The DiMaggios

by Tom Clavin

  The two teams hopped trains for the Bronx to make up a game that had been rained out earlier in the season. Now the stakes were even higher. Certainly that was apparent to the 67,434 who piled into Yankee Stadium on the afternoon of the 26th. Was it too much to ask of the Sox to win ten in a row? Initially, it looked to be. The Yankees jumped out to a 6–3 lead. But in the eighth inning, Boston tied it up, and Pesky was on third. Doerr executed the squeeze. Henrich, playing first, picked up the ball and tossed it to Ralph Houk. The catcher applied the tag, but Pesky was called safe. Stengel, his hair on fire, charged out of the dugout.

  The two teams seesawed back and forth during the final week of the season. Boston had gone 59-19 and needed only one more win to be back in the World Series. “Sox and Parnell to Clinch Flag Today,” the Boston Herald optimistically proclaimed on its October 1 front page.

  But they would have to do it on Joe DiMaggio Day at Yankee Stadium. He had climbed out of his hospital bed but had been a reclusive figure at the Elysee suite, 18 pounds lighter and still struggling to catch his breath. With so much at stake, Joe couldn’t stay out of the lineup. He could have done without the attention and the extra effort of having to respond to the press and the 69,551 fans at the ballpark. The hardest part was standing through the speeches and ceremonies before the game began.

  Thankfully, Dominic was there. “He made his whole speech leaning on me,” Dominic told Dave Anderson in 1982. Not wanting to take anything away from Joe in the spotlight, he asked Joe if he wanted him to leave. “No,” Joe croaked.

  The newly widowed Rosalie DiMaggio had made the tiring trip from San Francisco with her son Tom. Dominic recalled, “When she came out onto the field, she walked right by Joe and came over to hug me, the baby of the family. I think people wondered why she ignored Joe, but she had seen Joe the night before. She hadn’t seen me until she came out onto the field.”

  Joe, with Joe Jr. also on the field, choked back tears and managed to give a speech to the adoring crowd. He called the Yankees “the gamest, fightingest bunch of guys who ever lived” and ended with what is probably his most famous quote: “I’d like to thank the Good Lord for making me a Yankee.” Then he dragged himself out to center field, having told Stengel he would try to play three innings.

  Dominic led off the game with a single. Pesky’s bouncer should have been a double play, but Dominic took Rizzuto out at short before the relay to first. Williams singled, and a sacrifice fly by Stephens made the score 1–0. In the bottom of the inning, Joe struck out to end it with Rizzuto on third. In the third inning, Reynolds walked Pesky, Williams, and Stephens, and Doerr’s single made it 2–0. Joe Page came in and walked Al Zarilla (who during the season had taken over right field when Mele was traded). Then he walked Billy Goodman. The Sox had a 4–0 lead going into the fourth.

  Then Joe doubled to right, and Bauer drove him in with a single. In the fifth, the Yanks made it 4–3. They went on to a 5–4 win. Joe played the entire game.

  Rosalie was escorted down to the Yankee clubhouse. When it appeared there would be a wait to see Joe, Frank Scott, then the Yankees’ traveling secretary, offered to bring her to a room upstairs. With a sad smile, she said, “No, take me to Dominic, he lose today.”

  As much as he wanted to see his brothers go down to the wire for a league championship, Vince had not accompanied his mother east. He had his own season to finish up in the Far West League. Pittsburg’s attendance got a boost in July from a special “Vince DiMaggio Night.” It was a very modest affair compared to the one that Joe would have to endure. A highlight of the game was the gimmick that Vince and his rival player-manager, Ray “Little Buffalo” Perry of the Redding Browns, played all nine positions during it. Vince’s Diamonds enjoyed an 11–2 victory.

  His team was on its way to a celebration dinner at the Los Medanos Hotel when they came upon a building on fire. The Diamonds joined the volunteer firefighters, and while he helped battle the blaze Vince cut his hand. He recovered quickly, however.

  By season’s end, Vince had had a great year at the plate. He slugged 37 homers, drove in 117 runs, and hit a very satisfying .367. And he was again a fan favorite. Spectators enjoyed the way he sang arias in the outfield during lulls in games, as well as what was routinely described as his “affable personality.” But the Pittsburg Diamonds as a whole didn’t do too well, finishing fourth in the eight-team league.

  Still, ownership was happy enough with attendance and Vince’s rapport with the fans that they hired him back for the 1950 season.

  The National League race was going down to the final day too. The winner of the American League’s 154th game would face either the Brooklyn Dodgers or the St. Louis Cardinals.

  Raschi took the mound for New York and Kinder for the home team Sox. The Boston hurler surrendered a run in the first inning on a Rizzuto triple and Henrich groundout, but he gave up nothing after that. The score was still 1–0 in the top of the eighth when McCarthy sent up pinch hitter Tom Wright for Kinder, who walked. But Dominic bounced into a double play, and there was no threat. The Yankees capitalized against Parnell. Henrich homered. After Berra singled, Hughson came in to pitch. Before the inning ended, he had yielded a three-run double to Coleman. In the top of the ninth, the Red Sox were in a 5–0 hole.

  Pesky fouled out. Ted walked. Stephens singled. Doerr tripled—a wheezing Joe was unable to catch up to the fly to center—to bring Ted and Stephens home. It was 5–2. Joe, spent, removed himself from the game, replaced by Cliff Mapes. Mapes caught Zarilla’s fly ball, and his throw home froze Doerr at third. Goodman singled, and the score was 5–3 with two outs. Henrich, drifting away from first, gloved a foul fly by Birdie Tebbetts, and the Yankees had won their 16th pennant, stunning even their own fans.

  The Boston locker room was like a morgue. Stephens tried a couple of cheering-up comments, but nothing worked. “That phrase, ‘You could hear a pin drop,’ I never really knew what that kind of silence was like until after that game,” the Sox catcher Matt Batts recalled 63 years later.

  “The whole team was heartbroken,” Williams later wrote. “Sick. To come that close twice in a row was an awful cross to bear. I remember sitting at my locker and seeing McCarthy come in and wondering where he had been. He had been over to congratulate the Yankees. He had perked up pretty good, but I know it hit him hard. I don’t think he ever got over it completely.”

  “Very, very painful,” remembers Doerr. “We couldn’t look at each other.”

  The Red Sox had the dubious distinction of becoming the only team in major league history to finish a game out of first in two consecutive seasons. Once more, Ted had done all that could be asked of him, and in a few weeks he would have his second MVP Award to corroborate that. Dominic had been the best leadoff man in the league, batting a career-best .307. He drew 96 walks and scored 126 runs, both the second-highest totals of his career. It just wasn’t enough.

  When a devastated Dominic skipped the World Series, he missed a very good one. The Dodgers had won the NL pennant. They had a talented outfield of Duke Snider, Gene Hermanski, and Carl Furillo and an excellent infield with Gil Hodges at first, Robinson at second, Pee Wee Reese at short, and Spider Jorgensen at third. Campanella had become the full-time catcher; his three MVP Awards were still ahead of him. Don Newcombe, Preacher Roe, Ralph Branca, and Carl Erskine were formidable hurlers. Charlie Dressen’s team seemed to have the advantage over Stengel’s exhausted, injury-riddled roster.

  But as the Bronx Bombers had proved before, especially during the DiMaggio years, the Fall Classic was a different season, one in which the Yankees elevated their game. In the first game, at Yankee Stadium, Newcombe pitched brilliantly, striking out 11 and giving up one run. But Reynolds pitched a two-hit shutout. The second game produced the opposite result, as Roe blanked the Yanks 1–0. Joe scratched out a hit, then would go hitless until the final game.

  At Ebbets Field on October 7, the Yankees earned
a 4–3 victory. Brooklyn, needing to even the Series up, sent Newcombe out again, this time against Eddie Lopat. A winded Joe wore the collar once more, but the Yankees were up 6–0 after five innings. Lopat surrendered four runs in the sixth, then Reynolds, the Big Chief, shut the door. After the 6–4 loss, the Dodgers faced elimination in Game 5. Rex Barney and five other hurlers were slapped around by the seemingly inexhaustible Yankees. Joe finally contributed with a solo home run and two RBI, Coleman had three RBI, and Brown two more in the 10–6 triumph. The Subway Series had not been much of a contest.

  When Stengel was asked if his first world championship as a manager was the biggest thrill in his life, he replied, “No. I’d say the biggest thrill came when we got in there. If we hadn’t won the pennant we wouldn’t be here. Winning the pennant took some doing, after all we’d been through.”

  The press noted that in the clubhouse celebration, with his son beside him, Joe, though having gone 2-for-18 in the five games, smiled for the first time since the Series began. He admitted to reporters that he was wiped out by the season. It had been the worst of his career.

  Did Joe have more celebrations planned? No, he was too tired. He just wanted to go home to San Francisco. He took Rosalie to the airport for her return trip and followed her two weeks later. Her home cooking would restore him. If not, since he was about to turn 35, maybe it was time to consider retiring.

  EIGHTEEN

  While Joe sought to be restored in San Francisco and Dominic and Emily began living full-time in the Boston area, Vince prolonged his career in Pittsburg. After a strong 1949 season, and with the fans behind him, he didn’t want to retire. He simply loved the game too much.

  The Far West League had begun in 1948 with nine teams: two in Oregon—the Klamath Falls Gems and the Medford Nuggets (soon renamed the Rogues)—and six in California besides Pittsburg: the Marysville Braves (renamed the Peaches), Oroville Red Sox, Willows Cardinals, Santa Rosa Pirates, Roseville Diamonds, and Redding Browns. When the 1950 season began, the Santa Rosa and Roseville clubs were already history and a Vallejo club had quickly come and gone, as had one in Chico.

  The Pittsburg club seemed relatively stable, not least because the marquee DiMaggio name kept bringing fans in. They flocked to watch him when the Diamonds were on the road too.

  “My father fully believed in the saying, ‘If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,’ and that included even when he was a manager,” recalls Joanne, who was by now a teenager. “One time at dinner he mentioned something about talking to an umpire, and I said, ‘Dad, how can you talk to him after he called you out in the game?’ He said, ‘That’s his job to make a call, but otherwise we’re friends.’ He always tried to be good to people, and I never heard him curse. Never.”

  During the off-season, Vince continued to work at DiMaggio’s Grotto and still sold sporting goods as well. Yet, Joanne says, “with all the jobs he had, my father always kept time for fishing. Nothing got in the way of that. He loved it so much. I remember one time my mother and I went out on the water near Pittsburg with him and all of a sudden the weather changed. Large swells were striking the boat. My mom turned green. My dad was fine, so I was too. I had no worries that he would get us back to the marina. I thought he’d probably done this lots of times and the boat was big enough. I found out later that there were plenty of people he had rescued out on the water in bad conditions because he knew what he was doing and they didn’t.”

  From time to time at his brothers’ restaurant a patron would ask him to sing, and when he did he demonstrated that he still had a fine operatic voice. Family gatherings were an occasion for songs too. “I remember that most about Vince, his wonderful voice,” says Emily DiMaggio, who had heard him sing the first time Dominic brought her to San Francisco. “He sang for me at the dinner table, and I could understand why Dom had wanted him to pursue training in the opera.”

  The most important performance for Vince, though, was still on the field. To some extent he was carrying the entire Far West League on his shoulders. He was 37 when the ’50 season began, but he looked pretty spry feasting on D league pitching. By the end of the season, having played in 125 of the team’s 130 games, he had a .353 average, 26 home runs, and 129 RBI, with a whopping .624 slugging percentage. He even stole 15 bases. And no one in the league was a better outfielder. Unfortunately for the Diamonds, their pitching was weak, and the club wound up with a 67-73 record.

  The Far West League had always struggled, and it folded in the middle of the 1951 season. Vince still tried to hold on. He signed with the Tacoma Tigers, a step up to the Class B Western International League. Vince could focus on playing the rest of the season because the Tigers already had a manager, Jim Brillheart, who at 47 still pitched occasionally. The team wasn’t very good, though. Vince could contribute only a .225 average with five homers in 74 games. When the 63-82 season ended, so did the Tacoma club.

  For the first time in over two decades, Vince had to face a future without baseball. He would not be picked up by any organization in 1952, neither as a player nor as a coach-manager. While his brother Joe’s retirement would produce nationwide headlines, Vince’s departure went unnoticed except by his family. Unlike the Yankee Clipper and the Little Professor, Vince was the DiMaggio who never got a nickname. In addition to his various Pacific Coast and minor league stints, Vince had played in ten major league seasons and had compiled a .249 career average, 125 home runs, and 584 RBI. He had been a two-time All-Star and would have been selected more often if more weight had been given to excellent fielding and rapport with the fans.

  San Francisco was good for Joe. Rosalie’s home cooking helped him heal. Away from the New York spotlight and expectations (though no expectations were ever higher than his own), Joe relaxed at the Grotto with his brothers and visited with his sisters and various nieces and nephews. He kept fit by taking up golf as a gift to himself when he turned 35, with Lefty O’Doul as his regular partner. When the Yankees sent a contract in January, he signed it immediately. He hadn’t looked forward to spring training this much since he’d returned from the Army.

  He did not go to New York before heading to St. Petersburg, instead fielding phone interviews from the team’s beat writers while in San Francisco. He told them that he once again tipped the scales at over 200 pounds, and that he still wore the smile that had finally appeared in the clubhouse after the World Series win. “Maybe it would be tempting fate to go popping off,” Joe said. “Nevertheless, the way I feel now I can’t see any reason why there should not be three or four more good years ahead of me.”

  Asked how the club would do in the ’50 campaign, he responded, “If a fellow doesn’t expect to finish first, what’s the sense of him being a Yankee?”

  At Casey Stengel’s request, Joe took it easy in the early weeks, then played more games. By the time the Yankees broke camp, Joe had batted .403. Old Reliable Henrich was a bigger concern for the team. He, Joe, and Phil Rizzuto were the only remaining prewar starters. Henrich had returned too soon from a back injury the previous season and still wasn’t right. Chronic knee problems were flaring up again. Henrich was smart enough to know that most likely this was his final campaign. He wanted to go out the way he’d always been—a winner.

  For much of the 1950 season, the press and fans tracked milestones for Joe to reach. In an 8–2 win over the Indians, he cracked his 2,000th hit, a single to center. But it was clear that Joe was slower in the outfield. Stengel wanted him to try playing first base, but couldn’t bring himself to talk to Joe directly about it, so co-owner Dan Topping did, one Saturday night in Boston in early July. To the press it was announced that DiMaggio would cooperate. “Joe is willing to go along with the idea,” Arch Murray reported in the New York Post. “DiMag, who doesn’t want to reach the sunset any quicker than his bosses want him to, will go along with anything that may stave off the encroaching years.”

  But Joe hated the
idea. Henrich noted that when Joe returned to the locker room after a practice session, he was drenched in sweat—not because the workout was that intense, but because of his fear of embarrassing himself in front of the fans, especially the ones in New York. Joe played first base exactly one game, handled 13 chances flawlessly, then told Stengel he was finished as a first baseman. The official reason offered was that an injury to Hank Bauer left the Yanks one outfielder short.

  It was, of course, as a center fielder that Joe was selected to play in the All-Star Game. Joining him at Comiskey Park in Chicago were Yankees Yogi Berra, Rizzuto, Jerry Coleman, Vic Raschi, Allie Reynolds, and, for old time’s sake, Tommy Henrich. Joe and Dominic were starters in the outfield again. Also from the Red Sox were Ted Williams, Walt Dropo, and Bobby Doerr. The brothers went hitless—in his only appearance, Joe hit into a double play. The National League prevailed in the 14-inning battle, 4–3.

  After the crushing disappointments of the previous seasons, it would take a lot for Dominic and his teammates to pull themselves together for another pennant drive in 1950. If consistency was a key, Boston had a good chance, as they had pretty much the same lineup and pitching rotation as before, with Joe McCarthy back as the skipper.

  Opening day at Fenway Park began on a festive note, with commissioner Happy Chandler presenting Ted with his MVP Award. The Sox leaped to a 9–0 lead against the Yankees. But in the eighth inning, the visitors exploded for nine runs of their own. Billy Martin, a Pacific Coast League product, set a record with two hits in one inning in his first major league game. With Henrich tripling twice, the Yankees won, 15–10. Dominic went 2-for-5 with two runs scored, and Joe went 3-for-6 with an RBI. Despite this loss, by the end of the month the Sox looked good, burying the Athletics 19–0 in one game and dusting the White Sox 11–1 the following week. Dominic inspired his teammates with his consistent hitting and ability to get on base. He himself may have been inspired by a happy occasion in his private life: on April 28, Emily gave birth to a seven-pound, 13.5-ounce boy, Dominic Paul DiMaggio Jr. They’d call him Paul.