The DiMaggios

by Tom Clavin

  The reporter asked Giuseppe—also described as “rosy-faced, with white hair, white mustache and twinkling eyes”—who was the best player among his sons. With Tom translating from Sicilian, he replied emphatically, “Joe! He makes three times as much money as the other two.”

  Joe’s streak continued after the All-Star Game—a single on July 10, three singles and a homer on the 11th, a single and a double on the 12th, four singles during a July 13 doubleheader, a single on the 14th, and a single and a double on the 15th. Newspapers around the country avidly followed his exploits.

  “Joe was handling all the attention from the press and fans well,” Dominic remembered. “That 61-game streak with the Seals might have been good preparation for what he was going through. He was the only thing people in baseball were talking about at that point in the 1941 season.”

  In Boston, Dominic didn’t have to wait until the next newspaper to find out how Joe did during that day’s game. Ted Williams had made an arrangement with Bill Daley, who operated the scoreboard in left field at Fenway Park. Daly would call out to Ted when he received a report from wherever the Yankees were playing, and then Ted would yell “Dommie!” to get his attention and inform him of what Joe had just done.

  “I didn’t notice any change in Joe during the streak,” Dominic recalled. “We had dinner a couple of times when the Yankees and Red Sox played each other, and we visited on the field. I was glad to see him holding up so well.”

  Not that Dominic made it easy for his older brother. In a game against the Red Sox, Joe made outs his first two times up. The third time up, the bases were loaded with two outs. He tagged one to left-center. When Dominic caught the long drive, half the ball was sticking out of his glove. “As soon as I caught it, I got a sick feeling in my stomach. You know, this is his third time at bat. On the way in, [Joe] was coming out to his place in center field, and I’ve got to pass this guy, and, gee, I’m feeling so sorry. And then I turn to give him an apologetic look, and he just turned at the same time and looked at me—believe me, if looks could kill, I would’ve dropped right there, and I said, ‘Oh my God, I’ve made an enemy.’ ” Joe put the ball in the seats on his fourth time up, letting Dom off the hook.

  When the Yankees arrived in Cleveland on July 16, in 55 consecutive games Joe had collected 51 singles, 16 doubles, 4 triples, and 11 home runs. That night he made it 56 straight when he had two singles, a double, and three runs scored. Incredibly, during the streak he had struck out only five times.

  It ended the next day, thanks to Cleveland pitchers Al Smith and Jim Bagby and the stalwart fielding of Ken Keltner, who converted two smashes down the third-base line into outs. In the top of the eighth, Joe, with even many of the 67,468 Indians fans at Cleveland Stadium cheering for a hit, faced Bagby with the bases loaded and grounded to shortstop Lou Boudreau, who turned it into a double play. Typically, the Yankees won the game anyway, 4–3.

  Joe was stoic about the streak ending (even though he missed out on an offer from Heinz “57 Varieties” Ketchup to award him $10,000 if he hit in his 57th consecutive game). “I can’t say that I’m glad it’s over,” he told reporters in the locker room. “Of course, I wanted to go on as long as I could. Now that the streak is over, I just want to get out there and keep helping win ball games.”

  In the more than seven decades since Joe’s streak, only two other ballplayers have vaguely threatened the record—Pete Rose and Paul Molitor. Years later, Shirley Povich wrote in the Washington Post that “man would never walk on the moon, an actor would never get elected president, and nobody would ever break Joe’s streak.” Only one of those predictions remains true.

  In Pittsburgh, the Pirates under Frankie Frisch had started the season looking to do some damage in 1941. On paper they looked better than the Cubs, Braves, and Phillies. It seemed unlikely that they were ready to compete with the Cardinals or a reviving Dodgers squad for first place, but when Vince had mailed his signed contract to club president Bill Benswanger, he enclosed a note that read, “Best wishes for a pennant, and nothing less.”

  Vince had a solid spring training and was the starting center fielder. In March the Pirates issued a release about him that offered a glimpse of how his stock had risen in the organization: “When Frankie Frisch, on May 8, of last year, induced Bill McKechnie, the Cincinnati skipper, to give up Vince DiMaggio in exchange for Johnny Rizzo, the Pirate manager made one of the most profitable deals engineered by the Pittsburgh club in years. Vince is one of the greatest center fielders in the game, a natural ballhawk who turns many a seeming extra-base drive into a putout, plays ground balls like an infielder, and owns a throwing arm that is second to none in power or accuracy.”

  As the season progressed the Pirates played pretty good ball, and Vince emerged as the offensive leader as well as continuing to play excellent center field. Soon to turn 29, he had finally hit his stride in the majors. In July the Bucs were battling the Dodgers for first place. On the 22nd, they drew to within a game when they beat Brooklyn, 8–3, at Ebbets Field, spurred by Vince going 2-for-3 with a home run. Vince was comfortable and confident at the plate. Fans in Pittsburgh had not had a lot to cheer about in recent years, so when Vince hustled and displayed the only real power on the team, the crowds at Forbes Field applauded enthusiastically.

  As expected, the strongest contenders for the pennant were the Dodgers and Cardinals. But Vince was undeterred. When he saw a pitch he liked, he swung. He was well behind his brothers in making contact, but when Vince did connect, the ball went places. During one stretch in August, he hit three homers in three games that led Pittsburgh to a sweep of the Boston Braves. With power numbers down throughout the major leagues because of a less-lively baseball, Vince’s performance was all the more impressive—21 home runs and 100 runs batted in. And he displayed impressive durability too by playing in all but three of Pittsburgh’s games. Pitching would hurt the Pirates, but they had a respectable season. They finished 19 games back, but they were 81-73, one of the better records in the history of a franchise that had been established in 1887.

  A few days after Joe’s streak ended, Newsweek noted, “Joe DiMaggio’s perpetual-motion hitting streak . . . had put another up-and-coming young man in the shade.” It was a reference to Ted Williams, who was hitting .412 during Joe’s streak—four points higher than Joe. Earlier in the season he’d been hitting as high as .489. The fans weren’t booing him anymore, and the press wasn’t carping at him.

  “I always sympathized with him when he had those problems with the media,” Dominic recalled. “I was quiet, and Ted would get to talking about hitting in our little corner of the clubhouse—he never talked about fielding—and he would draw a crowd, and after a while he’d turn to me and say, ‘Dommie, you think I’m full of shit, don’t you?’ ” As the New York sports columnist Joe Williams informed his readers, “I invited him to dinner and spent three hours with him and couldn’t develop any sort of story about Dominic. That same day I rode down the elevator with Ted Williams and between the eighth and the fourth floors I picked up my column for the day.”

  With the year Joe and Ted were having, and with Dominic now entrenched in the Boston lineup in his sophomore season, the rivalry between the Yankees and Red Sox again entertained fans. Well-known brothers like Dizzy and Daffy Dean or Lloyd and Paul Waner had played on the same teams, not on competing teams like Joe and Dom. It was exciting to watch the two center fielders and their teams going head to head.

  “When I got to Yankee Stadium, the adrenaline flowed,” Dominic told Fay Vincent. “I just loved playing in Yankee Stadium. I had all that room out there in center field and I was a line drive hitter. I loved playing against New York, and when they came to Boston, you could cut the atmosphere with a knife. It was just so full of tension. I mean just great.”

  When they won, the Red Sox—who would finish first in the league in batting average, on-base percentage, and runs scored—won big. They establi
shed a formula they’d follow for much of the decade: Dominic would get on base (and, beginning the next season, Johnny Pesky), and Doerr or Williams would knock him in.

  But their pitching hurt them. Lefty Grove’s career was in its final stage. On July 25, on his third attempt to win his 300th game, he defeated the Indians at Fenway Park, with Dominic catching the last out. That was it for the lefty. Winless in six more starts, he retired after the season with a 300-141 record. His .680 winning percentage remains the best of the 24 pitchers who have earned 300 victories or more.

  In August, Ted Williams was hotter than the weather. It was something of a surprise that he was playing at all. In July, in a rainy game against the Tigers, Ted walked three times. Trotting down to first base after the third walk, the spikes of his left shoe caught in the soft, damp dirt and he reinjured his ankle. But he returned to the lineup with a vengeance. In a doubleheader against the Browns, he smacked three home runs. He slugged two more the next day. Nothing seemed to work against him. The White Sox tried a shift against him by swinging infielders and outfielders to center and right, but Ted just poked a double to left. On September 1, in a doubleheader sweep of the Senators, he hit three more homers.

  Dominic was smacking his own. Against the Tigers in Boston, he hit a grand slam in the second inning, then followed up with a triple and double. On the 17th, Dominic’s two-run single in the ninth inning joined his RBI in the third to give the Red Sox a come-from-behind win over Cleveland. On the 24th, he slugged his second grand slam, off Dutch Leonard, in a 7–2 win over the Senators.

  All three DiMaggios were having stellar seasons, and the press couldn’t get enough of them. Gossip columnist Louella Parsons wrote that a Hollywood producer was floating the idea of a film titled The Great DiMaggio that would focus on Giuseppe and feature Joe, Vince, and Dominic.

  The dean of American sportswriters, Grantland Rice, was inspired to poetry in one of his daily newspaper columns:

  Out the olive trail they go—

  Vincent, Dominic, and Joe,

  Lashing, flashing, steaming hot

  In the fabled land of swat.

  Where the big ash sings its song

  For the glory of the throng,

  Or the big mace through the fray

  Sends the apple on its way—

  Watch them as they whirl, careen,

  Over the fields of verdant green.

  Rulers of the batting eye,

  Where their gaudy triples fly,

  In the sunset’s shining glow

  Who is it that steals the show?

  Vincent, Dominic, and Joe.

  And one of the more popular acts of the time, Les Brown and His Band of Renown, came up with a tune titled “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio.” Of course, it became the number-one song in America.

  Joe twisted his ankle in a game in August. Before he was back in the lineup, his teammates threw him a surprise party. After a loud rendition of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” they gave him a silver humidor with the number 56 etched on it, with the inscription, “Presented to Joe DiMaggio by his fellow players on the New York Yankees to express their admiration for his consecutive game hitting streak. 1941.” Also inscribed were the signatures of every player, and Joe McCarthy’s.

  There was every reason to throw a party. When they clinched the pennant on September 4, it was the earliest in the major leagues—another record that still stands. When Joe did return to the field, the Philadelphia Athletics paid the price as he slugged his 29th and 30th homers. The Yankees sailed through September and concluded the season with 101 wins, 17 games ahead of the Red Sox and 24 ahead of the White Sox.

  Again, the Boston ball club had shown improvement but was bested by a machine with all its cylinders working. Dominic couldn’t rival his brother’s remarkable accomplishment in the 1941 season, but Ted was aiming to give it a good shot. As the games dwindled down to a precious few, Ted’s average was consistently 40 or more points higher than Joe’s. With a week left in the season, it stood at .406. Manager Joe Cronin suggested that Ted sit on it. The irascible left fielder responded, “If I’m a .400 hitter, I’m a .400 hitter for the entire season. Not a part of one. I’ll play out the year.”

  But he hit under .400 that week, and his average was .39955—technically .400—going into the final weekend series against the Philadelphia Athletics at Shibe Park. Saturday’s game was rained out. That night Cronin again went to Ted and asked him to sit out the next day’s makeup doubleheader. Ted refused.

  According to Dominic, “It was a decision that I’ve always admired him for, one that all of us were proud of. . . . The books of baseball history show that Ted responded the way champions do.”

  In the first game, Ted faced right-hander Dick Fowler. The weather was damp and dreary, but because that Sunday was the last day of the season, both games had to be played. When Ted stepped up to the plate the first time, the A’s catcher told him, “If we let up on you, Mr. Mack said he would run us out of baseball. I wish you all the luck in the world, but we’re not going to give you a damn thing.”

  Williams singled. Next time up, off left-hander Porter Vaughan, he homered. He singled his next two times up, then reached base on an error. He was 4-for-5 in the game and easily could have finished over .400. But he still wouldn’t sit. In the second game, he went 2-for-3. With Dominic and his other teammates silently urging him on, Ted had elevated his average back to .406. Such a day deserved a party, but Ted was not much of a drinker: “I don’t remember celebrating that night, but I probably went out and had a chocolate milk shake.”

  As with Joe’s streak that year, no player has bested Ted Williams’s 1941 batting average. Of the thousands of men who have worn baseball uniforms since then, only George Brett, with .390 in 1980, and Tony Gwynn, with .394 in the strike-shortened 1994 season, came within hailing distance. (And if sacrifice flies had not been counted as outs in 1941, Ted would have hit .419.)

  Joe couldn’t touch several of Ted’s other achievements that year. He was tops in the American League in home runs (37), walks, and runs scored (135). An even more remarkable statistic is that with his 145 walks and 185 hits, Ted had an on-base average of .574, meaning that he wound up on base (or with a home run) more than half the times he stepped up to the plate. His longest hitless streak the entire season was seven at-bats.

  Dominic’s batting faded as the season wore on, to .283, but his value to Boston was in scoring 117 runs. He could be counted on to set the table for Williams and Doerr, as well as the aging Cronin and Foxx. Dominic was third in the American League in runs scored—bettered by only his brother and Ted.

  The Brooklyn Dodgers were finally back in the World Series in 1941, their first visit since 1920. Perhaps the biggest distinctions for the franchise since 1920 had been playing the first night baseball game in New York City—on June 15, 1938, at Ebbets Field—and the first game ever televised—against the Reds on August 26, 1939. They were led by Pete Reiser (a league-leading .343 average), Dixie Walker, Ducky Medwick, Dolph Camilli (National League MVP), Pee Wee Reese in his first full season and leading the league in putouts, 22-game winners Whit Wyatt and Kirby Higbe, “Fat Freddie” Fitzsimmons (2.07 ERA at age 40), and manager Leo Durocher. They apparently posed the best challenge to the Bronx Bombers in the “Fall Classic” in a decade.

  In the first game, at Yankee Stadium, Red Ruffing reminded everyone why he was considered such a money pitcher when his neat six-hitter resulted in a 3–2 win. But Wyatt got revenge with his own 3–2 victory the next day. At Ebbets Field, the Yankees’ Marius Russo pitched a complete-game four-hitter, for a 2–1 win. Joe drove in one of the runs and had two hits.

  He had two more hits on October 5 as the Yankees beat Brooklyn 7–4. This was the game with a play that would have Dodgers fans saying, “Wait till next year,” for 13 more seasons. Brooklyn clung desperately to a 4–3 lead going into the top of the nin
th. Tying the Series with another game to go at Ebbets Field would be a huge boost. Hugh Casey had already pitched three and a third innings, but Durocher left him in. This seemed the right decision when Johnny Sturm grounded to second and Red Rolfe grounded to the mound. Two outs. The dangerous Tommy Henrich came to the plate, but Casey struck him out—so everyone thought. But the catcher, Mickey Owen, let the ball get through. The alert Henrich raced to first base and was safe. That brought up Joe, who singled to left. He and Henrich then scored on Charlie Keller’s double to right. Dickey walked. Joe Gordon doubled in two more runs. Rizzuto walked. Finally, a battered Casey got pitcher Johnny Murphy to ground to short for the final out.

  In the bottom of the inning, the Dodgers’ play reflected the total deflation of their 33,813 fans. With Murphy on the mound, Reese fouled out to Bill Dickey, Walker grounded to Rizzuto, and Reiser grounded to Sturm. The ball never left the infield, and the game was over. One headline in the next day’s newspapers called the out that wasn’t “Flatbush’s Darkest Hour.” Another said, “The Yanks Slip the Dodgers a Mickey.” The demoralized Dodgers lost again the next day, and the Yankees had yet another World Series to their name.

  Throughout the summer of 1941, most major league ballplayers kept their eyes and ears on the ever-worsening news from Europe. By that time, Germany had overrun most of Europe and the Battle of Britain was on. On June 22, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, expanding the war. There were ominous rumblings from Japan in the Pacific too, but most ballplayers were more focused on Europe because they had ethnic ties there. With Italy the third party in the Axis, the DiMaggio boys had to wonder if they might have ended up in Fascist uniforms had Giuseppe and Rosalie never left Sicily. As it was, they could still wind up in uniforms should the United States enter the war. When the Selective Service announced that it was lifting the limit of 900,000 men who would be drafted, all professional athletes in their twenties had to face the possibility of their careers being put on hold.