It was the kind of deal in which nobody gambled—as Barrow later said, “the best deal I ever made.” Once the season ended, it went together in a hurry, too. The San Francisco papers got the word November 24, 1934, the day before Joe’s twentieth birthday. Joe got the word from the newsmen: they tracked him down at home, by phone. They were coming over. They had to get a comment—and a photo!—right away! . . . But when they got to Taylor Street, there was Joe, in the kitchen, bare-chested, in his best suit pants, trying to iron his white shirt. So they had to wait while he got ready—then they posed him (No! Not just sittin’, do something!) peeling potatoes.
Of course, the way Abe Kemp wrote it, they’d just found Dead Pan Joe peeling potatoes in a suit and tie. But, what the hell, it was all PR . . . as was the quote they helped him with (“It’s a fine birthday present!” said Joe.) . . . as was the little favor they did at the same time for Uncle Charley Graham—reporting the rosy lie that the Seals got their asking price, $75,000, for their “bundle of ivory.”
The unreported part of the story was how disappointed Joe was. Not about the Yanks—that part was fine—but the deal . . . For almost a year, Tom DiMaggio had been cajoling Charley Graham: when the scouts came calling, Joe should get a portion of his purchase price. And Graham had agreed—or, at least, he played along. If he didn’t, Tom said, Joe could walk away from baseball, take up fishing, and nobody would make a dime.
So they had a quiet agreement—had to be quiet because organized baseball had made the “reserve clause” an article of religion. That clause meant the club owned the contract and all rights to the player. A player horning in on the deal when he was sold, or traded—well, it looked like extortion, in those days. If anyone found out, Judge Landis might have made Joe a fisherman for good . . . .
So Joe’s $6,500 share would have to be paid under the table. But that was before he busted up his knee—when the price for him was $75,000. With the reduced price, Joe got cut out of the deal—stiffed—he’s peelin’ potatoes. And no one (least of all he) could say a word about it.
Still, Joe did receive one fine present that winter, the best gift any young hitter could get. Charley Graham fired the Seals’ manager, Ike Caveney, and replaced him with one of the game’s great men—and one of its greatest batters—Francis Joseph “Lefty” O’Doul.
IN SAN FRANCISCO (where he grew up, and debuted as a pitching star), O’Doul was celebrated as the Boy from Butchertown. In Philadelphia (where he played outfield—and hit .398!) he was the Hero of Baker Bowl. From his years as a dandy (and Irish icon) in New York, he was famous as the Man in the Green Suit. In Tokyo (where he traveled off-season, as ambassador for the Great Game) he was the Father of Japanese Baseball. Everywhere he was known, and everywhere beloved: Lefty had the gift of greeting life with a glad heart.
When Graham wooed O’Doul home as skipper for the ’35 season, he was calling in the biggest name in San Francisco baseball (the city would hold a parade whenever Lefty came home for the winter) . . . a winner on the diamond, and a consummate showman (he’d keep a big red bandanna in his pocket to wave, maddeningly, at opposition pitchers) . . . one of the few baseball men who knew pitching and hitting, both from the inside . . . and withal, a handsome character, who had the generosity to teach.
In years after, O’Doul would insist, the only thing he could do for Joe DiMaggio was “change nothing”—Joe could hit, already. But that was over-modesty. Joe was a great line drive hitter—a gap hitter who battered fences in the PCL. But Lefty had played in Yankee Stadium, where the wall in left center was more than four hundred fifty feet from the plate. Lively Coast League doubles, or even home runs, would quietly expire in a New York center fielder’s glove. So Lefty talked to Joe about looking for a pitch he could pull. (The left field corner in the Bronx was only three hundred feet away.)
The wonderful thing was, Lefty only had to say it. Joe would take it from there. He could do anything he wanted with a bat, or anything Lefty told him to do. In O’Doul, Young Joe found a craftsman he could learn from. Lefty was fresh-arrived from the world where Joe was headed, a world of great names from Joe’s Sporting News. That world came alive when Lefty told his stories of New York. “Mel Ott and I would practice nothing but pulling the ball for hour after hour. Ott could put the ball within inches of the foul pole.” And so, in that ’35 season, Joe had a new request for the BP pitchers: “Pecker-high, middle-in.” He wanted a ball he could turn on, to pull it (where else?) inches from the foul pole.
Joe talked more to Lefty in a week than he’d talked in the prior two years with the Seals. Lefty could make a street lamp talk. Now, the Seals’ clubhouse was full of talk—and laughter. Rainy days, O’Doul would give the batboys a dollar and send them off to the Fox Theatre at Market and 10th. They adored him, as did the players, suddenly freed of rules. Lefty didn’t care what they did at night—just be ready to play. He’d say: “If you come into a bar and I’m there, don’t you dare try to get out without coming over and having one with me.” (O’Doul’s own drinking was famously major league. When Lefty wanted to open his own bar, Ty Cobb, the shrewd businessman, declined to go partners—for the businesslike reason: “He drinks more than me.”) Outside the world of baseball, Lefty showed an even freer hand. Once, at a small-town bar in Calaveras County, Lefty spotted an aged man drinking alone, and told the barkeep: “Give the old-timer a drink.” But the bartender said the man came in every day, had one beer, and then left. O’Doul took out his checkbook, wrote a sum, and signed it: “Buy him a beer every day for the rest of the year.”
Sometimes Lefty took Joe along on his progress through San Francisco—and Joe would soak it all in: the way Lefty talked, how much he tipped, how much he gave to bums, how he signed autographs for kids while he walked, how many friends he gave a big hello. Lefty had more Italian friends than Joe did. Fridays, before a night game, Lefty would take Joe to the winery in North Beach—the Brucato brothers’ cask room—where thirty or forty people (politicians, opera stars, winery workers) would feast on crab cioppino for lunch, while Lefty regaled them with stories. Or O’Doul would invite Joe to join him for lunch at the home of one of the prominenti, Allesandro Baccari. (But Lefty would have to get there early to help Signora Baccari shell peas for the pasta con piselli.)
The biggest thing Joe learned from O’Doul was how to live like a hero. Everybody knew Lefty, everybody watched him, said hello to him, loved him. And in the middle of it all, Lefty did just what he wanted. He was handsome, at home anywhere he went, always the best-dressed man in the room. The admiration of males he accepted with offhand grace, and to the adoration of females he extended a courtly and catholic welcome. Kids—there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for them. (Charley Graham, unwisely, made a deal with Lefty—if he’d stop giving away so many baseballs to kids, Graham would hold a Kids Come Free Day. When more than ten thousand little freebies came out, Lefty climbed to the stadium roof, with flour sacks full of free balls to scatter.) . . . For Joe, this brush with the hero’s life wasn’t quite like hitting—he couldn’t just do it himself the next day. But if he was going to be a big-leaguer, a New York big-leaguer . . . this was his chance to learn at the master’s knee.
From the moment that season started, there was no doubt: Joe was going to New York. His speed was back, the knee had healed—at least it was solid enough—and his outfield play was something better than that. For the first time, he wasn’t just making the plays, he was making remarkable plays, and making them look easy. Now, at the plate, he wasn’t just a natural, but a polished hitter. Under O’Doul’s approving eye, Joe raised his already gaudy average more than fifty points that year. Through the summer and into the fall, he was flirting with .400, racing toward a batting crown. In fact, all the Seals were hitting, and for the first time in years, fighting for a pennant. San Francisco baseball was a grand and glad story that year. And everywhere in the league, the headliner was Young Joe.
“DiMaggio plays ball with a grim intensity,” wrot
e Billy Stepp of the Portland News-Telegram.
“You’ve seldom seen a more accomplished flychaser,” Cliff Harrison noted, in the Seattle Star.
“DiMaggio never makes a mistake on the bases,” said Rudy Hickey of the Sacramento Bee.
“DiMaggio,” Gene Caughlin wrote, in the Los Angeles Post-Record, “is likely to kill an opposing infielder at any time.”
But those were just the congregants’ murmured devotions compared to the Hallelujah Chorus in San Francisco. Even Abe Kemp dropped all caution and called the case, once and forever: “In passing,” he wrote, near the season’s close, “just a word about Joe DiMaggio, who has finally convinced me that he is the greatest ballplayer I have ever seen graduate from the Pacific Coast League. And I have seen all of them since 1907.”
Joe lost the batting crown on the season’s last day—to Oscar Eckhardt, a slap hitter who could run like crazy. The final league stats read: “DiMaggio .398, Eckhardt .399.” But the Seals won their pennant and the championship playoff with the L.A. Angels. After that, the only story in town was whether the Yanks had sent Young Joe his contract. As Kemp remembered, it was hell-on-wheels getting information from the Taylor Street household: “Joe’s mother was impossible. You’d phone and ask for Joe, and she’d say, ‘No, Joe da’ home.’ That’s all we ever got. ‘No, Joe da’ home.’ ” Kemp finally got his story from a Post Office pal who looked up the registered mail receipts. There it was—Joe had signed for a letter. So they knew he’d gotten a contract. But for how much? They never could find out.
Actually, Joe had gotten several contracts. The first called for $5,625 in salary, barely more than Joe made with the Seals. Joe consulted Lefty, who brought in an expert—a man who could squeeze a nickel till the buffalo on it was dead from lack of air. “Kid,” Ty Cobb said, “get a pen and some paper.” Then he dictated for Joe a polite and recalcitrant letter to the New York GM, Ed Barrow. And that worked out fine. Barrow sent back a contract for $6,500. “That’s not enough,” Cobb said. And he dictated to Joe an even more polite and implacable response. So Barrow sent back a third contract: $8,500!—with a note attached: This is the limit. Don’t waste another three-cent stamp. Just sign it. And tell Cobb to stop writing me letters.
NOW THE NEW YORK papers got into the act in force. When the Pinstripes finished out of the money for the third straight year, it was the winter’s business to analyze the “pennant problem”—and its possible solution, viz., “Joe De Maggio.” There were stories when the Yankees’ owner, Jake Ruppert, made a West Coast visit and met his future star. (“He seems,” said the Colonel, “a difficult young man to get acquainted with.”) There were stories as the Yankees picked up their option on Young Joe. (The Red Sox counteroffered $65,000, a quick and tidy profit for the Yankees, who declined.) Another round of stories covered DiMaggio dickering on his contract. (Maybe the boy was not so timid, after all.) And in every round, there was lip-smacking rehearsal of his statistics, comments on his excellence, speculation on his impact. The New York Sun—which wasn’t any more breathless than the competition—announced in one headline:
YANKS PIN HOPES ON ROOKIE
Di Maggio, Sensational Outfielder, May Be
Deciding Factor in Pennant Problem
The New York sports pages exhibited such a flush of Joe-fever that the Sporting News weighed in, ostensibly to protect the boy:
Di Maggio Comes Up With Two Strikes
on Him as Innocent Victim
of Lavish Newspaper Ballyhoo
REACHES BIG SHOW WITH BRILLIANT RECORD
Fans Expect Recruit
from Coast to Be Cobb,
Ruth, Jackson in One
Of course, they thought all the hoopla would shake him. They didn’t know Joe.
They thought the “big jump” to the Yankees might trip him up. But he’d already climbed, in three years, from nothing and nowhere—a boy without prospects—to become the most heralded young man in the country. The move to New York was a baby step, after that.
First chance he got, the Yankees’ Ed Barrow made a fatherly point of talking to Joe. The GM counseled the boy: don’t get too worked up about all the good news, don’t pay too much attention, don’t let it get . . .
“Don’t worry, Mr. Barrow,” Joe cut in. “I never get excited.”
* Across the Harlem River, the rival Giants were digging for another vein of ore: John McGraw spent the 1920s searching for a terrific Jewish player. McGraw never found a great one, or didn’t know it when he saw one (Oy! On Hank Greenberg this Irish putz passed?)—but the theory on creating new fans was sound: in ’28, when the Giants’ new second baseman, Andy Cohen, drove in two runs in the home opener, the crowd surged onto the field and carried him around on their shoulders, like the groom at an Orthodox wedding. The Polo Grounds box office started getting letters from Jewish kids, asking for seats behind second base.
BOOK II
THE GAME
* * *
1936–1951
AT THE ALL-STAR BREAK, JULY 1936.
CHOOSING UP WITH FRANK CROSETTI AND TONY LAZZERI.
WITH THE PROUD OWNER, JACOB RUPPERT.
THE BIG TIME, IN THE BIG BRONX CLUBHOUSE.
CHAPTER 6
JOE DIMAGGIO, TWENTY-ONE YEARS OLD, TALL AND slender, hawk-faced and buck-toothed, slow to smile and reluctant to speak, made his first trip east of the Rocky Mountains on his way to spring training in 1936. The Yankees made sure their prize package wouldn’t have to travel unattended: they deputed their two veteran Italian stars, Tony Lazzeri and Frank Crosetti, to fetch Joe from his home on Taylor Street, and take him cross-country in Lazzeri’s new Ford. That was no mean drive—San Francisco to St. Petersburg, Florida—more than a week on two-lane roads that zigzagged from town to town, and turned to gravel or rutted mud where there were no towns to be found. Lazzeri drove for hours the first day, then turned the wheel over to Crosetti. Crosetti drove through the afternoon, then turned to the back seat, where Joe was lounging. “Your turn,” said Crosetti. And DiMaggio, in his longest speech of the day, said, “I don’t drive.”
“Let’s throw the bum out,” said Crosetti. But of course, they didn’t, and Joe gazed out the window for three thousand miles.
For DiMaggio, this was his first look at the vastness of the country he would thrill with his exploits. In a few years, he would be said to represent this land and exemplify its virtues: aspiration, hard work, native grace, and opportunity for all. But even as a rookie-to-be, yet to face his first big-league pitch, Joe was separated from the common conditions of American life, walled off as surely as he was behind the Ford’s plate glass.
As the three Yankees left San Francisco, there were thousands of men who’d moved (some with their families) into shantytowns near the staging piers for the new Golden Gate Bridge. There were men who’d literally sit on those piers all day, watching, waiting, for some poor SOB to fall off the high girders, so they could take his job: bridge work paid fifty-five dollars a week. But Joe would make more than that every time he pulled on his stirrup-socks and played for two hours in the sunshine. As the three Yankees passed, more thousands of desperate families were heading west, with everything they owned piled on their Model T’s—fleeing from the parched plains, hoping for a living wage in California. On the roads themselves, there were tens of thousands of laboring men, bent to their shovels or barrows of gravel. The endless national routes had been laid out and numbered in the 1920s, but it was the Depression, FDR, and the PWA that made them into highways for the fortunate motorists. The New Deal’s Public Works Administration paid not quite four bucks a day. The new friends Joe would find in New York flipped that sort of money to the hat-check girl.
The strange fact was, Joe was probably closer in his thinking to those rootless Okies, or the sweating shovel men on the road verge. But he never would be among them. He’d passed them, as he passed them now, so fast he never even saw their faces. When next he would meet them, if ever he did, those faces would display awe at hi
s presence, joy at his godlike glory among them, avarice for his autograph or some token of him. For he had been touched (they’d read all about this, heard him on the radio, they’d seen him in Life magazine) . . . as if the Hand of God had reached down and made this man great—uncommon, unlike them—and that would wall Joe away forever.
He’d jumped from newsboy to national star without apprenticeship, no stops in between—from the commonest kid to king—and his feet had barely touched ground. That made him an odd mix: majestic and modest at the same time. His attitudes, his tastes, were those of the boy who hawked the Call at Sansome and Sutter. He was mindful of rules, compliant to authority; still, he angled for every edge, as the newsboy fumbled in his pocket till the trolley came, so he could walk away with two extra pennies. He didn’t need and wouldn’t have liked extravagant living of any sort. (He, Lazzeri, and Crosetti each tossed in fifteen dollars for the trip across the nation—and Joe was surprised, in the end, when he had to come up with two or three dollars more.) Fancy people—those with status, importance—made him so nervous he wouldn’t say a word. But he showed not a moment’s doubt when he told Mr. Barrow and Col. Jacob Ruppert to take their first five-thousand-dollar contract and go shit in their hats.
He was a kid who could say, earnestly, he didn’t want a fuss made over him. But there hadn’t yet been a day of his life, either at home or on the road with his club, when his needs and wants had not been seen to by others. This he accepted (by now, he expected) with regal entitlement. Truly, he could say he was “just a rookie, nothing special.” But when confronted with the names of the game’s greatest pitchers—Schoolboy Rowe, Lefty Grove, Dizzy Dean, Carl Hubbell (not one of whom he’d ever seen)—he was as truly convinced that he would hit them all, that there was, in fact, no pitcher alive who could stop him. DiMaggio could believe (and even say) he was just trying to make good and help his team win ballgames. But at the same moment, he was convinced (as who would not be, with his life thus far?) that it was his destiny to be a great star.
Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (Touchstone Book) Page 9