Recently, I asked Feller if facing DiMaggio and Williams after the war changed his mind about anything he had said before it. He responded that even though DiMaggio continued to hit him well for average, he liked his chances pitching to him: “Well, you know, he was a right-handed hitter, and I always thought I had a good chance facing righties. It seemed to be I could get him out by keeping it tight and belt-high. Get it up and he sees it too well. Get it out and that big swing kills it. I tended not to throw low strikes because it took the jump off my fastball. So I jammed DiMaggio all the time at the belt, but he’d hit it somewhere. When I turned around, the ball squeaked by an infielder or dropped in front of an outfielder. DiMaggio always got his hits off me.” And Williams? “Well, no one could ever throw the ball past Williams anywhere in the strike zone. Especially coming at him from the right side. Yeah, he was loose up there. Other guys don’t move a muscle—faces like a Prussian general. DiMaggio was like that.”
When I asked Ted Williams about Feller’s assessment made in the spring of 1941 and repeated nearly half a century later, his response was interesting. Everyone threw him curves, if they could throw them at all well. “It got to the point where I didn’t even key for the fastball because of the breaking pitches, and pitchers consistently tried to throw them low and outside.” But what Williams remembers most about Feller was the hard stuff. “Guys who knew their fastball was their best pitch tried to challenge me with it. So did Feller. Don’t think I could hit every one—I couldn’t. Sometimes the background was tough; sometimes a pitcher just had too much stuff that day. Did I smile at the plate? I don’t know, I guess I looked pretty lackadaisical. It was my build more than anything that made me seem that way—I was a loose and skinny kid back then. But if someone threw at me there was no smile, that’s for sure. I got extremely angry, and I knew I was a better hitter after that. Oh, by the way, one more thing about Bobby Feller: He was the greatest pitcher I ever saw.”
Williams even had something to say about Feller’s comments on DiMaggio: “Bobby was pretty much echoing the book on DiMaggio, though I hated to see Boston’s pitchers throwing him up and in, because when they made a mistake it was right down his alley.” Since Williams played left and DiMaggio was a dead pull hitter, he saw the result of those mistakes often enough: “DiMaggio was an absolutely superb hitter—by far the best right-handed hitter I ever saw.” Williams thinks of DiMaggio only in comparison with “Jimmie Foxx, who was in the same league as a hitter, though I only saw him in his last three seasons.” DiMaggio and Foxx ended up with identical .325 lifetime batting averages. “Right-handed” is, of course, the operative phrase in Williams’s remarks, and one senses from listening to him talk about hitting that a loose and skinny kid for the Red Sox was the best left-handed hitter he ever saw.
The very presence in the mind’s eye of DiMaggio and Williams registers not only the thought of what they could do but the image of it being done: the width of a famous stance, the power of a famous grip, and the arc of a famous swing. Dominic DiMaggio recalls a time with the San Francisco Seals in the late ’30s when his manager, Lefty O’Doul, coaxed Joe DiMaggio, then a big leaguer visiting his younger brother, into a filming session. Dominic was lunging at the ball, and O’Doul thought he could correct the problem if he had an image of Joe and Dom taking alternating cuts at the plate. The home movie camera ran while the brothers stepped in and out of the batter’s box.
To this day Dom remembers the results. Joe DiMaggio’s stance and swing were the image of what they would be for his whole career: feet far apart, stride a matter of inches, swing wide but whipped and powerful, head motionless and dead level. Dom could see the difference right in front of him. While his head and shoulders moved forward and down as he lunged at the ball, his brother’s stayed parallel to the ground. With the wide stance, short stride, and level head, Joe DiMaggio’s eyes were riveted on the approaching ball. He could put wood to it almost at will, which was one secret of the long streak, according to Dominic. Joe could—and did during the hitting streak—go games on end without striking out. In fact, he fanned a grand total of 5 times during the streak and a mere 13 times for the entire season in 1941, a statistic that remains absolutely remarkable. Perhaps even more remarkable, from June 10 to July 25, 1941, DiMaggio played in 41 games, came to the plate 166 times, connected for 70 hits, and never struck out once. If a power swing opens up the far reaches of the ball park for a hitter, habitual contact puts the ball in play, where that other law of averages—luck—gets a time at bat.
As for Williams, the key lay elsewhere. When Babe Ruth saw him play early in the 1941 season, he told Boston reporters that just watching the kid swing told him that Williams had a shot at .400. “A baseball comes at you too fast to begin thinking about it only after it leaves the pitcher’s hand. Most hitters cheat by timing a backswing to pick up the rhythm of the pitcher’s motion.” The reason, Ruth went on, “that my own number 3 was so visible on my back, even directly from center field, was that I exaggerated my backswing before the pitcher’s release. But Williams waits much longer. The strength of his wrists, the speed of his swing, and the uncoiling of his hips are exceptional. He gets a better look and a better cut. Yeah, he could do it; he could hit .400.” Ruth was merely shrewd on the mechanics; he wasn’t privy yet, if he ever was, to Williams’s elaborate theory of zoning the plate that made his selection of hittable pitches akin to Cartesian geometry.
One of the more fascinating and least known things about DiMaggio’s streak was Williams’s phenomenal performance during the early part of its run. For the first 23 games the two kept pace, each getting at least one hit daily. But Williams’s .489 average for those games humbled DiMaggio’s solid .374. Though Williams took the collar often enough during the remainder of DiMaggio’s 56 games, he still edged DiMaggio .412 to .408 in overall average for the days included in the record streak. Williams recalls the wonder of DiMaggio’s consistency; DiMaggio recalls the wonder of Williams’s average.
Entries in the Streak Journal will plot out the details, but the performances by these marvelous ballplayers for a few weeks in May, June, and July weave only part of a tapestry that covers three brilliant years, including 1941, since Williams’s arrival in the league as a rookie in 1939. No two players after them have ever courted parallel years like these, not even DiMaggio and Williams after the war. DiMaggio’s cumulative batting average from 1939 to 1941 topped out at .363, Williams’s at .359. Both hit the exact same number of home runs: 91. DiMaggio knocked in 384 runs for the 3 years, Williams 378. In slugging percentage Joe muscled ahead .647 to .646. Not since Ruth and Gehrig or Gehrig and Foxx of the 1920s and early 1930s had two players in the same league put numbers like these on the board during the same seasons. No other combo or any arrangement of players and seasons, selecting among Mantle, Mays, Snider, Banks, and Aaron, has approached the matchup of average and power achieved by the Yankee center fielder and the Boston left fielder during these years. DiMaggio’s legendary streak and Williams’s .406 average in 1941 crown mirror performances the likes of which may belong to an era whose glory resides not only in its achievements but in its very pastness.
III. Maydays
When the 1941 season began in earnest, several DiMaggios showed up handsomely in the initial weekly averages. Having hit in all 19 exhibition games following his contract dispute plus the first 8 of the regular season, Joe DiMaggio began the year with an unofficial 27-game hitting streak. He also opened on a first-week rampage, posting an average of .528, with four homers, four doubles, a triple, 13 runs, and 14 runs batted in. Dominic and Vince DiMaggio didn’t get off to bad starts either; Dom was at .444 for the Red Sox, and Vince was hitting .400 for the Pirates. A few thousand miles away from most of the action, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a daily feature in its sports pages called the “DiMag-o-Log,” which charted the day-by-day progress of the homegrown DiMaggio brothers in the big leagues. The log in early May was a bull market. Soon it would turn bear for Joe DiMaggio b
efore it began in mid-May to mark the quickening pace of an incipient hitting streak.
As the Yankees opened a western tour early in May the euphoric days of their first homestand began to sour. They lost ball games in which they had built up big early leads, and the frustration came to a head in Detroit during one of those baseball moments which give the sport its folkloric timelessness. Yankee hitters complained unceasingly that the Detroit pitcher, Tommy Bridges, was throwing them nothing but spitters. In a second at bat after going down on three pitiful swings the first time, Joe Gordon cut at a tough Bridges pitch and missed by a foot. He groaned at umpire Bill McGowan, “The sonofabitch is loadin’ it up.” “Get in there and hit,” said McGowan. Bridges then let one go that watered the grass on the way to the plate. Gordon rolled his eyes; McGowan took off his mask, ran halfway to the mound, and warned Bridges about a spitter so obvious that the weatherman could have called it. Bridges looked toward his manager, Del Baker, as if McGowan had accused him of molesting a child, and a huge brouhaha ensued. Baker: “What? Him?” Bridges: “Who? Me?” McGowan: “Yeah, you.” Some things have changed in baseball; some have not.
If baseball is a game of concentration, diversion is one of its more persistent strategies. Players, managers, and coaches are always working not only to fool their opponents but to distract them. A story in the Sporting News in May revealed that wily third base coaches around the league had spotted a tip-off to Bobby Feller’s fastball. When the fastball was coming, he wiggled his fingers after receiving the catcher’s sign. The story was something of a setup, intended to get Feller thinking about what was second nature to him, his speed. When he heard it, he responded in kind: “Any hitter dumb enough to rely on a sign from the third base coach is going to end up picking red stitches out of his ear.” Those for whom hitting against Feller was no picnic under ordinary conditions cried foul. It was criminal for a man with his fastball to talk about hitting anyone intentionally. “Who’s talking intentionally?” Feller shot back.
In speaking with Feller about the 1941 season, I asked him if he remembered this incident, and indeed, he not only remembered it, he still fumed over it. “Sure, they were always picking up my pitches. That’s why I won 25 games that year. The ball’s coming over 90 miles an hour, and a hitter’s going to take a sign from the coach telling him it’s really a slow curve because my fingers weren’t wiggling? Good luck! I never meant I’d start throwing at people—I just meant that anyone stupid enough to trust in someone else’s guess might be stupid enough not to duck. It happened this way every year. Coaches are paid to say they can pick up pitches. But if I’m a hitter, I’m not buyin’ it.”
As the baseball season meandered through mid-May, the sweetening air of spring eased some of the year’s early tensions. The dailies brimmed with warm weather ads, everything from Jantzen swimsuits to Spalding tennis rackets, from Realsilk “Tropics Nude” nylon stockings (three pairs for $5; imports from the Orient were at a premium) to Stetson Stratoliner hats at $6.50 up top. Kool cigarettes in the warming months of 1941 told their prospective smokers in full-page spreads to switch from “hots.”
Along the coasts of California—Pacific Palisades or Santa Monica—the rotogravures advertised nine-room ranch-style homes for under $10,000, which seemed about right for the middle-class family as profiled in May by Life magazine. The average salary for a head of household ran around $2,500 a year, with normal family expenditures running $735 for food, $265 for clothing, $460 for rent, $135 for utilities, $97 for furniture, and $800 for miscellaneous flings. To gauge the range of things in the spring of 1941, a dozen eggs went for 47 cents, a quart of milk for 14 cents, a loaf of white bread for 9 cents, a gallon of gas for 20 cents, and a pack of cigarettes for 15 cents.
The neighborhood gallant in his springtime worsted at $17.50 could pick up a snazzy middle-of-the-line Packard for $1,345 or the De Soto of his dreams for $898. For $100 a month he could rent a six-room apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan near where Joe DiMaggio then lived with his wife, the actress Dorothy Arnold, in a ritzier and more expensive penthouse at 425 West End Avenue. For a nickel DiMaggio could have caught the subway to Yankee Stadium, trains that Mike Quill’s Transit Union drivers ran for 99 cents an hour, his mechanics worked on for $1.01 an hour, and his change-makers changed for 65 cents an hour. But of course, DiMaggio never did take the subway; he took a cab at 35 cents for the first mile or Lefty Gomez drove down from his apartment at 800 West End Avenue and the teammates headed up Manhattan and across to the Bronx at the 155th Street Bridge.
A traveler in May 1941 could book a Pullman round trip to Miami from New York for $40; a more exotic itinerary encompassed a $395, 38-day sail to South America, including Rio and Buenos Aires. European vacations, of course, were beyond the pale. The Philadelphia Enquirer ran a man-on-the-street poll asking who would take a trip to England that May if offered $5,000 to do so. Only 1 in 10 found the notion or the nation attractive, and she had a sister in London. Nearer and safer, $30.95 purchased a 3-day cruise to Bermuda, $75 a 6-day trip to Cuba, $160 a 14-day tour of Trinidad and the Virgin Islands, and $241 two thrilling weeks in the national parks of the American west, the Black Hills, and the Dakota badlands, where Mount Rushmore sculptors were hurrying to put the finishing touches on presidential noses, ears, and eyelids so that this famous depression monument could open in the fall of 1941.
The restrictions of wartime might have kept Americans in their own hemisphere in 1941, but nothing kept them from getting to where they were going faster than ever before. America’s new frontier in the ’40s was up in the air. To understand this era is to imagine the airplane. An RKO-sponsored Gallup survey in May told moviemakers what they had already figured out: “The horse, symbol of adventure, is on the way out as a standby. His most likely successor: the airplane.” Spring was both blessed and burdened with such films as I Wanted Wings, starring Ray Milland, William Holden, and that classic World War II pinup in her first role, Veronica Lake. However much the movie inspired those who wanted wings, there could be little doubt that it enraptured millions who wanted Veronica Lake.
The obsession with aerial adventure was as much visionary as actual in 1941. Air fares, by comparative standards, were expensive: $149.95, New York to Los Angeles; $71.75, New York to Miami; $44.95, New York to Chicago. Nonetheless, the major airlines (American heading the list with 81 planes) flew over 2.5 million passengers in 1940, an increase of nearly a million over 1939. Bookings for 1941 continued to increase despite a series of crashes such as the one in February, when Eastern’s “Silver Sleeper” to Mexico smashed into the fog-shrouded hills north of Atlanta with the second most famous aviator in America, Eddie Rickenbacker, on board. A badly mauled Rickenbacker, president of the airline, acted with extreme courage in aiding passengers and crew even worse off than he.
Of course, the real aerial adventure in 1941 was not civilian flight but air power. The strategic implications of air defense and air attack permeated every stitch of the social fabric and dominated media time and space, especially the advertising columns, from Dallas urban development ads (“from Plains to Planes in 120 Days”), where the horse indeed meets the plane, to Parker pens: “Why is the Parker Vacumatic like a Flying Fortress?” “I have it, they’re both super-charged.”
If the American people aired it out like never before, the American media responded in word and image. The New York Times Rotogravure ran a feature, “Air Minded America,” whose title articulated what its pictures revealed. For those whose heads were in the clouds, a syndicated feature appeared in newspapers all over the country, “Know America’s Planes,” in which tabloid readers could experience on the installment plan the virtues of everything with wings on it, from the Curtiss “Helldiver” to the huge B-19, unveiled for the first time in all its massive glory during DiMaggio’s streak. A springtime issue of the elegantly produced Fortune magazine featured a cover-to-cover review of air power in the warring world. The titles of the articles indicated the scope of t
he arena in which World War II was being waged and would continue to be so: “U.S. Air Power,” “Air Power as World Power,” “The New Battlefield,” “A Portfolio of U.S. Military Airplanes” (the photographs in this feature are simply stunning). Most telling of all was the subtitle of the Fortune piece on U.S. air power—“If the future belongs to us”—which picked up a refrain—“Tomorrow belongs to us” (Die Zukunft gehört uns)—from a Nazi youth movement song of the earlier ’30s, later sung with such frightful poignancy in the movie Cabaret.
The future, for obvious reasons, was on everyone’s mind in May 1941, but no one spoke of it more often or more fearfully than the most renowned aviator in America and perhaps the most revered hero of the twentieth century, Charles A. Lindbergh. Lindy was a daunting and darkening presence in the days just before DiMaggio’s streak, and this tortured American soul now seemed much more than 14 years removed from the magical moment of his solo Atlantic flight in 1927, when he landed to the nighttime cheers of so many delirious Parisians.
Late in May, Hollywood’s Preston Sturges began filming one of his classic comedies with Joel McCrea, Sullivan’s Travels. The story involved a famous movie director who finds himself, through a series of pathetic mishaps, condemned to a prison chain gang. When McCrea as Sullivan tells a wily trustee that he is actually a famous man and not a criminal, the trustee responds: “Sure—last year we had a fellow here said he was Lindbergh. Flew away every night. Flew back every morning.” Sullivan insists he would be recognized if he could get his picture in the paper: “Who in these parts gets his picture in the paper?” The trustee stares balefully at him: “Baseball players.”
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