The DiMaggios

by Tom Clavin

  This time, however, Cronin wasn’t going to miss out on a DiMaggio. The Red Sox offered the Seals $75,000 for Dominic’s contract. It was an “I told you so” moment for O’Doul when he predicted to San Francisco reporters, including one from the Examiner, “He’ll be a sensation up there—a positive sensation. He can’t miss. I’m glad he’s going to Boston because Boston is one town where the fans know and appreciate all-around good ball players. Boston is going to idolize Dom.”

  All through the ’39 season, Vince had done everything he could to be called up by the Yankees—driving in runs, crushing homers, covering the outfield. He had become a fan favorite. It had been the best season of his career. And Vince made a few lifelong friendships on the Blues. One was with another Italian-American player. “Phil Rizzuto was my babysitter,” Joanne DiMaggio Webber recalls. “He was like a kid himself and lots of fun, and a very sweet man. And yes, he was scared to death of the lightning in Kansas City, he would always dislike going back there. Phil played all those years with Joe once he got to the Yankees, but he was more friendly with my father then than I think he ever was with Joe.”

  But the cruising Yankees had no need for an outfielder—especially not a center fielder, with Joe remaining healthy. And with Joe now as popular as he could possibly be in New York, there was no PR value in adding Vince to the roster. There was value in trading him, though, for prospects. On August 4, when Vince slammed his 37th and 38th homers, he was called into the Kansas City office to talk to Roy Hamey. He was sure this was it. He was going to New York. Instead, Hamey told him that when the season ended he was being shipped to the Cincinnati Reds for two minor leaguers and $20,000.

  It hit him hard. The Reds already had a good team and were in a fight for the National League pennant. There was no open position for Vince to step into. At first, he kept trying while still with the Blues—he hit eight more home runs to finish the season with 46 and 136 RBI, leading the American Association. The Blues took first place in the league. Then they lost in the first round of the playoffs, and Vince packed his bags for Cincinnati. There, he just couldn’t shake his disappointment. Appearing in only eight games at the end of the Reds’ season, Vince hit an embarrassing .071.

  The Reds won the pennant. It would have been wonderful for the DiMaggio family if Vince and Joe had faced off in the Series, but because he didn’t join the Reds until after September 1, Vince was not eligible to play in the Series. If he went at all, it would have to be with tickets from Joe. In a way the Reds did Vince a favor, because they never stood a chance. The closest they came was in the first game, at Yankee Stadium, when they held New York to two runs, but the Yanks’ Ruffing gave up only one. The Yankees went on to sweep the Series in four games.

  The New York juggernaut had won 16 of the 19 World Series games played since Joe joined the team, including the last nine straight. If the Yankees could be this strong without Lou Gehrig and with Joe being only in his midtwenties, it seemed they could be world champions indefinitely. As Joe wrote: “I had come to the Yankees a naive kid of 21 and now I was an established regular on a club which was a champion among champions. With my forthcoming marriage, and all that had happened, I looked eagerly forward to 1940.”

  And why not? He had played four seasons in the major leagues and had four world championships to show for it.

  The DiMaggios had two Most Valuable Players in the family that year. Joe was voted MVP of the American League. Dominic was named the MVP of the Pacific Coast League.

  The whole clan gathered in San Francisco for Joe’s wedding. They’d set the date for November 19, two days shy of Dorothy’s 22nd birthday, six days before Joe turned 25. She had converted to Catholicism, pleasing Giuseppe and Rosalie. The ceremony took place at St. Peter and St. Paul, the church the DiMaggio brothers had attended as kids. Giuseppe and Rosalie were a bit bewildered by all the attention the event received. When the decade began, they were an immigrant couple still working tirelessly to raise their family. As the decade drew to a close, they were still a couple from the old country with limited English, but their sons were baseball stars. One was the most famous athlete in America (though a few might argue for heavyweight champion Joe Louis), he was about to marry a Hollywood actress from the hinterlands of Minnesota, and Mayor Rossi himself was a prominent guest.

  A crowd estimated at 10,000 lined up to catch a glimpse of Joe and Dorothy going to and from the church. She managed to slip into the church without much notice, but Joe had to be escorted by police through the throng of mostly North Beach well-wishers. To these onlookers—some of whom, like Giuseppe and Rosalie, could remember the old country—this was a royal wedding.

  Tom and Mike and their sisters (with their spouses and children, as all were married by this time) were already inside the church. Nelly, Marie, Frances, and Mamie were part of Dorothy’s wedding party, while her sister, Irene Morris, was the maid of honor. Their parents from Duluth were also there. Dominic arrived in a cutaway tux like Joe’s. “Isn’t this silly?” he joked. “Someone just handed it to me and I had to put it on.”

  Tom, as the oldest brother—described by press accounts as the one “who always speaks for the family”—was Joe’s best man. Dom and Vince were to serve as ushers, but Vince and Madeline arrived at the last minute and got caught up in the crowd outside. United Press reported that “San Francisco’s North Beach Italian population turned out in a carnival spirit that jammed streets and broke police lines. Standing room was at a premium in the edifice and the crowd overflowed into Washington Square. Even the wedding party had to battle the crowd to get inside the church. One woman fainted in the crush at the doorway.” Vince had to pound on a side door and prove that he was Joe’s brother to get in.

  According to newspaper accounts carried across the country, the most emotional of the DiMaggios was Marie, who through tears exclaimed, “I used to hold Joe in my arms—why, I raised him!” Cops escorted the newlyweds out of the church. After having photos taken at a studio, they arrived to cheers at the wedding reception at Joe DiMaggio’s Grotto on Fisherman’s Wharf, where Mike still tied up his boat. Lefty O’Doul was there, along with many friends, now men, who had run with the DiMaggio boys in their North Beach days. While the reception was still in progress, Joe and Dorothy slipped off to begin their honeymoon.

  Vince and Madeline had lived on their own from the day they were married seven years earlier, but Joe had a different idea about his new domestic life: why not just live in the Beach Street house bought with his money?

  In Joe & Marilyn, Roger Kahn writes, “Joe may have expected Dorothy to become simply one more of the admiring and supportive DiMaggio women. She would decorate, pack suitcases for his trips, perform in bed, cook, and root. All that he excluded from his expectations were Dorothy’s own needs. He wanted to live in San Francisco. She preferred Los Angeles or New York. He wanted a hausfrau, but picked a woman who had rejected domestic life for show business. He wanted a pliant pinup. Instead, he found someone with strong ideas of her own. The marriage never had a chance.”

  TEN

  It was a Pacific Coast League reunion when Dominic arrived at Boston’s spring training facility in Sarasota and met teammates Ted Williams and Bobby Doerr. They had been born within 18 months of one another. Tom Yawkey was so pleased with Ted’s 1939 season that he had doubled the rookie’s salary to $10,000. In his third season with the Red Sox, the then-20-year-old Doerr had batted .318 with 73 RBI. A core group of hungry young players was forming. The Yankees just couldn’t win five pennants in a row—no team ever had. Surely 1940 was Boston’s turn.

  “As a member of the Yankees in 1940, I had no idea what it was like to end the baseball year without a trip to the World Series,” Joe recalled later. “I was about to be brought back to the reality that the Yankees were, in truth, mortal.” He still made a heavenly salary, though, signing a contract for $32,500 before heading to St. Petersburg.

  There was a high leve
l of uncertainty in the spring training camps of all 16 major league teams. The 1939 season had been in full swing when Germany invaded Poland. No one knew at the time what would come of that, but in February 1940, with France, Great Britain, Italy, and other countries involved in fighting in Europe and Japan expanding its empire in Asia, there was no doubt that the world was at war and it wouldn’t end soon. Would the Americans get involved? If they did—and most people thought they would—what would be the impact on the national pastime?

  To make room for Dominic on the Red Sox roster, Joe Cronin had to cut a player. He had already sold the contract of 21-year-old Pee Wee Reese to the Brooklyn ball club for $75,000. Reese would go on to anchor the infield of the Dodgers for 18 years and be inducted into the Hall of Fame. Outfielder Joe Vosmik had a much less bright future in baseball, but he also attracted money from the Dodgers. The deal opened a spot for Dominic.

  Joe’s opinion of his youngest brother was improving. “Dominic came up with the best of recommendations. There was no longer any doubt that Dom was getting by on the family name. He was a ball player in his own right . . . indeed, I had no doubt that Dom would make the grade.”

  Boston’s veteran catcher Moe Berg took one look at Dominic at early practices and declared to reporters, “You know me, I’ve seen a lot of rookies in my time. I don’t go overboard with a splash. I don’t say this boy will be better than his brother Joe. I wouldn’t know about that. But this boy is a ball player; he has everything, all the ingredients—like cioppino.” Reporters respected Berg’s opinions. The Princeton graduate knew a dozen languages, including Japanese and Sanskrit.

  With Vince in Tampa with the Cincinnati Reds, for the first time all three DiMaggio brothers were in major league spring training camps. Joe maintained that he was “happy over the fact that my brothers were in the major leagues with me,” and there is no reason to doubt him.

  In his syndicated column, Joe Williams wrote, “The old-time baseball writers used to refer affectionately to Henry Chadwick as the Father of Baseball. It would seem fitting to bestow this distinction today upon Pere DiMaggio. There is something unusual about a major league team that doesn’t have one of his sons on it these days. We know of no other father who has contributed that many sons to the uplift and perpetuity of what is called the great national pastime.”

  It was not a fun rookie spring training camp for Dominic, however. During the very first exhibition game, Boston versus the Reds, he sprained an ankle sliding into home—and in a way it was Vince’s fault. Williams came up with the bases loaded, Dominic on second and Johnny Peacock on third. The sophomore outfielder singled. Because he thought there was some chance it would be caught, Peacock hesitated. Dominic, with a better angle, saw that Vince wasn’t going to get to the ball and took off. Vince grabbed the ball right after it bounced and fired a strike to the plate. Peacock slid safely into home. Right behind him, Dominic slid awkwardly to avoid spiking his teammate in the back. The ankle injury was the result. As John Kiernan reported in the New York Times, “The throw knew no brother, and Dominic was lifted from the ground and helped to the hospital ward for treatment.”

  Dominic recovered in time to be in the lineup at Griffith Park, against the Senators, on opening day of the season. “The first time I walked into Fenway Park was a day in April 1940,” he recalled about the subsequent home opener. “There was ice on the field. Coming from California, it was a bit of a shock to me. I was wondering how we were going to start on time.” Another day when Dominic reported to the ballpark, there was snow lingering on the field. When reporters asked what he thought about that, Dominic—who at 23 was seeing snow for the first time—replied, “I know when I was a kid even before I went to Galileo High School—named after a great Italian scientist, by the way—I used to get a big kick out of reading [a poem] by Whittier who, I understand, was a local boy, about ‘Snow, snow, beautiful snow.’ Then there was another by James Russell Lowell, another local boy who made good, which started ‘The snow had begun in the gloaming and busily all the night.’ That was a sad one that used to make me feel like weeping.” The “Little Professor” had begun to intrigue Boston fans before he even played.

  Because of Dominic’s injury, Boston had slotted veteran Doc Cramer in center field. Williams was in left field, and a gimpy Dominic had to play right. If he wanted center field back, he’d have to take it from Cramer—not easy considering that Cramer had batted .311 in 1939.

  With Dominic now in the majors, articles like “The Amazing DiMaggios” appeared in magazines and newspapers in the spring of 1940. Tom Laird, a San Francisco writer, opined in Collier’s magazine that Dominic was “the greatest twenty-two-year-old [sic] player in the game today.” Even Ty Cobb, Joe’s onetime contract negotiator, claimed, “Dom’s a throwback to the kind of ball players we used to have.”

  While Dominic was being hailed this way, Vince was facing what could be his last chance to stay in the majors. Always being compared unfavorably to Joe, he had never really had the press behind him, and he wasn’t exactly lighting up the National League in Cincinnati.

  He got a vote of confidence from Cincinnati executive Gabe Paul, who issued a press release championing the Reds’ acquisition of Vince and stating, “It is doubtful whether the most famous of the DiMaggio boys, Joe, can field as well as Vince. This fellow is one of the best defensive men ever to don a spiked shoe, and his throwing arm is strong and accurate.” He also referred to Vince’s offensive outburst in Kansas City the year before: “That record was the cause of the Reds shelling out a fancy price for his services.”

  From the beginning of camp in Tampa, however, it was obvious to Vince that he was not in Cincinnati’s plans as a starting outfielder. And in fact, once the season got under way, he only managed to get into two games before the Reds traded him to the Pittsburgh Pirates for Johnny Rizzo. Vince wasn’t sure if this was good news or bad. In Pittsburgh he might be a starter. But the Pirates hadn’t won a pennant since 1927.

  In New York, Joe missed the start of the season yet again. He had injured his right knee sliding into second in a tune-up at Ebbets Field against the Brooklyn Dodgers. He watched the opening day game from the bench for the fourth time in five years.

  The Yankees missed him. Without him, they were an under-.500 ball club. Boston was in first place, in the unaccustomed position of looking down at a struggling New York squad. Even more than in his rookie year, the pressure was on Ted Williams to lead them to the pennant. As the Yankees had once done for Joe, the Red Sox altered the dimensions of their ballpark to help him do that. They built a new bullpen area and put box seats in right field that brought the home run zone for left-handed batters like Ted significantly closer. Sportswriters dubbed the new area “Williamsburg.”

  But at first it didn’t seem to help. Ted was off his pace, hitting just over .300 in the first half of the season. Given the high expectations after his stellar rookie season, it was no surprise that he now heard his first booing fans, and the sportswriters attacked him. His teammate Dominic fretted for him. He’d watched how Joe handled the press in San Francisco. Joe didn’t antagonize reporters, didn’t take the bait, but Ted wasn’t built that way. He’d grown up essentially parentless and fighting for himself. He could turn loud and confrontational when he felt that his manhood or abilities were challenged. It didn’t help when manager Cronin discussed with a Boston reporter the possibility of benching him.

  Ted lashed out. After one game in which he was booed, he told reporters, “Boston is a shitty town. Fans are lousy.” When someone questioned his high salary, he responded, “I’d rather be traded to New York.” He told another reporter that he was going to quit baseball and become a fireman. The next time the Red Sox were in New York, the Yankees’ Lefty Gomez stared into the Boston dugout wearing a fireman’s hat. As the coverage got nastier and more personal, Ted repeatedly told reporters to “go fuck yourselves.”

  Meanwhile, Dominic had been s
pending more time on the bench than on the field. Cronin, not completely sold on his ability to be a major league player, was playing Lou Finney instead. Then Finney and Ted Williams collided chasing a fly ball. Ted was carted off, and Cronin put Dominic in his spot. Now he showed his stuff. As one sportswriter put it, “The bespectacled speedster has been showing a brand of outfielding that makes the average major league patrolman look slower than your horse in the home stretch.” When Ted returned to the lineup, Cronin shifted Dominic to center field.

  The comparisons to his brother soon came. A typical comment: “He hasn’t Joe’s power at bat, which isn’t surprising in view of the fact that he is three inches shorter and 40 pounds lighter. But he has an eye like a house dick and enough punch to hit any fence in the park and plant an occasional onion in the left field nets.”

  He developed a standard reply to the question “How do you compare yourself to Joe?”

  “I can do two things better than he can,” he’d say. “Play pinochle and speak Italian.” When pressed for more detail, he’d say how proud he was of Joe, then stress, “Yes, he’s my brother—and I’m his brother.”

  Boston readers loved it. It showed a new spunk from a Sox club that no longer felt inferior to the almighty Yankees. With a DiMaggio on each team, their rivalry grew hotter that season.

  The brothers faced off for the first time in a five-game series at Fenway Park. For some of the reporters, it was like the other players didn’t exist—this was a Joe versus Dominic series. The press and fans watched intently after the top of the first inning as Dominic ran in from center field and Joe headed there. What would their confrontation be like?

  “Hello, Joe,” Dominic said. Joe responded, “Hello, Dom.” And they continued trotting their separate ways.

  As Dominic remembered it: “The writers thought it was a case of two brothers being so reserved, so shy, that they hardly said anything to each other, but it wasn’t that at all. We had a game to play, an important game. We couldn’t very well stand out there and exchange news from home.”