Streak

by Seidel, Michael; Siegel, George ;

  Circumstances were far happier for the Yankees in the American League. In their last three actual playing dates (four games), the Yankees and Indians had drawn over 146,000 fans. This day’s 3–2 win for the Yanks, their seventh in a row, placed them just two games behind Cleveland for first place. The Yankees managed the win against the same two Indian pitchers, Al Smith and Jim Bagby, who would appear in reverse order in a game on July 17 that would have a different outcome for DiMaggio. But the Yankee center fielder settled matters early this time when in the third inning he belted a Jim Bagby pitch into the upper tier of the left field balcony for his thirteenth home run of the year. The long blow extended both the hitting streak to 28 and the team home run streak to 11. It put DiMaggio in position to tie the Peckinpaugh and Combs streak record the next day.

  Red Ruffing breezed along with a three-run lead until the Indians put together a rally in the eighth that stalled after two runs. The Yankees held on to win. A souvenir hunter grabbed DiMaggio’s streak bat after the day’s game and headed for open spaces, but DiMaggio loped after him and wrested it back. Now that the streak had gone public, the public felt it had the right to help itself to bits and parts of the streak. DiMaggio would be plagued by equipment thieves from here on, though few of the pirated goods stayed pirated for long.

  The New York Daily News contacted George Sisler in St. Louis on June 15 because its baseball correspondents sensed that DiMaggio might be making a run at the modern major league hitting streak record that Sisler had set at 41 in 1922. No one had begun dusting off the 1897 records for Wee Willie Keeler’s 44 yet. Sisler told the Daily News: “You can’t imagine the strain. The newspapers keep mentioning the streak. Your teammates continually bring it up. You try to forget but it can’t be done. It’s in your head every time you step to the plate.” Sisler said that Ty Cobb, who had had a 40-game streak in 1911, had done all he could as manager of the Tigers to keep Sisler in check when he neared 40 straight in 1922. Unfortunately for Cobb, Sisler came into Detroit red hot, and despite Cobb’s long meetings with his pitching staff before the game, he fed gloriously on Tiger hurlers. “Cobb was blazing mad. I don’t know what he said to his pitchers and I don’t want to know.”

  In American League action on June 15, Ted Williams, with a spurt of 7 hits in 11 at bats against the Chicago White Sox, raised his league-leading average to .425. Another famous left-handed hitter, Babe Herman, was also leading a league this day at .412, but not a major league. The colorful ex-Dodger, who had broken in with Brooklyn in 1926, was playing for the minor league Hollywood Stars at the age of 38. The Stars’ management cabled Larry MacPhail of the Dodgers and asked if he wanted another crack at the Babe’s contract, insofar as the Stars would be happy to garner the premium befitting the Pacific Coast League’s leading hitter. MacPhail cabled back that he would let the Stars know if he wanted Herman for a couple of innings on the day the old-timers game rolled around at Ebbets Field. Ironically, World War II would give the Babe his revenge; Herman got one more whack at the majors in 1945, when at the age of 42 he played in 37 games for Brooklyn and hit .265.

  There was a wonderfully zany episode in the second game of a doubleheader between the Cubs and Phillies at Wrigley Field this Sunday. Johnny Podgajny was on the mound for the Phils. After he served up a triple and two singles in the fourth, the third baseman, Pinky May, came over and urged, “Don’t give up.” Podgajny was so furious he stalked May back to third and popped him one on the nose. Umpire Larry Goetz had to break up the ruckus between the two Phillies. Podgajny got back on the mound, didn’t give up, and won the ball game 8–4. Pinky May played the rest of the game nursing his nose and his dignity but keeping all inspirational comments to himself.

  The war crept closer and loomed larger in mid-June. Hitler and Stalin had by now massed over 100 divisions along the eastern Russian border, and these nations were still nominally allies. On the other side of the world in Hawaii on June 15, civil defense planners announced that they were building a huge air raid shelter on Oahu that would cost nearly a million dollars and that might be ready, if construction stayed on schedule, by January 1942. Even on schedule, the timing would prove just a touch off. But Roosevelt had more immediate concerns on June 15. He secretly gave the order for a plan he and Churchill had been conjuring for weeks, America’s first overt military action in the Atlantic. The President would send Marines and part of the Atlantic fleet to Iceland to release British forces, currently protecting crucial Icelandic waters, for more direct action against the Nazis. By law Roosevelt could not send draftees for this duty, nor could he send even a tugboat until the Icelandic government requested it of him. But the British were working on the appropriate Icelandic officials. These moves so far were top secret; when the isolationists in America found out, the roar would be heard from the Azores to the Golden Gate.

  A week had now passed since Roosevelt had ordered the Army out against the renegade strikers at North American Aviation, and some in the CIO began to reconsider their hasty support of the President at the expense of union workers. Philip Murray, president of the CIO, while he had not stood with the renegade strikes of the previous week, commented that traditional antilabor groups in the nation were using Roosevelt’s defense emergency speech to confuse the distinction between fair wages and defense priorities. Murray begged for national sanity in these matters, whereby every threatened or actual strike would not be labeled traitorous, communist, or profascist. Roosevelt assured him that big business was on line for some sacrificing as well before the summer was out, perhaps a 50 percent cut in auto production or, even worse, gas rationing. When the Chrysler Corporation, less obligated to the national government in 1941 than in subsequent years, caught wind of these possibilities, there was hell to pay. The scrap between Chrysler Motors and the Roosevelt administration would prove one of the more colorful and abusive of the summer.

  GAME 29: June 16

  At the same time that the Nazi command in Berlin admitted on June 16 that they had sunk the Robin Moor because it carried contraband war matériel, news reached the United States that the remaining lifeboats were sighted and all survivors rescued after weeks at sea. A British steamer, the Wellington, sailing in the waters off Brazil, spotted the three lifeboats with everyone still in them and everyone still alive. The sighting had occurred on June 13, but the Wellington, for its own safety, could not radio until arriving in Capetown, South Africa, on June 16. The chief officer of the Robin Moor, Melvin Munday, filled in some of the details of the raid.

  Munday had come to deck of his ship in his pajamas the morning of May 21 when a crew member told him they were being signaled by a German submarine. The chief officer quickly put on his trousers and took one of his vessel’s lifeboats to row to the surfaced U-boat. The German captain told him that the cargo on the Robin Moor was intended for the Reich’s enemies and that in a half hour the Germans would send the freighter to the bottom of the sea. Munday claimed this was an outrage but rowed back and delivered the doleful information to the passengers and crew. Then he launched the ship’s three other lifeboats. The U-boat captain torpedoed the abandoned Robin Moor, and the freighter’s crew and passengers, 35 unlikely adventurers, began a 2-week odyssey in the open seas of the Atlantic.

  On one of the lifeboats was a 2-year-old child, Robin McCullogh, who behaved through the entire ordeal like an old salt. The tot became extremely fond of the hardtack rations, not exactly the favorite fare of the drifting adults, and entertained himself all day by looking at the pretty fishes (sharks) circling the boat. After 5 days at sea, one of the lifeboats (the one that had been discovered a few days before) separated from the rest. The three remaining boats stuck together during the searing heat of many days, the anxiety of many nights, and the ordeal of several storms with waves up to 13 feet. As the survivors pulled into Capetown on the Wellington after 26 days adrift at sea, they were received as war victims and celebrated as heroes and heroines. One opposition paper, however, Die Burger, whose leanings were di
stinctly pro-German, reacted to all the fuss in South Africa with the headline “TORPEDOED WITH GREAT GENTLEMANLINESS.”

  For his part, Roosevelt was not about to let the Germans off easy for the Robin Moor sinking, rescued survivors or no. He continued his provocative retaliations by ordering all German consulates and travel bureaus in America shut down. Those staffing the offices were ordered out of the country by July 10. We were very close to breaking diplomatic relations with the Axis powers, and for Roosevelt the issue of the Robin Moor was intimately related to our convoy policy, which was solidifying in his own mind as he contemplated more moves in defense of the Atlantic sea-lanes from Nova Scotia to Greenland to Ireland.

  At the Stadium on June 16, Joe DiMaggio went after the Yankee individual hitting streak record. After a rain delay of an hour and a half, he came to the plate hitless in the fifth inning. With the crowd screaming its support, southpaw Al Milnar served him one and DiMaggio smashed it to left for a double, tying the Yank record at 29 straight. Roger Peckinpaugh had reached 29 in 1919, the season of the infamous Black Sox; Earl Combs, also in the ball park this day as the Yankee first base coach, had done it in 1931. In the fourth inning, before the rains, Joe Gordon hit one 420 feet to left and out of the park with Buddy Rosar on base to extend the Yankee consecutive-game home run streak to 12.

  The Indians actually gave the game away on June 16. Lou Boudreau muffed a ball at short in the eighth, setting up a bases-loaded Bill Dickey pinch hit, and Ray Mack’s error at second set up another run as the Yankees came from behind to win 6–4. The Yankee shortstop, Frankie Crosetti, had his right middle finger severely spiked on a Hal Trosky slide, and Phil Rizzuto, riding the bench since the day after DiMaggio’s hitting streak began, came in to replace the veteran. In his column Dan Daniel predicted that “the Flea will not allow Frankie to reclaim the job for the rest of the season.” Daniel was right, just as he had been right in his prediction that DiMaggio would break out of his slump back on May 15, the first day of the streak. Rizzuto returned to the lineup hot; he would never relinquish his position at short to Crosetti again, except during the war, when he served in the Navy.

  There was an unusual play in the Indians’ half of the fifth inning. Cleveland had two on and none out when their first baseman, Trosky, hit a short fly to Tommy Henrich in right. With the runners staying close to their respective bases, Henrich dropped the fly intentionally, hoping to fire to second for a force-out and then, with a relay to third, another tag for a double play. But Jeff Heath on second saw what Henrich had in mind and took off for third. The umps, of course, also saw Henrich’s maneuver and immediately signaled an intentional drop, which had been established to prevent just such chicanery. The batter, Trosky, was automatically out; the runners could try to advance only at their own risk. Jeff Heath, moving off base, never did arrive at third, so Henrich’s crafty play, just invalidated by the umpires as a force-out, became a tag out on Heath. Henrich had his double play. Heath took a seat on the bench, and the Yankees had a laugh, something they were well able to do after this Cleveland series, unlike a month before, when Cleveland had blown them away in New York. On that occasion the Yankees had been in despair, Joe McCarthy in a slow burn, and Joe DiMaggio unable to buy a hit from the peanut vendor. This time, the Yankees, by beating Cleveland, won their eighth in a row, swept the three-game set, and sent Peckinpaugh’s Indians out of town with but a one-game hold on first place—they had entered New York with a four-game lead. Moreover, Peckinpaugh left the city when DiMaggio was about to wipe him off the books as holder and then coholder for 22 years of the Yankee hitting streak record. As Dizzy Dean was wont to say, Peckinpaugh “shoulda stood in bed.”

  GAME 30: June 17

  The Chicago White Sox, the team against which DiMaggio had begun the streak at the Stadium, revisited New York for a return engagement. When DiMaggio grounded a ball to Luke Appling late in the game—the seventh inning—it took a horrible hop and bounced off the Chicago shortstop’s shoulder, enabling DiMaggio to set the all-time Yankee hitting streak record at 30 straight. There was no way Appling could field the ball. The day’s game was a close one until the Chicago half of the seventh, when the White Sox broke it open with four against Yankee rookie Steve Peek. John Rigney, nearing his scheduled Army induction day set for June 20, pitched for Chicago.

  The Yankees almost came back, picking up three in the seventh and going for more when Johnny Sturm got caught in a rundown between first and second. Rizzuto broke for the plate from third, hoping the Sox would concentrate on Sturm. They didn’t. Catcher Mike Tresh got the relay and put the tag on Rizzuto to end the inning. In the eighth, Keller tied the game with a monstrous home run into the upper tier in right field to extend the Yankee home run streak to 13 games, and the Yankees might have been able to score before the Keller drive had not White Sox right fielder, Taft Wright, made a brilliant catch of a DiMaggio line smash heading over the low barrier at the fence. A ninth inning rally on a bloop single by former Yankee Myril Hoag led to a White Sox victory, 8–7, stopping the Yankee winning streak at 8.

  As World War II approached a momentous day and a momentous action along a second European front, the scale of which would put everything before it in a new perspective, Roosevelt continued to grind what few Axis interests remained in America into finer and finer dust. On June 17 he placed all German aliens in America under a kind of house arrest—they couldn’t come and they couldn’t go. But on this same day another new policy emerged from the White House, one that had devastating implications for the Jewish populations under German domination. The United States would accept no more Germans or German Jews if they still had family in Nazi-dominated areas of Europe. Ostensibly such admissions would pose a threat to America because of pressure the Nazis could exert on family members still living in German-occupied lands, but there were also tactical and cynical reasons. Some in the State Department worried that saboteurs and agents would slip into America disguised as refugees; others were alarmed at a new Jewish diaspora to American shores. As was the case in much of the western world in the early ’40s, denial of the Jewish problem played as powerful a role as outrage at the German “solution” to it.

  Roosevelt’s refugee limitation had a disheartening and chilling effect on groups in America and in Europe working at extreme risk to their lives to move Jews out of Germany and German-controlled lands. A story in The New York Times this day told of the separation of one young Jewish girl from her family in 1939 and plotted her pathetic journey from country to country as she awaited entry into the United States via Portugal. She, like tens of thousands of others not exterminated by the Nazis, would now become citizens of a confused state of international limbo for the duration of the war.

  Excitement began to build in New York City for the next day’s heavyweight championship fight between Joe Louis and a converted light heavyweight, Billy Conn. By most accounts except Conn’s, Louis figured to have an easy time of it. The fighters were well primed. Louis was 27 and Conn 23; the champ weighed in at 200 pounds, Conn at 175. Conn, who had been talking a terrific fight all week, insisted his speed would win it for him, but Louis looked as though he could put out Con Ed’s lights, let alone Billy Conn’s, with either hand. Conn added some spice to the act just before the fight by applying for a license to marry Mary Louise Smith, 18-year-old daughter of the former outfielder for the Cincinnati Reds and New York Giants, Jimmie Smith. Mary Louise’s father declared himself dead set against his daughter’s marriage. He said he would punch hell out of Conn if the fighter kept hanging around his kid, but he wished Billy well in his fight with Louis.

  GAME 31: June 18

  With the Polo Grounds across the river from Yankee Stadium receiving its final fitting out on June 18 for what turned out to be one of the finest heavyweight championship fights of the century, DiMaggio and the Yankees were only a preliminary to a New York City main event. Another prelim of sorts took place across the Hudson River in Newark. Ten Italian nationals were on trial for
blowing up their freighter, the Aussa, after federal officials had impounded it earlier that spring in American waters. All were judged guilty, and as the convicted crew members marched out of court stone-faced, the owner of the former Aussa stood up and roused his crew to patriotic outbursts and fascist salutes in honor of Mussolini. The freak show appalled the spectators milling about, who hooted and jeered in return. Court officials acted with dispatch before they had a prelude to the Anzio beachhead on their hands.

  At the Stadium, DiMaggio extended his hitting streak to 31 straight that afternoon with considerably more ease than Louis would display extending his title defense streak to 18 that night. Once again DiMaggio continued at the expense of Luke Appling, who could barely get his glove on a blooplike fluffer beyond short. It was senseless for Appling to throw to first since DiMaggio was already past the bag when he picked up the ball. For his part, DiMaggio helped the White Sox score their first run of the game they eventually won 3–2 when he overran a Luke Appling second inning fly to left center and saw the ball drop embarrassingly behind him. These two great ballplayers were helping each other out, or helping each other on, with consistency during the days of DiMaggio’s streak.

  Charlie Keller’s two-run homer against Chicago lefty Thornton Lee in the second put the lid on the Yankee scoring for the day but kept the consecutive-game home run streak alive at 14. The Yankees were chasing the major league record of 17 straight home run games set the previous year during the Detroit Tigers’ run for the 1940 pennant. Chicago moved ahead in this day’s game when in the eighth Phil Rizzuto tried to get Joe Kuhel at third after fielding Myril Hoag’s grounder. The entire Yankee bench, along with Rizzuto and Rolfe, swore they had nabbed Kuhel, but the umpire thought otherwise. Kuhel, who later became famous for his outburst when fired as manager of the Washington Senators—“You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken feathers”—then scored on a single. Hoag soon crossed the plate on Skeets Dickey’s sacrifice fly. Young Skeets was Bill Dickey’s brother.