by Tom Clavin
Bob Feller would later recall, “Most of us were making up our minds during the season what we wanted to do. If you weren’t, you had to be living in a cave somewhere.”
Dominic’s day of reckoning had already come in May. The draft board in San Francisco had notified him that he was to report to Board 18 in Boston for a physical. After the eye exam, he was declared 4F. He protested the classification, to no avail. Vince and Joe, married with children, would be classified 3A.
At the end of the season, Vince returned to Hermosa Beach and Dominic went back to the family homestead. Dominic had told Boston reporters, “Just as soon as we finish the season, I’m heading right for San Francisco. My brother Tom has been tied down all summer at the restaurant, and I want to give him a hand.”
Joe stayed in New York—because Dorothy had been pregnant during the season and was due within weeks of the World Series. Weighing in at a lucky seven pounds and eleven ounces, Joseph DiMaggio Jr. arrived on October 23 at Doctors Hospital in Manhattan. Using the baby as incentive, Dorothy persuaded her husband to stay at their West End Avenue apartment indefinitely, maybe even until spring training rolled around again.
A few weeks later, he won his second Most Valuable Player Award. With 291 votes, he beat his younger brother . . . by one vote. More significantly, he edged out Ted Williams by 37 votes. (Bob Feller came in a distant third.)
A couple of weeks after that, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. “In the first days after Pearl Harbor,” wrote Dominic, “the question wasn’t whether 1941 was baseball’s most historic season. Instead, the question was whether it would be the last.”
TWELVE
The press treated the arrival of Joe Jr. that October like a royal birth. Headlines around the country heralded the event. Richard Ben Cramer wrote, “Assuredly this was the year’s most publicized baby. All the papers had to have pictures. Sometimes, they’d wrap the baby’s tiny hand around a tiny bat, and they’d take a picture of Junior, asprawl in the crook of Dad’s arm, with the bat propped up next to his lolling head.” When sportswriter Dan Daniel visited the DiMaggios’ apartment right before Christmas, they presented an image of domestic bliss. Dorothy cradled Joe Jr. in the living room as her superstar husband, dressed as Santa Claus, trimmed the tree.
It was a calculatedly false image. Joe didn’t let fatherhood curb his social life in New York. If anything, the arrival of Joe Jr. in the West End Avenue apartment inspired Joe to even more carousing. A man who’d been doted on by his mother and four older sisters and was now treated like royalty himself everywhere he went, was not going to be content at home changing diapers and heating up bottles of milk. Two years into the marriage, he was easily annoyed and often restless.
His favorite escape was Toots Shor’s on West 51st Street. His table was in the front right-hand corner of the dining room, where he could observe all who entered, with his back to the wall. Others sat at the table by invitation only. Those usually in attendance were former heavyweight champ Jim Braddock and a cabal of writers that included Ernest Hemingway, sportswriters Grantland Rice and Jimmy Cannon, and war correspondent Bob Considine. Joe was not a drinker, so he spent the night downing cups of coffee and inhaling cigarettes. He wouldn’t go home until Dorothy and Joe Jr. were asleep.
When the baby was old enough to be left with sitters, Dorothy wanted to be out on the town with him. She wasn’t fond of Shor’s, but that was where Joe was comfortable, so there she went. Joe wasn’t happy about that. According to Cramer, “The way he saw it, sometimes Dorothy just got in the way—or talked too much, or flirted too much—or was just too goddamn present. So he went out alone. If she got on him about that, he could walk away for days. He could always find a hotel room.”
When the Christmastime conversation with Dan Daniel had turned to the upcoming 1942 season, Joe, now 27, had offered, “This should be the year, if everything goes well. I have not yet reached my peak as a ballplayer.”
In fact, he had. Joe would never again have a season to equal the production of his first six. He had no way of knowing that Vince would play much more baseball than he would over the next four seasons, or that in several respects Dominic would be the better player of the decade.
On February 1, at its annual dinner, the New York chapter of the Baseball Writers of America honored Joe as the organization’s Player of the Year. He had once again beaten out Ted Williams for the award. It was telling that not only the New York but the Boston chapter selected Joe over Ted. Clearly, Ted’s relationship with the press there was still frosty.
As the ’42 season approached, Joe and Tom held out again for more money. The contract the Yankees sent him was for the same amount he’d made the previous year, despite the streak, the MVP Award, and another world championship. March 1 came and went. “Doesn’t he know there’s a war on?” Ed Barrow sniped to the press. Finally, he upped the offer to $42,000. It made Joe the highest-paid Yankee since Babe Ruth, who had collected a stunning $80,000 in 1930. It was reported that Barrow beseeched, “For God’s sake, Joe, give us a full year’s play this time. At these rates, we deserve it.” Joe in turn pledged to put 10 percent of his salary into U.S. war bonds. He headed to St. Petersburg—tellingly, not with Dorothy and Joe Jr. but with Toots Shor.
Joe certainly did know there was a war on. Back home in San Francisco, many feared that after Pearl Harbor Japan would target the West Coast. The night of December 7, there had been four air raid alerts in the city. The front-page headline in the next day’s San Francisco Chronicle was “Japan Planes Near S.F.” Later that day people claimed to have spotted enemy aircraft and even submarines. Ships began to arrive carrying military personnel and civilians from Pearl Harbor, some of them wounded. Immigrants and especially people of Asian descent had become suspected spies and were stopped and questioned.
Authorities issued curfews and placed restrictions on foreign nationals, especially those from countries in the Axis. This included Giuseppe and Rosalie DiMaggio, who still were not U.S. citizens, mainly because even after 40 years they couldn’t read and write English well enough to pass the test. It was especially frustrating for Giuseppe, who was essentially confined to his home.
The Grotto, like all restaurants in the city, suffered. People were not going out to lunch and dinner. Tom was running an empty restaurant, and Joe would have to make up the difference.
The war had an impact on the 1942 season in many ways. Some players enlisted or were drafted into military service, and others (along with team executives) looked over their shoulders wondering who was next. Bob Feller hadn’t waited. On the evening of December 7, he was having dinner with Cy Slapnicka, an Indians executive who had scouted and signed him. (Slapnicka’s other key signing for Cleveland would be Roger Maris, in 1952.) Feller announced that he was joining the Navy. Three days later, Gene Tunney, the former heavyweight champion who headed the Navy’s physical fitness program, met with Feller and signed him up, and “Rapid Robert” became the first major league player to enlist after America went to war. Hank Greenberg had been drafted into the Army in May 1941, missed the rest of the season, and was then discharged in November. Right after the Pearl Harbor attack, he went back into the Army. He would end up missing four years as a player. Hank Gowdy, a coach with the Cincinnati Reds, had been the first player to enlist when the United States joined World War I. At 53, he would return to the Army in 1942.
When Vince traveled to spring training in February, he worried about leaving Madeline and Joanne behind in Hermosa Beach. By then, fears of a full-scale Japanese invasion had faded, yet many believed that the West Coast was still vulnerable to air attacks. His plan was to get through spring training and then have them join him in Pittsburgh. Joanne would finish out the school year in Pittsburgh, spend the summer there, then return home with her mother when the new school year began in September. It was a pattern Vince and his family followed for the rest of the war.
; “It was exciting that my father was a professional baseball player, and my uncles too, but I would miss him when we lived apart,” recalls Joanne. “I’d miss his singing. He sang all the time at home. I can still see him in the front room, singing away. I used to sneak down the stairs and I’d peek around and I’d watch him sing. Dad sang Italian love songs, the classic ones.”
“Oh, he had a beautiful tenor voice then,” says Lee Howard. “Us younger guys used to beg him to sing for us during spring training.” Howard was a Staten Island native who was signed by the Pirates organization as a pitcher and, at 18, was in his first spring training in 1942. He would soon join the Navy, and by the time he made his major league debut for the Pirates in September 1946, Vince had moved on. But Howard remembers a lively personality, quite different from what the public knew about Joe and Dominic.
“Heck of a nice guy, and fun to be around,” Howard says. “Now, I was a rookie, even less than a rookie. He was not only a major league veteran, a star, but a DiMaggio. Vince didn’t act like it. He was a good teammate who wanted to win. Even with a war going on, there was hope for the Pirates that year.”
First, though, there was getting into playing shape. Not only the players but the managers were uneasy, not knowing who they would have on their rosters come opening day—if there was an opening day. Vince’s skipper, Frankie Frisch, a future Hall of Famer known from his playing days as the “Fordham Flash,” spoke for all managers when he said about early 1942, “Spring training was the worst time. The uncertainty—the rumors that the owners would shut down. If we started the season, how far could we go? Were there going to be enough ball players?”
It was a legitimate concern. When the 1942 season began, 61 major league players had already gone off to the war. Month after month, that number would increase. Of the roughly 400 players on big league rosters in ’42, a quarter of them were rookies. Many of these rookies were just interchangeable fill-ins, but a few were keepers, like Stan Musial with the St. Louis Cardinals and Johnny Pesky, who joined Dominic in Boston. The former Portland clubhouse boy was now a 22-year-old shortstop showing a lot of promise. He had been the MVP of the American Association the previous year. Joe Cronin was nearing the end of the trail as a player, and with Pesky playing like a veteran right away, Cronin could focus more on managing. Pesky would bat .331 in 1942. (At the end of the season, owner Tom Yawkey gave him a $5,000 bonus.)
As early as spring training, the impact of the war could be seen in the stands too. An estimated 2,000 soldiers—including Sgt. Hank Greenberg—attended a game between the Reds and the Red Sox. Dominic noted that “there seemed to be more fans in uniform than in civilian clothes.” By the time the Red Sox opened their season, five of their players were also in uniform. One of them, Earl Johnson, would come back from the war with a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and a cluster for heroism earned during the Battle of the Bulge.
While many players simply waited for notices from their draft boards, Dominic fought to get into military service. Midway through the season, he accompanied a friend to the Federal Building in Boston and filled out the paperwork to enlist in the Navy. But when taking the required eyesight test, he admitted to the doctor that he could make out only the “E” at the top of the chart. “The Navy’s not going to accept you,” the doctor told him.
A lengthy conversation ensued, with Dominic making his case for having fine sight with his glasses on and the doctor telling him that wouldn’t be good enough for the Navy. When Dom asked about the Army, the doctor replied, “The chances are 40 percent they might take you.”
“Well, why can’t the Navy take me if the Army’s going to? I’d rather be in the Navy.”
The doctor offered to write a letter to the War Department stating that Dominic’s athletic ability offset his weak eyesight. Dominic agreed to that. He would soon be notified that he had been accepted into the Navy, but that he did not have to report until the season was over. It was back to chasing the Yankees.
Ted Williams started the season with the opposite attitude. “Hitler had been giving Europe fits, and things were looking bad all over, but it hadn’t sunk in on me yet,” he would later write. “All I was interested in was playing ball, hitting the baseball, being able to hunt, making some money.” That winter he had told his draft board that he couldn’t go into the military because he was the sole support of his mother. While that was true, the board wasn’t swayed and classified him 1A. Ted appealed to the presidential board. That got the attention of the press, and when the season began, Cronin expected his best ballplayer to get an earful on opening day.
There were plenty of men in uniform in the stands at Fenway Park when the 1942 season began. Maybe they came to boo Ted, but he made that hard when, with Dominic on second and Pesky on first, he smacked the ball into the bleachers his first time up. He collected two more hits before the game ended in an 8–3 victory. The following month he finally signed up for the Navy.
Signing up didn’t completely silence the boos. On July 1, the Red Sox faced the Senators in a doubleheader at Griffith Stadium. The Senators fans down the left-field foul line got on Ted. He could hear every insult, which, to him, was always louder than any cheer. He made a rude gesture to them that only increased their abuse. In the fifth inning of the second game, admitting later that he wanted to “knock some teeth out,” Ted began launching line drives down the foul line in left. “He had those guys in his sights,” Dominic said. “Who else would ever do something like that?”
Ted accidentally hit one fair, and it bounced off the left-field wall. Surprised, he was slow getting out of the box and barely made it to second. An enraged Cronin took him out of the game, and fined him $250 to boot.
The war also made its mark on the All-Star Game in a couple of ways that year. In fact, because of the war, there were two All-Star Games. The first one began at the Polo Grounds in New York at 6:30 Eastern War Time and had to end at 9:10 so that the ballpark could be emptied out in time for the air raid drill scheduled for 9:30. Dominic was in the AL lineup again with Joe. The AL won. The next day they were in Cleveland, playing a second All-Star Game, a special wartime edition in which the AL team faced off against a team made up of major league players now in uniform. That team included Bob Feller, Hank Greenberg, and Cecil Travis of the Senators. The AL team won again. The brainchild of the Baseball Writers Association, the two games raised $160,000 for war-related agencies.
At the start of the season Joe had looked worth every penny the Yankees were shelling out when he slugged his first home run, a 450-foot blast. But that homer didn’t presage anything like his previous year’s hitting. Joe struggled through May into June, when his average had sunk to .253 after a 5-for-29 road trip. It didn’t help his performance that some fans were booing him, as they did other players, because he hadn’t joined the military. It’s likely that his worsening relationship with Dorothy was also distracting him. There were items in the New York papers about Dorothy having returned from a trip to Reno, Nevada, which got people wondering what she had been doing there. Barrow and the rest of the Yankee brass became alarmed. If Dorothy divorced him, he would lose his 3A status and might well be drafted. They didn’t like that fans were booing him, but they also didn’t want to lose him.
Dorothy put the divorce on hold, but she went to stay indefinitely with Lefty and June Gomez. It was probably no coincidence that Joe began, finally, to hit. Four hits in a doubleheader against the White Sox got his average above .300 for the first time in the season. “I’m in a groove now,” he told reporters, an uncharacteristic declaration.
The Yankees clinched the pennant in mid-September and finished the season nine games ahead of the Red Sox. Joe had played in all 154 games, the only season he would not miss a game. He managed to finish with a .305 batting average, but his production totals—including 21 home runs and 114 RBI—were the lowest of his career so far.
In the Fall Classic, Joe McCarthy was lookin
g for his Yankees to go seven-for-seven in the postseason during his Yankees tenure; for DiMaggio, defeating the Cardinals would mean six-for-six. St. Louis was a young team, featuring the rookie Musial, right fielder Enos Slaughter, and pitcher Mort Cooper, who had won 22 games. They faced a Yankee lineup full of experienced winners.
In the first game, Joe stroked three hits in the 7–4 victory, with Ruffing collecting a record-setting seventh World Series win (he had been tied with Lefty Gomez). But the Cards surprised them in Game 2 with a tie-breaking run in the bottom of the eighth that held up for a 4–3 triumph. There was an even bigger surprise in the third game, at Yankee Stadium—a shutout, 4–0, by southpaw Ernie White, the first time the Yanks had been blanked in the World Series in 16 years. The Cards won the next game too, 9–6. Now the Yankees faced elimination, something Joe had never confronted before in his major league career. The reliable Ruffing was sent to the mound on October 5. He pitched well, Joe had a hit and an RBI, a red-hot Rizzuto had two hits, the crowd of 69,052 cheered the Yankees on . . . and none of it was enough. The St. Louis Cardinals became world champions by virtue of a 4–2 win, with Johnny Beazley hurling his second complete game. For the first time since the Red Sox in 1915, a team in the World Series had lost the first game, then won the next four.