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

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  That spring was wet and cold; the fans were staying away in droves. And the Seals were cutting everyone with serious experience and salary. There were rumors that Seattle was going to fold, and that would have made the Pacific Coast League crumble. In fact, all the PCL owners were talking about shutting down for the year—they’d try to start up again in 1934. (They might have done it, but the baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, threatened to make all their players free agents.)

  So, whether he knew it or not, Joe was going to play, and perform—or he’d be fired, too. What he did know was he was suddenly alone. He’d come into that clubhouse as “Vince’s kid brother,” but now Vince was gone. Joe had made the club (he thought) as the fill-in shortstop. But now he would find himself bouncing between right field and center—great expanses in the new Seals Stadium—both equally mysterious to him. He was eighteen years old, he’d never been away from home. He didn’t know anybody—or how to get to know them. He didn’t have the gift of the glad hand or ready smile, and had not a word for the writers in the clubhouse. He was startled when he read an early description of himself in the paper: “a gawky, awkward kid, all arms and legs like a colt, and inclined to be surly.” But that was how he seemed. The other Seals saw him in the corner—silent, smoking, making (as they saw it) no effort to be friendly—so they left him alone. And he floundered.

  He went at his outfield job like a Sicilian fisherman—alone out there in the weather, talking to no one, vaguely suspicious, treating anything that came his way as a threat. The outfield played to two of his strengths: he could run—even if he was fooled on a ball, he might make up the ground with pure speed—and he could throw as hard as he wanted. In fact, in his first start in right, two Portland baserunners tried to filch extra bases, and he gunned them both down. That convinced Caveney he could get along with Joe in the field. But through most of April, Joe was stumbling along with a .250 average—anemic by PCL standards—and the Seals were awful. They had marched (largely unwitnessed from the grandstand) straight to the Coast League cellar, with nine wins and eighteen losses.

  With any other hitter, it would have been safe to assume that the pitchers had caught on: someone had found a way to get Joe out, and after that, well, word travels fast. But Joe wasn’t any other hitter: he could hit any pitch, any pitcher alive, when he was right. Of course, at that point, no one could be sure—least of all Joe. But there were indications that his problems were mostly from the neck up. Near the end of April, the desperate Seals re-signed Vince DiMaggio for two weeks—and for those two weeks, Joe hit over .300.

  But then, May 8, Vince was cut from the team again, and Joe sank like a scuttled boat. He wasn’t hitting for average (he was under .250); he wasn’t hitting for power (one extra-base hit in fifty at bats). If the Seals hadn’t been in such desperate shape (they even tried a pitcher, Jimmy Zinn, in the outfield), Joe’s chance might have been over.

  On May 28, last day of a home stand, the Seals played a doubleheader and won both. The first was a laugher, 10–2—though not for Joe: he went oh-for-four. The second game, the Seals won 3–1, Joe hit a double. And suddenly (was Mamma Rosalie at work at home?) the evil eye was gone. The Seals went north for a doubleheader at Seattle: Joe went six-for-ten, his best day yet in professional ball. Five more games against Seattle: Joe hit in all of them—two hits in four of the games, two home runs in the series. Back home for a full week of games against Oakland: Joe got a hit in every game—.400 for the series.

  And just as suddenly, the Seals were winning. At least they won as often as they lost. (They still didn’t have any pitching, but if they gave up fewer than ten runs, they had a chance.) Seattle came in for the next week: the scores show what kind of games they were (7–5, 8–5, 12–5, 9–6). But the Seals won half of them, and Joe hit in all of them—for an average of .520 in that series.

  No San Francisco writer would call this a streak, yet—not a mere twenty-three straight games. The PCL was a batter’s league, and a lot of guys kept hitting for two or three weeks before they cooled off. (When Joe got his first hit in that May 28 doubleheader, the opposition Portland outfielder, George Blackerby, was at the close of a thirty-six-game spree—still well short of the league-record forty-nine.) If any writer did think of DiMaggio-and-streak, they’d have reckoned, surely someone would stop him soon. In fact, the next day, at the start of a series with the local rival Missions, Johnny Babich almost did.

  Babich was only one year older than Joe, and at the start of a career that would carry him to the Dodgers and Braves, and on to a reputation as a “Yankee Killer” with the Philadelphia A’s. He’d come from the lumber country up North, and signed with the Seals, but when they wouldn’t give him the contract he wanted, he jumped crosstown to the Missions. He was a big right-hander, a power pitcher, and a tough competitor. That year, he would win twenty games with the last-place Missions; and that day, in Seals Stadium, no one could touch him. Babich was out to show the Seals that he’d been worth every dime he asked for.

  But for once, the Seals also got good pitching—from the sometimes-outfielder Jimmy Zinn. (That’s another reason Babich wanted that game—Zinn was his old Seals roommate.) In the bottom of the eighth, it was still 0–0, and DiMaggio was hitless. But then the Seals’ new center fielder, Elias Funk, got on with a double. And Babich tried to throw a fastball past Joe . . . who hit a line drive to left—a white blur through the late, slanting light. By the time the left fielder turned and took two steps, the ball was over his head, and it crashed into the left field wall and rolled away while DiMaggio rolled around to third. That triple knocked in the only run—a run neither Joe nor Babich would forget. Zinn and the Seals won 1–0. And Joe was their new game-breaker.

  The next day Joe went two-for-three, and once again, his hit in the ninth knocked home the run that made the difference. The Seals won 6–5, and in the clubhouse they all came to shake his hand. No one could stop him when he was right, and now everything was right in Joe’s world. When Vince got a job with the Hollywood team, the Stars, that monkey was off Joe’s back: the DiMaggio boys were both playing, at last. It was three DiMaggio boys, in fact: little Dommie got his name in the paper as the infield star for his Boys Club and Legion teams. (Dommie didn’t have Joe’s God-given power, but he was smart and he worked hard on his game. And when he got his glasses, and could finally see the ball at the plate . . . well, all of Giuseppe’s sons could swing the bat.) Now the flat on Taylor Street was a baseball industry, with Giuseppe as the proud proprietor.

  The old man no longer went out to fish, but he still woke by habit in the dark before dawn. Now, he didn’t go for his boat, but for the Chronicle, the morning paper. Giuseppe still couldn’t read a lick, but he knew the Sporting Section was the one on green paper. And he knew the Seals’ box score would be on that green front page. His thick index finger would count down the Seals’ order—one, two, three—till he got to the only name he could recognize: “J. DeMaggio.” He knew the first number after the name was how many times Joe came to bat, the second was how many hits. If Joe got a hit, Giuseppe would put down the paper, satisfied, maybe have a cup of coffee. If it was more than one hit, the coffee could wait: he had to wake Rosalie to tell her.

  In those days, there was often more than one. Through the series with the Missions, Joe hit in every game, at a .440 clip. Now, there were plenty of people who’d talk about Young Joe’s “streak.” Abe Kemp noted in the Examiner that “De Maggio” had hit safely in thirty straight games, though the kid (“greatly improved,” Kemp conceded) still had a long climb before he’d threaten the mark of old Jack Ness, first-sacker for the Oakland Oaks, who had hit for forty-nine straight in the summer after Joe was born.

  The Seals were on their way to L.A., where the Angels’ ace, tough Bobo Newsom, almost justified Kemp’s caution. Newsom was a bear: six foot three, more than two hundred pounds; he was twenty-six, had appeared three years in the majors already, and still had another twenty years in his arm. He woul
d win thirty games for the Angels that year, and in L.A.’s Wrigley Field, he had DiMaggio handcuffed all day . . . until the ninth, when Joe got his last chance. The kid cocked his dark hickory bat once, then took his statue’s stance. Whack! A bullet, line drive, base hit. And then, a strange thing happened: though Newsom was their hero and the Angels their team, the Wrigley fans gave an audible cheer.

  Wherever the Seals played, the crowds were growing: people wanted to see this kid hit. When the Seals came home, and Joe’s streak stood at thirty-seven games, the word was out in San Francisco. More than five thousand fans came to 16th and Bryant, Seals Stadium, for the start of the series with the Hollywood Stars. Of course, it was a big day, the July Fourth doubleheader. But when Joe hit in each of those games, the lead on the sports page wasn’t “Seals, Stars Split a Pair.” The Seals were nowhere in the pennant race—the only story in San Francisco baseball was “Young Joe.” Even the most conservative writer on the beat, the Chronicle’s statesman in residence, Ed. R. Hughes, had trouble getting the result of the game into his first paragraph, when the kid’s streak turned forty and the record was in sight: “Young Joe De Maggio of the Seals, who is on his way to tie the record for batting in consecutive games set in 1915, had to wait until the eighth inning yesterday to get his hit, but when he got it, [it was] a good one, a line drive to left field good for two bases. He has now hit safely in 40 consecutive games. But that hit did not save the Seals, for Hollywood won the game 4 to 3.”

  Some of the writers dropped the news of the games completely: their stories were just about Joe. Some took the family angle, asking Vince DiMaggio, “fly-chaser for the Hollywood club,” what he would do if his kid brother needed a bingle to keep the streak going, and hit the ball toward him. (“I would stand on my ear to try to get the ball,” said the soldierly Vincent.) There were discussions of the rival pitchers’ sportsmanship. (In nine games with the Stars in that series—two doubleheaders in a week-long visit—no one would walk Young Joe to keep him from hitting.) There were comments from the avuncular manager, Caveney, and the scout who got credit for finding the kid, Spike Hennessy, about Joe’s surprising talent. (“The best natural hitter since Paul Waner . . .”) The writers mined comment from the injured third baseman, Leo Ostenberg, who revealed that he gave the kid a “pep talk” before each at bat, and had counseled him (Ostenberg was a dapper professional) that it wasn’t good form to wear a bright yellow shirt around a hotel lobby. But “Young Joe De Maggio” still had nothing to say for himself. Abe Kemp ran an interview with Joe in which the whole column was Kemp’s questions: Joe’s responses were grunts or shrugs. By the close of the series with the Stars, the Chronicle’s Hughes started covering gestures—noting, with a touch of asperity, the North Beach boy’s lack of drama: “Young Joe is probably scared half to death as he nears the hitting record of Ness, but he does not show it in his actions. [His] face is so expressionless that some one has called him ‘Dead Pan Joe.’ Even Buster Keaton himself could not show less emotion. The customers are all pulling for Joe, but until last Saturday he showed no sign that he knew it. But that day, after he had walloped two hits in the first game, and got one his first time up in the second game, he touched the rim of his cap in acknowledgement of the applause.”

  Up in the press box, they all called him Dead Pan, and complained to one another. But what could they do? The Seals needed a hero. San Francisco needed a story. And here was a local kid who’d come from baseball-nowhere to flirt with history—on their beat! So they wrote up his silence as humility, courage, mute concentration in pursuit of his American dream. Uncle Charley Graham was raking in the money at the turnstiles; attendance had doubled, and was climbing still. People would come to the game (it seemed like half the crowd was talking Italian) and after Joe got his hit, they’d leave. What the hell, they still paid their quarters. From the headlines, you couldn’t even tell there’d been a game—just Joe. Here’s the eight-column screamer from the Sporting Green, after the first game of a series with the L.A. Angels:

  DE MAGGIO HITS IN 47TH STRAIGHT

  Local Youth

  Near Record

  Of Jack Ness

  Line Drive in Third Follows

  Intentional

  Walk in First

  Inning

  The papers, the Seals, and the city were (literally) banking on Joe. Charley Graham started planning and publicizing a celebration for the next night game, which would be the fiftieth of Young Joe’s Streak, when he would set the new record. Graham ordered a fancy watch, engraved to mark the occasion. And that was when he finally asked Joe how to spell his name. Graham told the writers Joe’s response: “Aw, spell it any way you want to.” (But Graham persisted and learned it was “DiMaggio.”) . . . It would have been an awful letdown if he’d fallen short at that point—(perhaps) for Joe, (and surely) for the team, the fans, the town. In our age, it would be the kind of thing for which they’d call in therapists—to counsel the grieving victims in the aftermath. But it wasn’t just a simpler age back then. It was Joe. What made everyone so cocksure was that quiet his North Beach pals knew—the same thing the writers all complained about—that was his armor. Dead Pan Joe was not going to fall victim to the pressure (what pressure?), the hoopla, or anything else. In the forty-eighth game he hit a double to drive in a run. In the forty-ninth game, to tie the record, he hit a single on the first pitch he saw in the first inning, a home run on the first pitch he saw in the fourth, and a line drive single, for good measure, in the eighth.

  The Seals were so certain that Joe would take care of business the next night, they held the ceremony for his new record before the fiftieth game even started. The Honorable Paesano, Mayor Angelo Rossi, presented the gold watch from Charley Graham. The Jolly Knights were in attendance, to present Joe with a fine leather traveling bag. The Seals gave him a check. (And why not: the crowd of ten thousand in the Stadium that night would pay Joe’s salary for the year.) Then Giuseppe and Rosalie DiMaggio were invited onto the field—the old man in his fedora—and introduced like ambassadors to the home plate umpire, shaken by the hand by Charley Graham, and kissed (to great huzzahs from the crowd) by Mayor Rossi. Then Joe, with his arms full of flowers, walked Rosalie to the Seals bench, while their fellow San Franciscans rained cheers upon mother and son . . . . Reaction from Joe? There was none. That was for the writers to make up. (Said the Chronicle, next morning: “No doubt the youngster was pleased, as who wouldn’t be?”)

  Well, here was his reaction:

  In the top of the first, the Angels looked like they would bat forever—five hits, three runs . . . until DiMaggio captured a drive to right field and threw a BB to the plate to double up the L.A. runner trying to score. Side retired, the Seals came in to hit. There was a base hit by the leadoff man, Sever, a walk to Galan, and both men moved up on an infield ground ball: runners on second and third, one out—and Young Joe at bat for the first time. Photographers edged closer and closer to the plate, pans of flashpowder held toward the kid’s face. On the mound, big, glowering Bobo Newsom humped up and threw the ball as hard as he could . . . the powder flared in a shock of lurid white . . . the kid swung and missed. The crowd was standing, screaming for Joe, booing the photographers. The Seals were bellowing at Newsom and the ump. (“Get those bastards outa his face!”) Charley Graham jumped over the box seat railing, onto the field, and ordered the photographers away from the plate. With a rolled-up program, Graham beat the cameramen back from the foul line. Newsom threw again. Joe swung—crack!—and the ball took off on a line, past Newsom’s ear, and safely into center field for two Seals runs . . . for history and the record . . . for the triumph of truth, justice, the American Game, and its thousands of new San Francisco fans.

  “Joe De Maggio,” wrote Ed. R. Hughes (who, in the excitement, hadn’t quite caught up with the spelling), “18-year-old batting sensation of the Coast League, either has nerves of steel, or he has no nerves at all.”

  Reaction from Joe? He just kept going. He hit in e
very game with the Angels, and then it was off to Sacramento—and the biggest crowds ever seen there—half of ’em screaming for the San Francisco rookie, half for the hometown Senators to stop him. After one game in which Joe’s only hit was a ground ball that the shortstop couldn’t field cleanly, irate fans stormed the press box. The official scorer, Steve George, sports editor of the Sacramento Bee, had to be escorted from the ballpark by police.

  Truth be told, a bit of help from the scorer (or the shortstop) wasn’t out of the question. They were all, one way or another, in the baseball business. And this mute boy with nerves of steel had saved the season—put the fans back in the seats. But now, it was clear, the kid was tired (though of course he wouldn’t say so). In the last week, his hits were bleeders and bloopers—too many balls never got past the infield . . . until at last, against Oakland, in his sixty-second game, Young Joe was stopped. The writers said he must be relieved. DiMaggio didn’t say that—or anything else.

  He finished the year at .340, with his name misspelled nationwide by the Associated Press, with his picture in The Sporting News, with rumors flying that some major league club was offering $40,000 for him (or was it $60,000?) . . . and with the certainty that he’d done what he came to do: he’d made himself a big-time pro player, a kid with a future, a success in his father’s house—and in North Beach, where his name would be honored, and where he could spend all the winter months. And he wouldn’t have to lift a finger.