Painting the Corners Again

by Weintraub, Bob;

  DiMaggio reacted just as you’d expect, in that low key way of his, not getting excited at all. “Thanks, Dan. It’s been great being a Yankee since I came up. I’ll miss the guys and the city, but everything will work itself out. I’m going back to sleep. Good night.” That was it and he hung up the phone.

  At about ten o’clock the next morning, Yawkey finished the cheese omelette he made for himself and washed it down with his third cup of black coffee. He had a slight recollection of his dream the night before in which DiMaggio led the Red Sox to a pennant, and then to victory in the World Series. Still, knowing how much his wife, Jean, liked Williams personally, he was nervous about informing her of the trade. When he did, he was unprepared for what followed.

  “Are you crazy?” she hollered. “You’re trading the greatest hitter in all of baseball to the Yankees? I hope you’re not serious, Tom. Because if you are, what they’ve said about Harry Frazee over the last thirty years since he sold the Babe to New York will be a drop in the bucket compared to what our fans say about you. And that will continue for generations to come! Every time the fans hear your name, they’ll start booing. How could you be so stupid? Were you drunk? It was Topping’s idea, wasn’t it? He’s probably been waiting to catch you at a time when he figured you couldn’t think straight, and last night was his chance. He didn’t drink as much as you, did he? Did you two shake hands on the deal? Because if you didn’t, then there was no deal. I can’t believe you’d have even considered making a trade like that. What do we do with Dom? Take the second best center fielder in baseball and stick him in left? Make him play next to his brother and feel inferior all the time because Joe’s the one in center? Couldn’t you see that yourself? Any Red Sox fan could tell you that. Well, you listen to me, Tom, you just get on the phone to Dan Topping and tell him the trade is off. Tell him you weren’t thinking straight last night when the two of you agreed to it. Tell him you didn’t have the authority to make it without the unanimous approval of the club’s trustees and that I won’t go along with it. Tell him I’m ready to divorce you over this. Tell him anything you want, but make damn sure he understands that Ted Williams isn’t leaving this team and going anywhere else.”

  Mrs. Yawkey didn’t wait for an answer. She stormed out of the kitchen, went to the office she had in their apartment and slammed the door behind her.

  Dan Topping didn’t fare much better that morning. Although Del Webb was furious when he heard about the trade, he managed to control his temper while talking to his partner. “Dan, I think you’re forgetting that you only own fifty percent of the ball club, not fifty-one. Any major decision like this is something we both have to agree on. You may know a lot more about baseball than I do, but I know enough not to let Joe DiMaggio out of New York. We’re talking about the ‘Yankee Clipper’ here. What the hell would we tell the Italian population of this city? Hell, it wouldn’t matter what we told them, they’d stop coming to the Stadium altogether. And who’s going to play center field? Our pitching staff will go nuts if DiMaggio’s not out there to save games for them. I don’t know how you’re going to do it, Dan, and I really don’t care, but you’d better find a way to kill that deal before anyone in New York gets wind of it.”

  At about the same time those conversations were taking place, DiMaggio was walking through the children’s area of the cancer center at Beth Israel Hospital, not far from Fenway Park. He’d been asked a month earlier to visit with some of the patients when the Yankees were in Boston and agreed to do it. The doctor taking him around told him about a boy named Dickie Collins, a twelve-year-old who was the biggest Red Sox fan in the ward, and brought Joe over to the boy’s bedside. Collins recognized DiMaggio as soon as he saw him, and said the Yankees would be his favorite team if the Red Sox weren’t. Joe laughed and said that Ted Williams was probably Dickie’s favorite player. Collins said he was because he was the best player on the team, but that DiMaggio was his second favorite player.

  “So what if I was playing for Boston and Ted was a Yankee?” DiMaggio asked.

  “Then you’d be my favorite player and I’d be rooting for you to hit a home run every time up,” the boy said.

  “Well, Dickie,” DiMaggio said, giving him a wink he couldn’t miss, “you never know, maybe that will happen one of these days and then you and I can be real close friends. Is there anything I can do for you today?”

  “Yes, Mr. DiMaggio, I’d like you to hit a home run for me this afternoon, but don’t let it beat the Red Sox.”

  “That’s a big order, young man, but I’ll see what I can do. Meanwhile, I’ve got a baseball here I’m going to autograph and leave for you.” DiMag signed the ball “To Dickie Collins from Joe DiMaggio” and handed it to him. “And what you can do for me,” he told the boy, “is try and get better every day. If that’s a deal, let’s shake on it.” Collins stuck out his hand, DiMaggio shook it and then patted the boy’s head where his hair had been shaved.

  A half hour later, Williams was walking through the same area of the hospital, as he did on so many Sunday mornings when the team was playing at home. It was something he never wanted the fans to know about. He and Collins were old friends by this time since the boy was in his second year in the ward, and Ted stopped in to say “Hello.” Before he left, he promised to try and hit a home run for Collins that afternoon, and found out that DiMaggio had said something about playing for the Red Sox and Williams becoming a Yankee. Ted couldn’t wait to get to Fenway Park and find out if there was a rumor of that sort going around. He knew that where there was smoke in the clubhouse, there usually was fire.

  Late in the morning Tom Yawkey and Dan Topping agreed to call off the trade they both liked so much the night before. Topping was willing—“reluctantly,” he said—to accept Yawkey’s explanation that the two of them hadn’t finalized the deal with a handshake, and that in any event his wife had the right to veto the trade in her position as a trustee. Of course he was damn happy about not having to tell Yawkey how furious Del Webb was over the trade and that he’d been told to find some way to wiggle out of it. Topping’s luck was that Yawkey called him first. And being the fast-thinking executive he was, he kept the pressure on until Tom agreed to send the Yankees one of the Red Sox relief pitchers (who would become a star) in return for a New York utility infielder (who would always underperform).

  Topping grabbed hold of DiMaggio as soon as the Yankee slugger arrived at Fenway Park. He told him he had been under the weather the night before and that some crazy impulse he couldn’t explain had pushed him into wondering how Dimaggio would react to being traded to Boston. He assured him that no such trade was in the offing or even in the team’s consideration. Joe D. accepted the explanation at face value and didn’t say a word to any of his teammates about the conversation with Topping the night before.

  When Williams asked around the Red Sox clubhouse whether anyone had heard anything about a trade involving him and DiMaggio, the answers he got from the players dressing for the Sunday game were “Not me,” “You’ve got to be kidding,” and “That’ll be the day.” He went to his locker and began putting on his uniform, not certain whether he was happy about the response or not.

  The rubber game of the series was tied through seven innings. In the Yankees’ eighth, DiMaggio batted with two outs and the bases empty. The Sox pitcher tried to throw a full count fastball over the inside corner of the plate, but missed. The ball was still rising when it went over the Green Monster and past the light tower in the direction of Kenmore Square. In the last half of the ninth, with two out and nobody on base, Johnny Pesky grounded a single to center field, keeping the Red Sox chances alive. Within seconds, fans all around the ballpark were on their feet, clapping their hands and shouting for their hero as Williams stepped into the batter’s box. The Yankee reliever tried to fool Ted into swinging at some bad balls but couldn’t do it. When the count went to three balls and a strike, the crowd noise was almost deafening. Sox fans were waiting for number nine to win the g
ame with one swing of his bat. But it didn’t happen. Ted hit the next pitch on two easy bounces to the second baseman and was thrown out to end the game.

  Up in the owner’s box Yawkey watched Williams jog back to the Red Sox dugout and then turned to his wife. “I don’t know, Jean,” he said, shaking his head back and forth, “I don’t know about calling off that deal.” She gave him one hard look that left no doubt about its message, made a last notation on her scorecard and walked away.

  That’s it, Murph, the whole story of the greatest trade that never took place. Personally, I think that if it had, one of those guys would have broken the Babe’s record before Roger Maris had the chance. Or maybe both of them. Meanwhile, when the hell is that new flight crew going to show up?

  HER BEAUTY WAS JUST SKIN DEEP

  “I’m getting smarter. I finally punched something that couldn’t sue me.”

  —Billy Martin

  YEAH, IT’S REALLY something. I chuckle every time I think how long it’s been since the seed leading to this got planted. Fifty years, Emo. Fifty years, and I suddenly hear from this crazy man and he’s sending me a present. Without Google—and he must have looked me up there—it probably wouldn’t have happened. But the fact he remembered that day at the ballpark fifty years later, the golden anniversary for chrissakes, I mean it shakes me up.

  And you know what? When I sit down here in the recliner, rest my head on the pillow and close my eyes, I can remember almost every detail of the trip when I met him.

  It goes back to May of 1959. Man, was I ever that young? I was coaching baseball at Holy Cross and we had just a couple of games left on the spring schedule. It was a talented bunch of guys that year, for a change. We’d beaten several of the Ivy League teams, including Yale, which lost only three times all season, and Penn, which averaged over eight runs a game against everyone. They were a powerhouse, but we came out hitting everything, scored ten runs ourselves and almost shut them out. Anyway, out of the blue I got a call from the State Department in Washington, and they want to know if I can come down there because they want to talk to me about a ballgame. It was something they couldn’t get into on the phone, the guy said. I’d get plane tickets delivered overnight, and any expenses I had they’d take care of. So we agreed on a day later in the week, and I had no clue what it was all about.

  Well, you’re my age, Emo, give or take a year, so think back to ’59. That’s when our friend in Cuba, Mr. Castro, pulled off his revolution against the guy—I forget his name—who’d been the dictator down there. Castro appointed himself the Prime Minister, and in April he came to the States. The biggest news story about him had to do with the pile of chicken bones they found in his New York hotel room after he checked out. Of course you remember that. Everyone does. All the papers had it on the front page. It looked like him and his bodyguards were eating chicken three meals a day. So tell me, who was President then? You got it, Eisenhower. Ike didn’t like Castro, or trust him, so he wouldn’t even meet with him while he was here. I’m no politician, but afterwards I figured it was a big mistake.

  Anyhow, I got to see these three guys at the State Department, one of which was the Secretary for Latin American Affairs. He was a weird sort of guy who never took off his sunglasses the whole time. And he smelled funny, like he’d taken a bath in sour milk. It didn’t surprise me when he showed up ten years later in Nixon’s cabinet. He was a Nixon type, if you know what I mean. The thing was they couldn’t tell whether Castro was going to be friendly with us, like the dictator was, or thought he had a better deal with the Russians. So their idea was to get him to try things our way and let Cuba be democratic. I was going to ask how they thought Ike giving him the cold shoulder helped out the situation, but I kept my mouth shut.

  So anyway, one thing they’d found out was Castro was a big baseball fan and had been a pretty good pitcher when he was younger. At that time, though, he was going on thirty-three, and they figured with the revolution and all he probably hadn’t played in years. But to make a long story short, they wanted me to put together a team of college guys—no more than twenty-two of them—find myself an assistant coach, and go play a five-game series in Cuba the first week of July. I guess that was supposed to get Castro to like us somehow, maybe remind him the Russians didn’t play baseball. They knew it would be hot and humid down there, but still wanted to get the games played as soon as possible. They kept telling me not to worry about being safe, it wasn’t a problem. So, naturally I agreed to start putting a team together right away.

  That part was easy. First, I got my buddy, Pete Donnelly, from Boston College to coach with me—we Jesuits had to stick together, you know, especially when you’re talking a free trip to Havana. Then we made a list of the twenty-five best players each of us could think of from the games that year, and ranked them one to twenty-five. We both took two players from our own teams—you know, a little bonus we gave ourselves—and then worked our way down the list for the rest. We knew we needed at least nine pitchers because all five games were going to be played in a week. So some of the names higher up the list didn’t make it if they weren’t pitchers. I made up a schedule of practices and intra-squad games we’d play in June, when they were all out of school, and we stayed in an empty dorm at Yale. The government said it was the best housing they could get us.

  In the meantime, the weird guy at State, the Secretary, told me the date we’d be flying out of New York, and said we’d spend four days on an island in the Caribbean to practice and get used to the weather. We weren’t going to find out where that was until after the plane took off, and we were supposed to never tell anyone which island. He made it sound like the whole trip was hush-hush, keep it to yourself. That was fifty years ago, but no one from the State Department ever got hold of me in the meantime and said it was okay to spill the beans on that, so I never did. I don’t want no FBI agent showing up at my eightieth birthday party and telling me I’m arrested for talking about it. Besides, it’s nothing important for you to know.

  Okay, enough about that. I know you want to hear how we ended up with this thing. We trained on the island for four days, like he said, then had to be at the airport at five o’clock in the morning for the flight over to Cuba. We’d been staying in a big house, all to ourselves, and we were the only ones on the plane, including an old guy from the State Department who was in charge of everything. The only conversation with him usually was when he said “Do this,” or “Do that.” He sure as hell was no baseball fan.

  Of course we’d all been excited about seeing the sights of Havana right away, but it didn’t work like that. We sat in the airport for about two hours, with no idea what was holding us up, and then Mr. State Department told us to follow him. We went through a private gate and then we were outside the terminal again and walking over to another plane sitting there. We boarded that one, thinking maybe the whole deal was off and we were going back to the island we’d come from. But it turned out they were flying us from Havana down to Santiago at the other end of the island. That was a five hundred mile flight, I found out later, and that’s where we were going to play the first two games.

  I remember it was a Friday we got there and the games were scheduled for Saturday and Sunday. In the middle of the afternoon some Cuban guy who spoke real good English showed up in an old beat-up school bus, colored dark red—I never seen a yellow school bus there—and took us on a tour. Santiago’s the second largest city there, he told us, and an important seaport. The most time we spent in one place was parked in front of the City Hall because he wanted us to see where Castro gave his speech six months earlier when he said they’d won the revolution. He talked about the building like it was some sort of a shrine, and read from notes that had parts of the speech Castro made there. On the way back to the hotel we drove by the stadium where we’d be playing, and I thought it looked pretty small from the outside.

  When we got there on Saturday for the first game, I saw I was right. The place was called Estadio Guillermon
Moncada. The reason I remember is because I wrote down the names of the stadiums in this little diary I was keeping, and I asked for some old programs they had from some earlier games. Anyhow, they squeezed twelve thousand people into the place for both games, and that’s with a whole lot of standing room. There were no lights for playing at night, and the games started at four o’clock. By then it had cooled off enough so you weren’t sweating the minute you stepped onto the field. We did everything right that day, both hitting and pitching, and beat the Cubans 10–3. The players on the other team were all older than our kids, but they were family guys who practiced when they could and played whenever someone arranged a game.

  Afterwards they took us to this restaurant with long tables running along two walls. All the Cuban guys sat on one side, and we were on the other side, opposite them. Some of the waiters served just the Cuban players, and other waiters brought us our dinners. We could see our food wasn’t the same as theirs, but Mr. State Department said it was because we couldn’t handle the spicy stuff they ate. Meanwhile, he sat alone at a small table with the guy who took us on the tour the day before.

  Well, about three o’clock in the morning everyone on the American team was wide awake and sick to our stomachs. I knew what me and Donnelly were going through, retching, throwing up, and running back and forth to the toilet. But it wasn’t until the morning, when half the team didn’t come down to breakfast, and the other half just wanted to drink some coffee, I found out how sick everyone had been during the night. I figured something had been put in our food to cause what it did, and that’s why we didn’t get the same things to eat as the Cubans. When Mr. State Department said he’d had a great night’s sleep, it pretty much convinced me someone wasn’t happy about our winning the ballgame.