by Tom Clavin
It couldn’t have been easy. Joe was not a talker and not much of a socializer. He was coming out of his shell a bit as he started hitting a few New York watering holes—in one, he was introduced to a head waiter named Bernard Shor whom everyone called “Toots”—but on road trips he stayed in his hotel room. Gomez later recalled that a highlight of the week for Joe was Wednesday, because that was when the next Superman comic hit the newsstands. To keep this obsession out of the newspapers, the much-less-recognized Gomez bought the comics for his roommate.
The presence of three Italian-American stars on the team—DiMaggio, Crosetti, and Lazzeri—led to the inevitable ethnic jokes from teammates. Reportedly, during a laugher against St. Louis (as most games were against the hapless Browns that season), a Browns runner headed for second. Lazzeri and Crosetti raced toward the base, and Joe ran in from center to back up the play. He was only halfway there when Gomez threw the ball to him, and the runner was safe.
At the end of the inning, McCarthy growled to Gomez, “What the hell was that about?”
The pitcher replied, “Someone called out, ‘Throw it to the dago,’ but nobody said which dago.”
The incensed manager yelled to his team, “Whoever said that, from now on, specify which dago!”
Not everyone was a Joe DiMaggio fan. In a column he might later have wanted to retract, the Washington Post’s Shirley Povich wrote: “The Yankees’ young Italian boy is seemingly too goldarned content to hit his home runs and those long triples and let it go at that. He has none of Ruth’s flourish and gusto, none of Dizzy Dean’s self-admiration. And because of that, he will set no salary records no matter how many slugging records fall before the power of his bat.”
In 1937 Giuseppe and Rosalie could also claim they had a movie star son. It was not unusual for sports stars in the first full bloom of fame to be asked to appear in a Hollywood production. Jack Dempsey, Walter Hagen, and Babe Ruth all gave acting a shot, though the roles were usually little more than cameo appearances to boost attendance for pedestrian productions. Joe’s turn came that August. He agreed to deliver three lines—a total of only six words, though still a lot for Joe—in the musical comedy Manhattan Merry-Go-Round filmed at the Biograph studios in the Bronx. The lighthearted romp starred Ann Dvorak, Gene Autry, James Gleason, Cab Calloway, and a hot new sensation from New Orleans—and also the product of a Sicilian family—Louis Prima.
It took 12 takes for Joe to get through the scene. No wonder he never made another movie. Relieved that it was over, he chatted up one of the chorus girls, a blonde from Minnesota named Dorothy Arnold. Then Joe left for Yankee Stadium, with no inkling that he had just met his future wife.
Vince was having a solid season, playing hard and helping a bad Bees ball club get better. In a June 10 game against the Cincinnati Reds, Vince showed his power potential by homering in the fourth inning and then doubling in Gene “Rowdy” Moore in the eighth for the Boston victory. A reporter wryly asked him after the game if there were any other ballplayers in the family. Keeping a straight face, Vince replied, “Just a guy named Joe.”
The reporters in Boston became more tactful and supportive of Vince as the season went on. In the other National League cities, however, he was peppered with questions about Joe, each one a veiled criticism of him for being “the wrong DiMaggio.” But Vince went out there every game and played hard. What else could he do?
The 1937 All-Star Game gave Joe a chance to redeem himself after his dismal performance the previous year. It was the first All-Star Game attended by a sitting president, with Franklin Roosevelt making the trip from the White House to Griffith Stadium, home of the Washington Senators. There were familiar faces in the lineup for the American League: New Yorkers Gomez, Gehrig, Rolfe, and Dickey, as well as Mel Harder and Earl Averill of the Indians, Charlie Gehringer and Hank Greenberg of the Tigers, and Lefty Grove, Joe Cronin, and Jimmie Foxx from the Red Sox. Dizzy Dean again started for the National League, as did Gomez for the “Junior Circuit.” In the bottom of the third inning, Averill hit a liner that struck Dean in the foot and broke his toe. (When Dean returned to pitching for the St. Louis Cardinals later that season before the toe had healed, his changed delivery injured his arm. Though only 26, he was never a dominant pitcher again, and at 31 the former ace of the Gashouse Gang retired.) The AL cruised to an easy 8–3 victory. Joe returned to New York feeling a lot better than he had a year earlier, not only because of the win but because he had notched his first All-Star Game hit.
As the season progressed, the Yankees saw only token opposition from the Detroit Tigers and Cleveland Indians. The pitching was strong, led by Gomez and Ruffing, who would both win more than 20 games, and Bump Hadley contributed with 11 victories. Dickey was a workhorse behind and at the plate—he caught 140 games and batted .332 with 29 home runs and 133 RBI.
The club was easing out George Selkirk, who had replaced Ruth in the outfield in ’35, and easing in Tommy Henrich. The Ohioan who earned the nickname “Old Reliable” would roam the green grass next to Joe into the 1950 campaign. He had begun the ’37 season playing for the farm team in Newark. After ten days there, Henrich was batting .444. When Yankee outfielder Roy Johnson made light of a tough loss to the Tigers, McCarthy told Ed Barrow to trade him. Johnson was soon gone, and Henrich was promoted. By the end of the season, he had made the talent-rich Yankees richer.
He and Joe worked out a system in the outfield. “If I wanted the ball, I called for it, and DiMaggio gave it to me,” Henrich told Fay Vincent many years later. “If I didn’t call for it, get out of the way, because DiMaggio is gonna catch it. And it was as simple as that.”
Joe tried to keep up with how Vince and Dominic were doing. Playing on three different teams in three different leagues, the brothers didn’t often cross paths, and they had little direct contact with each other. The two older brothers called home to try to catch Dominic, and if he wasn’t there, they got updates from Giuseppe. Their father still checked the sports section every morning on rising at 4:00 A.M., and now he had the activities of three sons to stay on top of. The local papers accommodated him by running a “DiMaggio Digest” every day that kept track of their baseball exploits. Giuseppe would relay information to the boys back east in a mixture of English and Sicilian.
“The DiMaggios were playing well from one coast to the other,” Dominic explained. “The ‘Digest’ had a picture of each of us, plus a report on what we did the day before and a table showing our batting averages, number of games, runs, hits, doubles, triples, home runs, runs batted in, putouts, assists, and errors.” Giuseppe and Rosalie were bursting with pride. In the house on Taylor Street, “pictures of three baseball players now shared the wall space which previously had been reserved only for Christian saints.”
Joe genuinely wished the best for his brothers, though he could be a tad patronizing. “From almost the start of the season, stories were coming in from the Pacific Coast about another DiMaggio. This time it was Dominic, the kid the rest of us never thought would make a ballplayer because he was short and skinny and wore glasses. Dominic didn’t look like a ballplayer.”
Dominic continued to show that size didn’t matter in Pacific Coast League competition. Under the scholarly appearance and friendly demeanor was a tough player who wouldn’t back down. Most likely, the toughness was a product of DiMaggio stock, enhanced by being the youngest of nine children, with four older brothers. Yes, Dominic was the baby of the family and at times had been treated as such. But in his view, being the baby also meant always having to prove he belonged at the grown-ups’ table. That was doubly true in baseball for a player with the last name of DiMaggio.
Besides Dominic, there was not a lot of talent on the 1937 Seals. When the regular season ended, third baseman Frankie Hawkins had the highest batting average on the team. His .324 was modest compared to hometown hitters of the past. Dominic wasn’t far behind, at .306. He could get on base, he ran aggressively,
he made few mistakes, and nothing got by him in center field. O’Doul pulled a rabbit out of a hat and got the Seals to second place, at 98-80, missing first place by four games. Dominic looked forward to the next season when, with O’Doul in his corner, he could build on his progress and maybe be ready for the majors. He had thrust himself into the starting lineup and appeared in 140 games with almost 500 at-bats. He hit only five home runs, but he saved a lot of runs for the Seals with a .967 fielding percentage in center.
When the Seals played the Padres during the season, Dominic and Vince’s former teammate, Ted Williams, greeted each other warmly. Ted had begun to fill out and was showing more promise as a player. According to Joanne DiMaggio Webber, “My father had taught Ted Williams how to eat. Ted had been just skin and bones when he came to the Padres in 1936. My father would get him to eat better for his strength, and of course he could feast when the Padres were in San Francisco and my Grandmother Rosalie was cooking.”
Ted’s best friend on the Padres in the ’37 season was Bobby Doerr. He and the infielder were two of the youngest members of the team, both liked fishing, and to kill time on road trips they went to the movies to watch Westerns. There was a little friendly competition too—who was going to make it to the majors first?
On road trips to Portland, Williams and Doerr became friendly with the clubhouse boy there, a homegrown product named Johnny Pesky, who had not yet impressed anyone as a player. So did Dominic. “I certainly do remember John as the clubhouse boy,” he told Bill Nowlin for his biography of Pesky. “We’d come up to Portland and John was there and he took care of the clubhouse.”
Williams wound up the season with a .291 average, 23 home runs, and 98 RBI. The Padres had an easy time of it in the playoffs. Williams got his club off to a fast start in the first game, going 4-for-5. The Padres swept Sacramento in the first round, then did the same to Portland and were handed the Governor’s Cup. Before the year was over, the Red Sox gave Bill Lane some cash and four minor leaguers to purchase Williams from the Padres. Ted was less than thrilled: “I read about that for the first time in the paper and I was sick. The Red Sox didn’t mean a thing to me. A fifth-, sixth-place club, the farthest from San Diego I could go. I sure wasn’t a Boston fan.”
Joe took advantage of the Yankees’ gift of a shorter Death Valley. For once, “Larrupin’ Lou” Gehrig was not leading the team in home runs. His end-of-season totals of 37 round-trippers and 159 RBI would have led many teams, but Joe had emerged as the man brandishing the heavy lumber for the Bronx Bombers and at one point was on pace with Ruth’s 1927 season.
His stance at the plate had become one of the most distinctive and imitated in the game. When Joe stepped into the batter’s box, he stubbed his right toe into the dirt in back of his left heel. Then he spaced his feet precisely four feet apart, with more of his weight on his left leg. He stood erect with the bat on his right shoulder (no choking up) as he waited for the pitch. He was deep in the batter’s box and close to the plate. Joe, it appeared, could wait until the last moment before deciding to swing at the ball.
In the second half of the season Joe faded from Ruth’s pace, but he still showed an uncanny ability to get the right hit with men on base. The 167 runs he would knock in, in 151 games, would be one of the highest totals ever in Yankee history and his personal best, at age 22. These totals also demonstrated that Joe was already a great hitter no matter what the dimensions of the ballpark.
The Yankees steamrolled down the stretch. They finished with 102 wins and a .662 winning percentage. The Tigers saluted from afar, finishing an unlucky 13 games out. (The St. Louis Browns finished a woeful 56 games out.) Joe’s 46 home runs led both leagues, with Greenberg and Gehrig finishing second and third in the AL. His .346 average was 21 points higher than his strong rookie year.
In the World Series, familiar faces were waiting for Joe, Gehrig, Dickey, Crosetti, Lazzeri, Gomez, and the rest of the Yankees: the New York Giants had again won the National League pennant.
Watching from a box at Yankee Stadium, Vince had better seats than any of his teammates enjoyed. The Boston Bees had played well down the stretch. They had no chance for a National League title, but after their dismal records of recent years, finishing over .500 would be a triumph. On September 14, they swept a doubleheader from the Cubs, 9–0 and 4–2. Vince helped out with his bat in the first game; in the second, he “suffered a possible fracture of his left collarbone in making a sensational catch of Stan Hack’s high, short fly to left center. . . . DiMaggio was taken to a hospital.” He was back in the lineup a few days later.
As the season drew to a close, it seemed that Vince’s toughness—mental as well as physical—had won over many in the press. A columnist who wrote as “The Old Scout” opined in September, “All things considered, this has been a fairly satisfactory year for Vince DiMaggio. Vince fooled a lot of people, including Owner Bob Quinn, who had given up on him before the season was a month old. His hitting is improving, and there never was anything wrong with his fielding. He has helped the Bees far more than was expected.” Vince, he went on, “is gaining confidence and with more experience and less ballyhoo about the fact that he is the brother of the Yankee star, he is expected to fan less frequently and improve his average of .260 or thereabouts.”
Vince came close, batting .256. It would be his lowest as a professional. The Bees finished fifth in the eight-team league.
As his wife had done the previous fall, Giuseppe DiMaggio made the long cross-country trip to be at the 1937 World Series when it began in New York. He was accompanied on the train by Tom and Dominic.
“Yesterday,” Bob Considine wrote in his New York Daily Mirror column after the elder DiMaggio’s arrival, “was a considerable day in the life of a red-faced, stocky retired crab-fisherman. He had come all the way across the country from his native San Francisco, where he raised a brood of children in a section called Cow Hollow, to see one of his progeny—Joseph—play ball.”
When Joe went off to batting practice, “Poppa DiMaggio stayed behind awhile, to puff one of the cigars Jim Braddock gave him and look out the window of the Mayflower Hotel. He would go out to Yankee Stadium in a little while, sit in the box seat his son had bought for him, and watch his boy play for the first time since Joe became a Yank.”
Considine also revealed to his New York audience a new DiMaggio venture in San Francisco, a seafood restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf named Joe DiMaggio’s Grotto. “Tom DiMaggio looks after that too, and Mike, who keeps to the sea he has always known, supplies it with its seafood.” Giuseppe was impressed when Angelo Rossi, the mayor of San Francisco, became a regular customer. It was a piece of the American Dream when the mayor came to shake your hand and eat your food.
The first game of the Series was tight, with the Giants clinging to a 1–0 lead into the sixth inning, Carl Hubbell and Gomez dueling. In the bottom of the inning, the Yankees broke through when Joe drove Gomez in. When the inning was over, the Yankees were up 7–1, and they would cruise to an 8–1 triumph. There was an identical outcome the next day, this time Red Ruffing gaining the win and Joe having his second straight 2-for-4 game. It was only slightly better for the Giants at the Polo Grounds—they lost 5–1.
They finally won in Game 4, 7–3, staving off elimination. (Gehrig hit his 10th World Series homer, and it would prove to be his last.) But they lost the next game, 4–2. According to one account, “Papa DiMaggio, who came all the way from San Francisco to ‘see Joe hit some home runs,’ finally was rewarded when his big son catapulted a drive a few feet inside the left field line in the third inning of yesterday’s finale.” Joe and his teammates would each receive $6,500 in winner’s money.
During the off-season, Tom ran the restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf, Mike supplied the fish, and Vince, Joe, and Dominic were on hand to greet customers and talk baseball. Tom and Joe had an idea of what to do with some of the fourth son’s money—buy their parents a house. I
f there was a silver lining to the Depression, it was that anyone with money to spare could get a lot for it.
The DiMaggios found a house on Beach Street in the Marina District. Among the “amenities” that Giuseppe and Rosalie hadn’t enjoyed on Taylor Street were a garage and a living room. To the immigrant, middle-aged couple, their new home was a palace, and baseball had bought it for them.
EIGHT
The New York Yankees made a curious move for the 1938 season: they got rid of Tony Lazzeri, shipping him to the Chicago Cubs. They replaced him with a talented farmhand, Joe Gordon, but still, the team was tinkering with the core Italian-American group from San Francisco. That group included the man emerging as their best player, which he would presumably be for at least a decade. It was incredible, then, when general manager Ed Barrow sent the American League home run champion a contract with the salary set at the same $15,000 as the season before.
When Tom DiMaggio eyed the insulting contract in San Francisco, he told Barrow, no dice. Colonel Ruppert demanded that Joe appear in his office on January 21. Joe told Barrow and the Colonel that he wanted $40,000, almost giving them both heart attacks. They claimed that even Gehrig didn’t make that much. Joe was unimpressed with the $25,000 counteroffer. Take it or leave it, Ruppert told him. Joe left, returning to San Francisco.
The Yankees were not accustomed to such insolence. This 23-year-old son of a Sicilian immigrant who grew up in a house that stank of fish and who could hardly put a sentence together was refusing to play ball with the marquee ball club of the major leagues? The Yankees leaked stories to the press about how greedy Joe was, a tactic they would use for decades with rebellious players. Joe looked worse in the public eye when the club announced that Gehrig had signed a contract worth $39,000.