Streak

by Seidel, Michael; Siegel, George ;

  During the opening week of DiMaggio’s streak the whole world was deep in wonder at a story developing in and around Glasgow, Scotland. Headlines for the past two days had bannered the strange, war-related news of the inexplicable flight and descent into Scotland by parachute of the third-ranking official in all Nazi Germany, Deputy Reichsführer Rudolf Hess. What could this possibly mean? The sequence of events went back to the previous weekend, May 10 and 11. All seemed natural enough. The great colt Whirlaway, with Eddie Arcaro up, dashed to a five-length victory in the Preakness, the second leg of what would be the Triple Crown for the colt that year. That Saturday afternoon the new British ambassador to the United States, Lord Halifax, attended his first baseball game—a contest between the White Sox and the Tigers—though he understood precious little of it. The American League president, William Harridge, told umpire Bill Summers to keep the irascible Jimmy Dykes under control to avoid a spectacle in front of Lord Halifax. Summers said he would take care of it before the game by telling Dykes that the Lord himself was in the stands.

  In Boston the same Saturday, the stripper Sally Rand was guest of honor in the evening at a Harvard freshman smoker. When in response to shouts of “Take it all off,” she said, “I will if you will,” 200 Harvard lads began to shed their shirts. The ensuing melee was calmed when a dour New York columnist in attendance, Ed Sullivan, who introduced Elvis Presley and the Beatles to television audiences, insisted on the restoration of clothes and sanity. Meanwhile, one lonely man, inspired as he later said by Charles Lindbergh’s solo Atlantic flight of 1927, hunched in the cockpit of a specially souped up long-range Messerschmitt late Saturday and began to fly undetected from, of all places, Bavaria, the heartland of Nazi fanaticism, to, of all places, the estate of a British Air Force officer near the coast of Scotland.

  While Hess was in the air, having told no one in the Nazi hierarchy about his plans, Göring and Hitler sent the German Luftwaffe on a bombing run over London, not an unusual occurrence, though on this sad occasion the targets were the great monuments of West End London: Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, and Big Ben. Pictures of these ruined structures covered the newspapers all week, and the images were heartbreaking for the western democracies. This much was in keeping with the Pulitzer Prize—winning political cartoon just announced; Jacob Burch of the Chicago Times had won for a wrenching sketch of a little girl kneeling in prayer next to her bed in her bombed and gutted London home. The caption read “If I should die before I wake.”

  Hess flew on through Sunday, despite the monumental London carnage. At eight o’clock Sunday night, with darkness approaching off the Scottish coast, he homed in on preset coordinates and prepared to ditch his plane. He pushed himself out of the cockpit and parachuted to the ground, landing a few miles from the rural seat of the Duke of Hamilton, an aviator in his own right, having in 1933 been the first to fly over Mount Everest.

  Two days later, when this episode hit the newspapers with bold headlines half a page high, the world went crazy, with the Times of London calling the adventure “the most bizarre incident so far in the war.” Correspondents marked the reaction worldwide as a global fit of “Hessteria.” Bill Henry of the Los Angeles Times wrote that he would give his eyeteeth to know what went through Churchill’s mind when his aides told him that Deputy Führer Hess had just dropped out of the sky into Scotland. Actually, Churchill was at a country house retreat watching a screening of the Marx Brothers’ Day at the Races: “Hess or no Hess, we’ll deal with the matter after the movie.” Few, including Churchill, had any real grasp of the details yet, though the prime minister sensed that “the maggot is in the apple.” This strange adventure in the air was still momentous news when on May 15 Joe DiMaggio laced a single off Chicago lefty Edgar Smith in the first inning and launched a legend.

  The rest is streak history.

  Streak Journal

  “In order to do the toughest thing there is to do in sport—hit a baseball properly—a man has got to devote every ounce of his concentration to it.”

  —Ted Williams

  GAME 1: May 15

  “Properly” is the rub. The baseball is a joy to hold and jiggle in the palm of one’s hand but a terror to hit properly, to hit hard, and to hit consistently. There it sits according to 1941 specifications: a spheroid with a cork-centered pill (small percentage rubber) 3/16 of an inch in diameter; covered with four separate red and black rubber shells to a circumference of 41/8 inches; wrapped in three layers of yarn, totaling 219 yards, and another layer of rubber-cement-soaked cotton, 150 yards, to a circumference of 87/8 inches; covered again with two distended figure eight patches of taut horsehide 0.050 to 0.055 inch thick, nuzzled in the fetal position at cross-purposes; and sewn together with 108 raised cotton stitches.

  If powerfully thrown, the baseball spins through the air at speeds ranging from 88 to 95 miles per hour, a blur with red highlights between 9 and 91/4 inches in circumference and between 5 and 51/4 ounces in weight. Hitters, who have subjected the baseball to the same scrutiny as physicists have the atom, differ as to exactly what it does under different conditions, though they have seen them all, even those never intended by Mother Nature. When a hitter is at a peak of concentration and in a comfortable groove, the baseball, according to Williams, seems to grow disproportionately as it approaches the plate: It looks bigger than it ought to. On the other hand, when a hitter is slumping, the ball looks like a cross between a white tablet and a firefly.

  On Thursday, May 15, 1941, Joe DiMaggio was in the middle of a horrible slump. A slump is a streak in reverse. It is leveling in its agonies, equalizing the paying customer, who thinks he could do as well, and the player, who so desperately wants to do better. DiMaggio suffered from a doozy. In 3 weeks he had shorn more than 200 points off his average; he was hovering at .306 thanks only to a torrid opening week of the season but no thanks to his work for the past 20 games. Other astronomical early season averages in both leagues made it look as if the Yankee center fielder had fallen from grace. Roy Cullenbine of the Browns led the American League at .431, followed by the Senators’ Cecil Travis at .394, and then a duo of Red Sox, Joe Cronin at .387 and Dominic DiMaggio at .368. Arky Vaughan of the Pirates led the National League at .395, followed by Enos Slaughter of the Cards at .388. DiMaggio’s 1 for 4 on his first streak day dropped him another 2 points to .304.

  The Yankees were a grim crew all around on May 15. Tommy Henrich was struggling so badly that McCarthy wouldn’t play him against lefties; the rookies, Phil Rizzuto and Jerry Priddy, were tumbling toward the .200 barrier; and the largely rookie pitching staff was blowing early leads in the later innings game after game. Having just dropped two to Cleveland and, prior to that, two to Boston, the team had now lost four in a row and seven of the last nine. The Yanks were 51/2 out of first and falling.

  They were not the only ones. Three thousand miles west, about the same time as the ball game at the Stadium, an extraordinary aerial adventure took place over the skies of San Diego. It all began when Navy Lieutenant Walter S. Osipoff thought he was making a routine parachute jump from a Douglas transport. He leapt out the open door, but before he cleared the plane the shrouds of his chute caught on the wing supports. The jolt knocked him cold and left him dangling in midair. While base personnel stared up in horror, a marine pilot, Lieutenant W. W. Lowrey, and a machinist’s mate, J. R. McCants, ran for an empty Navy biplane dive-bomber. They jumped in, hurriedly taxied along the runway, and took off. Moments later they sighted the Douglas transport at an altitude of about 1,500 feet out over the ocean. Osipoff was still hanging unconscious as the transport banked and circled.

  Then a miracle: Lowrey caught up to the transport and delicately edged his biplane toward the dangling chutist. While he steadied the plane underneath, McCants, a giant of a man, grabbed Osipoff and tugged as hard as he could against the pull of the air and the tangle of the chute. He finally managed to stuff the limp lieutenant headfirst into the open cockpit. But the shrouds o
f the parachute were still ensnared by the wing supports, so Lowrey maneuvered the biplane within inches of the larger transport and severed the tangled lines with his propeller, shearing off a few centimeters of metal in the process. He veered away and landed moments later with a battered and stunned extra passenger. Crowds on the ground cheered themselves hoarse. And Osipoff? He had a Hall of Fame headache and a cut on his arm that required 25 stitches.

  The New York press reveled in this event on the first day of DiMaggio’s streak, but the sportswriters had a different set of aerial motifs ready for the Yankees. “A non-stop flight toward the second division” was the lament of the New York Herald Tribune. The Yankees got pasted 13–1 by the White Sox, and the papers were merciless, muddling all distinctions between the linotype key and the panic button. The Daily News called the Yankees “ghastly” and their play a “shameless shambles.” It reached the point where team president Ed Barrow had to plead for charity. “The vets can take it, but give the rookies, Rizzuto and Priddy, a break.” Dan Daniel, writing for the Sporting News that week, finally concurred: “Rizzuto and Priddy had the hard luck to drop into a lineup that was not hitting. They could not carry everybody.”

  A cartoon on the sports pages of the New York World-Telegram depicted manager Joe McCarthy sitting in despair as his minions fell exhausted at his feet. If only the Yankees could switch places with their provincially named farm team in Atlanta, the Crackers, who had won 30 of 35 ball games so far. (The catcher and manager of the Crackers was a shrewd fellow named Paul Richards who would do a bit of managing in the majors before he was through.) Salvation, however, would have to come from elsewhere. Dan Daniel ventured a guess in his World-Telegram column for May 15: “Slumps are overcome suddenly, and once the bellwether shows the way, a whole club very often will follow him. It is possible that when Joe DiMaggio begins to hit again he will pull the other Yankees with him.”

  This was prescient, but Daniel was placing his money on a good bet. The revival of a blighted team by a kind of fisher king—an appropriate role for DiMaggio, the son of an immigrant fishing family—has its charm. On the more somber side, a few of the Yanks were still involved in genuine legal proceedings against a writer’s tasteless charge that Lou Gehrig had blighted his buddies with a disease of mysterious etiology and debilitating symptoms. Rookie first baseman Johnny Sturm, about to be put into the lineup as a regular, remembers that the Gehrig situation was all the more unsettling because Lou was desperately ill then and getting worse fast. The times themselves were neither healthy nor happy for the Yanks. McCarthy, Sturm said, was unusually on edge. He was also about to lower the boom.

  During the game Chicago jumped all over Ernie Bonham, Charley Stanceu, and Norman Branch for 14 hits and 13 runs. Bill Knickerbocker, a Yankee castoff, blasted four hits, including a home run. DiMaggio didn’t do badly against Chicago lefty Edgar Smith on this otherwise woeful day. He hit the ball crisply and even drove in the only Yankee run. Things might have turned out better for DiMaggio if he had kept the ball away from his brother Vince’s boyhood chum, Dario Lodigiani, now at third for the White Sox. Lodigiani snared one smash down the line on a bounce and deflected another to Luke Appling at short, who threw DiMaggio out. These drives were precursors for two later shots to third off another lefthander named Smith on a fateful July night in Cleveland. That time Ken Keltner would be at third.

  DiMaggio’s hit came early in the game. With two out in the bottom of the first and Phil Rizzuto, who had led off the inning with a double, on second, DiMaggio slammed a solid shot to center. Rizzuto scored, and the Yankees folded their tent for the rest of the day. They were already losing in the first because in the top of the inning DiMaggio had picked up Luke Appling’s bouncing single to center and drew a bead on the runner, Knickerbocker, heading to third. The ball caromed off Knickerbocker’s elbow into the box seats, allowing him to score. DiMaggio drew a rare error as Appling chugged all the way into third smiling.

  Luke would end up returning the favor on a number of occasions during DiMaggio’s streak; fate provided him more chances than any player to put the kibosh on the record early and late, but bad hops and hairbreadth plays deprived him of the honor. Appling was a great Hall of Fame shortstop whose brilliant career was capped, after a fashion, when in a 1982 nationally televised old-timers game in the nation’s capital he stepped up to the plate against Warren Spahn, took a mighty ancestral swing, and launched one over the left field fence at the tender age of 75 years.

  May 15, 1941, was roster cut-down date in the major leagues, and of much more importance on the first day of DiMaggio’s streak than a game in which the Yanks seemed to be coming apart at the pinstripes was the fate of two of baseball’s more incredible presences. White Sox player-manager Jimmy Dykes and the great right-hander Dizzy Dean, then barely hanging on with the Chicago Cubs. The fiery, loudmouthed, irrepressible Dykes was the umpires’ scourge, and with his playing days by common consent near an end, he placed himself on the inactive list, though he continued to manage as actively as anyone in the majors. In pregame ceremonies, Dykes clutched at the bag near his customary position, third base, and wouldn’t leave the field until a half dozen of his players dragged him back to the dugout.

  As for Dean, he had never been the same since an injury to his toe in the 1937 all-star game threw his pitching delivery out of whack. The Cubs released him for good and made him a coach on the day DiMaggio’s streak began. Dean would soon take a job broadcasting radio games for the St. Louis Browns, and his mangling of the English language would set the St. Louis Board of Education’s teeth on edge: “He’s standin’ confidentially at the plate”; “The scar is nothin’ to nothin’ and nobody’s winnin’”; “Don’t fail to miss tomorrow’s game.”

  Around the majors, Cleveland led in the American League over the Red Sox by 31/2 games and added to that lead with a 6–4 win over Boston. Ted Williams, hitting .339, laced a single in the game, beginning a streak that would shadow DiMaggio’s for 3 weeks. Bill Dietrich of the White Sox helped take Williams to the laundry the day before, starching him at 0 for 5. In the National League, Brooklyn and St. Louis began the season by playing almost perfect ball for a month. Indeed, the Dodgers won 15 of their first 18 and still trailed the Cards, who had won 13 of 15, by 0.033 percentage point. By now both teams had cooled off just a bit and the Dodgers held a lead of a game and a half at the end of the day’s action. All summer long it would be a seesaw race.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the world was still abuzz over the Hess aerial misadventure, the deputy führer’s solo mission, ditched plane, and parachute jump over the inland coast of Scotland. By Thursday afternoon Embassy Newsreels had hastily pieced together footage for a brief feature, This Man Hess: Hitler’s Right-Hand Man in Action, and ran it at many neighborhood theaters. Fast work. The explanation for Hess’s bizarre flight was still anybody’s guess, and the New York Daily News reminded its readers of a 1940 novel by Peter Fleming (Ian’s brother) called The Flying Visit in which none other than the führer himself fell out of a reconnaissance plane over England and parachuted to the ground. Locals picked him up, dusted him off, and entered him in a Hitler look-alike contest, which he won. In the London papers, the versifier A. P. Herbert caught the tone of the myriad rumors concerning Hess and the flight. The rumors would become odder still as the days rolled by.

  He is insane. He is the Dove of Peace.

  He is Messiah. He is Hitler’s niece.

  He has a mission to preserve mankind.

  He’s non-alcoholic. He was a “blind.”

  He’s fond of flying. He was racked with fear.

  He had an itch to meet a British peer.

  More deliberate and less impish voices were no less absorbed by the Hess mission. President Roosevelt imagined the worst and feared Hess was in cahoots with German sympathizers in England who had connections to the noninterventionist movement in America, especially Lindbergh and the America First Committee. In Russia, the steel-willed Stalin suspected so
mething that turned out to be closer to the truth, that Hess was in England to negotiate an alliance before the Germans engaged the Russians along an eastern front. For this, more than for his war crimes, the Russians refused to let Hess out of Spandau Castle in Berlin, where, according to the memoirs of Albert Speer, who was there with him, he walked the halls alone, a perfect martyr and a perfect loon. Hess killed himself at the age of 93 by wrapping an electrical cord around his neck and stepping off a chair in his cell at Spandau on August 17, 1987.

  At home on May 15 Roosevelt continued a long series of provocations aimed at firming up a western alliance against the Axis powers. Next to the dangling Osipoff on the front pages of the papers were news photos of a great ship, the magnificent 85,000-ton Vichy French liner Île de Normandie. The President had just impounded it. For good measure he signed impounding orders for 11 other ships sailing under the flags of Axis-dominated nations. Ostensibly Roosevelt wished to protect these vessels from sabotage, but actually he was signaling that the Atlantic belonged to us and to the British. Noninterventionists and isolationists all over America saw in Roosevelt’s actions the very incremental tactics that would edge us toward war, which is precisely what they were.

  GAME 2: May 16

  The Yankees ended the skid of a five-game losing streak on the second day of DiMaggio’s embryonic streak with a clutch ninth inning rally to put the game away 6–5. Trailing the White Sox 5–4 entering their half of the last inning, the Yanks flexed a bit of muscle. DiMaggio tripled off the wall 415 feet away in left center for his second hit of the day. He barely had time to dust himself off after a headlong slide to the bag at third before Joe Gordon lined another triple to the exact same place in left. With the game now tied, Chicago manager Jimmy Dykes decided to have his pitcher, Thornton Lee, walk the bases loaded to set up a force at home. The Yankees then pinch-hit Red Ruffing, a frontline pitcher, for Johnny Sturm, inserted into the lineup this day to play first as veteran Joe Gordon moved back to his old position at second for Jerry Priddy and Frankie Crosetti took over at short for Phil Rizzuto. Ruffing, one of the best hitting pitchers in baseball history, promptly delivered a game-winning line smash over Appling’s head at short to put Chicago and arch-strategist Dykes out of their misery.