Power, sure, but still DiMaggio would look enviously out at that bullpen in Fenway Park. The Red Sox had added it before the 1940 season especially to benefit Williams. In effect the bullpen had moved the fence closer to the plate by 23 feet, smack in Williams’s rightfield power alley—and it was a low fence at that. When DiMaggio drove a ball into his sweet spot in left center at Yankee Stadium he had to hit it 80 feet farther, at least, to have a chance at a home run. During batting practice at the Stadium sometimes, Henrich and Keller would set up cones in left centerfield, mimicking the distance of a more normal ball field—like Comiskey Park in Chicago, or Briggs Stadium in Detroit—to see how many homers Joe could hit. The answer was that he could hit a lot of them. The other Yankees tended to stop and watch when DiMaggio was taking his licks before a game.

  DiMaggio couldn’t understand why Williams drew so many walks. A hitter with his talent? What, did Williams like giving up a chance to hit? DiMaggio himself would gladly swing at a pitch off the plate to try to drive in a run or move a base runner. “I go after everything I think I can hit,” he said. Not Williams. If the pitch wasn’t just about perfect he let it go. They said he had the eyesight of an eagle. He made the pitcher give in. Right now, 37 games into the Red Sox season, Williams was hitting .421, easily the best average in either league.

  Williams was just different from DiMaggio, more outgoing, always yapping, sparring with opponents and
needling the umps. DiMaggio rarely said a thing. To DiMaggio hitting was principally, as he framed it in his mind, a “God-given gift,” an ability akin to running speed or arm strength that might be tinkered with and honed but not significantly improved. He never wasted a turn at the plate, but his approach was by and large intuitive; often, he didn’t know who the other team’s pitcher would be until shortly before the game began. For Williams, it seemed, hitting was like a science to be studied and explored with every at bat, his or someone else’s. His teammates had come to expect to be grilled by Williams each time they got back to the dugout after a turn at the plate—“What’s he got on that fastball?” “Was that third pitch a sinker or a slider?” When an opposing pitcher came out to warm up for a game, Williams would break off from playing pepper and just stare at him. “When I walk down the street I’d like for them to say, ‘There goes Ted Williams, the best hitter who ever lived,’ ” he told people. Old-timers had begun comparing him with Babe Ruth.

  Before the start of the doubleheader Dominic and Ted stood near one another in the outfield, bantering while catching flies and occasionally pointing up into the Fenway stands that were rapidly filling in. It was a holiday Friday, Memorial Day. Now Dominic shouted something out and Ted laughed and pointed back at him, then threw a gentle air punch Dom’s way.

  Dominic always made friends easily. Growing up, he was the DiMaggio that the other kids came by the three-step stoop to see. Dom was easy to talk to, small and unthreatening, lively and open to frivolity in a way that Joe could never bring himself to be. Like the cheese-rolling, for example. One of Dominic’s friends was the son of a cheese maker and Dom and his guys would get together and roll wheels of cheese, competing for distance, on a flat stretch of Bay Street near the wharf. The winner took a pot of change. Everyone cheered and laughed the day little Dom set the record for a Bay Street cheese roll: nearly three full blocks.

  Dominic was Ma’s favorite, or so it seemed to Joe. She and the older sisters doted on him, the baby of the nine kids. Marie called Dom “a little doll.” Ma referred to him as her “angel.” And Dom played the part, helping voluntarily around the house, complimenting his sisters on their looks, once devoting himself to try to teach Ma to speak better English. (Not that it had helped much, Joe thought with a smile.) When Dom used to tease Joe about his lousy grasp of Italian, no one at home scolded Dom but rather chuckled right along.

  Mainly, Dominic was smart—the best checkers player at the North Beach Playground for one thing. He used to say that he wanted to be a chemical engineer. And six years after Joe had walked in the front entrance of Galileo High, strolled through the inner courtyard and then out a side door onto Polk Street without even staying long enough to get a grade, Dominic left the building with a diploma in his hand. Class of 1934. Ma and Pa were proud. Around the ballfield Dominic, in his spectacles, was called the Little Professor.

  You wouldn’t even know they were brothers, Red Sox second baseman Bobby Doerr thought when he saw the DiMaggios pass each other wordlessly on the field. It’s like they don’t even know the other exists.

  They knew. By the start of the doubleheader Joe had gotten his batting average up to .329. Dom was at .345.

  In the first game Joe’s ninth-inning single came in the middle of a three-run rally and the Yankees went into the clubhouse with a 4–3 win. Earlier in the game, though, he had dropped Joe Cronin’s easy fly ball. Now, between games, DiMaggio was trying to get some movement into his neck. I’ll throw it out, he thought. I’ll throw the ball as hard as I can, break right through this tightness.

  Not once but twice in the second game did DiMaggio, throwing home to try to get a base runner, heave the baseball over Yankees catcher Buddy Rosar and into the stands, a performance which, combined with a misplay of a ball hit by Williams, gave him four errors on the day. The Yankees were on their way to a 13–0 loss and Joe’s pop-fly double in the fifth inning did nothing to stop the fans from chanting “Meatball Joe” when he came to bat, or from shouting out “Dommy’s better” when Joe took the field. (A day later, after Gomez let slip to the writers about Joe’s injured neck, DiMaggio wouldn’t lean on it to explain his errors. “I just had a bad day,” he snapped.)

  The shutout was the first of the season inflicted upon the Yankees. Dominic had three hits in the two games. Williams went 3 for 5 (naturally, he also walked a few times); he was now hitting .429.

  The Red Sox and Yankees headed west on the same chartered Pullman late that afternoon, the Sox bound for Detroit, the Yankees to Cleveland for three games. And though Dominic and Joe were but a few hundred feet apart, though they might have met and chatted in one of the dining cars as some of the other Red Sox and Yankees players did, the brothers did not meet. Anyway, after a 13–0 game there was not a lot to say.

  Chapter 8

  The Loss

  THE INDIANS WERE now the favorites in the American League, all the experts said. They had Bobby Feller, the most dominant and thrilling pitcher in baseball, and they had other starting pitchers who could shut a team down too. Cleveland had a powerful first baseman in Hal Trosky and a good-hitting outfielder in Jeff Heath. The infield, with Ken Keltner at third base, Lou Boudreau at shortstop and Ray Mack at second, included some of the finest defensive players in the game. Keltner, who often batted third and was a home run threat, stole a hit per game with his glove, it seemed. Boudreau, so quick afield despite his sluggardly pace on the bases, and Mack, brilliant on the pivot, went by the nickname Murder Inc. for the many double plays, the 6-4-3 rally killers, that they turned. Cleveland won 11 straight games in late April and early May, and four weeks later the team was still in front of Jimmy Dykes’s overachieving White Sox. The Yankees had come into Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium at the start of June in third place, four games behind. When they departed, they were a game closer in the standings.

  Those few days in Cleveland now seemed a blur to DiMaggio, though the Yankees had just left the city that afternoon. At the beginning of the series, heavy rains had given the teams a day off, allowing DiMaggio to rest at the Hotel Cleveland, helping his neck to heal. The Yankees doubleheader sweep the next day in front of more than 50,000 fans was achieved on the strength of fine pitching by Red Ruffing in the first game and by Gomez in the second. DiMaggio’s single against the lefthander Al Milnar helped make the difference in the opener. In game two he scratched a ground ball hit off the tough breaking-ball pitcher Mel Harder. And though Cleveland, with Feller on the mound, had responded with a 7–5 win in the third game, the Yankees were pleased to have won twice in the series, and pleased that even in their final-game loss they’d hit well against the Indians’ ace.

  DiMaggio had knocked a single and a double against Feller, his first multihit game since the opener against the Senators. He usually handled Feller. At the plate, DiMaggio would prepare himself for Feller’s fastball—really, you had to do that or you’d have no chance to hit it when it came—and though the ball would zip in at near to 100 miles per hour, DiMaggio had the bat speed to meet it. If Feller threw his curve, DiMaggio would wait stock still until the last instant and then lash at the pitch.

  It’s as if he waits and waits so that he can watch my curveball break and only then swings, Feller thought. Is it possible he can do that and still hit it? Not even Williams can do that.

  On the train trip from Cleveland to Detroit, Joe Gordon had sung gaily in the aisle, entertaining the team. Henrich had talked about the two home runs he’d hit off Feller. Rizzuto was teased for the stiff new suit he’d just bought; in response he stood and sang along with Gordon. The Yankees players made jokes and were happy, and McCarthy did not seem to mind.

  But now, just a few hours later, that train ride was forgotten, irrelevant. DiMaggio stood silently in the splendid lobby of the Book-Cadillac Hotel in Detroit. He shifted his weight and then smoothed his tie. It was 10:30 at night. The glinting marble walls and the gilded latticework of the hotel seemed out of place, unreal. There was a tremulous hush all
through the big lobby. Gomez stared somberly, seeing nothing. Selkirk tore a piece of paper once and then again and kept tearing it until the paper was in tiny strips. McCarthy sat on one of the pinkish upholstered couches, alone and away from everyone else. Some players clustered by the room clerk’s desk and collected a piece of mail or the key to their room. Other players stood with their hands in their pants pockets quietly murmuring to one another. Nothing that anyone did seemed to matter.

  Catcher Bill Dickey, Lou Gehrig’s old roommate, came in through the front door. He had been out for a malted. One of the bellmen told him the news. “My God!” said Dickey. “I only spoke to Lou a few days before we left New York. He told me he felt fine.”

  The Yankees had been expecting this, of course. They had seen the hard, awful signs over the past years. The end result was inevitable. Even so, the news landed like a blow from behind: sudden and harsh. For DiMaggio, in the first moments of knowing, it almost seemed impossible. Lou Gehrig was dead.

  They had met for the first time in the Yankees clubhouse in St. Petersburg, spring training 1936. DiMaggio was the young Italian rookie with the big reputation. He wasn’t sure how people would take to him. He remembered feeling Gehrig’s strong hand against his back and then hearing Gehrig say, “Nice to have you with us, Joe.”