This was the high-water mark of the McCarthy-DiMaggio era, and maybe the best Yankee club ever. (Dan Daniel, for one, rated the ’39 Bombers superior to the Murderers’ Row of 1927.) Babe Dahlgren, who took over for Gehrig, was much better than competent at first—and hit fifteen home runs, knocked in eighty-nine. The rest of the infield—Joe Gordon at second base, Crosetti at short, Red Rolfe at third—was without weakness. (Gordon and Rolfe, along with DiMaggio, pitcher Red Ruffing, and catcher Bill Dickey, were named by The Sporting News as the best at their positions in either league, any league: they were the best, period.) And that year, baseball’s best outfield—DiMaggio, Henrich, and Selkirk—was made stronger with a strapping rookie from Maryland, Charlie Keller, who announced his arrival with a batting average of .334.
By June, once DiMaggio emerged from the hospital, the Yankees weren’t just beating the other clubs often, but badly. One Sunday in Philadelphia, the Yankees hit thirteen home runs in a twin bill, and drubbed the A’s 23–2 and 10–0. The Pinstripes were running away with the pennant—winning three of every four games. The writers dubbed the other AL clubs the Seven Dwarfs. The only thing that stopped the Yankees was the All-Star Game—and even that was a Pinstripe party. It was held, aptly, at Yankee Stadium. The AL manager was Joe McCarthy, the AL captain was Lou Gehrig. DiMaggio and Selkirk started in the outfield, Rolfe and Gordon in the infield; Ruffing was on the mound, pitching to Dickey . . . the rest of the league only fielded three men. And it was Joe D.’s home run that put the game away for the Americans.
In 1939 DiMaggio played ball with a ferocious efficiency that left even other players in wonder. At the start of the season, he let slip his conviction that this would be his big year. His goal was the batting crown, nothing less. And nothing was going to get in the way: not pitchers—no matter how good they were (Tom Henrich described DiMaggio standing in against Feller: “Joe was bearing down—criminy—veins were standin’ out on his neck”) . . . not friends from other teams, other years (Dario Lodigiani, one of Joe’s pals from the San Francisco sandlots, then with the Philadelphia A’s, tagged DiMaggio out at second base—nothing on the line, a normal day, normal play. “He knocked me ass-over-teacups,” Lodi recalled. “Then he got up, brushed his pants a couple of times and never said Doo, hello, shit, or nothin’—just ran off to the dugout”) . . . and nothing outside the game would be allowed to intrude. Joe went along through spring training, while the writers spun out stories on his deliciously modern, fabulously expensive, nightly long-distance telephone romance with Dorothy Arnold. (Fifteen dollars a coo, the writers figured.) But when Dorothy let some Hollywood writers know that she and Joe had gotten engaged—she said they would marry that summer—well, Joe hit the roof, and denied it all. Next day, he thought better and admitted the engagement, sort of: “We may be married next winter or the following winter. But the wedding definitely will not take place while the baseball season is on.”
Nothing must stop him—not while he was hitting over .375, and still climbing. He’d get a hit in ten or twelve straight games, and then he’d take the collar for a day or two. Everyone would sigh and forget about Joe and his average: it was bound to sink, he was only human (last time anybody hit .400 was back in ’23, Detroit’s Harry Heilmann) . . . and the next time anybody noticed, Joe had hit in fifteen straight again. Mid-August, when the heat was supposed to wilt the flowers and statistics, Joe embarked on a road trip to the western provinces, and over twelve games hit for an average of .509. Then it was eighteen straight again. In the San Francisco Examiner’s daily DiMaggio box, the headline suggested a cure for all those new troubles in Europe:
They Ought to Hire DiMaggio to
End the War, Hitting .408!
In the field, DiMaggio was incomparable, or compared only to bygone greats. The name most often linked to Joe’s was Tristram Speaker, the Grey Eagle, said to be the classiest fly-chaser in history—though now, some writers suggested, Joe was rewriting history. At last, someone made bold to ask the aged Hall of Famer himself: Did Tris think Joe was a better center fielder? In the printable portion of his response, Speaker snorted: “HIM? I could name fifteen better outfielders!” The problem was, nobody else could name even one. (Finally, sheepishly, the Great Grey Immortal conceded to Bob Considine that he couldn’t name fifteen current outfielders of any sort.) For his part, DiMaggio wasted not a word in response, but put on a center field show that seemed to settle the question. In one game at Yankee Stadium, DiMaggio registered ten putouts, one shy of the all-time record, and stole at least three hits from the Tigers. Next day, as the Yankees were losing 7–2, the great Detroit slugger, Hank Greenberg, came to bat in the ninth, with Pinky Higgins on first base. The Yankees always pitched Greenberg away and DiMaggio was shading him to right center. But Greenberg launched a howitzer shot to deepest left center field. DiMaggio turned and took off at a dead run toward the monuments—and he ran . . . Higgins ran from first base, around second, and then around third . . . the lumbering Greenberg made the turn at first with the thought that the ball would bounce around amid the plinths and plaques, and he’d have an inside-the-park home run . . . but DiMaggio still ran. Once, he glanced up at the ball, but mostly he kept his head down, and ran. He ran past the monuments, past the flag pole in front of the fence where the numbers 461 were painted, and then, behind the flag pole, at the edge of the world, he twisted his head, flung up his left hand, and at the edge of his reach, still at a dead run, caught the ball and brought his hands down to brake his run at the fence. Then he turned and trotted in with the ball—and that was the only mistake of that sort that anyone could remember Joe making: there was only one out when Greenberg came up. DiMag could have doubled Higgins off first. But somehow, his lapse just confirmed what every spectator felt: with that catch the inning should have been over—nothing more to be said.
Of course, the sportswriters were just the men to say it. “He is the greatest player in baseball,” wrote the normally understated North Dakotan, the World-Telegram’s Pat McDonough. “Not alone as a hitter. His fielding has been marvelous, his throwing grand.” The AP’s Gayle Talbot took the case nationwide (and into history): “Every time you see Joe DiMaggio take that effortless swing of his or race back against the boards to rob some luckless batter of a triple, you can’t help getting a sneaking feeling that here, perhaps, is the greatest all-around ball player there has been.”
But sadly, at the season’s end, it was Joe who went luckless. An infection invaded his left eye, swelling it nearly shut. That puffy blurred eye was his lead eye at the plate, so Joe expected McCarthy to sit him down, until he could see the ball. But day after day, McCarthy wrote Joe’s name on the lineup card, and DiMaggio was too proud to ask for a rest. Day after day, Joe went hitless; his .400 average melted that September like a snowman in May. In the season’s last three weeks, Joe lost thirty points. Still, he finished atop the league at .381, more than twenty points better than the runner-up, the Red Sox first baseman, Double X, Jimmie Foxx.
More than fifty years later, Joe was still complaining that the Yanks had already clinched the pennant, but McCarthy wouldn’t let him rest the eye, even for a day. More and more, through those fifty years, it would gall Joe that the subject of batting .400 called to mind not his name but that of his hated rival, Ted Williams. (Ted would hit .406 in 1941.) More and more, Joe would insist (to friends—never in public or print) that he could have hit .400, too, if only McCarthy had let him sit. But that wasn’t McCarthy’s way. After the season the Skipper volunteered (Joe would never have asked) his reason—such as it was: “People might’ve said you were a cheese champion.”
Joe took that explanation in silence. What good would it do to protest? And at the time, he was too busy to look back. There was the pressing matter of the Cincinnati Reds, and DiMaggio’s fourth World Series. Once again, in the game that would live in the lore, DiMaggio made the difference. That was Game Four, after the Yanks won the first three. To stave off elimination, Cincinnati put its ac
e, Paul Derringer, on the mound—and the game was a tight affair. DiMaggio saved a run in the second by racing back to pull in a long drive from the Reds’ catcher, Ernie Lombardi. In the third, Joe sprinted to the wall again to rob Billy Werber of an extra-base hit and keep another runner from scoring. Still, it was 4–2 in favor of the Reds as the Yanks came up in the ninth. Keller led off with a single, and DiMaggio singled him to third. When Dickey bounced a ball to second base, Joe wiped out the shortstop, Buddy Myers, who dropped the throw—Keller scored, DiMaggio and Dickey were safe. Then, on Selkirk’s fly to right, DiMaggio tagged up and made third—and that was the crucial extra base. Because the next batter, Gordon, chopped a ball to the third baseman, Werber, who gunned it home . . . but DiMaggio slid around the tag to tie the game, and send it on to extra innings.
In the tenth, a walk to Crosetti, a sacrifice by Red Rolfe, and a bobble on a grounder from Keller put Yankee runners at first and third—with Joe at the plate and all the money on the line. Joe didn’t make any show, or try to power the ball—just spanked it on a line into right field, a sure single, to score Crosetti. But the right fielder, Goodman, charged so hard that the ball got past him, and Keller kept running all the way around third. The throw from the outfield got to home plate at the same time Keller crashed into Lombardi, who dropped the ball—and Keller was safe. Lombardi lay on the ground, stunned, till he saw that DiMaggio had never stopped: he was racing around third like a mad Little Leaguer. Lombardi lunged for the ball and launched himself, glove first, toward the plate. He got his glove there ahead of Joe, but DiMaggio came up with a slide no one had ever seen: he twisted his body to the first-base side, and hiked his lead foot into the air. He airmailed his right foot over Lombardi’s glove, then dropped it onto the plate as he slid past. It was the most instinctively brilliant baserunning that players, coaches, fans, or writers had ever seen. Lombardi was mocked for his “snooze” through the rest of his career. Of course, that was unfair: Lombardi wasn’t napping, he couldn’t move—after Charlie Keller kicked him in the nuts. But the winners write the history, and the Yanks were winners, 7–4—and winners in their fourth straight World Series, a feat no team had ever pulled off. Joe was the only man in history who was a World Champ his first four seasons.
As a consequence, Joe was busy through October with awards, prizes, and gifts. This time the MVP balloting was no contest: Joe got the trophy from The Sporting News in a landslide vote from the baseball writers. Some of those voters were now billing him in print as “the all-time great centerfielder,” or “America’s No. 1 ball player.” Joe was more than that—bigger than his game. When he accepted the Golden Laurel Award at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, an eight-foot-tall portrait of Joe was mounted on the wall of the Academy of Sport, dominating the vista for millions of visitors. DiMaggio was Sport. And even Americans who never looked at the sports page knew about Joltin’ Joe: from the cover of Life magazine or the newsreels on the Ten Best Dressed, or the boxed “bright” on the front page when DiMaggio’s salary passed FDR’s. Now, for good measure, he would debut on the society page—as America’s number one bridegroom-to-be.
By that time, Joe’s engagement was the real thing; had been since July, when Dorothy showed up in her hometown with a four-and-a-half-carat diamond shining on her left hand like a locomotive headlight. As her sister recalled, “It was humungous! . . . We’d never seen a ring like that in Duluth.”
Of course, the nice folks in Duluth had no idea where that grand stone came from, save what Dorothy said: it came from Joe. If they had thought about it, they might have guessed Tiffany’s, or Harry Winston, or some other great Fifth Avenue jeweler. They never would have thought of Newark, New Jersey. And they’d never heard of Richie “the Boot” Boiardo.
RUGGIERO BOIARDO WAS actually a Chicago boy who’d moved to Newark before World War I, and found a job delivering milk in the First Ward. While he was stopping house to house with the milk, it was very little trouble to pick up the numbers: that is, the bets that the housewives placed on the local policy game—what police used to call “the Italian lottery.” Actually, they could have called it the Jewish lottery, the Irish lottery, or half a dozen other names. It depended on the neighborhood and who was running the racket. At first, young Richie used to lay these numbers off with a local “banker,” but soon he began to handle the action himself. He was ambitious that way. And being from Chicago, he had a knack for handling disputes. For instance, there was the “banker” who complained that Richie wasn’t bringing him his action anymore—until something lamentable happened, and the banker ran into a bullet. So there was no more dispute.
Over the years, Richie became well known for that sort of story, the kind with a sudden and lamentable ending. He got so famous, matter of fact, that Life magazine did a photo spread on him and his house—actually, his compound. By that time, Richie had moved out of Newark to a large and private spread in Livingston, New Jersey. The Life feature (“House of a Mobster”) showed the mansion (made of stones brought from Italy), and the grounds (with an outdoor barbecue grill—big like a furnace), and the sculpture grotto, with statues of Richie’s kids and the grand statue of Richie himself on a horse, like Caesar, or Garibaldi at least . . . . By that time, Richie had become just like Joe, in one particular way: the more famous he got the more misinformation, or disinformation, seemed to surround him. In later years, there were people—even local people—who maintained that Richie was a famous mafioso who was nicknamed the Boot because of some heavy-footed way he disposed of his gangland foes . . . which just went to show, as Joe and Richie always agreed, how wrong and mean-spirited public talk could be. Because everybody who truly knew Boiardo knew that he disposed of his gangland foes in that big barbecue (more like an incinerator than a furnace, come to think of it)—and if you got on Richie’s wrong side you could, lamentably, get cree-mated . . . . As for “the Boot,” there was a simple explanation. Richie got the name back in Newark, in the early days, when he couldn’t get or couldn’t trust a private phone in his Newark row house. Like many residents of the First Ward, he took care of business from the pay phone at the candy store where no one could listen in on account of the glass enclosure thoughtfully provided. So, in those days, if you came to Richie’s house, and asked for the boss, the muscle on the door would say, “He’s not here. Siddown if you wanna wait.” And you’d say: “What do you mean he’s not here?” And they’d say, “Relax, will ya? He’ll be back in a minute. He hadda make a call. He went down ’t’da boot.” (Of course, you shoulda known—da phone boot.)
In those days Prohibition was making Boiardo wealthy and powerful—but only in the First Ward. Richie might have shipped beer and whiskey all over the city; he had the ambition, he had the idea. But he encountered a more established supplier named Abner “Longy” Zwillman, who came from the Jewish Third Ward—and something lamentable happened: Richie went for a walk on Broad Street, one day, just as eight bullets were coming by. And Boiardo ran into them all. It was a sign of God’s favor that Richie the Boot lived.
The amazing part of the story was, after that, Longy and Richie made peace and even went into business. That odd turn of events was owed, primarily, to Zwillman, who was that rare sort of mobster who saw the strategic value of cooperation. In fact, Longy would later extend that radical idea to mobsters of the entire region—he was the man who formed the Commission with Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Joe Adonis, Lucky Luciano, and the great brain of New York crime, Frank Costello. In those days, they were called the Big Six. Later they would extend cooperation and control out to Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and of course, Las Vegas. In a way, that was all Zwillman’s doing. There was no one bigger or smarter than Longy.
Zwillman put the “organized” in organized crime because he understood it was a business: turf wars, shooting sprees, and tit-for-tat assassinations did nothing but weaken all parties and bring unwelcome scrutiny upon affairs that would ripen to more profit in private. Longy was a peacemaker by temperament.
Contrary to speculation (which he did not altogether discourage), he did not get his name for his sexual equipment. Rather it was because he grew to full height (six feet two) by the time of his bar mitzvah, and became the defender of his neighborhood. When the Irish kids would swoop down upon the Jewish merchants—turning over their pushcarts, yanking their sideburns, or knocking their yarmulkes off—the merchants would start hollering, in Yiddish: “Reef der Langer!” “Fetch the Tall One!” . . . And thus, young Abner became the Longy.
By the time he had to deal with Richie the Boot, Longy’s methods were well developed. He could have finished off Richie’s gang while the Boot, still lamentably perforated, languished in a hospital bed. But at what cost? Let Boiardo run the First Ward—it needed running, anyway. So Longy made peace. To mark the occasion, Richie threw a dinner that lasted two days. And in commemoration of their solemn accord, Longy gave Boiardo a gift: a huge diamond-studded belt buckle that Richie would wear forever after. (Years later, that gift would save his life, when Richie ran into another bullet—but the bullet hit the buckle and never entered the Boot.) . . . Longy took the trouble to research what Richie liked. Richie liked diamonds. In fact, another name on his police rap sheet was “Diamond Boiardo” (which, as a handle, never caught on).
But the point was, by the time Joe DiMaggio showed up in Newark . . . showed up not as a stranger, but as a friend of the well-known Jerry Spatola . . . showed up not anonymous but already possessed of a great name (you could call it the greatest Dago name in the country) . . . showed up with that league-leading average and that World Series ring on his finger . . . showed up with his quiet unassuming manner, with his physical grace, with his gorgeous dark suits, with that beautiful blond broad on his arm . . . showed up not just around town but amid the cascading grapes at Vittorio’s Castle, which Richie himself had built as his palace, which he owned, and which he ran—in everything but name (alas, the Boot was legalistically ineligible to hold a liquor license, on account of some minor felonies, so the Castle was held in the name of his son, Tony Boy Boiardo) . . . the point was, by the time Joe DiMaggio showed up, Richie the Boot and Longy Zwillman had been at peace for years, running Newark for fun and fortune, unchallenged, unassailed in their hyper-profitable lines of work, which included the rackets, protection, whores, narcotics, numbers, betting parlors, and untaxed liquor. The point was, there was no one in Newark who could show Joe DiMaggio a better time than Don Ruggiero Boiardo; no one who could bring to bear such splendid resources for making Joe D. his friend, an honored guest and ornament to the operation. There was sure as hell no one else with a safe containing drawers full of jewels, piles of precious cut stones—mostly diamonds (still Richie’s favorite); no one else who knew that Joe was thinking of marriage, who could take Joe from his table at Vittorio’s Castle, back to the office, who could throw open that safe . . . and say: “Take any one you want Joe. For the ring. Whatever you like.”
Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (Touchstone Book) Page 17