The DiMaggios

by Tom Clavin

  Afterward, Joe told reporters, “I’ll never forget that crowd. It was standing and roaring like one man. I tipped my cap but it didn’t stop. I looked up at the stands at this ovation they were giving a guy who had tried to beat them.”

  For the first time in American League history, two teams finished tied, with the Red Sox and Indians both at 96-58. The Indians traveled to Boston the next day for the playoff.

  There were 33,957 anxious people at Fenway Park. In a decision that would haunt Sox fans for years, McCarthy bypassed his established starters to choose 36-year-old journeyman Denny Galehouse to take the mound. He only made it into the second inning, having given up four runs. The Indians broke the hearts of Boston fans yet again with an 8–3 win. They would go on to beat the Boston Braves in six games for the championship.

  Dominic and Emily were married on October 11—a just-in-case last-minute change of date—at St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Wellesley. Though the crowd wasn’t as rowdy as the San Francisco one had been for Joe and Dorothy’s wedding, there was enough commotion that extra police were called out. “Most of the fans were a trifle disappointed as the cops hustled Dom and his bride through a back door of the church at the conclusion of the ceremony.”

  Unlike Joe’s marriages, Dominic and Emily’s would endure for 61 years.

  SEVENTEEN

  The DiMaggio clan welcomed Dominic and Emily to the Bay Area. Unlike Joe, Dominic was not going to bring his wife to live in the house on Beach Street. The couple rented an apartment in San Francisco from November through February 1949, when Dominic would report to spring training. They both missed Boston, where Emily’s family lived and where Dom had come to feel at home. But the San Francisco sojourn gave him time to be with his family, and there was work to do at DiMaggio’s Grotto. Dom also wanted to spend time with Giuseppe, who at 76 was moving slower and getting fragile. Rosalie, who turned 71 in February, still ran the kitchen and household with help from her daughter Marie. In 1947, the couple had celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary with all nine children in attendance.

  “After my wife and I got married that November, we went to the West Coast for our honeymoon,” remembers Boo Ferriss. “Dom and Emily invited us to stay a couple of days at their apartment. That was a generous gesture, because they were newlyweds too, and we didn’t have much money to spend on a honeymoon. The two of them couldn’t have been nicer, and we had a great time.”

  In the spring—having successfully dickered with Cronin over his contract—Dominic headed to Sarasota. After coming within one game of the World Series and eliminating the previous world champions, the Red Sox looked liked the American League favorites for 1949. A lot depended on the pitching. The outfield would be more than solid with Dominic, Ted, and Mele. The infield was iffy—Bobby Doerr and Johnny Pesky continued at second and third, but Vern Stephens was only an okay fielder at short and Walt Dropo was untested at first. Then again, the Sox had the best hitter in baseball in Ted Williams, who had become a father in the off-season.

  Cleveland, of course, could repeat. And what about those Yankees? The front office had done the right thing by Joe after his courageous ’48 campaign—they made him the first $100,000 player. “Thus, the 34-year-old son of an Italian immigrant fisherman, who used to sell newspapers for a dollar and a half a day on the streets of San Francisco, becomes the highest salaried player in Yankee history and perhaps all of baseball,” John Drebinger commented in the New York Times.

  But a question lingered: could Joe and Casey Stengel get along? The 58-year-old had been plucked from the Oakland Oaks by GM George Weiss to skipper the Yankees. McCarthy and Harris had been as much Joe’s fans as his managers. Stengel had been around too long to idolize anyone—and he’d never managed a star of Joe’s magnitude before. How much he could get out of the Big Guy could well define the Yankees’ season. For his part, Joe might not have much faith in a manager with a lifetime .439 won-lost percentage in the Major Leagues.

  Mainstays Tommy Henrich, Johnny Lindell, and Charlie Keller were back. Phil Rizzuto and Jerry Coleman made for an excellent keystone combination, and Bobby Brown was still at third. Bill Dickey was working with Yogi Berra to turn him into a solid, everyday catcher.

  The Yankees would surely struggle, though, if Joe wasn’t healthy. After the ’48 campaign, he’d had another operation, this time on his right heel, to remove bone spurs. He’d been slow to heal. Except for the occasional foray on crutches to Toots Shor’s or to visit Joe Jr. (the seven-year-old was a student at the Walt Whitman Progressive School in Manhattan), Joe holed up in his fifth-floor suite at the Hotel Elysee on East 54th Street.

  When the reporter Will Wedge visited him a few weeks after the surgery, Joe told him, “I sit around and smoke and listen to the radio and read. No exercise. That’s what’s been tough. As a result, my appetite is no good now. I’m irregular about ordering my meals up. Often I’m content just heating up a can of soup for myself in the kitchenette, and making coffee. I’m a kinda loner, as you know.” The ulcer pains had returned, and on top of everything else he was plagued by insomnia. He’d had bouts of it before—the chronic coffee-drinking sure didn’t help—but not as bad as this.

  When spring training began in St. Petersburg, Joe was there, but suiting up was all he could do. When he tried to run, the pain in his right heel was intolerable. Mostly pinch-hitting, he went just .226 in exhibition games. The worried front office, fretting over the six-figure salary they had committed to him, shipped Joe back to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore for more treatment. Once again, he would miss the start of a regular season.

  And more than that, as it turned out. According to a New York Post headline, “Joe DiMaggio Reconciled to Long, Drawn Out Comeback Process.” Week after week went by, and at the end of April he was still out of commission. The Yankees didn’t fall apart. While Boston and Cleveland struggled, the Bronx boys won enough to be in first place.

  Joe was well enough at least to make an unhappy trip west when Tom called to say that Giuseppe had died, on May 3. The funeral was in San Francisco. Joe, with his bad heel, was the only son who couldn’t serve as a pallbearer. At the reception afterward at the Fisherman’s Wharf restaurant—where Papa DiMaggio’s boat was still docked—his children agreed that he’d had a good life, made unexpectedly better by baseball, the most American of games. Tom would assume the role of the head of the family.

  At 36, Vince still couldn’t stop playing the game, even after the Stockton Ports cut him loose. He stepped down another rung to the Class D Far West League as player-manager of the Pittsburg Diamonds. Pittsburg, about 30 miles northeast of San Francisco, was largely Italian immigrants and first-generation Italian-Americans. Martinez was next door, where people knew the DiMaggio family back in an earlier era and would turn out to cheer a favorite son. And he could earn extra income working for Tom (and his youngest brother, Dom) at the family restaurant.

  Vince found managing frustrating. “I thought playing was tough,” he said. “Try to please a couple dozen athletes.” But as a player, he was a former major leaguer facing minor league competition. His arm wasn’t the same, but it was still better than most, and he simply knew the game from now having been playing it professionally for 18 years. That he still hit with some power and drove in runs was not a surprise, but finally he was enjoying not striking out as much. His average stayed above .300 as the season progressed.

  One might think that with Joe sidelined indefinitely, Dominic would have relished being the only DiMaggio in the spotlight. But that wasn’t his personality. He felt awful about his brother’s woes. At best, he would shrug when favorable comparisons were made. When reporters asked him about his own exploits, he often turned the subject to Joe or to one of his teammates.

  Yet, at 32, he was having an MVP season. After a rocky start, Boston was playing very good ball, and Dominic was propelling them. He was hitting well, and his fielding was so good that most opponents had
given up on running against his arm.

  “I never saw a guy go from first to third on a base hit against Dominic,” says Babe Martin. “Never. To try it was like giving us an automatic out.”

  “During my career, I played with Joe and against Dominic, and each in his own way was a great guy and a great ballplayer,” says Charlie Silvera, another Italian-American ballplayer from San Francisco who had joined the Yankees the previous September. “Dominic didn’t get all the recognition he deserved, but just like Joe he went out and played hard and never complained.”

  James O’Francis of The Sporting News tried to get at least some chest-thumping out of the man he described as “the fellow who looks more like a school teacher than a ball player,” but found that he was “modest to a point of irritation to an interviewer and reluctant to discuss his feats on a diamond.” Dominic attributed his hot pace to “a lot of luck,” and his boldest statement, echoing what Vince had said during the war, was that while Joe was recovering, “I’ll do my best to carry on the family name in the best DiMaggio tradition.”

  The Little Professor used an advantage he had over his brother—his brains. Joe studied pitchers, but Dominic went a step further. “When we were in a room together or with a few of the other guys, he would take out his little black book and we’d study it with him,” remembers Mele. “Dominic had notes on all the pitchers on all the other teams in there—how they throw, what they like to throw in certain situations like the strike count, how you could tell what a pitcher was about to throw. That was way out of the ordinary back then. And every time we’d go to another city, he’d say, ‘Remember this or that when you go up to the plate.’ ”

  “Dom was a well-organized guy, he was always prepared to play,” says Doerr. “He was a really good team ballplayer, and how he collected and shared information on pitchers was just one good example.”

  When the Red Sox were at Yankee Stadium on April 30, Dominic went 3-for-4, but New York won, 4–3. Boston was hitting and playing well, but Stengel’s Bronx Bombers were playing better.

  Dominic was still not chatty on the field with players. Berra was one of the few catchers with whom he exchanged pleasantries. “I knew from Joe that I had a lot in common with the DiMaggios,” the Yankee Hall of Famer recalls. “Whenever Dom came up to the plate, we said hello and such, how you doing, where you going to dinner that night.” Berra had been born to Italian immigrants in St. Louis. His mother never learned English. His father supported the family as a factory worker, and the last thing he wanted was for his son to be off playing baseball. As Berra recalls, “I sold newspapers on the street, just like Vince, Joe, and Dom, and we used to crack jokes about that while Dom was in the batter’s box.” Berra also didn’t look like a gifted athlete. Like Dominic, he had to prove through hard work that he was the best at his position.

  Boston got an opportunity to gain on the Yankees with a three-game series beginning June 28. It also marked the return of the Yankee Clipper. That Friday Stengel put Joe in the lineup for the first time in the ’49 season. After months of pain, Joe had gotten out of bed one morning and the right heel felt fine. Almost afraid to believe his good fortune, Joe walked on it, then ran, then went through some drills and batting practice at Yankee Stadium while the team was away. From there he went to join his team in Boston. He was weak from inactivity, but he was going to play.

  “I tried to talk him out of it,” Dominic told Dave Anderson of the New York Times in 1982. “I didn’t think he was ready. I told him his health came first. But he played. And he was ready.”

  Yes he was. After awkwardly fouling a few off, Joe lined a pitch over short for a single. His next time up, he hit a two-run homer, and some Boston fans couldn’t help cheering. In the bottom of the ninth, with the Yanks leading 5–4, Ted launched a long fly that Joe hauled in to end the game. Perhaps distracted, Dominic was hitless.

  On Saturday, Boston jumped out 7–1 after four innings. Then Joe clubbed a three-run homer. In the eighth inning, with the score knotted at 7–7, Joe put one over the Green Monster, and the Yankees held on for an improbable 9–7 victory. On Sunday, the Yankees led only 3–2 going into the top of the eighth. Joe cracked a three-run homer, and the final score was 6–3. Joe didn’t need Dominic or anyone else to carry on the DiMaggio tradition—in the three games he had batted .455, slugged four round-trippers, and driven in nine runs.

  The Sox went into a long slump after that. By the first week of July, they were at 35-36 and a full dozen games behind New York. Stengel broke a cardinal baseball rule when he declared, “That’s it. The Red Sox won’t bother us.”

  Ebbets Field hosted the 1949 All-Star Game, and the American League presented an especially strong starting outfield: Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, and Dominic DiMaggio. Dominic wound up with two hits and two runs scored, but his brother stole the show with three RBI, the biggest hit being a sixth-inning double. Stan Musial had a homer, two singles, and a walk, but the American League took an 11–7 win. It was the first All-Star Game to feature not just one but four black ballplayers: Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, and Larry Doby.

  The Red Sox rebounded after the break. Leading them at the top of the order was Dominic. As his hitting streak reached 30 games, the press wondered if he’d match his brother’s famous streak.

  “Dom was a nightmare for third basemen,” recalls Bobby Brown. “If you came in, he’d smack the ball past you. If you stayed back, he’d drop the most beautiful bunt. And of course, once he got on, he was an excellent base runner.”

  The streak was at 34 games when the Sox went to the Bronx. Dominic was 0-for-4 when he came up in the eighth inning. It has gone down in legend that Joe made a sensational catch to stop his brother’s streak. But as Dominic described it for the writer Alan Schwartz: “I smacked a line drive right up the middle so hard that it passed Raschi’s ear! He ducked to get out of the way of it! As soon as I hit it, I said, ‘O.K., that’s 35.’ But the ball wouldn’t drop. The ball refused to drop. Joe is standing out there in center field, and he didn’t have to move. He said it himself later—if he hadn’t caught

  the ball, it would have hit him right between the eyes. So there was no effort on his part. I just hit the ball too damn hard!”

  One might think that the dinner the two brothers had that night would be strained. But as disappointed as Dominic was, it wasn’t in him to hold a grudge against his older brother. The dinner was probably Joe’s treat. When the Red Sox were home against the Yankees, at least one night Dominic would bring his brother home and Emily would cook dinner. In New York, Joe brought his brother to Toots Shor’s, where Dominic could rub elbows with regulars like Jackie Gleason and Frank Sinatra.

  “My father was there the night Gleason came in and announced he had just gotten the job to host a variety show,” says Paul DiMaggio, the eldest of Dominic and Emily’s three children. The show was Cavalcade of Stars, which helped make Gleason a star. “My father was not a big party guy, but he told us there was a huge party that night, with Gleason buying drinks left and right.”

  The Red Sox offense ran rampant through August. Playing the Senators helped Boston’s surge—doubleheader losses on the twelfth and fourteenth. (They would roll over again in a twin bill on September 5.) In the game in between, Stephens hit a walk-off grand slam. Though he cost the Sox a few runs because he wasn’t nearly the shortstop Pesky was, Stephens was having another strong offensive year. In the rotation, Ellis Kinder was a pleasant surprise. The righty had begun the season as a 34-year-old with an underwhelming 21–25 career record and was known more for his partying and curfew-breaking than pitching, but he was leading the Boston staff in almost every category. He would end the season with a totally unanticipated 23–6 record. Parnell was having another strong season too. When he defeated the White Sox on the twenty-sixth, it was his twentieth victory. During August, Parnell and Kinder were each 6–0, Jack Kramer was 3–0, and Chuck Stobbs was 3–0. In
the middle of September, with his team still trailing New York, Ted Williams once more lifted the Sox on his shoulders. He was putting himself in the record books again: from July 1 through September 28, he had reached base in 84 consecutive games, which remains a major league record.

  As the Red Sox clawed their way back into the pennant race, the Yankees weren’t rolling over for them. The club was beset by injuries, most significantly to Berra, Hank Bauer, Rizzuto, and Vic Raschi. But even though injuries cost each playing time, the team managed to keep winning enough to hold on to first. Most important, the team had a healthy Big Guy. In the first week of September, Joe had five RBI, four from a grand slam, in a game in Philly. The Yankees and Red Sox were like two racehorses making the turn into the home stretch. The Sox were two games behind. It got closer as the month went on.

  Then it happened again—Joe was sidelined. He had contracted a cold, which turned into something like the flu. When he reported for the September 18 game with a 102-degree temperature, Stengel benched him. It was pneumonia, and Joe went back to the hospital.

  Many people believed that the Yankees-Sox game on September 25 would be the big showdown of 1949. Despite all the injuries the Yankee players had suffered and a manager untested in major league pennant races, New York had clung to first place day after weary day. With Joe listening to the game at the hospital, the Yankees sent out the veteran Allie Reynolds against Mel Parnell, who was 15-3 at Fenway that season. Beating Boston at home and going two games up with a week left would be huge. But Parnell surrendered just one run, the equally worn-out Red Sox pushed four across, and the teams were tied for first. It was Boston’s ninth victory in a row.