The DiMaggios

by Tom Clavin

  Also for the first time, Vince was chosen for the National League All-Star team. The first Midsummer Classic to be played at night, it showcased just how good a player Vince was. Stan Musial, in his first of 24 consecutive All-Star appearances, drove in a run in the first inning, then the American League scored five runs, helped by a Bobby Doerr three-run round-tripper. Vince led a comeback. After singling in the fourth, he tripled in the seventh off Tex Hughson and scored, then homered in the ninth.

  The fans continued to love him in Pittsburgh, never more so than during a game in late July. As the Pittsburgh Post reported: “The last of the DiMaggios proved why he is the most colorful and popular of baseball’s royal family yesterday. Vince’s murderous four-for-four which made the road so tough for the Dodgers wasn’t the reason, either. Any hitter has those days. It was rather the Ruthian gesture prior to his second home run of the slugfest. As he trotted in from center in the sixth, 2000 kids in the centerfield bleachers roared, ‘We want a homer.’ DiMag doffed his cap, nodded and pointed to the leftfield wall. The first batter in that frame, he stepped up and whaled the ball over the fence right at the spot where he had pointed. You should’ve heard those kids roar! The Babe was never a greater hero at Yankee Stadium.”

  “For my father, playing major league baseball was always about the fans,” says his daughter Joanne. “When there would be things in the papers about he wasn’t as good a player as Joe and Dominic, he would shrug and say that the fans get their money’s worth seeing him play too.”

  When the 1943 season was over, Vince finally had his chance to do battle in the Pacific Theater—but on ball fields, not battleships. The commissioner of baseball, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, approved a plan to have 18-player all-star teams from each league go on tour and play games against each other. The managers of the National League and American League squads were Frankie Frisch and Joe Cronin. Vince was one of the five outfielders representing the senior league, the others being Stan Musial, Augie Galan (a fellow Pacific Coast League alum), Dixie Walker, and Ducky Medwick.

  During the off-season, Vince and his family spent some of their time in the Bay Area. “I loved being there very much,” says Joanne. “My Uncle Tom ran the restaurant, and he was very nice. My father helped some during the off-season. My Uncle Mike was a sweetheart, and I liked his three kids. My grandfather tried to teach me Italian, but I just couldn’t get it. Right down the street from where he and my grandmother lived was the Palace of Fine Arts. Rosalie always gave me pieces of bread, and I walked down there to feed the ducks.”

  Back from the Pacific tour, Vince took an off-season job at the California Ship Building Corporation. If he wouldn’t be allowed to fight, at least he could help build the equipment that did the fighting. The job allowed him to manage a ball club for the first time, helming a team of electrical workers who played in a Long Beach winter league. When he showed up late for spring training in ’44—he’d wanted to put in as much time as he could at the shipyard—some in the press accused him of holding out for more money. Harvey J. Boyle in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette intoned, “This wouldn’t be a very good season for holdouts. Baseball owners are too preoccupied with a variety of manpower problems to get very excited about the hesitancy of a player to accept terms. Beyond the resentment of the owner, there is the fan reaction to be considered.”

  At spring training it soon became clear that Vince and manager Frisch weren’t seeing eye to eye. Watching Vince practice, the Fordham Flash griped to Arthur Daley of the Times, “I’m getting tired of telling him to throw that glove of his away. If he could only learn to hit he’d be as great a ball player as his brother Joe.” It set the tone for the season. Vince made the National League All-Star team, but with Frisch helming, he rode the bench the whole game. In August he got into a tiff with the organization over his meal allowance. He charged a $9.60 meal to the club. The Pirates sent the bill back to him citing a $4.50 limit. Vince told them through reporters, “If you think I eat too much, trade me.”

  When the season ended, he had played in only 109 games, his fewest since 1939 with the Cincinnati Reds, with only nine homers and 50 RBI. The Pirates traded him at the end of the season to the Phillies, the worst team in the National League, finishing 43 games out of first. It looked like a punitive move, but Vince had actually requested the relocation.

  “He left Pittsburgh because of the problems that happened, and one of the problems was he was having an affair,” Joanne says. “He asked to be traded because my mother would not give him a divorce, and he had to get out of the situation. No one said anything to me. I overheard a conversation at my Aunt Frances’s house. When I asked about it, I was told, ‘Oh no, we’re talking about Joe.’ ” Vince and Madeline would later patch things up.

  After exchanging southpaw Al Gerheauser for Vince, Herb Pennock, Philadelphia’s general manager, told reporters, “I think Vince will hit a lot of homers over that left-field fence in Shibe Park.” He proved clairvoyant. Vince had his best season since the 1941 campaign. The highlight came on September 1 in a game against the Braves in Boston, when Vince hit a grand slam. It was his fourth of the year, and with it he tied a National League record set by Frank “Wildfire” Schulte back in 1911 (later broken by Ernie Banks).

  Vince wound up supplying Philadelphia with 19 home runs, easily the most on the team, and 84 RBI in 127 games. (Jimmie Foxx, at 37, was back in baseball and also with the Phillies, but he slugged only seven homers.) Vince also had 12 stolen bases, a career high. Alas, with 91 strikeouts, he led the league for the sixth time. Not that it mattered very much, because the Phillies were the Phillies—they lost 108 games, and finished 52 games behind the surprising Chicago Cubs.

  Vince was now 33. With the war over, many players in their prime would be returning to the big leagues. He might have to fight to be a starter in the 1946 spring training camp.

  The spring of 1945 had found Joe as a physical training instructor in the Army Air Forces Redistribution Center in Atlantic City. Nearby, at Bader Field, that year’s edition of the Yankees had begun spring training. “I’d give anything to be able to take the field with the Yanks in the American League race,” he told Dan Daniel. “But if I were discharged tomorrow, I would not return to the club. I would not play ball with the war still on.”

  This sounds like Joe being patriotic and showing solidarity with other ballplayers still in uniform. But then he added, “You say the fans would not hoot a man with a medical discharge. Well, I would not take the chance. I never will forget the going over some of the boys in the Stadium gave me before I went into the service.”

  For the Yankees, Joe couldn’t get back from the Army fast enough. There was no shame in the Detroit Tigers winning the American League pennant (they would defeat the Chicago Cubs in the World Series), but finishing fourth, behind the perennial punching bags the Senators and the Browns, was humiliating.

  Joe was finally discharged on September 14. Still being treated for stomach ulcers, he had been at the Army Air Forces Don Ce-Sar convalescent hospital in a familiar city, St. Petersburg. Two days after his discharge, Joe was back at Yankee Stadium, but in civilian clothes. He attended a doubleheader against the Browns, accompanied by Dorothy and Joe Jr. In his autobiography, dedicated “To little Joe,” Joe Sr. reports that after some fans called out, “Hello, Joe!” and “Glad to see you back, Joe!” his son said, “See, Daddy? Everybody knows me.”

  He told reporters that he was heading to San Francisco that week to see his family. Reporters wondered about his being out in public together with Dorothy, but Joe wouldn’t reveal that he was trying to win his ex-wife back. He wanted to save that news to tell Giuseppe and Rosalie when he saw them again. They were not used to his failing at anything, and that included marriage.

  There was another reason to be in New York—to work out a deal for his autobiography. Joe didn’t particularly want to do a book, since it would mean talking about himself, even if only to a wri
ter (Tom Meany), but he needed the money. Missing three seasons meant he had missed out on at least $125,000 in salary from the Yankees.

  In his biography of Joe, David Jones described Joe’s dilemma: “DiMaggio resented the war with an intensity equal to the most battle-scarred private. It had robbed him of the best years of his career. When he went into the Army, DiMaggio had been a 28-year-old superstar, still at the height of his athletic powers. By the time he was discharged from the service, he was nearly 31, divorced, underweight, undernourished, and bitter. Those three years, 1943 to 1945, would carve a gaping hole in DiMaggio’s career totals, creating an absence that would be felt like a missing limb.”

  Joe’s appearance at Yankee Stadium signaled that it was time for the traditional order of things to be restored in baseball. Everyone expected that in 1946 the Yankees, with Joe leading them, would win the pennant, then the World Series. Boston had ended the ’45 season 10 games under .500 and 17.5 games out. Though the Red Sox had good players returning too, especially the core group of Ted-Dominic-Doerr-Pesky, that had to be too large a deficit to make up in one year.

  As it turned out, the Red Sox were about to have one of the greatest seasons in the franchise’s history, and Dominic and Joe would square off as two of the best players in the American League.

  “All in all, World War II taught me that we’re all on the same team working for a common goal and hoping somehow that we could all get back to where we were,” said Dominic. “I understood that, being a player. I understood it even better in 1946.”

  As the two brothers battled for the flag, Vince’s lonely struggle to survive in the National League would go virtually ignored.

  FOURTEEN

  In the 1946 season, Dominic became the best center fielder in the American League, Joe struggled to regain his superstar status, and Vince found himself wearing a uniform he had discarded 13 years earlier. As had happened in the 1930s, the DiMaggio brothers were going in different directions. This time, though, only Dominic was going up.

  The much larger picture was that for American society and culture, true baseball was back. According to David Halberstam, “In the years immediately following World War II, professional baseball mesmerized the American people as it never had before and never would again. Baseball, more than anything else, seemed to symbolize normalcy and a return to life in America as it had been before Pearl Harbor.”

  Anticipating opening day, Arthur Daley wrote in the New York Times that a scene “will be enacted in eight major league baseball parks on Tuesday as the long-awaited first post-war season moves off with a gigantic stride. When the first batter steps up to the plate, he will be greeted by roars of anticipation from the stands, echoing off Coogan’s Bluff behind the Polo Grounds in New York and rolling out over the prairies from Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis.”

  Although many familiar names would return to major league rosters in 1946, it was still a significantly changed landscape. There was no longer room for many players who had hung on during the war. Others who had gone off to serve came back a few years older and with their skills diminished. In Boston at the end of the 1945 season, Catfish Metkovich told his teammates, “Boys, better take a good look around you because most of us won’t be here next year.” (Metkovich did manage to stick with the Red Sox.)

  “We had added pressure on us, because we knew that those war years were lost forever,” Dominic observed. “Lawyers and accountants coming home from the war would be able to pursue their careers for another 30 years, but the limited number of years available to us in our chosen profession had been reduced to an even lower number. We never knew what that number was because it was going to be a different one for each of us, but we knew that what was going to be a short career anyhow was going to be even shorter now. We couldn’t afford to spend a couple of years getting our sharpness back. A ten-year career in the major leagues is far above the average length, and if a player lost three of those ten years because of military service, that’s 30 percent of his career.”

  Johnnie Pesky was not having such dark thoughts. He told the Boston Herald years later, “It was a great feeling to be back at Fenway for the opener that year. We had all made it back. A lot of people didn’t. We were together again. And we were playing baseball.”

  Home in San Francisco, Dominic had been having some practical thoughts besides the philosophical ones. He also looked forward to being back with his core teammates, but after returning from the fight to defeat the Evil Axis, he wanted to fight for the rights of players—starting with himself. Decades before it actually became official in baseball, Dominic, after discussing his position with Tom, declared himself a free agent.

  He wrote a letter to the Red Sox brass explaining that after spending three years in military service and not signing any baseball contracts, he didn’t belong to anyone. One can imagine the impact on baseball—and on America—if other players, especially Dom’s brother, decided that their years in a military uniform made them free from ownership as well. But there is no indication that Joe shared his brother’s revolutionary ideas about labor relations. Quite the opposite. He couldn’t wait to ink his 1946 contract.

  Apparently, the Red Sox grasped the potential for disaster. Joe Cronin arrived in San Francisco in a lather. “The veins were popping out of his head,” Dominic told Leigh Montville. “He said the Red Sox owned me, and he was there to sign me up for $11,000. This was not the figure I had in mind.”

  Anticipating that baseball would be more popular than ever, and displaying the business acumen that would make him successful years later, Dominic was maneuvering for a piece of the action. First, he wouldn’t take a penny less than $16,000 in salary. Second, he tied additional pay to attendance at Fenway Park—if the club drew 500,000 (it had attracted 603,794 in 1945), Dominic would receive an extra $500, and additional $500 payments for every 50,000 people after that. Cronin relayed this counterproposal to Tom Yawkey, who agreed. Ted Williams would follow Dom’s example and work out his own percentage-of-the-gate contract.

  A notable returnee who picked up right where he left off after the war was Bob Feller, who had missed more than three seasons and was now 27. He struck out the first batter he faced when the 1946 season began; when it ended, he would have 26 victories and would lead the majors in shutouts and strikeouts. This was especially remarkable given that while seeing combat in the Pacific on the USS Alabama, he had suffered an injury to his pitching hand that could have ended his career.

  With baseball back in full bloom, the rivalry between the Red Sox and Yankees would achieve a new intensity. When Boston traveled to New York by train through Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, fans lined the tracks to cheer Dominic and his teammates. They jeered Joe and the Yankees when they traveled in the other direction.

  One of the insults they could have hurled was “old-timers.” The Bronx Bombers were indeed aging. When the season began, Bill Dickey was still catching at 39. He would be spelled by a youngster from St. Louis, Yogi Berra. Tommy Henrich was 33, Red Ruffing was 41, and Spud Chandler was 38. During the season, younger players with potential—including Tommy Byrne, Joe Page, Vic Raschi, and Bobby Brown—would get some playing time, but they weren’t ready yet to be stars. Even Joe McCarthy, who had been the manager since 1931, was getting on, with drinking problems speeding the process.

  It was generally a good time for Joe. He had left the military far behind. In San Francisco, Giuseppe and Rosalie had returned to their normal lives, though both were getting a bit frail. Customers were showing up at the restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf again, making Tom and Mike smile. It had been good to see Vince and Dominic and hear the latter’s stories of far-off Australia.

  Joe was ready to resume his role as the Great DiMaggio—the very first edition of Sport magazine that year featured a cover story titled “The Story of Big and Little Joe DiMaggio,” while Lucky to Be a Yankee turned out, not surprisingly, to be a bes
t-seller. He could sit again at his regular table at Toots Shor’s whenever the Yankees were not on the road, and even the ulcer wasn’t bothering him anymore. Opponents in the American League would fade as the season wore on, and he would be back in the World Series. Life was good—most of it anyway.

  “Everybody talked about how he’d changed,” wrote Richard Ben Cramer. “Not the way he played. And not physically (though he was still ten pounds underweight). It was the way he smiled, laughed out loud, and talked about anything—Daig was tellin’ stories!” (Daig was a nickname, short for Dago.) “And chatting up the writers, and buying dinners: happy as a kid. Hell, he didn’t even hold out, but settled on what MacPhail gave him. Same as his old pay: that’s what the papers said.”

  Giuseppe confirmed that his fourth son would have a good year when he told local reporters, “He gonna hit thirty-six home runs.”

  In his personal life, though, Joe wasn’t seeing such success. Dorothy refused to consider his proposal of remarriage. In fact, she had met someone else, a stockbroker named George Schubert. They moved into a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria together. Later in the season they would be married. Joe had no wife, and Joe Jr. had a stepfather.

  Despite expectations, the Yankees played pedestrian baseball early in the season, while the Red Sox began 1946 like they had been shot out of a cannon. Late in May, Boston took two out of three at Yankee Stadium, and the home team was already five and a half games behind them. The Bombers then went on a hellish road trip, during which McCarthy drank so much that he couldn’t attend games. When he did, his drunken exploits embarrassed everyone, like screaming insults at relief pitcher Joe Page. When the team returned to New York, McCarthy vanished. A few days later, his resignation arrived by telegram.