Streak
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GAME 11: May 25
The Boston Red Sox won easily against the Yankees 10–3 at the Stadium to conclude their series before a large New York Sunday crowd of 36,461. Given the lopsided score, a contingent of sailors was able to leave the park with no regrets in the eighth inning when the PA announcer called for “all personnel of the USS George E. Badger to report back to ship immediately.” The announcement was related to a general alert of U.S. naval forces in light of the ongoing Bismarck adventure. By the early morning of May 25, British intelligence had picked up coded German messages that the Bismarck had been hit and that destroyers and U-boats were to cover her as she turned south and made a run for the French coast in the wake of the Prinz Eugen. At the same time, feeling a bit heady about the sinking of the Hood, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder of the German Navy, later imprisoned with Rudolf Hess at Spandau, warned that if the President of the United States intended in his publicized upcoming speech to order armed convoys for British merchant ships across the Atlantic, this would be tantamount to a declaration of war on the German Reich.
Roosevelt did not yet intend to order armed convoys, but he must have been sorely tempted. Moreover, Admiral Raeder would have been surprised to learn exactly what the President had on his mind this morning. According to his speech writer, the dramatist Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt began speculating on what might happen if the Bismarck escaped the British dragnet and approached American waters in the Atlantic: “Suppose the Bismarck showed up in the Caribbean. We have some submarines down there. Suppose we order them to attack her and attempt to sink her? Do you think the people would demand to have me impeached?” The noninterventionists’ fear that Roosevelt was staying awake nights trying to figure a way to get us into the war was not far from the mark in this instance.
Before the USS Badger crew left Yankee Stadium late in the game on May 25 as part of a preparatory scenario in which Roosevelt’s Bismarck pipe dream might be parlayed into reality, a future navy cadet and fighter pilot, Ted Williams, led Boston’s onslaught against the Yankees with four hits: three singles and a double. DiMaggio countered with a single to center on his first at bat against 41-year-old Lefty Grove to keep the streak intact at 11. By giving up a hit to DiMaggio, Grove participated unwillingly in two of baseball’s most famous hitting records; he had also given up a home run to Babe Ruth on September 27, 1927, during Ruth’s 60-home-run season. One other veteran pitcher later in the streak earned the same dubious distinction of gophering Ruth in ’27 and sustaining DiMaggio in ’41. His name will turn up on July 13.
Ted Williams wrote of this day’s game at some length in his autobiography. Most teams in the American League adjusted their infields clockwise—though not yet to the extent of the 1946 Lou Boudreau shift—when Williams came to the plate, since he was a dead pull hitter. But Yankee manager Joe McCarthy did not like to wrench his players too far out of the normal alignment. Needless to say, Williams put all four of his hits between Sturm at first and Gordon at second. His double not only found that slot but continued in the outfield past a startled Henrich, who ought to have been positioned to play it on a hop. Sturm remembers the double in particular because he claims that neither he nor Gordon picked it up off the bat from the white-shirted background of the box seats. When he got back to the dugout, McCarthy was all over his infielders: “Christ, you could at least wave at it.” Years later Williams remained puzzled by Yankee defensive strategy, wondering “why they didn’t pull the shift on me that day.” His wonderment is slightly anachronistic, yet his four-hit binge brought him to a league-leading .404; his game-for-game matchup during the streak now had him at .488 (21 for 43) and DiMaggio at .341 (15 for 44).
New York’s baseball writers continued tracking Johnny Sturm’s streak at 9 without noting that DiMaggio’s was at 11. They were, however, on top of another set of numbers. This day’s win put Lefty Grove on flight approach toward his goal of 300 major league victories: 296 down and 4 to go. As the weather heated up and his old dehydrated bones took the brunt of it—the man still threw hard and needed reserves of energy—wins were few and far between. But Grove wouldn’t call it a career until he hit his milestone. He began as a rookie with the Philadelphia A’s in 1925 and came to Boston in 1934. From 1927 to 1933 he won at least 20 games a year, including a remarkable 31–4 in 1931. During one 4-year stretch beginning in 1928, Grove had a winning percentage of .817 (103 and 23).
Another great Red Sox veteran whose career after 1941 had only a couple of sputtering years left, Jimmie Foxx, found the game this day a more troubling effort than had Lefty Grove. Foxx was playing third for the injured Jim Tabor, and during the Yankee fourth he fumbled a DiMaggio grounder for one error and then dropped a Charlie Keller pop fly in foul territory for another. With two men on and Keller given another life, “Don’t Call Me Kong” stroked one into the nether regions of Yankee Stadium 457 feet away in left center for an inside-the-park home run. This was the second inside-the-parker for Keller in the last 10 games. Wearying of this unusual sort of home run, he would begin hitting grand slams in a few days. When I recently asked Keller how fast he was in comparison to the Yankee rookie Rizzuto and the Yankee Clipper, DiMaggio, Keller said, “I could beat both of ’em.”
Keller generated a special kind of awe among many baseball writers of 1941, the kind associated with Williams, DiMaggio, and Greenberg. The writers thought him capable, with his power and speed, of hitting .350 every year if he weren’t subject to horrendous slumps. All hitters are streak hitters after one fashion or another, but Keller could streak and fade with the best of them. He complained about this recently and blamed the Yankee front office: “I used the whole field before 1940, and then I was asked to pull the ball. Before that I never had a real slump.” With Keller’s enormous strength and the Yankee left-handed power tradition, it’s not altogether unreasonable that the brass would request that he concentrate his attention on the right field porch.
Cleveland still led in the American League by 41/2 games over the White Sox, but the Yankees had at least stabilized at 7 games back. The Indians were working on a five-game win streak. Bobby Feller won his ninth of the year on May 25, shutting out the Browns and striking out 13. Their right fielder, Jeff Heath, father of the Tigers’ Mike Heath playing today, blasted one into the upper deck of the massive Municipal Stadium in Cleveland on May 25, the first player ever to perform this Herculean feat.
Across town in New York, this was a big day for Brooklyn. Not only had their 22-year-old star, Pete Reiser, belted a grand slam home run to beat the Phillies 8–4, but the former semipro ballplayer turned composer, Robert Russell Bennett, premiered his Symphony in D for the Dodgers on radio. The musical extravaganza opened with a stirring fanfare (“The Dodgers Win”) and continued with a pathetic dirge (“The Dodgers Lose”), a scherzo of bassoon bleats (Dodger prexy Larry McPhail offering Cleveland the Brooklyn Bridge for pitcher Bob Feller), a series of thudding minor chords (signifying no answer from the Indians), and a rousing finale replicating the sounds of Red Barber thrilling to a last-ditch ninth inning rally to beat the hated Giants as Dolf Camilli blasted an imaginary home run off Carl Hubbell. These were indeed radio days.
GAME 12: May 27
The Yankees had no league game on May 26 and stopped in Norfolk, Virginia, for an exhibition game with their farm club on their way to play the Washington Senators in D.C. Lefty Gomez and Charlie Keller skipped the game and headed straight for the capital, but DiMaggio played in the exhibition, making two fine running catches in center, walking, and scoring a run before popping out twice, to third and short center. He left the game in the seventh as Tommy Henrich moved over to center field to replace him. A purist’s question: What southpaw pitcher held DiMaggio hitless for the whole game in the middle of his record 56 straight in 1941? Answer: Jimmy Halperin of the Norfolk Tars.
The Yankees broke open a 2–2 tie against their farm team by batting around in the seventh inning and scoring four runs. Phil Rizzuto, very popular in Norfolk from his s
tint there as a minor leaguer, did most of the damage with a two-run double as New York ended up winning 7–4. Rizzuto was the toast of the town, along with local revel master Genial Gus (“Hotfoot”) Meloni, who escorted the Yankee shortstop right up to the dock where the team boarded a steamer for a leisurely voyage up Chesapeake Bay to Washington, D.C.
While the Yankees were on exhibition in Norfolk, up the eastern seaboard in New Jersey another kind of exercise was the order of the day or, better, of the early morning. At 12:15 A.M., Newark city officials, in cooperation with National Defense Forces, attempted a total blackout as a trial run for similar procedures in case of air attack. This had little significance in itself except in juxtaposition with another event that provides insight into the tone and temper of America in spring 1941. A man named John Cudahy, a friend of Charles Lindbergh and a former ambassador to Belgium, had recently gotten a solemn promise from Hitler that he wouldn’t bomb American territory. Cudahy wired Time magazine this reassuring news from Europe after a personal interview with the führer at his Bavarian Berghof. Hitler wanted to inform the American people that he had nothing but the best intentions toward them and would never even think of an aerial assault in this hemisphere. Cudahy longed to get his interview, prepared for a larger feature in Life magazine, printed quickly to counter Roosevelt’s major foreign policy address scheduled for this day, but Time refused. The editors stalled him partly because they did not want to serve as an uncritical conduit for Hitler’s messages to the American people, especially messages delivered through the obliging mediation of a staunch isolationist. Cudahy was furious; he joined many of his compatriots in blaming the media, with some reason, for stifling their views.
When the Yankee ship steamed up the Chesapeake into Washington, the capital was abuzz with rumors about the President’s talk that night. Something big was about to break. But first DiMaggio broke loose in grand fashion himself at Griffith Stadium in the afternoon game. He had four hits—three singles and a three-run homer smashed 425 feet to left—in the Yankees’ 10–8 win over the Senators. Sturm, Crosetti, and Joe Gordon chipped in with three hits each in the New York rampage. Sturm had now hit in 10 straight, Crosetti in 9. DiMaggio’s streak, almost 2 weeks old, continued to go unnoticed, though Dan Daniel in the New York World-Telegram first marked Crosetti’s in addition to Sturm’s, which he had posted almost daily. The Yankees had a 9–1 lead until a Washington uprising in the sixth, when the Senators sent 10 men to the plate, most of them against Yank ace Red Ruffing, narrowing the gap to 9–6. But Washington couldn’t quite catch up. The report of the game in The New York Times boasted that “Joe DiMaggio’s bat spoke with unmistakable authority today at Griffith Stadium.” When DiMaggio later tried to reconstruct his sense of the progress of the streak around the time of his assault on George Sisler’s modern-day record of 41 straight, he remembered this game but got it confused with another nearer the beginning of the season against the Senators in which he also had gotten four hits. The day-by-day pressure of the streak was not yet significant enough for DiMaggio to recall which of his early games fell inside its perimeters and which outside.
Shortly after the day’s game ended, Franklin Roosevelt spoke to the entire world. Estimates of between 50 million and 85 million people listened to Roosevelt’s address that evening on radio, including the New York Giants and the Boston Braves in the middle of the first night game of the year at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan. The game was halted for 45 minutes as Roosevelt’s speech was relayed over the loudspeakers. Translated into 15 languages, the President’s speech rallied the western hemisphere to its core. Addressing his words to “steelworker or stevedore, barber or banker,” Roosevelt mustered all the moral conviction and sentiment he had stored in him for England’s cause and for its plight. The bravery of that lonely nation characterized the passion of the address as Roosevelt hammered at the economic and political realities of the war. We required open sea-lanes and a free Europe for our nation to prosper, and we had no way of competing with a major industrial German nation if the Nazis enslaved the populations of Europe, controlled the Atlantic, and threatened England with annihilation.
For the President, there was no negotiating out of this war. Roosevelt ridiculed those seeking such a course, thinking, without saying so, of Hess and Lindbergh. And he openly challenged the Germans in the sea-lanes of the western world by playing on a historic tactic in American policy: He extended his notion of the boundaries of America to an almost complete Atlantic sphere of influence from Greenland to the Cape Verde Islands. We would defend the seas as we defended our borders: “When your enemy comes at you in a tank or a bombing plane, if you hold your fire until you see the whites of his eyes, you will never know what hit you. Our Bunker Hill of tomorrow may be several thousand miles from Boston.” In what came to be known as his “unlimited emergency” speech, Roosevelt echoed the energy of his attack a decade before on the great depression: “We must not be defeated by the fear of the very danger which we are preparing to resist.” If this phrase sounded familiar, Roosevelt made the connection implicit by rounding out his speech with his famous depression rallying cry, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Roosevelt’s broadcast could not have come at a better time for the British. His Majesty’s Royal Navy on May 27 had put the pride of the German fleet, the Bismarck, to the bottom of the sea. After a week of tracking and a relentless pursuit across 3,000 miles of open ocean, a combined British naval force of six battleships, two aircraft carriers, four 8-inch-gun cruisers, seven other cruisers, and 21 destroyers converged on the lone and limping Bismarck. The German ship was hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic south of Ireland and far east of her destination, the port of Brest in Vichy France.
The day before, May 26, an American-built Consolidator Aircraft scout plane with an American copilot had sighted the Bismarck in the morning, and the British launched an aerial torpedo attack from the newly arrived carrier Ark Royal. By nightfall at least one torpedo had scored a direct hit, damaging the giant ship’s steering device. When the British first saw the Bismarck turn north, they assumed it was making a run back to the Baltic, but in reality the ship was fated to sail in maddening, unalterable circles. British intelligence decoded a signal from the Bismarck during the night from its commander, Captain Lütjens: “Urgent. Ship unmaneuverable. We shall fight to the last shell. Long live the führer.”
British destroyers moved in during the night, and the Bismarck, in another wartime first, began firing radar-controlled torpedoes. But by morning, the big British ships, the Rodney and the King George V, had arrived, joined by dozens of others in a massive flotilla. The British ships fired at a range of 7,000 yards, and then the Rodney moved in to fire at point-blank range of 3,000 yards. The Bismarck was helpless, its guns silenced and fires raging on all its decks. A smaller ship, the Dorsetshire, sank the German battleship at 10:40 A.M. on the morning of May 27. Lloyds of London rang its historic bell on this day upon news of the Bismarck’s fate. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the company rang the bell only when ships insured by Lloyds were lost at sea. How fitting that they chose to ring it on May 27 in jubilation at the sinking of a ship decidedly without a Lloyds of London policy.
In a final American footnote to the Bismarck sinking, an 86-year-old retired rear admiral, Bradley A. Fiske of the U.S. Navy, claimed credit for the weapon that had led to the German battleship’s demise. Back in 1912 Fiske had taken out a patent on a torpedo device launched from an airplane and offered it to the Navy. They had shown no interest, claiming the torpedo would be wildly inaccurate if dropped from a plane. The British Navy listened more favorably to Fiske, and nearly three decades later an advanced version of his patented product did a nifty piece of work against the deadliest ship in the German fleet.
The celebration in London over the sinking of the Bismarck was unrestrained; symbolically the naval victory meant dominance in the Atlantic. There was nothing left to celebrate for the British on Crete,
however. On the afternoon of May 27, the commander of the middle east for the British, General Wavell, issued orders to abandon the island after receiving a telegram from its commanding officer, Brigadier General Freyburg: “Crete no longer tenable.” The weary commander called it the worst day of the war. A frustrated Hitler couldn’t understand why it had taken so long. He cabled his own commanding general, Kurt Student: “France fell in eight days. Why is Crete still resisting?” Meanwhile Churchill was still writing his regimental commanders on Crete to reinforce and hold. Such a thorough misapprehension on Churchill’s part could only mean that he had been lied to egregiously for months about the degree of preparation for the island’s defense. As the battle for Crete entered its mop-up phase, the British managed to get about 11,000 men off the island by ship, the Italians landed on eastern Crete to secure positions the Germans had taken days before, and the Australian forces, which had fought best, hardest, and most successfully against the initial shock of the invasion, were captured almost to a man by the advancing Germans.
GAME 13: May 28
The Yankees and Senators played the first night baseball game in the history of Griffith Stadium on May 28, but another first made the game historic. For the first time a sportswriter noticed DiMaggio’s daily performance as contributing to a sustained hitting streak. Dan Daniel was out of town traveling with the Yankees, and he was making something of a feature out of Johnny Sturm’s daily hits in his columns. When on the road, Daniel would submit game accounts back to his home paper, the New York World-Telegram, under the anonymous tag “special to.” With Daniel’s daily column appearing side by side with the day’s report on the ball game, the paper obviously did not wish its readers to think that Daniel wore every hat in the shop. But the “special to” correspondent and Daniel were one and the same: “Last night’s battle saw all three hitting streaks on the Yankees continued. DiMaggio hit in his thirteenth consecutive contest. Sturm in his eleventh and Crosetti in his tenth.” It may have sounded as if Daniel had been tracking all three for days. He hadn’t. In fact, he even stopped noting the streak games for a couple of days after Sturm’s parallel effort collapsed; Daniel’s real interest was in the rookie. He would pick up DiMaggio’s sequence again in Cleveland.