STREAK
Joe DiMaggio and the Summer of ’41
Michael Seidel
With a new afterword by the author
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
LINCOLN AND LONDON
© 1988 by Michael Seidel
Afterword © 2002 by Michael Seidel
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Seidel, Michael, 1943–
Streak: Joe DiMaggio and the summer of ’41/Michael Seidel; with a new afterword by the author.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: McGraw-Hill, c1988.
ISBN 0-8032-9293-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-9293-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-9371-7 (electronic: e-pub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-9372-4 (electronic: mobi)
1. DiMaggio, Joe, 1914–99 2. Baseball players—United States—Biography. I. Title.
GV865.D5 S45 2002
796.357′092—dc21
[B]
2001052238
To the Memory of Jack Seidel
for whom Joe DiMaggio was as great a source of admiration and wonder as he has always been for me
It’s amazing the hold he has on people after all these years. You would think a whole new generation of baseball fans had grown up who didn’t know him, but they know him just as well as their fathers did.
—Lefty Gomez
Contents
Preface
Prologue
Streak Journal
Endgame
Epilogue
Afterword
Appendix—Box Scores
Preface
Great streaks in baseball are idealized versions of the game itself. They combine absolutes of concentration and duration; they exhibit on a continuous basis what one normally expects intermittently; their pace is glacial, and their crucial moments are lightning-quick. The very days of a streak generate all the captivating rhythms associated with baseball: its anticipatory potential, its tensions, its attenuations, its gratifications. And the individual effort required for a personal hitting streak is comparable to what heroic legend calls the aristeia, whereby great energies are gathered for a day, dispensed, and then regenerated for yet another day in an epic wonder of consistency.
No other sustained performance in the history of baseball builds with the drama and explodes with the energy of Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game consecutive hitting streak launched on a hazy Thursday afternoon in New York on May 15, 1941, and grounded on a damp summer night in Cleveland on July 17. Surely, none is more memorable. The following pages, in prose and pictures, focus on 56 baseball games and on the unforgettable days of a spring and summer in America. There are other books that chronicle the whole DiMaggio saga, including the private marital obsessions that have contributed to Joe DiMaggio’s place in the order of things through the 1950s and 1960s. I am not charting the biography of a man but the rhythms of a legendary sequence, perhaps the most admired sequence in sports history. To be legendary is to be worthy of written record—that is what legendary means. My intent is to inscribe DiMaggio’s great streak in a context worthy of the memories it evokes.
In a recent film version of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, set in the spring and summer of 1941, Robert Mitchum, playing Philip Marlowe, follows the magical course of DiMaggio’s 56-game streak in counterpoint to his own experiences in the sleazy night world of murderers, frauds, freaks, hookers, and addicts. The daytime world of baseball, sunshine, and energy is antithetical to Marlowe’s misadventures and somehow restorative after them. But in a larger sense, even beyond Marlowe’s immediate comprehension, the tracking of DiMaggio’s streak in the movie is deeply nostalgic. Marlowe imagines through DiMaggio’s presence the heroic best of a land in its last summer glory before the wartime winter of its discontent.
DiMaggio began hitting during the spring thaw of Hitler’s ruination machine in Europe, and he continued during a time of massive preparation in America for a war at once anticipated and dreaded. The days of the streak record the energies in a land preoccupied by war but as yet untested and unscarred by it. Early in 1941 America was excited by heroic prospects and frightened by bleak realities; fascinated by air power as a symbol of the frontier of modern adventure and horrified by the beginnings of saturation bombing in Europe; rallied by the concerted effort, especially in the media, to generate new reserves of heroic mythology and depressed by the Nazi threat casting an indecent pall over the western world; thrilled by the arming of democracy and spellbound by powerful isolationist voices such as that of the greatest American hero of all, Charles Lindbergh.
On the day DiMaggio’s streak began, headlines the world over bannered the bizarre solo flight and parachute jump of Rudolf Hess into Scotland a few days earlier. A few days later, in silence and in secret, a crack division of Hitler’s paratroopers were poised on Athenian shores for an innovative and daring aerial attack on the oldest civilized island in the history of the world, Crete. Before DiMaggio’s streak was over the nation and the world would bear witness to the absorbing and climactic tracking of the huge German battleship Bismarck; the mysterious saga of the American merchant ship Robin Moor and the lifeboat odyssey of its passengers; the largest military campaign ever in world history, Hitler’s monumental invasion of his nominal Russian ally along a 1,300-mile front on June 22, 1941; and the martial posturing in America culminating in midsummer with the hullabaloo over the first dispatch of American troops to a war zone, Iceland and its crucial Atlantic trade lanes.
Just three days after DiMaggio’s streak ended in July, a secret project in England reporting on new weapons concluded that the Allies had the capacity to produce the atomic bomb before Hitler’s Germany. The British began work immediately, and so would America. That legacy of the war we have borne ever since. It is the cusplike quality of 1941, before any real recognition of the outrages then in embryo—the total Holocaust in Europe and the dawn of the atomic age—that helps account for the nostalgic strength of the year’s appeal today.
The events, sagas, and personal histories crosscutting those fabled days include the names of some of the greatest statesmen and henchmen the world has ever known as well as the names of other men, women, and a few beasts still very much alive in memory if not in flesh: Roosevelt, Churchill, de Gaulle, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Hess, and Pétain, along with Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Tallulah Bankhead, Hope and Crosby, Abbott and Costello, Gene Tierney, Orson Welles, Veronica Lake, Rita Hayworth, Noël Coward, George Bernard Shaw, Fritz Kreisler, Lillian Hellman, Ernest Hemingway, Harry Truman, Claude Pepper, Lyndon Johnson, Joe and Jack Kennedy, Fiorello La Guardia, Lou Gehrig, Joe Louis, Billy Conn, Max Schmeling, Sugar Ray Robinson, Craig Wood, Bobby Riggs, and Whirlaway.
What follows is a journal of DiMaggio’s streak and its games, of the players who played in them and remember them, of what actually occurred in them, of what made up the texture of life in America and in the world surrounding them. Baseball offered the land a good deal to remember in 1941: the drive of Ted Williams toward the .400 barrier, the approach of the immortal Lefty Grove toward his 300th victory, the Yankees’ team consecutive-game home-run record enfolded so neatly within DiMaggio’s own streak, the dramatic and scorching race between the Dodgers and the Cardinals for the National League pennant, and, finally, a moment of infamy in October—Mickey Owen’s passed ball in the fourth game of the ’41 World Series. But DiMaggio’s legendary 56-game streak will always remain the season’s crowning achievement.
Once the streak was picked up by the press and the fans in 1941, its daily rhythm became part of a national myth in a sport calling itself the national
pastime. As an emblem of consistency under mounting pressure, the streak surely touched a responsive chord in prewar America and was recognized to have done so immediately by those excited enough to speculate about its significance. To tell the story of the streak is to tell many interweaving stories of the year, to enrich a legend with details that make its best moments truly epochal. These are famous games and cherished times, and the Streak Journal records them. While there are games within the sequence that shed familiar light on baseball recollections, there are also forgotten games that shed new light, clearing up some distortions that add little luster to a legend that shines more brightly without them.
When I spoke to some of the key players from the 1941 Yankees and around the league about the days of DiMaggio’s streak, they had forgotten much and distorted some, but they also had particular reasons for recalling streak games that otherwise might be lost to an account of the record and, in several instances, that led to significant revisions of streak lore. For example, the young Yankee Johnny Sturm, who played for only one year, 1941, before he was injured in the war, recollects the opening games of DiMaggio’s streak as no other player at the time could or would. Here’s why. The Yankees were slumping badly, and their manager, Joe McCarthy, had just rearranged the lineup. Sturm was inserted at first base, and he caught fire for a couple of weeks, logging a brief streak of his own near the beginning of DiMaggio’s. Moreover, Yankee catcher Bill Dickey was in the middle of a 17-game hitting streak and Frankie Crosetti, back in the lineup with Sturm after displacing the rookie Phil Rizzuto at short, also was hitting on a daily basis. Sturm has vivid memories of these veterans all sustaining streaks, Dickey and DiMaggio ahead of him and Crosetti a game behind. He literally began as a regular swinging with the stars.
Recall is by its nature selective and oddly associational. A red-hot Johnny Sturm, remembering his debut and playing out a little private drama in which he matched Dickey, DiMaggio, and Crosetti in a four-way hitting streak, has those May days deeply etched in his mind. Furthermore, Sturm remembers another legendary ballplayer, Lou Gehrig, desperately ill and not even near the diamond then, whose very presence in New York City added to the impression these games made upon him. The New York baseball writers were keeping daily tabs on Sturm when he took over at first because they thought him a poor fit for the powerful Yanks and treated his insertion into the lineup as a desperation move on Joe McCarthy’s part. Half mockingly, the writers matched Sturm’s performance with that of Lou Gehrig’s rookie year. The Yankees’ collapse in 1940 and their miseries early in 1941 were still vocally and volubly attributed to the loss of Gehrig. One writer was involved in litigation initiated earlier by Gehrig because of what Gehrig regarded as slurs about his illness infecting the other Yankees in proximity to him on the road and in the dugout. This was no joke; Sturm says the whole clubhouse was unsettled when depositions were taken from Bill Dickey and Lefty Gomez well into 1941.
To talk with Sturm now is to realize that Gehrig exercised a more powerful hold on him in regard to the memory of the early DiMaggio streak games than the writers could have imagined. Earlier, in the spring training of 1940, a weak and weary Gehrig often spoke to Sturm in German, the language of their families. This meant more than Sturm could measure considering that speaking German in America in the year of Dunkirk and the battle of Britain had a certain edge to it. Now, May 16, 1941, the day after DiMaggio’s streak began, McCarthy put Sturm into a revised Yankee lineup that included the veteran members of the Gehrig-dominated infield of the late ’30s: Dickey, Rolfe, Crosetti, and Gordon. McCarthy had just benched his rookies, Jerry Priddy and Phil Rizzuto, and Sturm was all alone. He was Gehrig’s ghost on the field a matter of weeks before Gehrig, only 37 years old, was to die at home.
Sturm felt the pressure, thought about it, and played through it: a rookie inserted into a legendary lineup. While the writers insisted he would hit neither for average nor for power, he matched streak games with the likes of Joe DiMaggio. One can still hear pride and a kind of quizzical resentment in Sturm’s voice that make otherwise obscure games come alive. DiMaggio himself told me he had largely forgotten the earlier games of his streak which Sturm remembers: “I hit pretty good, and all the writers were keeping tabs. They noticed as soon as I started. But DiMaggio already had a head start and no one sensed it—not even him. Pretty soon I stopped and Joe kept going.”
One writer, the respected Dan Daniel of the New York World-Telegram, tracked Sturm’s streak at 4 games, then 5, 6 . . . 9, 10, 11. When Sturm reached 11 on May 28, Daniel mentioned in passing that Crosetti had hit in 10 straight and DiMaggio in 13. Jack Smith of the Daily News, perhaps tracking Daniel, picked up DiMaggio the next day at 14. Getting in, as it were, at the beginning of DiMaggio’s streak via the attention paid to the wrong streak by the right writers helps dispel a story that every chronicler of DiMaggio’s record has repeated for years: No one recognized the streak until the Herald Tribune in New York picked it up at game 18. This is simply not the case.
By paying attention to Sturm—and remembering along with him—we also come to a forgotten moment, the first really crucial one in DiMaggio’s young streak. There was a game in Washington, D.C., on May 29 played in sweltering and near-cloudburst conditions. In the sixth the Yanks got a bundle of runs; Sturm smashed a single, and so did DiMaggio, a rip as clean as a whistle. But the rains came. The game reverted to the fifth inning score, a 2–2 tie; the Yankee sixth was wiped out, and with it Sturm’s streak hit. So was DiMaggio’s clean single, but Sturm recalls the image of another play in the fourth inning, when DiMaggio topped the ball and bounced it high off home plate. It came down finally, but “Joe just beat the throw to first. He kept the streak alive by a hair. Me? I lost my only hit in the rain. You know, DiMag was a little bit lucky that day.” The great are always a little bit lucky.
No one has ever described this play before because no one aside from Sturm ever had reason to remember its context. Both in a taped interview now housed at the Hall of Fame and in a recent telephone conversation, DiMaggio mentioned a rained-out game so dim in his memory that he couldn’t place it and a base hit so lost that neither the record books nor recall could get it back. He wasn’t able for the life of him to unravel the details. Unlike Sturm, he didn’t lose a streak that day, and the one he sustained was not yet significant enough to worry over. Sturm’s memories, for discernible reasons, produce a different kind of pressure and recover a moment muddied for DiMaggio, who so gropingly tried to recapture it.
If memories can sustain a legend, they can also betray one. Roger Angell, to my mind the greatest writer on baseball of any generation, insists that the great memorial power of baseball is sometimes awkwardly rooted in the very timelessness of the game. Isolated and suspended moments mythify the details of particular plays or sequences. Memory is transformed into something greater than or different from the occurrence that stimulated it. There is one stunning example of invented recall within the great arc of DiMaggio’s hitting streak that is still perpetuated today. It begins with a famous description of a circus catch made at a climactic moment in game 45, when DiMaggio was trying to break Wee Willie Keeler’s all-time streak record of 44. DiMaggio himself describes the catch in his Lucky to Be a Yankee, detailing how his brother, Dominic DiMaggio, playing center field for the Red Sox, ran back deep at Yankee Stadium to haul in a drive fated for streak destiny. Almost everyone, including chroniclers of the streak, believed in the drama of this great catch for years. There was, however, one small problem: Dominic DiMaggio never made it. The only ball Joe hit that day snagged by an outfielder was a long drive to Stan Spence in right center, backed up of course by Dominic, who had taken off at the crack of his brother’s bat.
A bizarre sequence of fragmented memories are at work. In a long phone conversation Dom DiMaggio said he recalled little of his brother’s streak, but he mentioned his supposed catch as one of the few incidents he could describe; he reminisced about it with wit. “Dick Newsome was pitching. Joe h
it one a mile to center. I had to run a long, long way to get it. Maybe I just should have stopped short and let it fall. Joe and I talked about it later, but you know, we always wanted to beat the Yankees, especially in New York. I had to go after that ball. I went after them all. Another time I robbed Joe of two sure triples in a game in New York and Toots Shor called up and broke a dinner date on Joe’s behalf that evening. Joe wanted those hits. I have to try to make the catches.”
With a bit of close scrutiny one can figure out what probably happened. The memories of both DiMaggios and of several writers who concur in the story are actually a curious amalgam of another play that did occur during the streak, a ball driven deep to center by Joe DiMaggio in Yankee Stadium over a month before, on May 24. After misjudging the ball and then readjusting, Dom caught up with the drive and had it trickle out of his glove. The distortions of memory are accountable—a tense game, the same location where Dominic DiMaggio was in the vicinity of a long drive, a wished-for result that had in fact occurred before—and a wonderful but inaccurate mythic bit emerges as truth. To record the streak day by day is not only to reconstruct how Joe DiMaggio did it but to explain how on some occasions he didn’t do it the way he and others remember it. Mythological variants write themselves into the legendary record.
Many other stories within the streak are composed of fragments of memory rather than memorial wholes. DiMaggio told me that he began thinking about the streak seriously around game 33, and that in large part may be so. But something intriguing occurred earlier, perhaps lost in the streak’s jumble of internal and external memories. Ken Keltner, the great third baseman whose two superb plays helped hand DiMaggio the collar for the first time in 57 games on July 17 in Cleveland, told reporters right after the streak stopper that a month and a half earlier DiMaggio had hit a ground ball by him just like the ones he speared that night. He was absolutely correct: On June 1, in the eighth inning of the second game of a doubleheader, DiMaggio hit a bullet off Mel Harder just to Keltner’s right. Keltner got a glove on it, but the drive shot by him behind third base. That was DiMaggio’s only hit of the game. When the inning ended and Keltner moved toward the dugout, he remembered DiMaggio saying something—neither hostile nor argumentative—but he couldn’t hear it above the noise of the crowd.
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