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

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  IN THE FIRST three weeks of the season, the Yankee box office got hundreds of letters asking: When would DiMaggio play? The papers covered his medical exams, his every appearance at the ballpark, the new layers of skin on his foot—“The Most Famous Hot-Foot in Yankee History.” The New York Times ran a lively exchange of letters from readers arguing out the pronunciation of “Dee-Mah-Jee-Oh.” The Yanks were playing well, but not well enough: after eighteen games, at eleven and seven, they were just where they’d finished the last three years—second place. Finally, the papers trumpeted the glad news: the kid would play on Sunday, May 3, against the St. Louis Browns.

  A crowd of more than twenty-five thousand (by far the largest since opening day) braved cool and showery weather to cheer the debut. “An astonishing portion of the crowd,” said the New York Post, “was composed of strangers to sport—mostly Italians—who did not even know the stadium subway station.” Perhaps it was these new fans who screamed in glee when Young Joe, now wearing Number 9, made his first plate appearance—with Yankee runners on first and third—and bounced a tame ground ball to third base. But all the fans rose to cheer when Crosetti, the runner on third, got into a rundown, the Browns threw the ball away, Crosetti scored, and DiMaggio ended up on second base—whence he later scored on a double from Chapman.

  Joe was up again in the second, and looped a single to center field. In the sixth, Joe got ahold of a pitch from “Chief” Elon Hogsett and drove it, as the Post remarked, “like a cannon shot between the center and left fielders,” and DiMaggio had his first big-league triple. In the eighth, Joe hit another line drive single to right. The game as a whole was never in doubt: the Browns’ pitching was awful; but who cared? The Daily News ran DiMaggio headlines three inches high, but in the lead tried to keep matters in perspective: “This is the story of Joseph DiMaggio, a kid of 21 from San Francisco, though it might be proper to mention that the Yankees beat St. Louis 14–5, at the Stadium yesterday.” The Post one-upped the competition, not only with its screamer headline (“DI MAGGIO IS YANK HOPE”), and a lead on DiMaggio (“He clicked.”), but a half-page cartoon of Young Joe smashing a baseball into the heart of New York (“It’s in the Baggio for Joe Di Maggio . . .”) and a three-stanza paean of praise entitled “Calling All Fans!”

  Oh, I am Joe Di Maggio,

  Come, folks, and have a look.

  I scintillate, I simply glow,

  Although I’m just a rook.

  I pop the pill a wicked whack

  And make opposing pitchers crack—

  I’m one for stardom’s book! . . .

  In fact, Joe was the lead nearly every day, in every paper, as the Yanks reeled off six wins in his first seven games. In the Thursday game (Joe’s fourth), the catcher, Bill Dickey, was the hitting star, with two home runs and four of the Yankees’ six runs driven in. But Stanley Frank, the Post’s Yankee writer, begged his readers’ pardon as he made Joe the lead, once more.

  “Excuse it please, but that Di Maggio boy is in again today. In again on top of the ballgame and the Yankee story, as he has been every day since Sunday, when he stole the show in his major league debut. Young Joe seems to have a positive genius for dominating situations . . . .”

  Frank explained that Dickey got the hits, powered the Yanks to a 6–5 lead. But in the ninth inning, the Tigers put men on first and third, with no one out, and only one run needed to tie. Charley Gehringer drove a high fly almost to the warning track in left field, where DiMaggio caught the ball, and fired it toward the plate . . .

  “Pete Fox, who ranks among the first ten fastest men in the league crouched tensely on third and was off when the ball touched Joe’s glove.

  “It was a 20 to 1 bet that Fox would score standing up, but he was out by five feet despite a desperate slide.”

  After forty years in baseball, Ed Barrow called it the best peg to the plate he’d ever seen. Frank called it “an incredible throw,” a “spectacular heave.” He said Joe had a better arm than the Yankees’ gold standard, Bob “The Rifle” Meusel. But in the end Frank could make only one comparison:

  “Maybe Joe, in whose honor a large Italian flag was unfurled yesterday by an exhuberant customer, has another positive genius. The sort that a big guy who once played right field had for making the right play instinctively. Babe Ruth.”

  The next Sunday, against the Philadelphia A’s, Joe hit his first home run; the Yanks took the contest 7–2, and for the first time moved ahead of Boston, into first place. “Hero No. 1,” the Daily News called him—under a picture of Joe, trotting his home run home. And in the photo caption: “ . . . Nice going, Joe!”

  The Sunday after that, on his first western road trip, Joe was honored by the Italians of Cleveland, who presented him with a leather traveling bag and kit before the game. They were apparently ignorant of the jinx such pregame gifts were supposed to bring . . . but so was Joe: he followed up with two doubles to power another Yankees win.

  Two days later, it was Joe’s teammates who showed what they thought of him. In the ninth inning of a 10–4 Yankee blowout, DiMaggio singled, and then Gehrig hit an infield ground ball. DiMag barreled into second base hard—he never ran any other way—and broke up the double play by wiping out the Indians’ shortstop, Billy Knickerbocker . . . who then tried to teach this rookie a lesson, by throwing the ball straight down at Joe’s head. Fortunately, he missed. DiMaggio was oblivious—he looked up from his slide, saw the ball on the ground, and didn’t know what happened—but Tony Lazzeri led eighteen Yanks in a dash from the dugout to protect Young Joe. Then the Indians poured out of their dugout, and the umpires raced in to stop the fight. No punches were thrown, but the message was clear: Hands Off Our Boy.

  By late May, Joe was leading the league with a .411 average, and the Yankees were streaking. On the last day of May, they won their fifth straight, to sweep the Red Sox (whom they now led by four and a half games), when DiMaggio singled in the seventh to tie, and tripled in the twelfth to win, the game. Almost forty-two thousand fans (including Mayor Fiorello La Guardia) left Yankee Stadium to tell of the rookie’s glory. Young Joe had to leave the ballpark in a phalanx of cops, to protect him from adoring fans.

  In June, the New York papers counted and recounted Joe’s streak of hitting in eighteen straight games. Then they raised panicky alarums as Joe stopped hitting (oh-for-twelve!), but the hand-wringing ended when he drove in five runs against the Browns with a homer, triple, and single. “YANKS SCORE, 12–3, AS DIMAGGIO STARS,” the New York Times reported. Almost lost amid the effusions was the fact that Gehrig also powered the Yanks, with a homer, double, and single of his own. It was seldom mentioned all year that Gehrig was having a banner season, that Dickey was pounding the ball flat; that the whole Yankee offense was producing runs at the rate of the mighty ’27 Yanks; or that the champion Tigers had lost two great stars, Hank Greenberg and Mickey Cochrane, to medical woes. The story was painted in bold black and white: the Yanks, resurgent, were racing toward a pennant. And the reason for resurgence was Joe.

  Nor were the New York papers alone: the Yanks were the story everywhere in the country, and the Yankee story was Joe. Writers in every AL town used the coming of the rookie wonder to build attendance for their local clubs. In the month before the All-Star Game, the AP feature on the daily star of baseball named the rookie Di Maggio seven times. (Dizzy Dean, with four mentions, ranked a distant second.) Little wonder, in the count of two million ballots from fans in forty-eight states and Canada, Joe led the voting for the AL All-Star outfield. And in case anyone had missed the story, Time magazine took the occasion of the All-Star Game to look in on baseball—and on the cover (where portraits of presidents and foreign kings were the staple) there appeared a full-length photo of DiMaggio, pinstriped, at the Yankee Stadium plate, in graceful follow-through after another mighty line drive clout.

  True, he had only two months under his belt; but he’d played the game flawlessly. Not just the baseball game, with nine men on the field, but the
larger hero game—the one the writers played, with the management, and all the fans. Joe had made everybody look brilliant: the Yankee scouts, the general manager, Ed Barrow (attendance was up two hundred thousand), and Col. Ruppert, who wrote the check. Joe had proven true all the breathy praise of the writers who called him the Yanks’ messiah—and the fans who believed them. What he’d never done was fail; never tasted the gall that the hero machine could heap on a loser. But now his time came, at the worst moment: while the nation looked to Braves Field in Boston, for the fourth year of baseball’s All-Star Game.

  The American League was three-and-oh in the game Daniel called “The Midsummer Classic.” Only once (for three innings) had the NL even held a lead. And never before had a rookie taken part in this showcase of the game’s greats. But DiMaggio started in right field—and proved a disaster. In the second inning, with one runner on, the NL catcher, Gabby Hartnett, hit a liner toward Joe in right field. He charged the ball and bent for a shoestring catch, but the ball hit the grass and went right by him, to the wall, for a triple and a lead for the Nationals. In the fifth, with the NL ahead 2–0, Joe’s old Seals teammate (now a Cub), Augie Galan, hit a homer to the foul pole in right. Then Billy Herman singled, and DiMaggio kicked the ball around in right field till Herman wound up on second base. From there, Herman would score an unearned run that clinched the game for the Nationals.

  At the plate, Joe’s day went just as badly. In the first inning, against Dizzy Dean, Joe hit into a double play. In the fourth, he popped up against Carl Hubbell, and hit a weak comebacker to Hubbell in the sixth. In the seventh, Joe had his chance for redemption when he came up against Lon Warneke, with the bases loaded, two outs. Joe hit a liner toward short, where Leo Durocher snared it, and the AL rally was over. Again in the ninth, again with two outs, he had another chance, with Gehringer on second as the tying run. But Joe popped up again to end the game, the first NL win. And DiMaggio was the goat, nationwide.

  That was a day Joe would never forget. More than a decade later, he would make that experience Chapter One of Lucky to Be a Yankee. Even fifty years later, Joe would still be complaining that he would have had Hartnett’s line drive in the second, if the great AL pitcher Schoolboy Rowe hadn’t been warming up near right field—and ordered him to play deep on Hartnett. (“Hey, Rook! I said move back! This guy’s going to hit it out!”) . . . Joe would also stew for fifty years about the writers (another All-Star lineup) who covered that game—Granny Rice, Dan Parker, Bill Corum, Damon Runyon. “Runyon,” Joe would say, “was the only one who didn’t rip me.” Of course, he’d remember the others, too—he could recall them by name, and what they wrote. They taught him a lesson, or confirmed a lesson he was already prepared to believe:

  They were fans, they were friends . . . as long as he was a winner. But that could all be over in a day.

  IT WAS A CHARACTERISTIC turn of phrase with which DiMaggio described that game:

  “This was the fourth All-Star Game, and the National League had yet to win one,” he recalled in his memoir. “I don’t even feel that they won this one, even though the scoreboard showed four runs for them and three for us. The Nationals didn’t really win it—I lost it.”

  That was the distillation of DiMaggio’s worldview—and the Yankee ethic, expressed in one phrase. That’s why DiMaggio and the Yanks were such a perfect match, and why his Yankees were different from every other club.

  From our remove, at the end of the century, the Yankee Dynasty might look like a single seamless era of triumph—from the Babe and Murderers’ Row in the twenties, through Joe’s years in the thirties and forties, to Stengel and Mantle in the fifties and sixties. (Only blind loyalists would try to stretch the run into the years of Kaiser George.) . . . And it’s true that the Yanks did dominate for almost fifty years: six pennants in the 1920s, five in the 1930s, five in the 1940s, eight in the 1950s, and five (in the first five years) in the 1960s. But from the inside, those were three distinct eras, and very different clubs.

  Ruth’s Yankees were all about high-hat and high times, three-run homers and 12–5 wins. The first year the Yankees won the pennant, in ’21, they didn’t just lead the league in home runs (and scoring), they hit three times as many homers as second-place Cleveland. (The Bambino himself hit twice as many as his nearest competitor—who was his teammate, Bob Meusel.) Of course, they swaggered: those Yankees were playing (they had invented) a different game than any other team could play. They were like the U.S. after World War II—the only country on the planet with the A-bomb.

  Joe’s Yankees were a cooler edition of the Pinstripes. When hard times hit in the 1930s and the Bambino’s Bombers had played out the string, the ethic of the day became “Buckle Down.” Along with the pennants, high living was gone. While the Babe was in flower, he’d pushed his own salary to a soaring eighty G’s . . . but when Joe came up, the highest wage (Gehrig’s) wasn’t even half that much. As skipper, the Yanks had installed a demanding taskmaster, Joe McCarthy. Marse Joe didn’t like “comfortable ballplayers.” He didn’t like characters, loudmouths, or oddballs. Swagger he simply wouldn’t permit. He wanted players who did the little things right, who took every advantage, who stuck to business at all times. The Yanks still featured a powerful lineup—but there was power all over the league now. These Yankees couldn’t play a different game than other clubs. They just had to play better.

  That was the mantra these Yanks heard eight months a year: no mistakes! McCarthy wouldn’t harp on physical errors—a ball that dropped, a throw that sailed . . . anybody—everybody—had to contend with that sort of mistake. But a mental mistake—throwing to the wrong base, laggard or stupid baserunning, a lapse in concentration at the plate—that was a failure to pay attention . . . and that was inexcusable. McCarthy would turn to a rookie on the bench and ask, “What’s the count?”—just to see if his head was in the game. McCarthy’s rules were as square and unyielding as his jaw. On the road, every Yankee had to show up for breakfast, eight-thirty A.M., coat and tie, in the hotel dining room. McCarthy didn’t have to run curfew bed checks: he just checked their eyes in the morning. In the Yankee locker room, there was no shaving, no radio, no card games, and no pipe-smoking. “This is a clubhouse,” McCarthy said, “not a club room.”

  Any player who thought about something other than baseball—other than winning baseball—was Joe McCarthy’s ex-player. Once, when McCarthy was riding his boys hard (after two losses to Detroit), outfielder Roy Johnson complained, “What does McCarthy want? Does he want us to win every day?” Johnson was unloaded to the Boston Bees. Winning every day was exactly what McCarthy wanted—all he wanted, all he thought about. His long-suffering wife was under instructions to pray for the Yankees every day at early Mass. One day, when her prayers were unavailing and her Joe came home discouraged by another loss, Mrs. McCarthy offered this solace: “Joe, we still have each other.”

  “Yes, dear,” said McCarthy with a wan smile. “But in the ninth inning today, I would have traded you in for a sacrifice fly.”

  Small wonder, McCarthy and Ruth barely spoke. No rules, no stringency could bind the Bambino’s joys—certainly none from “a weak-hittin’ busher,” which is how the Babe referred to his skipper. (Ruth thought he should have got the manager’s job.)

  And no wonder, Joe DiMaggio became McCarthy’s perfect player. Of rules Young Joe was always mindful. Joys, he seemed to have none, save the one that McCarthy courted: winning.

  From the start, Joe DiMaggio played ball the new Yankee way—with total attention, with maximum effort, with the certainty every moment that a million eyes were upon him. If DiMaggio talked, it was about baseball. He would never attract McCarthy’s ire by laughter or ease after a loss: if the Yankees lost, Young Joe was as sour as the skipper. If the Yankees lost and Joe D. had made a mistake (or even failed to deliver), he was inconsolable—he’d lost that game.

  In the decade to come, the pressure of winning, the woe of loss, would pile up on McCarthy until it seemed he
was (literally) shrinking—he would retreat to remoteness and secret communion with a bottle. But the presence (and growing awe) of Joe DiMaggio in that clubhouse would continue to enforce the ethic of “not losing.” More and more, that became the Yankees’ way—the only way, as long as DiMaggio was there. That was how the Yankees were different—perhaps the biggest reason they were winners—and the reason they were respected, so much feared, and so richly hated.

  Even a dozen years later, when McCarthy was long gone, a kid second baseman named Jerry Coleman would come up to the Yanks, sit in Joe D.’s clubhouse, and arrive at a chilling realization.

  “Any other team,” Coleman remembers, “guys would sit at their locker before the game and think: ‘I’m gonna do something great today. I’m gonna hit a home run. I’m gonna win the game!’

  “But the Yankees were different. Every day, you’d think: ‘I’m not gonna be the one to make a mistake. I’m not gonna be the guy to screw up and lose this game.’

  “By the end of two years, I was eating mush for breakfast. That was the only thing I could keep down before a game.”

  TWO WEEKS AFTER the All-Star Game, DiMaggio almost screwed up in a mortal way. He was back on track at the plate, playing right field steadily—his embarrassment in Boston was fading into memory—when, in a game against the Tigers, DiMaggio raced into right center, chasing a high drive off the bat of Goose Goslin.

  The center fielder that day was Myril Hoag, who also took off after Goslin’s liner. DiMaggio and Hoag collided at full speed—head-to-head—and both dropped to the ground like they’d been shot. Goslin scored an inside-the-park home run; after several minutes, DiMaggio and Hoag finally rose, and both men played out the inning. But Hoag was still woozy on the bench and sat out the rest of the game. Clearly, DiMaggio had caused the foul-up: the center fielder has the right of way on any ball he can get to. But no one said anything. The Yankees won the game. And Hoag was still in the lineup the following day.