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

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  IT WAS MAY 20, 1934; or, more likely, the wee hours of May 21—the date is in question, like everything else.

  The Seals were in town, winding up a series with the Hollywood Stars—led by their slugging outfielder, Vince DiMaggio. During that week, the Seals and the San Francisco sporting press beat the drum repeatedly to promote the rivalry between the two brothers. Feature stories retailed anew how Joe took Vince’s job, how their fisherman father had never liked baseball, how the boys had learned to hit with oars . . . all the old chestnuts were roasting that week. Joe and Vince made some joint broadcasts on the local radio, giving baseball tips to the hometown kids—which was also good for attendance . . . and a fine crowd appeared for the big windup, a Sunday doubleheader, Family Day at Seals Stadium.

  This much is known: the whole DiMaggio clan was invited to mark the celebration. Both Vince and Joe went two-for-seven. The Seals and Stars split the two games. And when the second game was called on account of darkness, all the families in attendance adjourned, to further celebrate their familyhood.

  Here’s how Joe told the subsequent events, in Lucky to Be a Yankee:

  “After a double-header at Seal Park in June, I went to the home of one of my married sisters for dinner. It had been a long day at the ball park and when dinner was over, I decided to take a jitney cab home. I was riding in close quarters, cramped, and my left foot must have fallen asleep from the awkward position in which I was sitting. Getting out of the cab, I put that leg on the pavement first, with all my weight on it. Down I went, as though I had been shot.

  “There was no twisting, just four sharp cracks at the knee, and I couldn’t straighten out the leg. The pain was terrific, like a whole set of aching teeth in my knee, and I don’t know yet why I didn’t pass out.

  “There was a movie house nearby, the Milane, and a friend of mine, whom I knew only as Frank, was the manager. He drove me to the Emergency Hospital . . . .”

  Well, as they said in the movies of the day: that was his story—and he was sticking to it. He told the same tale in 1989, in Volume I of The DiMaggio Albums . . . with a couple of new details:

  “Before the next game I telephoned the manager of the Seals, Ike Caveney, and told him I was in a lot of pain and couldn’t walk. Charley Graham, the club president, sent a physician over to see me. He determined it was a torn cartilage. Later he put my leg in an aluminum splint from ankle to buttock, which I wore for what seemed the longest six weeks of my life. After it was taken off, I tried to come back that season, but couldn’t.”

  The problem is, all the details—old and new—are wrong, or at least they don’t mesh with the few known facts. The date, the location, the events, and the aftermath are all a confection—cotton-hero-candy—that were used for the next sixty years to show how the fates threw Joe into peril, but with pluck, faith (and a smile from Above), the Hero’s Life proceeded.

  The Examiner did the honest spadework: the overnight city staff talked to the hospital, and got the police reports. In the next day’s Examiner, the story said: “Joe DiMaggio, ace slugger and outfielder of the Seals, suffered injury to his knee early this morning when he fell entering his automobile . . . .”

  The paper put the incident well after midnight—on Market Street in downtown San Francisco—not outside the Milano Theatre in North Beach (where, incidentally, jitney cabs didn’t run).

  “DiMaggio, police reported, was getting into his car, parked at Fourth and Market Streets, when he suddenly lost his footing on the running board, grasped desperately to save himself, and fell.”

  That’s an intriguing sentence. If Joe was at Fourth and Market, in the wee hours (after curfew)—where no sister lived, where nothing but bars and nightclubs were open—how loaded was he? If Joe (in point of fact) did not yet have a car of his own, but always had people to drive him around, who was driving? (And whom did Joe protect for sixty years?) If Joe had to grab desperately to save his footing on the running board, and the resulting fall was severe enough to almost ruin him for life—was the car moving? And how fast?

  Alas, there were only questions, no answers. Who would supply them?

  After the Examiner’s overnight police grunts did their honest labor, the story moved back to the sports staff—to Abe Kemp, the self-styled Pollyanna, who was very much a part of the baseball business in San Francisco. (Kemp told Jerome Holtzman, for the oral history No Cheering in the Press Box: “Hell, I could have written some of the most scandalous stories of all time. But I didn’t.”) . . . The Examiner’s digging was over.

  Charley Graham, the chief of the baseball business, only wanted this story to die a quick death. He was in debt, and Joe DiMaggio was the most valuable asset on his balance sheet. Before the accident, Graham was whispering about offers of a hundred thousand dollars for the Dago boy’s contract. If the kid got stinko, fell down, and now he might never be the same—well, Graham wasn’t going to advertise that.

  The family was (as always) silent. If, in fact, Vince’s visit didn’t prompt a warm family dinner . . . if, in fact, Vince was cut off from the family fold again (having married that girl after all, and worse still, having sired a daughter whom he did not name for Rosalie, the grandma—a terrible slap!) . . . well, that was private family business. And no one named DiMaggio was going to discuss it.

  The confection served everybody’s interest because it served Joe’s, and he was the meal ticket. If he wanted to say his foot fell asleep in a cab, well, let sleeping dogs lie. If he said he couldn’t play for the rest of the year—in fact, he did, but not well or wisely—let him cover his tracks. No matter what he said, he couldn’t bury the most momentous fact. Word travels fast in baseball, and word was: DiMaggio was damaged goods.

  IN THOSE DAYS, scouting wasn’t science: there was no sheaf of computer printouts with rankings for all the players in the bushes. It was word of mouth and long dirt roads—hard on cars, and harder still on the two or three dozen full-time men who covered the country for the major league clubs. In the sports page argot, they were called “ivory hunters”—which was a cliche by ’34, but one that aptly hinted at the vast and viny thickets they explored: thousands of semipro and factory clubs, legion ball, high school teams, and small-town independent leagues . . . players touted by their coaches or managers, written up in local papers, whispered about by commission scouts or bird-dogs (who were paid when they found a kid worth signing) . . . three million square (and squarely baseball-crazed) miles. In most towns, you couldn’t fill a phone booth with the boys who didn’t play ball.

  The scouts made their reputations with the stars they’d signed. For example, one tricky operator with the dee-licious monicker of Cy Slapnicka was the ace of Indians scouts for thirty years, and finally general manager of the Cleveland club. But in baseball he was, forever, “the man who signed Bob Feller.” One future Hall of Famer, descried behind a barn somewhere, could make your club a fortune and become your calling card for life.

  But the scouts kept their jobs with the boys they didn’t sign. Sure, it was good scouting to know about that phenom pitcher in East Jesus, Indiana. But the great scout got to know that kid—and his high school coach, his mom, his minister . . . and was the first to know when that boy threw his arm out, trying to hit a squirrel with a rock. That’s how you saved your club a fortune—not once in a lifetime, but every year.

  And so, in the absence of science, there was art, anecdote, and a dose of idiosyncratic prejudice. Kevin Kerrane’s anatomy of the scouting life, Dollar Sign on the Muscle, tells of one of the first great scouts, Brooklyn’s Larry Sutton, who never appeared (rain or shine) without umbrella, and who preferred to sign light-haired players (because he believed they held up better in the summer heat). That Cleveland ace, Cy Slapnicka, gave up on the Hall of Fame pitcher Lefty Gomez because of a prejudice even more arcane. As Abe Kemp told the story in No Cheering in the Press Box, Slapnicka had a ten-day option to buy Gomez from the Seals for fifty thousand dollars and three players. Then he stopped by Cha
rley Graham’s office, and asked permission to visit the Seals’ locker room.

  “About a half hour later,” as Kemp recalled, “Slapnicka came back and said, ‘Charlie, I’m going to forfeit my option on Gomez.’

  “Graham says, ‘Tell me something, Cy. Why did you change your mind?’ . . .

  “ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I’ll tell you, Charlie. I saw Gomez undressed in the clubhouse, and anybody who’s got a prick as big as he’s got can’t pitch winning ball in the major leagues.’ ”

  In 1934, Abe Kemp was also scouting, on the side, for the White Sox. Along with Slapnicka, and every other scout in the territory, he had Joe DiMaggio on his A-list—a can’t-miss prospect—until Joe’s knee blew out. And then, like every other scout, he backed off . . . every scout but one.

  After the Family Day doubleheader, Joe had made the trip with the Seals to Los Angeles, where Caveney kept him under wraps through most of the series with the Angels. In the Saturday game, six days after the injury, Joe pinch-hit a home run—made the Seals a winner—but walked around the bases. The next day, he pinch-hit a double, but limped and hopped into second base—and everyone in baseball knew the kid was in trouble. Abe Kemp got a call from Chicago: Harry Grabiner, GM of the White Sox, wanted to know about DiMaggio’s knee.

  “I don’t know anything about his knee, Harry. Outside of that you can go the limit.”

  “How are we going to find out about his knee?”

  Kemp said, “I don’t know.”

  But the local scout for the Yankees, Bill Essick, had lived for a while in North Beach (in fact, across the street from the DiMaggios). He said he could find out about the knee—and quietly, he did. On the say-so of the club’s chief West Coast scout, Joe Devine, the Yankees paid for their own orthopedic specialist to examine DiMaggio’s knee. There was no reason, the specialist said, that a healthy nineteen-year-old couldn’t heal perfectly from that injury. The New York club kept the information under wraps and waited out the season.

  Joe Devine had always liked DiMaggio. As the scouts say, he liked the kid seventy-five thousand dollars—before the knee got hurt. Devine was barely forty years old but already a consummate baseball man, and a modern one. He’d started as an outfielder, but never amounted to much as a player. During World War I, he managed a shipyard team in Seattle, and at the close of the war, started scouting for Seattle. Then he managed Calgary, scouted for the Pittsburgh Pirates, managed the San Francisco Missions, coached in Albuquerque (where he watched a young prospect named Vince DiMaggio) . . . and, at last, hooked on with the Yankees as their West Coast chief. By that time, 1932, Devine had four ways to evaluate a player and only two dealt with natural ability. First, Devine would rate a boy’s body: looseness, reflexes, strength (and the speed of mental responses). Second, for infielders and outfielders, there was foot-speed. Third, there were mechanical skills: batting, fielding, throwing. Devine held those apart from a player’s bodily gifts, because skills could be taught (or at least might improve). But in his fourth criterion, Devine was a pioneer. “The fourth essential,” he said, “covers character and disposition, personal habits and diet. I always talk to a prospect, investigate his way of living and find out with whom he associates. How much he eats is important, too. How many fine-looking prospects have you seen hog their way back into the minors? If a player is absolutely dumb I will not consider him unless his tremendous ability counterbalances his mental handicaps. Usually I pass up the moron ballplayer. He is outdated.” Joe Devine liked DiMaggio’s fluidity, strength, speed, and skills—but he also liked a card-counter.

  By ’34 the Yankees also liked Italians, especially West Coast Italians, with whom they’d enjoyed two decades’ success—starting with Ping Bodie, who was born in San Francisco with the name Francesco Stefano Pezzolo, and became the first “son of Caesar” in the major leagues. Bodie was a strutting, vainglorious “slugger” (before Babe Ruth redefined that term) who was slow of everything but mouth. (When he once attempted a steal and was thrown out by ten yards, the Hearst columnist Bugs Baer wrote: “There was larceny in his heart, but his feet were honest.”) Nevertheless, after 1918, when he came to the Yanks, Bodie became a favorite of both writers and fans. In 1925, the Yanks signed a PCL second baseman, Tony Lazzeri, who became a fixture in their Murderers’ Row. Not only was he better than Bodie—he was smart, sure afield, averaged almost .300, and was always good for ten to fifteen home runs—but his clearly Italian name made the Yanks the team of choice for half a million new metropolitan fans. When the team followed up six years later and brought in the Seals’ Frank Crosetti at shortstop, their Italian-American following was cemented.*

  Clearly, the Yanks and DiMaggio would be a marriage heaven-sent (as would the union between Charley Graham’s mortgage and the beer-barrel fortune of the Yankee owner, Jacob Ruppert). But it was the Seals—and DiMaggio, himself—who almost broke up the wedding. Joe tried the leg again in early June, but the pain drove him out of the lineup. At the end of the month, he was pinch-hitting again, and by July he was playing every day, though the knee still wasn’t right. Graham and Caveney wouldn’t sit the boy down. That would be admitting the damage. And Joe insisted he was okay, though his average since the injury was only .270.

  In the first inning of a game on August 10, DiMaggio came in on a liner to right and fell down in the field. When he batted in the first, he tried to run out a grounder, and then limped back to the bench. When the inning ended, Joe stood up to take the field, but the knee buckled and he collapsed on the dugout floor. Scouts and fans watched DiMaggio struggling vainly to get up . . . and from that moment, Joe’s season was over. In the next day’s paper, the Examiner sports editor, Curly Grieve, wrote the dirge:

  “As he hobbled to the dressing room, the muscles of his face were drawn tight, his eyes expressed the fear and grief that weighed down his heart. He seemed to sense that this hour and day was a critical one in his life. Joe was a $50,000 bundle of ivory to the Seals. His sale seemed definitely assured. And leading the pack of bidders was the impressive checkbook of Colonel Jake Ruppert, part-owner of the New York Yankees . . . .”

  But as Grieve surmised, even the Yankees took pause from Joe’s latest collapse. In 1934, surgical repair of a knee was science fiction, as likely as a man on the moon. Either the knee would heal on its own . . . or Joe would be the most famous rookie in the Crab Fisherman’s Association.

  ONCE AGAIN, it was hard times that put the wind back in Joe’s sails. Even for the Yankees—the richest club in the big leagues, the first dynasty in American sport—’34 was a tough year, and the future looked grimmer still.

  That was the year it came painfully clear, the foundation of that dynasty had crumbled: the mighty Bambino was on his way out. For the last two years, Babe Ruth had been fading—ever slower in the outfield, less productive at the plate, more difficult in the clubhouse (he barely deigned to speak to the new manager, Joe McCarthy). Still, there he was, every day—a threat in the lineup and the sentimental favorite of fans. But the Yanks weren’t about sentiment: that September, the Babe would play his last in pinstripes. And for the first time, the Yankees had to dream up a future in the House that Ruth Built—without Ruth.

  With the Babe’s strength ebbing, the Yanks had finished out of the money for two straight years: in ’33 they ran second to the Senators; in ’34 it was the Tigers. That wasn’t acceptable. For the Yankees’ owner, the brewery heir Jacob Ruppert, what mattered wasn’t “how you played the game.” (In ’31, when Joe McCarthy had just come over from the Cubs, the Yanks played .614 ball—but finished thirteen and a half games back of the Philadelphia A’s. Ruppert snapped at his skipper: “I will stand for your finishing second because you are new to the league—but I warn you, McCarthy, I don’t like finishing second.” “Colonel,” said McCarthy, “neither do I.”) In the Bronx, second place wasn’t just a sporting shame. New Yorkers didn’t come out for also-rans: without a pennant, attendance fell, revenue went down. And the hard-eyed, bristle-browed GM
, Ed Barrow, had to stop using the lure of World Series money to haggle down his players on salary: without a pennant, costs went up. More than any other club in the country, the Yankees’ business wasn’t baseball, but winning.

  Ruth’s demise would leave a hole in the outfield and a chasm in the middle of the order. Gehrig was still a force, but as Gehrig (and the standings) had shown, he couldn’t carry the club. The Yanks were built on power, big innings, and runs in bunches. Barrow had to sign a power-hitting outfielder—or gamble on remaking the club from the ground up. Barrow was not a gambling man.

  Of course, he didn’t much like betting on some Dago boy’s knee, either—even with assurances from doctors, even on the say-so of the best scouts in the business. But as the season ended, he had to make a move.

  “Don’t give up on DiMaggio,” Bill Essick told Barrow. “I think you can get him cheap.” That was the sort of thing Barrow liked to hear.

  And Essick was right on the money. Charley Graham was desperate to realize some value from his wounded star. Attendance was lousy—the Coast League was down almost a quarter-million ticket sales. Graham’s mortgage hadn’t grown any smaller, and the Bank of America took whatever money he had. So the Yankees constructed a deal tailor-made for Graham’s hard times, and their own.

  They would buy DiMaggio for $25,000—which was half, or a third of the sum that Graham once hoped for . . . but the Yanks would throw in five players—prospects of middling caliber—so Graham could field a team next year. The Yankees would save a bundle, and Graham got something he could hold on to (instead of cash, which the B of A would have seized). But there was more: Graham could also fill his seats next year—because he got to keep DiMaggio for one more season. And the Yanks got to keep their money until the kid’s knee was proven sound.