The DiMaggios

by Tom Clavin

  The Recreation Grounds at the intersection of Folsom Street and 25th Street was the city’s first ballpark. One indication that the sport was rapidly catching on was the fact that 3,000 fans showed up on Thanksgiving Day 1868 to watch the Eagle Club thrash the Wide Awakes, an Oakland team, 37–23. The following year the Cincinnati Red Stockings came to town, traveling west on the just-completed transcontinental railroad. The five exhibition games weren’t pretty for the local teams that took the visitors on: the Red Stockings racked up a combined score of 289–22. But the contests against the Ohio professionals earned headlines in all the newspapers.

  More teams formed in Oakland, Stockton, Sacramento, and other surrounding communities as well as in San Francisco. These were amateur clubs, consisting of men with occupations, often middle-class ones, who played baseball strictly for recreation. But this was about to change. In 1871 the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players was founded; as its name implies, this organization promoted the hiring and paying of men whose occupation it would be to play the game. In the Bay Area, an increasing number of clubs began paying promising players and wooing talented amateurs.

  It was a milestone for local baseball in 1876 when the Pacific Base Ball Convention dispatched the Centennials (commemorating the 100th anniversary of San Francisco’s founding), a squad of 15 players, to Philadelphia to participate in a national tournament. The team returned in triumph, with a 6-1 record. Two years later, the Pacific Base Ball League was formed. Though it consisted of only four San Francisco teams, it was significant as the first organized baseball league on the West Coast. The subsequent California League teams played 30 games in 1886, and 170 only six years later. Ernest Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat,” which would become a staple in ballparks around the country, was first published in the San Francisco Examiner in June 1888.

  With national economic ebbs and flows, leagues in the Bay Area came and went, expanding or contracting. But soon after Giuseppe DiMaggio arrived, a revived and reestablished California League featured six teams consisting of all professional players. Ten years after Giuseppe’s arrival, in 1908, Mike Fisher, a native of San Francisco, created the Reach All-Americans, the first team to go on a barnstorming tour to introduce baseball to Japan.

  As his sons were growing up, the last thing Giuseppe wanted them to be doing was playing baseball. What little he knew of the local games was that there were “too many shoes, too many pants.” Though he himself played bocce during the little free time that fishing afforded him, he didn’t want his sons involved in any sports. Part of this attitude can be attributed to the bias of a man from Italy trying to retain the culture and attitudes of the old country, and baseball was so brazenly American. But it was at least equally important that, as Tom and Mike grew up, Giuseppe needed them on the boat fishing with him. If for whatever reason one of them didn’t go out on the water on any given day, the result was more work for Giuseppe and less catch to show for it. Baseball, like school, was an unwelcome distraction that didn’t put food on the table.

  Recalled Dominic: “Baseball violated Dad’s code of life, which emphasized the work ethic. But Mom would stick up for us and calm him down eventually. Later she’d even cover for us if we weren’t around. But we had to be careful about coming home with torn pants or a cut or a sprain that would be a dead giveaway as to where we had been. When those happened, we tried to slip into the house and touch up the evidence, or get rid of it altogether, before running into Dad.”

  In an interview with the former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent for Vincent’s book The Only Game in Town (2006), Dominic further explained: “Dad thought [baseball] was a waste of time but Mother took it from the point of view that we were all young men and we liked to play games and this was a good game, nice and clean. Dad would find Vince’s spikes and glove; he’d take them and throw them in the trash bin. And as fast as he did it, Mother would go out, take them out, and hide them until the next time Vince was to use them. He was the first one that this happened to.”

  Tom and Mike continued to comply. When not in school, they went down with their father to Fisherman’s Wharf, where the feluccas—Italian boats with lantern sails—were congregated. Each, though, still managed from time to time to play in pickup games in the nearby lots and drift in and out of informal leagues, just for the fun and competition. In this they had Rosalie’s subtle encouragement—she wanted them to grow up as Americans and to be active, healthy boys. They were burdened enough with trying to learn at school, coming from a Sicilian-speaking household. Despite their skills, neither Tom nor Mike would ever pursue a professional career. Tom became the family businessman, and Mike would be the only one of the five brothers to spend the rest of his life as a fisherman.

  Of the DiMaggio brothers, only Joe, in Lucky to Be a Yankee, wrote a first-person account in any detail of his childhood in San Francisco. The book must be taken with some grains of salt: Joe often either remembered some events incorrectly or was being deliberately vague. Published in 1946, when Joe was a returning war veteran and resuming his career as arguably the most famous athlete in America, it was a sanitized autobiography. The philosophy of Grantland Rice, the dean of American sportswriters (who wrote the book’s foreword), still held sway: great athletes were heroes and examples to the children of America, so only the positive was presented. Today we may laugh to read the squeaky clean biographies and autobiographies of Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and others of dubious character, but in the 1940s it was routine treatment for famous players, as well as what the public expected.

  But there is no compelling reason to doubt Joe’s recollections of his childhood. The few he offered throughout his life did at least remain consistent. In Joe’s memories, Giuseppe was an old-country man who could be stern and stubborn in his views about his children, especially his sons, but who provided for his family. He expected to be obeyed at home, and his sons probably feared him a bit—typical in those pre–Dr. Spock days—yet there is nothing to indicate that Giuseppe was not loved and respected too.

  Rosalie was the more educated and possibly more intelligent of the two parents. All three brothers who made it to the major leagues would credit her support. As the parent who spent all of her waking hours with her children, Rosalie was more likely to have been the one who impressed upon them that the new country and its culture, including sports, were to be embraced.

  Joe’s recollection was that he began to play baseball at age ten, mostly when he trotted after Vince to the North Beach playground. He was attending the Hancock Grammar School and “played well enough to be on the usual teams with the kids from around the block.” Instead of a diamond, Joe and his classmates played on a cleared space of ground that was known as the Horse Lot—a nearby dairy supplier used it as a parking area for its milk wagons. The bases were large rocks, the ball was a relic held together with bicycle tape, an oar handle served as a bat, and not being able to afford gloves, they caught with bare hands, which was made somewhat easier by the stickiness of the tape.

  One might think that the fourth DiMaggio brother, given the examples of the first three, would be eager to continue to play baseball whenever and wherever he could. Not so. “Baseball to me in those days was merely an excuse to get away from the house,” Joe recalled.

  As was pretty much any sport. A classmate at Francisco Junior High School, Dario Lodigiani, is quoted in David Cataneo’s collection of recollections, I Remember Joe DiMaggio (2001): “I lived on Telegraph Hill in North Beach, the Italian district. On the bottom of the hill is where Joe lived. And in between us was the playground. We were in that playground every day. And whatever sport was going on, we’d play it. He was a quiet kid. Never said too much. But he was a good athlete, no matter what sport we played. We played baseball, we played touch football. Basketball. We even played tennis. He was a heckuva tennis player.”

  When he became old enough, Dominic tagged along with Vince and Joe to the North Beach playgroun
d. He remembered one particular touch football game that showed how athletic and graceful Joe already was:

  “There was a fellow named Louis Daresta. He later became an all-American football player. During the early part of the game, Joe had done something to embarrass Louis somewhat. A little later in the game, Louis, who was a tough little football player, was running interference for the guy who had the ball. And the only one left between them was Joe. Louis felt he was going to take a shot at Joe. So he bent down low and started after Joe as if to knock his legs out from under him. And Joe held his ground and the runner was right behind Louis. When Louis got to Joe, Joe just gingerly bounced back a little and with both his hands hit Louis on the back. And because Louis was down so far, he lost balance. He fell and skinned both his knees. All torn up. Of course, this was on a tar field. And Joe reached over Louis and touched, with two hands, the ball carrier.”

  Of the several sports he played in his adolescent and early teenage years, the one that Joe enjoyed most was tennis. His favorite players were Maurice McLoughlin and Bill Johnston, because they “came from San Francisco and I wanted to be like them.” (Actually, McLoughlin hailed from Nevada; he was the first tennis champion from the western United States.)

  Joe’s most compelling reason to follow sports was to get “away from the chores of fishing.” For Joe, avoiding fishing with his father was neither an act of rebellion nor an indication of laziness—though, truth be told, he hated to get up before the sun—but a physical necessity. The smell of the boat literally made him sick. To Giuseppe, having a son who couldn’t fish—and who further embarrassed him by spending much of his time on the boat retching over the side—meant that the kid didn’t have much future in anything. He called his fourth son lagnuso (lazy) and meschino (good for nothing), but the boy shrugged him off. Eventually, Giuseppe gave up on making Joe a fisherman and suggested other trades to him. Joe was fine with working and making money, as long as no product from the sea was involved and he didn’t have to wake up early. “He liked to sleep,” Lodigiani said. “When we played ball on Sundays, if you didn’t go wake him up, he wouldn’t show.”

  Joe joined Vince on street corners for hours every day hawking copies of the San Francisco Call-Bulletin. Vince was easily the more popular newsie of the two, because all Joe could do was shout headlines, but Vince could shout headlines and sing arias.

  When he wasn’t performing bits of Don Giovanni to sell newspapers, Vince continued to pursue his other passion. By the time he was a student at Galileo High School, he was a third baseman on the varsity team. His plan was to earn his letters on the school’s diamond, and his hope was to be scouted by a major league team or two; then, after graduation, he could at least try out for the San Francisco Seals. If he made the team, he could play simply because he loved baseball, and who knew what could come of that. Maybe the money he made from the Seals could pay for formal training as a singer.

  But then the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began. Vince never made it to graduation. Despite pleas from Rosalie to stay in school, he quit to find jobs that would make more of a contribution to the family than street-corner newsboy and classical crooner. Dominic took his brother’s place on the street selling newspapers. Usually, he and Joe could be found on the corner of Sutter and Sansome Streets, only now, without Vince, there was no more singing.

  FOUR

  Would Joe DiMaggio have ever made it to the major leagues without the help of his brother Vince? The jury will always be out on that one. It can be argued that Vince’s passion for baseball led Joe in that direction too. Without Vince and without much education and ambition, Joe might have drifted into some kind of physical job that allowed free time to hang around with his friends. One day he would have met a nice Italian-American girl from North Beach and settled down to start a family.

  Then again, thanks primarily to the Pacific Coast League, many young men in the Bay Area in the early 1930s loved baseball. Though never recognized as one of the major leagues, it was the most prominent and popular regional league west of the Mississippi River, and a number of its best players went on to the majors. Joe might have given it a try at some point. If he had done that, he was so naturally gifted that he would have ended up on the San Francisco Seals, and from there he would have had a shot at the majors.

  But Vince made it a sure thing. He provided a fast track for his brother to get on the Seals, and Joe’s natural talent took over from there. For that to happen, though, Vince had to blaze a trail that Giuseppe had proclaimed was not to be traveled.

  “My brother Vince started it all,” remembered Dominic. “He was two years older than Joe and started sneaking out to play baseball when he was junior high school age. My parents were from the old country, born and raised in a village in the suburbs of Palermo. They didn’t take too well to the American game of baseball, especially Dad.”

  The middle DiMaggio brother, who appeared never to face a day he didn’t like, did bring in money to the family from other jobs. He even went out on the Rosalie D. with Tom and Mike from time to time to give their father a day off. Yet even as the economy tanked, Vince kept finding time to play baseball. He couldn’t help himself, the same way he couldn’t stop talking and singing. He and Giuseppe fought over the time he spent playing a game instead of bringing home more money. One day the arguments stopped, though, because Vince was gone—he had run away to play baseball.

  A scout from the Lumber Leagues north of San Francisco had seen Vince play in one of the local games. The players were amateurs, but when Vince connected, the ball traveled a mile. He was a good fielder too, whatever the position. The leagues offered him a contract to play professionally. Still a minor, he brought the contract to Giuseppe for his signature. Nothing doing. In addition to his other objections to baseball, Giuseppe had to have realized that if he set Vince free, it would be harder to prevent Joe, the next boy, from playing games instead of getting a real job. He probably wasn’t worried about Dominic, who, on the cusp of his teenage years, was too scrawny, actually liked going to school, and wore thick eyeglasses, unlike any ballplayer.

  Vince filed an appeal with his mother. Rosalie may well have wanted to help him, but there was no way she could defy her husband. Case closed, according to Giuseppe. But the rebel Vince had another way out: he forged his father’s signature on the contract and headed north. Joe had to be impressed, but as usual he said nothing.

  “Just think, if my father hadn’t made that decision, there wouldn’t have been any Dom or Joe in the big leagues, maybe not in baseball at all,” says Joanne.

  Vince had a good season in 1931 with the Lumber Leagues, which served as a kind of minor league for the Pacific Coast League. At the end of the season, right after he turned 19, the Seals offered him a contract. In San Francisco in the 1930s, that was like a kid from the Bronx being signed by the Yankees.

  A San Francisco team had been part of the Pacific Coast League since it began in 1903, along with franchises in Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles. The team took its name from the creatures who enjoyed sunbathing on the rocks in the bay. Until 1958, when they were replaced by the major league franchise the San Francisco Giants, the Seals were one of the most successful franchises in the country, winning 12 PCL titles and four Governor’s Cups (for winning the postseason playoffs). In 24 seasons, the Seals won 100 games or more.

  The Seals played their first game before 5,500 fans who paid 25 cents each on March 26, 1903, at the Recreation Grounds. The home team downed the Portland Browns 7–3. There weren’t quite enough wins that year, though, as the locals went 107-110 and wound up in fourth place, 29.5 games behind L.A.’s PCL entry. For fans, one of the attractions of the league was that the West Coast climate allowed the teams to play over 200 games per season. But the extended season led to a lot of wear and tear on the players, especially pitchers. Some were fine with that. In 1903 the apparently rubber-armed ace Jimmy Whalen compiled a record of
29-21.

  The team’s first winning season was 1905, when Whalen earned 30 victories. The following April the team’s home park was destroyed when the earthquake struck. The team resumed play two weeks later in Idora Park in Oakland, its temporary home, and began construction on a new stadium in San Francisco, Recreation Park. It opened on April 6, 1907, with 10,000 fans (now paying 35 cents each) in attendance.

  The Seals won their first PCL pennant in 1909 with a 132-80 record. A postcard commemorating the title win showed a group of seals frolicking on the rocks with the players’ heads superimposed on them.

  For years afterward, the Seals frustrated their fans by not winning another championship. This was actually good news for the PCL; with five teams winning championships from 1909 to 1918, the competitive balance increased the league’s popularity among fans throughout the West Coast. In 1915, when the Salt Lake City Bees joined the PCL, the Seals captured the pennant with a 118-89 record, led by Spider Baum’s 30 victories and 25 from Skeeter Fanning. They won another title in 1917. That season featured the debut of a left-handed pitcher named Francis Joseph O’Doul, who would later have a powerful impact on baseball in the Bay Area, as well as on the DiMaggio brothers.

  During the 1920s, as the three brothers were coming of age and becoming fans of the team, the Seals continued to have a loyal following. The club made good money by selling players to major league franchises. Some of them, including Harry Heilmann, Paul “Big Poison” Waner and his younger brother, Lloyd “Little Poison” Waner, Earl Averill, Dolph Camilli, and Ernie Lombardi, became stars; a few are in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Third baseman Bob Pinelli, who played for the Seals from 1927 to 1931, went on to work for 22 years as a major league umpire. His last game behind the plate was Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series.

  There were players who did well on the Seals but couldn’t find a career in the majors and were glad to go home to the welcoming fans, who were generous with their favorites. One was Ping Bodie, who evenly split 18 years between PCL teams and the majors. For four of those years, the genial, wisecracking Bodie—the model for the narrator in Ring Lardner’s “You Know Me Al” stories—was Babe Ruth’s roommate on the New York Yankees. He later told reporters that when they were on the road, he saw a lot more of Ruth’s suitcase than its owner. Bodie was a very good hitter, batting .348 in his final season in the PCL at age 41, but he was one of the slowest runners in baseball. This led to one of the best lines in baseball reporting, written by Arthur Baer after Bodie tried to steal a base: “He had larceny in his heart, but his feet were honest.”