Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (Touchstone Book)

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  So Joe played those last three games with the Seals, got himself a couple of hits, and an invitation to next year’s spring training. And there he would prove that all the talk about him wasn’t fiction. He would make the jump, in less than two years, from playground games to the Pacific Coast League—just a notch below the majors. And that would be, in reality, miraculous.

  But it would never be quite miraculous enough for public consumption—not quite neat enough for one column of newsprint. So, that’s where the myth would begin to cover the facts. Because the next year, 1933, Joe wouldn’t just stick with the club. He would become a sensation—a huge story. In fact, he would jump from the sports page to the front page before the newspapers could learn to spell his name. (Mostly, they would go with “DeMaggio.”) . . . But how would they make a big story with this kid—who would never say more than “Pass the salt”? Well, they would do their best:

  The poor Italian boy, who learned to hit with a broken oar for a bat . . .

  His papa wanted him to fish, but DeMaggio only loved baseball . . .

  His brother got him a job—his own . . .

  In other words, they would give him a story—or bits and pieces of old, proven stories—from the tasty American melting pot stuff, to Cain and Abel.

  Joe would rankle for years under the legend that he’d come up in ’33 to steal his brother’s job. (He would always protest: Vince was injured—he couldn’t throw. He was going to be cut, no matter for whom.)

  But for the rest of the myth, Joe would play along nicely. If the writers were gonna try to make him a hero, what’s he supposed to do—stop ’em? If they meant to turn him into the Dago poor boy who loved the Great American Game . . . if they wanted him to face down the old-world papa, and show him, in America, dreams really do come true . . . if they needed Joe to stand for all the miracles that happen with vision, belief, and good ol’ American spunk—well, why not? . . . Joe wouldn’t take Vince’s job—just his story.

  CHARLEY GRAHAM AND HIS SEALS, AND JOE, CENTER, WITH HIS BAT, 1933.

  RUNNING HIS HOME RUN ALL THE WAY BACK TO THE DUGOUT.

  JOE DIMAGGIO AS A ROOKIE WITH THE SEALS, 1933.

  CHAPTER 4

  WHEN JOE GOT THE INVITATION TO THE SEALS’ spring training, all the boys in North Beach knew he would stick. Of course, they talked about his chances, but there wasn’t any debate: at least someone from the neighborhood was going to make it. It was strange how the least forthcoming guy in their crowd (Joe was almost invisible!) came to be the one—like money in the bank. But if you knew Joe, it all went together. He had that quiet in the bottom of himself—like an absence more than anything they could name—that made him a zero, and a sure bet. They knew Joe was going to take care of business because that’s all Joe did.

  Of course, at that moment, no one could see it whole. But that was when the world leaned in on their lives, a time of choices—no choice was how it felt: ’33 was a tough year to be chasing dreams. Niggy’s glory was boxing; he’d rather fight than eat. He was training at Joe Roche’s gym—got a half a dozen fights and won them all, four by knockout. He was fast on his feet, and strong for a lightweight. If he got you in a clinch, you didn’t move. He was underage, so he used his father’s name: “Joe (Babe) Marino,” read the yellow embroidery on the back of his blue robe. The Oakland Tribune said he had more color than a Fourth of July parade. But he only got twenty-five or thirty-five bucks a bout. So, next day, he’d be fishing again. Niggy’s dad couldn’t earn a penny—arthritis in his legs—he couldn’t even get out of the house. (They didn’t have walkers in those days, so Papa Marino stumped around with a chair for thirty years.) Then, Niggy got a fight on the radio. His brother was listening at home. Niggy’s mom kept asking, “Who’s this Marino?” The brother said, “It’s another guy, different family.” But it got to the fourth round—the announcer’s screaming, “MARINO CUT IN THE EYE! MARINO’S BLEEDIN’ ALL OVER!”—and Niggy’s mamma had a heart attack, right there, next to the radio. After that, she told him, “You want me to live, or what?” And Niggy went to fishing full time.

  Shabby Minafo almost went Joe’s route: he jumped ship from the Rossi Olive Oils, and was making ten bucks a game for Horseshoe Tavern. He was a good outfielder, and could hit a ton. He got a minor league offer from the Cincinnati Reds. But they only paid seventy-five dollars a month (and you had to buy your own equipment and food). Shabby was bringing home a hundred a month from Pacific Box. So his oldest brother said, “You ain’t goin’.” And Shab stayed at Pacific Box for ten years, till he went in the service.

  The rest of the Rossi team finally made it to the Valley League—as high as they could go—but it didn’t last. Andy Banchero took the test to become a fireman, and after that, he was sitting in the firehouse weekends. Friggles Tomei went to work in an office and gave up on the game. Ciccio was still a hell of a pitcher, and a switch hitter, but his dad got sick with the diabetes so Ciccio had to fish. If he had any spare time, he did his Don Juan thing with the showgirls—“American girls,” as the boys called them. He had one girlfriend, Mickey Nichols, a dancer at the Lido Cafe, who lived out west in the Avenues. Sometimes, he’d hang around with the Powder Puff Twins (nice girls—and they were twins, but they had to stuff their bras with powder puffs to look right on stage). Most of the other guys had North Beach girlfriends—good Italian girls whom you had to take out weekend afternoons, and you couldn’t touch ’em or you’d have their brothers to deal with. If the fellows played any ball now it was with teams where they worked. Frank and Bat were both at Simmons Bed—good ball team there—but after a while they, too, gave up. It wasn’t their team. In the end, that’s what baseball was for them: their team, their friends . . . when that ended, it was over for them.

  But not for Joe. Joe was going to take care of business because he could treat the game as business. It wasn’t all tied up in his head with friends and the neighborhood, playground days and glorious dreams at night. Joe was living home, on Taylor Street, but no one from the neighborhood saw him. First, there was the Seals’ winter league squad, and then spring training. He’d come home, eat, sleep, and go train again. When his name was in the paper, someone at the playground would bring that up. “D’you see Joe got a write-up?” (Someone else would say, “Yeah. Joe’s doin’ good.”) The papers called him “the shortstop from North Beach.” But everything that used to be North Beach for him was left behind.

  One time that winter, Frank Venezia was selling papers at his corner, and saw Joe coming back from the big sporting goods store, Hirsch & Price. Joe was getting ready for the winter league, and he had his new spikes—showed ’em to Frank.

  “God, Joe, wouldn’t it be something if you went all the way?” Frank knew the Seals sold players to the big leagues; and he had pictures in his head from his own night-dreams. “What if you go up to the majors? What if it’s the Yankees!”

  Joe didn’t say anything, or even smile. It wasn’t any dreamy gee-whiz to him. It was something harder, more real, from the first day. But that was nothing he would say.

  Frank didn’t understand that silence. He thought about that for years . . . till he gave up thinking that Joe was like him. Sometimes, people still tell Frank: If you hadn’t signed Joe up, he could’ve drifted out of baseball for good. But Frank doesn’t buy it anymore.

  “Nah,” he says. “It’s like one of them oyster pearls. Somebody woulda found him.”

  OF COURSE, IN hard times, people just think life is harder. It wouldn’t come clear till after the fact that the Great Depression was working for Joe. Two years after the stock market crashed, Charley Graham, the Seals’ boss, had decided that the slump would soon be over. So he built a million-dollar ballpark. By 1933, the new Seals Stadium was still heavily mortgaged, the team still owed rent on the old ballpark, and attendance was down—who had a quarter for a ticket? The Seals had to shuck their best-paid veterans and fill the roster with kids.

  A local Italian boy who could hit was a good bet. Graha
m had done well with “his Latins.” A Castilian left-hander with the unlikely name of Vernon Gomez was the Seals’ star pitcher till ’29, and then fetched a pretty $35,000 from the New York Yankees. The local shortstop, Frankie Crosetti, helped the Seals win a pennant in ’31, and then was sold for a fortune—$72,000!—also to the Yanks. And in San Francisco, Italians were no longer at the bottom of the lineup. When the city fathers vowed to fight hard times with a grand new public work—the Golden Gate Bridge—they turned to the banker A. P. Giannini to make the dream real. (“We need that bridge,” he said. “We’ll take the bonds.”) And when the great bridge broke ground (just as Joe was trying out for the Seals), the mayor with the silver shovel was the Honorable Paesano, Angelo Rossi.

  Joe knew nothing of the city’s demographics or the club’s economics. He only knew he didn’t have much time—a few games in the winter league and one month of spring training—to show he belonged with the Seals. He knew the shortstop job was held by a rising young pro named Augie Galan (who would later become an All-Star with the Cubs). And Joe had to know, in addition, that he wasn’t the best rookie shortstop in camp. The best was another local kid, Tony Gomez.

  Gomez had all the moves around the middle infield. He and Eddie Joost (another future big-leaguer) had formed the best double play combination in the city for their championship American Legion club. Gomez had range, quick hands, a sure throw; he could hit, he could run, he was seventeen years old, and he’d work cheap. He was perfect . . . except for one thing. Gomez came from Latin stock—he had handsome high cheekbones, black curly hair, and skin the color of coffee with a little cream. When he got to camp, started taking grounders, the first thing he heard was someone in the stands, asking, “Who’s that black bastard?” Later, one of the coaches cleared everyone else off the infield, and started smashing ground balls at Gomez—trying to knock him over. Tony kept picking up everything hit at him (and making throws to Joe DiMaggio at first base) . . . until one of his legs cramped. You brought your own equipment in those days, and Gomez was wearing strips of rubber tire to hold up his stirrup socks. Gomez hobbled off and sat down. DiMaggio sidled into foul ground and muttered to him: “You better get up. Don’cha see who’s up in the stands?” Charley Graham was watching from a grandstand seat—along with his pal, the all-time great (and California retiree), Ty Cobb. But Gomez couldn’t get back on the field that day, and didn’t get much chance after that. Ten days later, the manager, Jimmy Caveney, took Tony aside. “Gomez,” he said, “you better quit playin’ ball. You’re too black.” Tony Gomez was finished with the Seals.

  Any misstep, any problem, was grounds for a cut at the Seals’ camp. There were a hundred and fifty kids on the winter league teams, sixty by the start of spring training. The impoverished Seals only meant to pay eighteen or nineteen players for the season, and there were twenty trying to come back from the ’32 team. In DiMaggio: An Illustrated Life, Dick Johnson and Glenn Stout note the sad case of catcher Charley Wallgren, who was cut from the ’33 Seals for a bad case of jock itch.

  But the grim rules didn’t apply to Joe. On the first day of spring training, Abe Kemp, the Examiner’s veteran baseball writer, was sitting in the grandstand next to Charley Graham, watching the kids at infield practice. Joe DiMaggio picked up a ball at shortstop and heaved it right past Graham’s head. “I’ll say one thing about that kid,” Graham remarked mildly. “He’s got a hell of an arm.” In the Seals’ last exhibition games, against the local rival Missions, Galan was benched with an injury: Joe got a start at shortstop and committed four errors. Even Abe Kemp, who called himself a Pollyanna (“If you can’t write something nice about a ballplayer, don’t mention his name”) wrote in the Examiner that young DeMaggio was “doing the best he can, but appears bewildered.”

  Still, Joe was bound to make it—for two simple reasons: he was hitting; and no pitcher could stop him from hitting. Anyone who saw him at bat knew instantly, this was a special case. It wasn’t one or two shots into the blue beyond—this wasn’t a sporadic prowess: it was every time he stood at the plate, cocked his bat once at the pitcher (whatever pitcher), and then stood still and easy, feet spread about a foot apart, bat up behind his right ear, the weight of his body held effortlessly back, until he saw the pitch (whatever pitch)—whereupon he would slash it on a hard line, somewhere. Even Tony Gomez, who was contesting (he thought) for the same job, used to stop whatever he was doing and stand behind the cage to watch Joe hit. “Just a little resin bag in his back pocket . . .” Gomez recalled, more than sixty years later. “One squaring of his bat . . .” And then Gomez searched for that word—the word many people used to describe Young Joe, because it evoked not just stillness, but beauty. “Then, the guy was a statue.”

  NO SCOUTING REPORT ever listed “beauty” amid the stats on speed, arm strength, or homers. It’s not a word that baseball men use. They’re more given to mechanical metaphor (“Has all the tools”), or if they’re really at a loss, they’ll compare a kid to a known major-leaguer (“Has Colavito’s arm”).

  But it was beauty (or something akin—classicism, grace . . .) that made the baseball men talk about Joe. Jack Kofoed, columnist for the New York Post, wrote up a conversation between Charley Graham and his manager, Jimmy Caveney, just after Joe DiMaggio had left the room.

  “Graham looked after the loosely built six-footer, who packs 190 pounds on his athletic frame, and said:

  “ ‘Give him a couple of years Jim, and Di Maggio is going to be one of the greatest ball players in the country.’

  “ ‘I’m sure of it,’ said Caveney.

  “ ‘Did you ever see a better natural stance at the plate or a guy who took a freer cut at the ball?’ . . .

  “ ‘Yes, sir, he’s as loose a swinger as Joe Jackson was, and that’s saying something.’ ”

  Caveney was a good baseball man. In other words, he could barely form a sentence—and seldom tried. But he’d watch the diamond for hours, mute, his eyes in a squint between his graying brows and a steaming teacup. Within the lines of that diamond he knew what to do. So that spring, he made Joe DiMaggio his project.

  Caveney had been a shortstop in the early 1920s for the Cincinnati Reds, and he tried to teach Joe how to set his feet, how to snap a throw sidearm. Joe’s sidearm throws would break seats behind first base. Caveney thought the kid must be pressing, thinking too much: he tried to talk with Joe, to relax him. But between those two, conversation didn’t last a minute. (Joe said two words: “Yes” and “sir.”) On a hunch, Caveney tried the kid at first base. But the footwork at first has to be quick, light, precise, like a dance . . . and the hunch proved wrong: Joe couldn’t dance.

  Or maybe, to be fair, Caveney was half-right: Joe couldn’t dance and think. At the plate, his footwork was flawless. (There wasn’t much—one quick stride from his stance and his whole body was into the swing.) But it was clear Joe didn’t have to think at the plate—or worry. As a hitter, he had total and marvelous confidence. It was the one thing in his life where he’d always been better than anybody else. He didn’t have to figure it out, or explain it. He couldn’t explain it. Unlike the other phenom from the Coast League, Ted Williams (who would sign with San Diego in 1936), DiMaggio never tried to turn hitting into science. “It has always been a theory of mine,” he said in Lucky to Be a Yankee, “that hitting is a God-given gift, like being able to run fast, or throw hard.” Even near the end of his career, after he’d studied the game for twenty years, Joe’s theory remained the same. When the young catcher Larry Berra made bold one day to ask the eminence, Joe, how to approach a certain pitcher, DiMaggio snapped: “Just walk up to the plate and hit the ball. There’s no talent involved.”

  That no-talent was Joe’s ticket. “Caveney,” Abe Kemp reported in the Examiner, “has a problem on his hands finding a spot for Joe DeMaggio. As a shortstop this lad has little to commend him, but as a hitter he attracts attention.” That was a cautious Kempian understatement: Joe was something more than interesting. But the asse
ssment of Caveney’s problem was correct: it wasn’t whether to keep Joe, but where.

  By the time spring training began, Charley Graham was already negotiating Joe’s contract with his oldest brother, Tom. (Unlike brother Vince, Joe was going to be a family business.) In Lucky to Be a Yankee, Gary-Cooper DiMaggio said that first contract took him by surprise. They just called him to the office one day, and there it was—two hundred twenty-five dollars a month. (How nice!) “ . . . and I put my John Hancock on the dotted line without any hesitation or conversation whatsoever. I don’t think I ever since signed a contract in baseball, even my first one with the Yankees, which gave me as big a kick as that original contract with San Francisco.” . . . But in the real world, the bargaining went on for more than a month: offer and counteroffer, back and forth, Tom and Mr. Graham, until the DiMaggios pushed the Seals to double what most rookies made. Then it was Giuseppe, not (the underaged) Joe, who was summoned to the office and that dotted line . . . upon which the old man painstakingly—but happily—signed. That two twenty-five was also twice what Giuseppe had made in the best month of his whole laboring life.

  WHEN THE SEALS broke camp, at the end of March, Joe’s position was listed as “utility”—which was to say, in the field, he was of no utility. But Caveney was still trying. In the third game of the season, eighth inning, Seals behind, the manager sent Joe in to pinch-hit for the right fielder. Joe quietly flied out. But for the ninth, Caveney told him to go play right field. Joe thought he must be joking—unlikely in Caveney’s case—or he must have meant Vince, who was still with the club, but riding the bench with his sore arm. Or what about “Prince” Henry Oana, the veteran Hawaiian? He could play. Joe said to Vince: “I never played right field in my life.” Vince said: “I know . . . but you’re going to start now.” So Joe stood in right field for the last inning, luckily untroubled by any fly balls. And after that game, both Vince and Oana were cut from the club.