The DiMaggios

by Tom Clavin

  The other version can be found in Richard Ben Cramer’s detailed biography, Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life, based on reports in the San Francisco Examiner. A Sunday in May was Family Day at Seals Stadium, featuring the Stars playing the home team in a doubleheader—which meant DiMaggio versus DiMaggio. Each team notched a win, and Vince and Joe each had two hits. The Examiner, citing police sources, had Joe getting into his car at Fourth and Market Streets after midnight. He didn’t own a car then, but anyway, the implication was that he had been out drinking and fell. The identity of his companion was never ascertained, and Joe stuck to his own version. Vince may have been with him, and Joe’s version of events may have been an attempt to protect his brother. Imagine what trouble Vince would have been in if he had been out carousing with his younger brother and Joe wound up in the hospital.

  In any case, Joe missed weeks of action with tendon problems. Even when he returned, the left knee was gimpy. Because of all the games he missed, he managed only 375 at-bats, but he collected 128 hits, good enough for a .341 average, one point higher than the 1933 season. His total of 69 RBI, though, was 100 below the previous year’s total. The Seals, who had gotten rid of a few veterans in cost-cutting moves, missed Joe’s production. They ended the season in fourth place.

  Vince had turned 22 that September and put in a full season with the Hollywood Stars. He had grown into a strong man at five-eleven and 183 pounds, and though his average fell to .288, he had power that he had not displayed before in the PCL. He smacked 17 home runs and drove in 91 runs. He had a better year than his younger brother.

  The Stars, though, had a disappointing season. They had acquired 32-year-old Smead Jolley. PCL fans remembered him as a sturdy left-handed hitter who in 1927 and ’28 had posted averages of .397 and .404 for the Seals before going on to spend several seasons in the majors. With Jolley in the outfield next to Vince, along with a couple of other fresh faces, the Hollywood club expected finally to dethrone the Angels. But owner Bill Lane’s heart attack on opening day augured that the year wouldn’t go as planned.

  The Stars enjoyed visiting San Francisco because they knew they were going to be entertained when Vince took them to the DiMaggio home on Taylor Street. “It was great fun going there,” recalled Bobby Doerr, a Jefferson High School prospect who joined the Stars in midseason that year. “The food was wonderful, and Mama DiMaggio was so generous—there was always a lot to eat. I loved watching the veteran ballplayers try to drink Papa DiMaggio under the table. He made his own wine in the cellar, as people did in those days, and these old-line ballplayers would come in, and they would drink the wine hard and fast the way they drank whiskey. Mr. DiMaggio—he always had this little cigar in one hand—would just hold his glass and sip it slowly and watch them, and pretty soon they would go under the table instead.”

  By season’s end, pitcher Joe Sullivan had done his part, compiling a 25-11 record. Jolley, Johnny Bassler, and future baseball executive Fred Haney all hit over .300. Vince and Jolley had been solid run producers. But a 97-88 record wasn’t nearly good enough, and the Angels sailed to another championship.

  Joe had come back after the injury, but he certainly didn’t appear to be as good as new. The Yankees were hesitant about adding him to the club. Joe later wrote that hitting .341 “was good enough, but the ‘wonder’ tag was off me. I was labeled ‘crippled’ now.”

  In November, the Yankees sent him to a specialist in Los Angeles, who determined that with a combination of treatments and rest, the knee would be fine. That was good enough for Yankees’ owner Jacob Ruppert (of Ruppert Brewing Company, addressed as Colonel Ruppert for the rank he’d achieved in the National Guard), general manager Ed Barrow, and manager Joe McCarthy. The club paid $25,000 for an “option” on Joe, meaning that he would be shipped off to New York after the 1935 season.

  Strapped for cash, Charlie Graham, the Seals owner, had to grit his teeth and take the offer. (In Lucky to Be a Yankee, Joe contends that Joe Cronin, manager of the Red Sox and also from San Francisco, told him afterward that if the Yankees had passed, the Boston club had intended to offer $60,000 to the Seals for his contract. If this was true, beginning in 1939 the Red Sox would have had Joe DiMaggio in center and Ted Williams in left and conceivably would have been the most successful major league team of the mid-20th century, instead of the Yankees.) When the time came, New York would also send five players west to fill out the Seals lineup.

  Joe made that ’35 season a memorable one for San Francisco fans. After a slow start, his knee regained full strength. He flirted with .400 for much of the season and finished at .398—which was not good enough, however, to earn the PCL batting title. Oscar “Ox” Eckhardt of the Mission Reds finished one point ahead. Eckhardt went on to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1936, but was never again mentioned in the same sentence as Joe DiMaggio. The Seals won the PCL title that year, and Joe picked up the MVP plaque. To go with his stratospheric average, he had slugged 34 home runs and led the league in both RBIs and runs scored.

  More than just the healed knee helped Joe produce such a scintillating season. Lefty O’Doul was back in town. There was no baseball figure in San Francisco more popular than O’Doul, including Joe. The city had been in mourning after he left the Seals at the end of his great 1927 season. Many remembered that a Kids Day he sponsored that September drew an overflow crowd of 20,000 into Recreation Park, which would remain the all-time record. He was not a particularly good fielder. “He could run like a deer,” commented a Chronicle columnist. “Unfortunately, he threw like one too.” But he could hit. Playing for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1929, he knocked out 254 hits and had a .398 average, which has been exceeded only twice in 84 years. No hitter in major league history who hit 32 or more home runs in a season has ever struck out fewer times—19. And his combined average of 330 hits and walks that year is still a National League record as well.

  From the A’s, O’Doul went to the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 1930 he joined a group of All-Stars that included Lou Gehrig and Lefty Grove to play a series of 17 games in Japan. Total attendance was 450,000. The tour was the beginning of a mutual infatuation between O’Doul and Japanese baseball fans. He returned in 1934 with Ruth, Gehrig, Gomez, Jimmie Foxx, and other American luminaries in tow. At the end of the 1934 season, he retired and returned to San Francisco. His lifetime average of .349 remains the fourth highest in major league history, behind Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson. He is not in the Hall of Fame, however, because his career game total of 970 is below the required 1,000.

  Lefty took over as manager of the Seals in 1935 and had a strong influence on Joe DiMaggio. “I never taught him anything about hitting,” O’Doul said about Joe. But he was being too modest. Louis Almada of the Mission Reds had numerous opportunities during the ’35 season to watch Joe emerge as a great hitter: “Lefty O’Doul told Joe to spread his feet out. Hit off his back foot. He said, ‘Don’t move until you see the ball. Just wait until the ball gets on top of you. Hold your bat back. Hold your bat up high.’ O’Doul had to correct a few things. Joe didn’t just fall into it right away. But you could see that tremendous change that came over him.”

  The most significant change was that Joe became more of a pull hitter. O’Doul had played in cavernous Yankee Stadium, and he knew, especially as the season progressed, that Joe was bound for New York. O’Doul had seen many fly balls to left-center, center, and right-center that would have been round-trippers in the PCL fall into gloves. By urging Joe to pull, O’Doul was helping him to develop the skill to hit homers down the left-field line, only 300 feet long in Yankee Stadium.

  O’Doul gave Joe more than technical instruction. No matter what he did on the field, Joe was still an awkward, socially stunted young man. In I Remember Joe DiMaggio, Steve Barath, the Seals third baseman who was his roommate on the road in the 1934–35 seasons, said, “Joe was never friendly. I mean, he was friendly with me, but he didn’t want to go
out. He was just scared of the world. Shy. That’s the word for him.”

  “The biggest thing Joe learned from O’Doul was how to live like a hero,” wrote Richard Ben Cramer in Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life. “Everybody knew Lefty, everybody watched him, said hello to him, loved him. And in the middle of it all, Lefty did just what he wanted. He was handsome, at home anywhere he went, always the best-dressed man in the room. The admiration of males he accepted with offhand grace, and to the adoration of females he extended a courtly and catholic welcome. For Joe, this brush with the hero’s life wasn’t quite like hitting—he couldn’t just do it himself the next day. But if he was going to be a big-leaguer, a New York big-leaguer . . . this was his chance to learn at the master’s knee.”

  Lodigiani remembered that “O’Doul was New York–smart from all the years that he played in the major leagues. He played with New York, especially. He kind of smartened Joe up, told him what to do, what to wear, how to dress. First thing you know, when he comes back, when you see him, Joe looked like a department store. He looked great.”

  The Yankees’ interest in Joe was hotter than ever when the ’35 season ended. It certainly helped that in an article in Collier’s magazine late in the season O’Doul declared that Joe would be a national star within two years. What a bargain he looked like now, a phenom from San Francisco in exchange for just $25,000 and five players who were not much more than castoffs. Joe’s .361 three-year average in the PCL had Ruppert & Company in New York believing that he was more than ready for the major leagues and could probably step into the starting lineup.

  And the Yankees needed the help. Babe Ruth, who had gone from slugger to sluggish, had been banished. On May 30, he had played his last game, back in Boston where he began, this time for the Braves. For the third year in a row the Yankees finished in second place. This trend could continue, or worsen, if the club didn’t find a young player to plug into the middle of the lineup next to Lou Gehrig, who would turn 33 in June and whose offensive stats were down significantly from his season in 1934.

  So the Yankees mailed Joe a contract with an offer of $5,625 in salary. Joe showed the contract to O’Doul as well as to Tom. O’Doul turned to his pal Ty Cobb, who had Joe write a letter to Ed Barrow asking for more money. Barrow offered $6,500. Cobb dictated another letter to Joe. Barrow wrote back saying that $8,500 was his final offer and that Joe should “tell Cobb to stop writing me letters.” Joe signed the contract in November and celebrated his 21st birthday.

  There was rejoicing in the DiMaggio household. Giuseppe and Rosalie were about to see a son of theirs earn what to them was a fortune, and on the world’s biggest stage. Maybe Tom and Mike had some regret that they hadn’t been given the chance to try baseball, but there was nothing to be done about it; that door had closed for them a good ten years earlier.

  Another older brother might have been jealous that Joe was going to the major leagues ahead of him. But Vince believed that his time would come, maybe after just one more season with the Hollywood Stars. His increasing power showed that he was close—he had finished the season with 24 home runs (fifth in the PCL, though 10 behind Joe) and 112 RBI to go with a .278 average. He had been a star on the Stars, who otherwise had a bad season. A 73-99 record indicated a franchise in trouble, as did drawing only 90,000 fans total. And anyway, Vince wasn’t the grumbling kind. He wanted Joe to do well and make the whole family proud.

  For Dominic, meanwhile, Joe’s promotion was like a beachhead. If Joe did well, maybe Dommie would get a chance too. Dominic was still undersized and slim, still wearing the thick eyeglasses that gave him more of a scholarly than athletic look, but the desire to play pro baseball was burning inside him, and he was going to take his shot.

  Though he would always call San Francisco home, there was to be no looking back for Joe. He recalled: “When I packed my baseball togs in the dressing room of Seal Park [after his last game], I was sorry to leave the fellows I’d been with for three years; sorry to leave Lefty O’Doul. . . . I was sorry, yes, but I was glad too, for the Yankees had picked up my option and I was headed for the big leagues, headed for the team I wanted to be with most of all.”

  SIX

  Joe had never been east of the Rocky Mountains. In fact, the farthest east he had ever been was his birthplace, Martinez. Now here he was, in February 1936, leaving the shelter of his large family and familiar San Francisco surroundings to travel 3,000 miles across the country. It helped that he traveled every one of those miles in a car with two other Italian-American hometown players, Tony Lazzeri and Frank Crosetti. The established stars would chaperone Joe to the Yankees’ spring training camp in Florida.

  At 21, Joe was by far the youngest of the three, and the least prepared for the trip. After saying good-bye to his parents, brothers, and sisters—displaying to Marie the signet ring she had given him—he climbed into the backseat of the Ford that Lazzeri, well established in the Yankees lineup, had recently purchased. And there he remained for the entire weeklong journey. The veteran players were chagrined to learn that Joe didn’t know how to drive a car, so they chauffeured as well as chaperoned him.

  He had no idea what was waiting for him in St. Petersburg, and Crosetti and Lazzeri thought it best not to tell him. They knew that the New York reporters were already hailing Joe as the next Babe Ruth who would immediately restore the Yankees to glory. (The irony of one headline, “Rookie May Don Ruth Mantle,” would only become clear 15 years later.) In fact, there was already a backlash to all the press Joe had been receiving before he even took his first swing as a Yankee. According to one New York newspaper headline, “DiMaggio Comes Up with Two Strikes on Him as Innocent Victim of Lavish Newspaper Ballyhoo.” The caption to an accompanying cartoon read, “The old ballyhoo will be DiMaggio’s toughest foe. Fans who have been reading the nice things said about him will expect Ruth, [Shoeless Joe] Jackson and Cobb all rolled into one.”

  The veteran teammates knew that was too big a burden for any ballplayer to bear, especially a 21-year-old who had lived with his parents in the cocoon of San Francisco. No matter how well he had played in the Pacific Coast League, Joe could easily crash and burn in the New York spotlight. And with Joe rarely one to initiate a conversation, “we went two or three hundred miles at a clip without any of us saying a word,” recalled Crosetti, who would room with Joe.

  That he had been far away from the major leagues was actually an advantage for Joe. Most of his experience in baseball was knocking the cover off the ball against any kind of pitching. His relative ignorance of pitchers in the American League allowed him to remain confident that he could hit anyone, anywhere.

  In the evening of the last Sunday in February, the San Francisco trio pulled into St. Petersburg. The next day, wearing Yankees jersey number 18, Joe stepped out onto Miller Huggins Field. There he encountered George Selkirk, Johnny Murphy, and Harry and Dixie Walker. For a week the workouts were informal. Then came the first official full-squad workout, presided over by Joe McCarthy. The strong and intimidating Lou Gehrig slapped Joe on the back and said, “Nice to have you with us, Joe.”

  The pitcher Red Ruffing came up to him and said, “So you’re the great DiMaggio. I’ve heard all about you. You hit .400 on the Coast, and you’ll probably hit .800 here because we don’t play night games and throw in a nice, shiny white ball anytime one gets the least bit soiled.”

  Joe would learn that Ruffing liked to tease his teammates. And he learned the prevailing Yankees attitude toward newcomers: if you help us win, that puts more money in my pocket and you’re okay with me. Cost me money and you’re gone. The expectation in St. Petersburg was that Joe would help the Yankees be champions again.

  Joe McCarthy insisted on “the Yankee Way.” “It is impressed on you right off the bat that you’re a professional now, you’re in the majors and it’s up to you to act like a major leaguer, not only on the ball field but away from it,” Joe wrote a decade later, when he
was the personification of the Way. McCarthy “stresses dignity, which may sound out of place among ball players, but which is definitely a morale lifter. When Horseplay gets too rough, or laughter too loud, among a group, McCarthy is likely to walk over and say quietly, ‘You fellows are Yankees. Act like Yankees!’ He doesn’t have to say any more.”

  The quiet dignity of the team—represented daily by Gehrig—and a winning tradition combined to create the perfect environment for Joe. Though 3,000 miles from home, he immediately felt that this was where he belonged.

  The backlash did not amount to much, and the normally tough New York press gave him a pass. Reporters tossed him softball questions, and Joe answered them briefly and modestly. “I don’t think anything I said made good copy, because I haven’t the knack of saying things that can be blown up into headline quotes. . . . All I was thinking about was getting a regular job with the Yankees.”

  He had a piece of good luck with that. The starting center fielder, Ben Chapman, was holding out for more money, and Dixie Walker had a sore arm, so there was room in the outfield. When spring training games began, McCarthy put the rookie in the starting lineup—in the three-spot, where Ruth had been entrenched all those years. In his first at-bat, against the St. Louis Cardinals, Joe tripled—just as he had done in his first Seals at-bat. That, he thought, was a good sign.

  The way the lithe but muscular newcomer batted—combining inherited strength with Lefty O’Doul’s instructions—impressed observers. “DiMaggio is a peculiar batsman,” wrote Dan Daniel of the New York World-Telegram. “He is not a long swinger, but a wrist swinger, with a terrific pull on the ball. In stance, one foot from the plate, DiMaggio reminds you of Joe Jackson. But in his application of power at the very last fraction of a second Joe is more reminiscent of Tris Speaker. How DiMaggio gets so much power on the ball when it is right on top of him is amazing. The Italian lad has big strong arms, with tremendous wrists. His back muscles ripple in their sheaths.”