Streak

by Seidel, Michael; Siegel, George ;

  Red Ruffing smashed yet another pinch hit in the ninth, to no avail for the Yankees. If there were such a thing as a record for pinch hits achieved by a teammate during a 56-game hitting streak, the amazing Ruffing would certainly hold it. In 1941 he ended up with a .400 pinch-hitting average and a .303 season’s average. For his career he had 58 pinch hits. Ruffing played 22 years with the Red Sox, Yanks, and White Sox and racked up a healthy .269 lifetime batting average. More significantly, in 7 of those years he hit over .300. Only such old-timers as pitcher-infielder Doc Crandall (.285 lifetime), Carl Mays (.268 lifetime), Ruffing’s contemporary Schoolboy Rowe (.263 lifetime), and Don Newcombe (.271 lifetime) approached the skill of Ruffing as a hitting pitcher. Babe Ruth’s .320 average in his 3 full-time pitching years for the Red Sox belongs in a somewhat different category.

  On the night of June 18 in New York, promoters expected a gate of 40,000 for the Louis-Conn championship fight, but 58,487 fans jammed the Polo Grounds for the nighttime spectacle. Lefty Gomez and Joe DiMaggio were among the throng, and fight fans went slightly berserk at the sight of the great Yankee as he moved to his seat. DiMaggio got a rousing ovation without hitting anything that evening. The New York Giants, whose absence from town had freed the Polo Grounds, found themselves preempted by the fight at the very stadium they had vacated. Their game under the lights at Pittsburgh was held up while Don Dunphy’s radio broadcast of the bout played over the loudspeakers. For the Giants this was the second time in 3 weeks a broadcast had interrupted their play; they were also on the field May 27 when their night game at the Polo Grounds was delayed by the broadcast of Roosevelt’s “unlimited emergency” speech. Giant manager Bill Terry was more than willing to listen to the President during the ball game but balked at listening to Don Dunphy. His protests, however, fell on the deaf, or preoccupied, ears of the Pittsburgh Pirate front office.

  From the opening round to the extraordinary conclusion in the thirteenth, the championship fight proved a spellbinding, classical, brilliant effort. Billy Conn began with a burst of embarrassing energy—he slipped untouched to the canvas shortly after the bell sounded to begin round 1. At first Conn appeared tentative, but through the middle rounds his confidence increased. His speed enabled him to move inside and crash Louis with accurate hooks and crosses before the champ could open up. Conn, with his hands held unusually high, then danced backward and clockwise, away from Louis’s left.

  Louis circled after him with the monotony of a second hand, but Conn consistently beat the champ to the punch in the middle rounds. And his punches were elegant, stinging, and accurate. By the twelfth round Conn commanded the action. Though his legs were wearying and were rooted more securely to the canvas, he hit Louis harder and more often than Louis hit him, landing one especially devastating hook that buckled the champ and made his eyeballs look as though they were attached to coiled springs.

  By round 13 his corner men told the champ he was behind, as indeed he was on the scorecards of one judge and the referee (the other judge had it even). Conn, having outboxed Louis for 11 rounds and outslugged him in the twelfth, then made a tactical mistake bred from eagerness. Louis had begun a more menacing direct stalk that bore little resemblance to his earlier fruitless circling, and Conn took the bait. He moved in swinging to center ring to meet Louis head-on, but the champ’s punches now reached their target first. Louis threw them short, from the shoulder, generating shock from a powerful, balanced stance. The alternation was textbook: head, midsection, head and hook, uppercut, hook, cross.

  Near the end of the round, Conn seemed exhausted. Louis finally hit him with a right-hand blow square on the chin. Conn stopped and stood dazed in the middle of the ring. The next Louis blow, a left uppercut to the gut, made Conn dance half an Irish jig. A right hand to the side of the head put him away. Conn’s spirit told him to get up, but his flesh just sat there. There were 2 seconds left in the round when the referee counted him out. Conn gave the ref a desperate, helpless look that measured eternities during the unhappy progress of the count.

  Billy Conn this night made Joe Louis work harder than he had on any occasion since he had taken the crown from Jim Braddock 4 years before. And the young challenger certainly earned the tidy $77,202 he took home for getting in the ring with Louis, though nothing in the contract said he had to put up this kind of fight. Louis earned $154,404, and he would need all of it because his wife would soon sue him for divorce, claiming the champ found it easier to land punches with her as the target than he had in the ring with Billy Conn.

  GAME 32: June 19

  On June 19 at the Stadium, Joe DiMaggio faced Chicago lefthander Edgar Smith, the same pitcher against whom he had begun his streak with a single in the first inning on May 15. Now, 32 games later, he greeted Smith with another single in the first inning. The Yankees went on to a 7–2 win. DiMaggio had a perfect day at the plate. He singled in the fifth off Buck Ross, and in the eighth he drove one out of the park for his fourteenth home run of the year. His 3 for 3 began a streak within a streak, a sequence of at bats over two games in which American League pitchers not only couldn’t get him out for an entire game but couldn’t get him out at all.

  The Yankee win, after two losses to the White Sox, came quickly and cleanly this day. Charlie Keller’s grand slam home run in the fourth (he now had two grand slams during DiMaggio’s streak to match his two inside-the-park home runs) virtually sewed up Chicago’s seams. The big blow extended the Yankee home run binge to 15 straight games, the third in a row in which Keller powered the streak. So far DiMaggio led the sweepstakes since the beginning of the sequence on June 1 with 7 home runs; Keller followed with 6, and Henrich with 5. All the White Sox could manage off Marvin Breuer was a skimpy run in the fourth and a home run by Bill Dickey’s brother, Skeets, the rookie’s first in the major leagues.

  Another rookie sensation hit the baseball world on June 19 and signed the largest bonus ever for a raw recruit in the major leagues. The path of gold was roundabout for Dick Wakefield, hot off the University of Michigan campus. Brooklyn got to him first when they were playing the Cubs in Chicago that past week. The Dodgers put the big, dashing fellow in a uniform and had him take his cuts during batting practice. Dodger player-manager Leo Durocher licked his chops. But before Larry MacPhail and Dodger Company could say Jack Robinson (indeed, before they even set sights on Jack Robinson, just out of UCLA early in 1941 and considering, among other things, a pro basketball career), the Detroit Tigers offered Wakefield $45,000. Dick signed. This was exceptional money for the era, and Wakefield was truly the first of the bonus babies.

  Wakefield got in a few games in 1941 for Detroit but enjoyed his best years during the war, when big league pitching left much to be desired. He also gained a special kind of notoriety by being the first major leaguer to face Rip Sewell’s famous eephus pitch in a 1943 exhibition game between Detroit and Pittsburgh in Muncie, Indiana. With two strikes on Wakefield, Al Lopez, catching for the Pirates, signaled for a change-up. Sewell improvised with the high-arching and achingly slow blooper. Wakefield started his swing, readjusted, started again, hitched, and finally went down from the force of his own roundhouse cut. Amid the laughter and the dust, a pitch was born.

  The current issue of the Sporting News bannered a long feature article on Ted Williams and his torrid hitting in May and early June. “Hitting is the biggest thing in my life. I love it. And the next thing I like best is to hunt ducks.” Short of ducks, pigeons would do. The year before he and Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey had gone out to an empty Fenway Park and killed 70 to 80 pigeons with 20-gauge shotguns. The now infamous Dave Winfield adventure with the sea gull in Toronto paled before this incident, which put the Boston Humane Society in deep mourning. Then the society consulted its lawyers.

  Unlike DiMaggio’s classical dignity and restraint, Williams behaved like a kid whose brashness would set him up for abuse all over the American League. Any bench jockey with imagination could get to him. In 1940, during a slump, Ted said in des
pair that maybe he should have been a firefighter like his uncle. From that point, wherever the Red Sox traveled, Williams had to deal with mock sirens, rival players wearing ridiculous-looking children’s fire fighter’s hats, and pleas for assistance during hot-foot sessions in the dugouts. Lefty Gomez got thrown out of one Yankee-Red Sox game by ump Bill Summers after he refused to stop ringing bells from the dugout and shouting “Fire!” whenever Williams appeared to take his cuts at the plate. A .400 hitter has one sure way of responding to all this, and Williams always had his sweet stroke to make up for his rabbit ears.

  When asked in the profile about another part of his game, his marginal work in the Boston outfield, Williams insisted that he was a much better fielder than he was credited for being. In fact, he hadn’t made an error yet this year. The Sporting News correspondent told him that one of his throws had hit a runner for an error in a game on May 28 against the A’s, and Williams retorted: “What kind of scoring is that? Do you mean to tell me they give you an error for hitting a runner with a throw? Gosh, these newspapermen!”

  On June 19 the United States made another crucial move toward funding a war that many throughout the land recognized as imminent. A plan came out of the House Ways and Means Committee that when voted into law later in the summer would change the structure of the income tax system and raise tremendous revenues for defense. In addition to almost doubling the tax obligation of middle-income citizens, the pending bill introduced the marriage tax, the notion that two incomes filed together ought to be more vulnerable than two incomes filed separately. A family earning $5,000 a year would see its tax liability jump from $110 to $308; at $10,000 a year, taxes would leap from $526 to $1,166. An income of $20,000 moved one’s tax liability from $2,336 to $4,338; $50,000 annually, from $14,128 to $20,002; and $100,000, from $43,476 to $53,310. As hefty a rise as the new bill projected, it came nowhere close to wartime England’s tax structure. No one in that beleaguered land was permitted to earn more than £10,000 ($28,000) a year. The exchequer merely siphoned anything in excess of that amount into the war budget.

  At no time during DiMaggio’s streak had the world seemed so aware about what was fated to happen in the war before it actually happened. The “showdown” as The New York Times put it, was near. With Nazi Germany poised on Russia’s borders, it was hard to imagine that Hitler would waste any of his ire against Roosevelt. But June 19 saw another tat in the tit for tat game going on over the last several days regarding Axis-American relations. Berlin announced that all U.S. officials in Axis territory would have just about the same amount of time to pack their belongings and clear out as Roosevelt had given to German consular officials in America. A deep diplomatic freeze set in at home just before a dramatic and massive outbreak of hostility abroad that would kick the entire war into another gear.

  For the 2 years since the German-Soviet treaty of 1939, Hitler and Stalin had parceled out spheres of influence in eastern Europe. Now Hitler wanted his parcel to include Stalin’s. Moreover, he wanted the rich Russian Ukraine region for the Reich’s agricultural and industrial needs, and he wanted Leningrad just for spite. Moscow appeared calm, and there seemed to observers something surreal about the looming invasion. It was simply too enormous to gauge. What might two armies, each 3 million strong, each with air support, each with mobile auxiliaries, do to each other? No one in the world really knew. Hitler’s intercepted and decoded plan, Operation Barbarosa, boasted that he could do fairly much what he wanted to do and could do it in 3 months, before the mud and snows of fall and winter. British intelligence sources came to the same conclusion, only they phrased it differently: Hitler would find himself in deep trouble if he failed to do what he hoped to do in 3 months, and his armies would suffer the same fate in the folds of Mother Russia’s wintery midsection that Napoleon’s had in 1812.

  GAME 33: June 20

  DiMaggio and the Yankees rolled over visiting Detroit at the Stadium on June 20, 14–4, to move within 11/2 games of first place in the American League. That night in New York, an ex-vaudeville comic and former child star in the Pearl White serial, Perils of Pauline, Milton Berle, celebrated his twenty-seventh year in show business. Some names—like Berle’s, Bob Hope’s, and in its way Joe DiMaggio’s—seem always to be around to grace the century. Currently hosting a variety act at the Paramount between movie screenings, Berle and his on-stage shtick became a New York legend that stood him in good stead when television beckoned in the late ’40s and early ’50s.

  The afternoon’s onslaught at the Stadium was vaudevillian in its own right, with the Tiger’s traveling clown, Bobo Newsom, heading the bill. Newsom hated to get hit hard, and he always showed the strain when balls were launched off him. This outing was particularly stressful for Newsom and delightful for Yankee fans. Tommy Henrich began the action in the first by driving one out with Johnny Sturm on base. The blast, whose parabolic flight over the right field fence Newsom balefully tracked, continued the Yankee home run streak, now at 16 games. DiMaggio followed with a single and an equally quick resolution of his hitting streak at 33 games. Charlie Keller then drove in DiMaggio with a mighty home run blast 430 feet to right center. He had been unstoppable in his last several games. Newsom looked ready to enlist in the Army on the spot and join his teammate Hank Greenberg at Camp Custer, Michigan.

  Before either Newsom or McKain in relief could get DiMaggio out this day, he ripped four hits—three singles and a double—in four at bats. Counting his perfect day the previous game against the White Sox, DiMaggio had now chalked up seven straight hits, the last two coming in one inning, the fifth, as the Yankees sent 11 men to the plate and scored seven times. DiMaggio also enjoyed an interesting day in the outfield. Though his feet slipped out from under him as he manhandled Paddy Mullim’s single in the first for an error, later in the game he made one of his best defensive plays during the streak. He glided, as only he could do, through the seemingly endless reaches of Yankee Stadium’s center field to snare Rudy York’s monumental drive some 450 feet from home plate.

  DiMaggio still recalls this day as the first when he thought seriously about a shot at the major league streak record, which he assumed was Sisler’s 41 straight. No one remembered anything at this point about Keeler’s 44. Up till now DiMaggio had been aware of the streak but hadn’t measured it against his own 61-game record with San Francisco in 1933 or against Sisler’s modern-day major league record. After he passed both Sisler and Keeler, he would tell Dan Daniel: “I didn’t get warm about this thing until the 33rd game. You may remember I got three singles and a double off Newsom and McKain. I hadn’t made four hits in a game since the 12th against the Senators.” This was DiMaggio’s only detailed comparative assessment of his progress, and he made a mistake of over 2 weeks in recalling the four-hit day against the Senators. (Daniel put the correct date in brackets: not 3 days before the streak on May 12 but 12 days into it on May 27.) The error simply suggests that DiMaggio’s substantial point was correct: He hadn’t begun projecting beyond the day-by-day growth of the streak until the thirty-third game, when he felt so good that it seemed as if he might hit in 56 straight at bats.

  DiMaggio’s seven hits in a row brought his season’s batting average up to .354 and placed him in the top five batters in the American League for the first time since the streak had begun. His average since May 15 soared to .395. In his next game he could set his short-range sights on George McQuinn’s 34 straight for the Browns in 1938. Ted Williams still led the league at .420, and his .456 average during the span of DiMaggio’s streak, even including another “ofer” on June 18 against Schoolboy Rowe and the Tigers, topped the Yankee center fielder by over 60 points.

  Chicago White Sox right-hander John Rigney showed up at his Army induction physical at 7 A.M. on the morning of June 20. Before he left the medical offices, a team of four doctors consulted on his case for an hour. Rigney’s own doctor claimed he had a punctured eardrum, and the Army doctors reluctantly agreed, declaring him unfit for service. The Wh
ite Sox told Rigney to hop a plane and join them in Philadelphia. Rigney made no secret of the fact that given a choice of boot camp or Philadelphia, he’d rather be in Philadelphia. Big John enlisted in the service on his own after the 1942 season at a time when both he and the doctors were less punctilious about punctures.

  On June 20 Roosevelt demanded what he knew he would not get: reparations from the Nazis for the sinking of the Robin Moor. This was a legal maneuver so that he could publicly call Germany an outlaw nation, which is precisely what he did. The term “outlaw” was well chosen. There were precedents in U.S. history when we did not wish to declare war formally but did wish to behave as if we were at war. Outlaw activity was often the specific charge and excuse. Obviously, Roosevelt wanted Germany to think we were on the verge of arming convoys to Great Britain, though he meant his remarks to justify what he had already agreed to do in Iceland: send troops and ships. The President also decided to wipe the Axis slate clean and boot the Italians out of their U.S. consulates as he had done to the Germans. The wife of our ambassador to Italy protested this day that Roosevelt misunderstood the Italians. There was no nation that Italy detested more than Germany and no national leader whom they held in greater contempt than Hitler. Italians may well have felt this way, but public broadcasts to that effect were rare in fascist Italy.

  A disaster that could not be laid directly at the feet or down the torpedo tubes of the German Navy took place in the coastal waters off Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on June 20. An American sub with the inglorious name of 0–9 sank to a depth of 400 feet and was crushed like an eggshell with 33 sailors aboard. Because of the pressure at that depth, divers could not descend to the wreck to determine the cause of the disaster or even recover the bodies. In the protowar we were angling for and to some extent suffering from in the Atlantic, there were times when an accident was just an accident. In this instance sabotage was considered highly unlikely.