The DiMaggios

by Tom Clavin

  Vince displayed power at the plate with the Boston Bees and was a terrific center fielder, but also led the National League in strikeouts.

  (Courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)

  Vince, always a fan favorite, blossomed as a hitter when he joined the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1940. He would become a two-time All Star.

  (Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Pirates)

  Dominic became the third DiMaggio brother to play on the San Francisco Seals, and he credited the tutoring and support of Lefty O’Doul for making him a major-league-caliber hitter.

  (Courtesy of Mark Macrae)

  Dominic’s rookie season in the major leagues was with the Boston Red Sox in 1940, and he soon intimidated runners who tried to test his throwing arm.

  (Courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)

  Joe’s 56-game hitting streak came to an end on July 18, 1941, but he still celebrated a 4–3 win over the Indians with manager Joe McCarthy and his teammates, including Phil Rizzuto (far right), who had played in the minors with Vince.

  (Courtesy of Bettman/CORBIS)

  Despite the intensifying competition between Joe and Ted Williams for best player in the American League, Dominic and Ted became close friends.

  (Courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)

  Vince was back in the Pacific Coast League after his major league career ended, and in 1947 he played for Casey Stengel on the Oakland Oaks.

  (Courtesy of Mark Macrae)

  Though not quite the fancy dresser his brother Joe was, Dominic could offer some sartorial splendor as a major leaguer.

  (Courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)

  In January 1946, Joe and Dominic were back from World War II military service and were reunited with Vince, then with the Philadelphia Phillies, on Fisherman’s Wharf.

  (Courtesy of Bettman/CORBIS)

  Though age and injuries hampered him after the war, Joe was still the “Big Guy” on the Yankees with many clutch hits during pennant drives. He is greeted at the plate by Yogi Berra (left) and Phil Rizzuto.

  (Courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)

  Boston won the American League pennant in 1946 with a potent run-producing lineup that included (left to right) Bobby Doerr, Dominic DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, Rudy York, and Ted Williams.

  (Courtesy Bettman/CORBIS)

  This is one of the few times that Dominic and Joe socialized on the field when the Red Sox played the Yankees. By the late 1940s, Dominic was acknowledged as the best center fielder in the league.

  (Courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)

  Later in his career, the “Little Professor” schooled a new generation of Red Sox players in hitting and fielding.

  (Courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)

  Three of the five DiMaggio brothers—Dominic, Joe, and Tom (right)—gathered at DiMaggio’s Grotto to celebrate the fiftieth wedding anniversary of their parents, Rosalie and Giuseppe.

  (Courtesy Bettman/CORBIS)

  The last full season Dominic (third from right, middle row) played on the Red Sox was in 1952. He reluctantly retired the following May.

  (Courtesy of the Boston Red Sox)

  Dominic and his wife, Emily, leaving a Boston restaurant with Joe and Marilyn in January 1955, three months after she had secured a divorce in Los Angeles.

  (Courtesy of Bettman/CORBIS)

  Marilyn Monroe is flanked by her new husband, Joe, and Lefty O’Doul in 1954 during a tour of Japan, where they were greeted by enthusiastic crowds.

  (Courtesy of Mark Macrae)

  Their playing days long over, Joe and Dominic together at the wedding of Dominic’s daughter, Emily, in 1981.

  (Courtesy of Emily DiMaggio Jr.)

  Dominic signing his 1990 book, Real Grass, Real Heroes, the introduction of which was written by Ted Williams.

  (Courtesy of Emily DiMaggio Jr.)

  The baseball-playing brothers together for the last time, at Fenway Park in Boston in May 1986. Vince (left), terminally ill, died five months later.

  (Courtesy of the Boston Red Sox)

  According to friends and family, Emily and Dominic were “inseparable” during their sixty-one years of marriage.

  (Courtesy of Emily DiMaggio Jr.)

  Dominic (second from right) was a member of the freshman class of the Red Sox Hall of Fame in 1995 and was inducted with dear friends Johnny Pesky and Ted Williams, and Charlie Wagner, a former pitcher, executive, and scout for the Red Sox.

  (Courtesy of Emily DiMaggio Jr.)

  PART III

  Look, I don’t interfere with other people’s lives. And I do not expect them to interfere with mine. There are things about my life, personal things, that I refuse to talk about. And even if you asked my brothers, they would be unable to tell you about them because they do not know. There are things about me, so many things, that they simply do not know.

  —JOE DIMAGGIO TO GAY TALESE, 1966

  FIFTEEN

  The 1947 and 1948 seasons would be turning points for Vince, Joe, and Dominic DiMaggio. Vince, in his midthirties, struggled to keep playing in the PCL. Joe’s legend expanded, but his body betrayed him. Dominic established himself as one of the best players in baseball—and found love while he was at it. These two years would also be the last ones of their parents’ enduring marriage.

  Much is made today of the fierce rivalry between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, which is said to have been burning bright since the Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yanks after the 1919 season, beginning the “Curse of the Bambino.” It makes for good copy and conversation, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s true that with the acquisition of Ruth the Yankees joined the New York Giants and St. Louis Cardinals as consistent contenders and frequent champions in the big leagues, while Boston went in the opposite direction. There might have been bad feelings in Beantown about the loss of Ruth, but there could be no truly consistent rivalry when one team was routinely in the World Series and the other struggled to stay out of the second division.

  The rivalry really ignited in 1947. After the delay caused by World War II, the Red Sox had finally caught up to the Yankees the year before. With their core position players in their prime, it was conceivable that they would now pull ahead. And having the two DiMaggio brothers vying for the league title was a story made for Hollywood. Despite the affection they had for each other, Joe and Dominic would not give an inch in their quest for the world championship.

  “He was just like his brother Joe in that regard, in that Dominic badly wanted to win,” says Sam Mele, who came up to the Sox from the minors in 1947. “Dominic was a flat-out tough competitor who wanted to win as much as anyone I knew. Every game I went on the field with him, I knew he would give all he had.”

  On May 26, 1947, Yankee Stadium was filled to bursting with the largest single-game crowd, 74,747, in the ballpark’s history. It was no coincidence that the visitors were the Red Sox. The fans knew that this year could well be a watershed for both teams.

  Joe had not been ready for spring training; the left heel was still bothering him. The Yankees sent him to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for an operation. It was over a week before he left the hospital and headed to St. Petersburg. Not until the first week in April could he begin batting practice. When New York opened the season with a loss to the Philadelphia Athletics, Joe was on the bench.

  There were a lot of questions about the 1947 edition of the Bronx Bombers, beginning with the manager. It had become obvious the previous season that not just anyone could replace Joe McCarthy. Larry MacPhail had chosen Bucky Harris, who previously managed the Tigers, Phillies, and Red Sox. At the tender age of 27 in 1924, doing double duty as the second baseman, Harris had guided the Washington Senators to a world champions
hip. But that was a long time ago, New York was a tough town to manage in, and success with the Yankees depended on how Harris could get along with the man teammates called “the Big Guy.”

  Yogi Berra, the veteran of D-Day who had been mostly a catcher in the minors, would find playing time in right field, with Aaron Robinson doing much of the catching and Ralph Houk as his other backup. (Dominic had played with Berra when both were stationed in Norfolk during the war and had written Joe Cronin about his great potential.) Bobby Brown was still a newcomer at third base. Two outfielders, Joe and Henrich, were aging and injured. Their best pitcher, Spud Chandler, was 39. The Yanks would have to see what Bobo Newsom had left in the tank (not much) and if new arrival Allie Reynolds and untested Vic Raschi could contribute. Frank Crosetti was still on the team, though he got into only three games. True, there had been a war on, but the fact was that the Yanks hadn’t won a pennant in the previous three seasons, a gap not seen since the 1933–35 period.

  Finally, as May began, Joe was back. He celebrated with a three-run homer during a doubleheader sweep of the Athletics. Just in time too, because as Lester Bromberg reported, “The Red Sox are coming, by appointment, but it surely will be a surprise to Dom DiMaggio to find Brother Joe a reasonable facsimile of his peerless self, instead of a dugout-haunting convalescent.” However, about the first game of the twin bill Bromberg noted that Joe didn’t look like the graceful outfielder of old: “In the fourth he clutched at Mickey Guerra’s hit after a slow approach, and a run scored from second. In the eighth he collided with bulky Berra. Nobody hurt, though.” Only Joe’s pride, no doubt.

  There were more comments that Dominic had emerged as the better center fielder, which meant the best in baseball. “We, his teammates, certainly thought so,” says Sam Mele, who was playing his first season in Boston.

  “He covered a lot of ground,” Doerr recalled 65 years later. “And he was so smart. When every game was about to start in any ballpark we were, Dom would check the wind, then call Pesky and me to a meeting at second base. He’d tell us if the wind was blowing in, we had the pop flies. Blowing out, we leave them to him. Nothing escaped him.”

  Later in the season, Red Smith reported, “Joe himself has declared that his kid brother, Dominic, is a better fielder than he. Which always recalls the occasion when the Red Sox were playing the Yanks and Dom fled across the county line to grab a drive by Joe that no one but a DiMaggio could have reached.”

  But soon it became clear that reports of Joe’s demise were premature, at least at the plate. In fact, at 32 he returned to prewar form. After a doubleheader in early June in which he had seven consecutive hits, Joe was leading the league with a .368 average and had batted .493 in the previous 16 games. He explained to Dan Daniel, “My heel mended, my timing came back, and I began to find pitchers I could hit.”

  A week later Joe had 36 runs batted in, first among four Yankees with over 30 RBI on the season. The Bombers were back at the head of their division.

  The Red Sox put a powerful lineup of their own on the field, enhanced by several additions—Eddie Pellagrini at third, Mele and Wally Moses in the outfield, and Birdie Tebbetts as a reliable backstop. If the pitching staff could have a season anything like ’46, clearly the Sox would be at least as good as the team that had come within one inning of a world championship.

  Passing on that experience and preparing younger players to be part of a winning club became a priority for Dominic. Though only 30, he was one of the older members of the lineup and he embraced the role of tutor. His easygoing personality was a clear contrast to Joe, whom young players often found chilly, even intimidating.

  Mele became a willing pupil. During spring training, the Associated Press ran a story that Dominic and the 25-year-old from Astoria, Queens, were “closer than Damon and Pythias, ham and eggs or a dead heat. It is Dom (the little professor) and young Sam Mele—on and off the field, find one and you have the other. Mele credits much of his success to the bespectacled Dom and the way he passes out baseball wisdom, which has done so well by all the DiMaggios.”

  Dominic had made the transition to being a veteran player, and rather than becoming aloof, he tried to raise the young Red Sox the right way. Mele recalls, “I think it was my first road trip. We go to Philadelphia. All the players run into the lobby of the hotel, to the front desk. What the hell, I don’t know what’s going on, so I see an empty chair in the lobby and sit in it. I’m waiting and waiting. The players are getting their room keys and telling bellboys to take their luggage. The last guy left is Dom DiMaggio. And me. He says to me, ‘Okay, rookie, you need a roommate? I’m it. Let’s go.’ So we roomed together on the road. In the rooms we talked not just baseball, like how to play different positions, but how to dress, how to present yourself to other people, especially fans. That was very important to establishing and maintaining a winning tradition.”

  In their season opener, led by Dominic’s three hits, Boston beat the Senators 7–6. They won their next three games too, and the most hopeful Sox were already figuring out World Series shares. When Tex Hughson pitched a two-hit 1–0 win over the Yanks in New York on April 24, it looked like the Red Sox could still succeed even when their offense took the day off. Two days later, tragedy was averted when first baseman Rudy York was pulled unconscious from his Boston hotel room. His careless cigarette smoking would cause a second hotel room fire in August, after he had been traded to the White Sox. Ironically, after his retirement from baseball York became a fire prevention officer in Georgia.

  Ted Williams was off to the races, hitting for both average and power. He was 2-for-3 in an 8–7 win over the Yankees at Fenway on May 12, though the winning run came when Dominic drove in Doerr. In a 19–6 demolition of the White Sox the next day, Ted hit two opposite-field homers at Fenway (while Doerr hit for the cycle), and three days later his grand slam powered a 12–7 victory over the St. Louis Browns. Three days after that, on a 3-0 count, Ted clobbered a two-run walk-off homer against the Tigers. In June the Red Sox, playing their first night game at Fenway, defeated the White Sox 5–3.

  Boston struggled, though, to put together the kind of long winning streak that separates a team from the pack. A big problem was that Dominic had pulled a ligament in his shoulder and had to sit on the bench while it healed. Mele was pressed into service in center field. The team missed Dominic’s speed and base-running smarts. But after winning many of the tough games they had to win, the Sox were within a few games of the leading Yankees when the All-Star break came.

  The Seals did not call Vince back in 1947, despite his contribution to their 1946 championship season. “My father was very proud to have played on that championship team in San Francisco,” says Joanne. “The rings in those days were comparable to what they were giving in the big leagues to World Series winners. Unfortunately, that ring didn’t lead to another baseball job right away.”

  Vince took a job as a sporting goods salesman. It was his first sales job since hawking the Call-Bulletin on San Francisco street corners as a boy. He wanted to play baseball, not sell them. He was still confident about his abilities. It was true that he was turning 35, but he had played in two All-Star Games and been among the top ten home run hitters in the National League six times. He would later tell Dave Larsen of the Los Angeles Times, “I never felt I played in the shadow of either [Joe or Dominic]. Joe was a better batter, but I could play rings around him as far as knowledge of the game and being in the outfield. I could smoke those throws. If you put a dime on second base, I could hit it from the outfield.”

  Finally, he did get a call from a PCL team—from Casey Stengel, his 1938 manager with the Boston Bees. The Oakland Oaks needed an outfielder. Vince confessed that he could “uncork only one good throw a game.” Stengel replied, “That’s good enough. It’s better than my other outfielders can do.”

  Though making consistent contact bedeviled him again—he batted .241—Vince went on to a solid season
for the Oaks. His 22 home runs would be third in the PCL, and his 81 runs batted in would help the Oaks into the playoffs in Stengel’s second year as manager. Two other key players were one of Joe’s former teammates, Nick Etten, and neighborhood pal Dario Lodigiani.

  Playing for a Bay Area team, Vince could keep tabs on the DiMaggio clan, even though his own family still resided down in Hermosa Beach. (Joanne now had a baby sister, Vicki Rose.) Postwar crowds were packing the Grotto, keeping Tom and Mike happily busy. Giuseppe and Rosalie were a worry, though. They were in generally good health, but with Giuseppe at 75, a very ripe age for a man in the 1940s, that could change at any moment.

  With Dorothy remarried, Joe was a free man in 1947, and one of the most eligible bachelors on both coasts and in all the cities in between where the Yankees played. He wasn’t looking for another wife, just companionship. Women flocked to him. He was a high-roller again, a regular at Toots Shor’s, always with a beautiful woman in tow. The problem was, he couldn’t afford it. He had lost a lot of money in missed salary during the war. Then there was an expensive problem with the IRS that had to be resolved. He needed help, and naturally he turned to the family. But when Dominic bought out his share of Joe DiMaggio’s Grotto, the first serious rift between Joe and his brothers occurred. The embarrassment of having his baby brother bail him out might not have been so bad, but Joe felt that the family ganged up to gyp him out of a fair price for his share. He angrily instructed Tom to take the “Joe” off the restaurant’s name, which Tom did. Still, for decades afterward, diners would believe that part of what they paid went into Joe’s pocket.