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

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  Joe would later say he didn’t wake up to The Streak till it ran well into the thirties. That was another polite fable. It wasn’t just the papers writing up the Big Guy each day—now the team record (twenty-nine straight by Roger Peckinpaugh in 1919) was in his sights. All the men in the Yankee clubhouse could see, they could feel Joe digging in, digging down, to keep it going. Of course, they couldn’t say anything—wouldn’t be the one to put the whammy on Daig’s chances. But they all knew. After Chicago, the Yanks went home to face the first-place Cleveland Indians (led by their manager, Roger Peckinpaugh)—who had a streak of their own: they’d won six straight. And the Indians would lead with their ace, Rapid Robert Feller, who at that point had won his last eight straight. More than forty-four thousand fans filled the grandstand—even Babe Ruth showed up—to see if the Bombers could keep their homer string alive (they’d hit round-trippers in nine straight) and gain any ground in the pennant race. But mostly, that crowd turned out to see DiMag hit Feller. Joe was about the only right-hander who’d dig in, wouldn’t give an inch to Feller. Feller was bearing down, too—trying to bust the fastball in under Joe’s hands. But Joe wouldn’t flinch, he’d just take it. In the third inning, Joe ran the count to three-and-oh; Feller had to throw a strike. He fired his heater out over the plate, and DiMaggio let loose, brought his bat through the zone in a blur. He slashed the ball on a line to right center, where it rolled up against the fence, drove home a run (that would be the game-clincher) . . . and DiMaggio, poker-faced on second base, busied himself brushing dirt off his pants while the crowd screamed his name. Feller’s win streak would be undone that day, 4–1; as would the Indians’ team streak—obliterated, more like it—by three Yankee wins in a row. In fact, the Bombers would make it eight straight wins (with a home run by some Yank in every one of those games), to let the world know: they were back in the hunt; the whole team was going to ride this streak. But that hardly required any more announcement, once manager McCarthy flashed that hit sign for the Dago on Feller’s cripple, three-and-oh. They might as well have put it on a billboard: DiMaggio’s hit streak was now official Yankee business.

  Joe took over the franchise record in the first game against the visiting White Sox, on a bit of good fortune: his grounder to short took an odd bounce and hit Luke Appling in the shoulder on its way into short left field. DiMaggio would call it the luckiest hit of his streak—game number thirty. Next day, Appling couldn’t quite glove Joe’s bloop past shortstop, and ended up holding the ball in short left again, staring across the diamond at Joe D. on first base. A couple of the writers essayed a few quips—Appling must be Joe’s “cousin” (heh heh). But there was no indication that Joe took that as a laughing matter. In the final game with the White Sox, he could have brought the drama to a neat close, when he faced the left-hander Eddie Smith—the pitcher against whom he’d started The Streak, thirty-two games back. But Joe wasn’t interested in a tidy roundness: he treated Smith just as he had the first time—with a solid single in the first. In fact, Joe would post a perfect three-for-three, including a home run to push the team’s streak (or, in Danielese: “their circuit-spree”) to fifteen straight games. In the locker room, with the writers buzzing in and out on streak story errands, there was open talk, now, about the home runs, and Yankee wins, and most of all, Joe’s hits. He didn’t seem to mind. “Heck, no!” the Jolter was quoted in the Newark News. “Hoodoos aren’t going to stop me—a pitcher will.” Daniel wrote that Joe’s streak had taken over the clubhouse and—“like the man who came to dinner”—it wouldn’t go away. Most writers were stacking Joe up against the modern major league record: forty-one games by George Sisler, in 1922. But Daniel insisted on the all-time record: forty-four straight by Wee Willie Keeler—back, for God’s sake, in 1897, before foul balls were even counted as strikes.

  Still, no real pal would talk to Joe about the records. The trick was to take his mind off all that—talk about anything else—and keep him entertained. There was a new player on the ’41 squad, another Coast League grad, Frenchy Bordagaray. He tried to play around with Joe, chatter at the table while Dago had dinner, or get him a beer on the train, run out for the papers—whatever Joe wanted. Mostly it was just to stick with Joe in public—so no one else could get to him. Bordagaray didn’t mind playing bodyguard, or playing the fool to amuse Joe. Frenchy was a cutup, anyway. And he’d figured out what other marginal Yankees would discover in later years: if Dago talked to you, you belonged—simple as that.

  Mostly, it was still Gomez who’d squire Joe out to dinners, or shows—if the place was good and dark, and they wouldn’t make a fuss about the Great DiMaggio being in attendance. If Gomez was scheduled to pitch the next day, he’d make sure Joe got home early—to get plenty of rest, get some big hits tomorrow. Lefty tended to Joe’s well-being like a second job. The night before DiMag’s three-for-three against the White Sox, Lefty and Joe went out to the Polo Grounds for the fight of the year: Joe Louis v. Billy Conn. In fact, that bout would be called one of the greatest of all time, after Louis stalked Conn for thirteen rounds, and finally caught him, knocked him out, and held on to the heavyweight title. Even that grand spectacle couldn’t divert Joe entirely from his own outsized athletic fame. When he and Lefty came in, just before the first bell, all other activity at the Polo Grounds stopped, as the crowd of fifty-eight thousand fans rose and roared approval for DiMaggio. “Joe always seemed more than just a baseball player,” Lefty was quoted, in Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? “He seemed like a figure, a hero, that the whole country could root for . . . . He got up to thirty, thirty-five games and that was all anybody in the country seemed interested in. Joe was the biggest news there was. They moved him from the sports pages to the front pages and I had to tell a lot of strange stories to hide Joe from all the people that wanted to shake his hand or be with him in those days.”

  Within the Yankee clubhouse, there was pride simply in being with Joe. As his streak climbed through the thirties, everyone connected with the club was more notable every day, for having been with DiMaggio, for having seen him up close, for having talked to him—well, they didn’t talk to him. But they watched him, admired him, learned from him. Maybe he wouldn’t say ten words. But just by the way he was, the way he did business, the standard he set for himself—by being Joe DiMaggio—he made them all better players. Johnny Sturm would more than hold his own at first base—in the only season he ever stuck in the major leagues. In the Yankee home run streak, ten different players knocked balls over the fence—even little Scooter Rizzuto poled one out. Players whom no one thought of as great Yankees put up great Yankee stats: the fill-in catcher, Buddy Rosar, had a batting average of .374. The pitcher Red Ruffing became the best pinch hitter in the league. (He would hit .303 for the year.) . . . Pride of the Yankees was a concept so winning, Hollywood picked up the title for the new Gehrig biopic (filming that summer), with Gary Cooper in the lead role. But at that time, in the real world, the Pride of the Yanks was Joe. More than that, he was the meal ticket: the man who put fans in the seats. He was the motor of their pennant progress: now, they were breathing down Cleveland’s neck. If Dago kept hitting every day, he might haul every player in that clubhouse to another World Series windfall. Why wouldn’t they do anything to help him?

  On June 26, the Yankees woke up in first place—for the first time in two months. They had won their last five out of six. They had just set a new major league record for a team home run streak: they’d passed the 1940 Tigers’ mark of seventeen straight games. DiMaggio’s hitting streak stood at thirty-seven games. And it looked like an easy series ahead. Time, tide, and the AL scheduler had washed into town (and the visitors’ dugout) the bottom fish of the league, the St. Louis Browns. Normally, DiMaggio feasted on this chum. (In his streak he was hitting .500 against St. Louis.) But Joe was worried by one Brownie pitcher, the submariner Eldon Auker, a veteran cuss who’d feed you garbage all day, and you’d never get a damn thing to hit.

  Sure enough, when Au
ker greeted Joe in the second inning, he offered ball one, ball two, ball three—until, in desperation, Joe reached for ball four and hit a weak fly to left field. In the fourth, Joe hit a grounder to short, where John Berardino couldn’t field it cleanly. The scorer, Dan “I Play No Favorites” Daniel, signaled an error—no hit for Joe—and the crowd lustily booed the scoring. Joe Gordon leapt out of the dugout, and let Daniel know how the Yankees felt about it—with what the papers called “graphic gestures” toward the press box. In the sixth, DiMag hit a weak grounder to third base, and that made him oh-for-three on the day. It wasn’t that the Yankees were in trouble—hardly: Henrich, who always hit Auker like a drum, smacked a home run in that same sixth inning, to put the Yanks ahead 3–0. And up to that point, the Yankee pitcher, Marius Russo, was throwing no-hit ball. But even Russo realized, no one gave a damn about his pitching. Joe had to get another chance.

  Eighth inning, it was now 3–1, as the Yanks came up for their last at bats. (No one could even imagine the Brownies would rally to tie, and help out.) . . . Joe was fourth in the order, so someone had to get on base to give Dago a chance. Sturm, alas, popped up for the first out. Red Rolfe hung in for a gritty at bat, and worked a walk that brought Joe out on deck, and brought the crowd to a fever. Henrich was next up. But he was seized with a horrible vision: he might hit into a double play and leave Joe bereft! Henrich checked with the Skipper, McCarthy: “Would it be all right if I bunt?” Of course, McCarthy saw instantly. “That’ll be all right,” he said. Henrich laid down a sacrifice bunt. He was thrown out at first. But that brought up DiMaggio for a last lick at Auker—and Joe wasn’t going to miss this chance. He wasn’t going to let that underhanded bastard nibble around off the corners this time. First pitch, a low inside fastball—Joe golfed a bullet over third base, into the left field corner. Joe would later call it the hardest-hit ball in The Streak—but maybe he meant the hardest hit to get. Anyway, the Stadium erupted in cheers like the Yanks had just clinched a World Series. The whole squad leapt out of the dugout—clapping, whooping, pounding bats on the steps. Auker was all but forgotten for the moment, staring down at the dirt of the mound; his bid to enter the hero game had fallen one out short.

  NOW, DIMAGGIO WAS only three games short of Sisler’s modern record, forty-one straight games. Every paper in the country was running Joe’s doings—some in a daily box on the front page. Radio stations were breaking into music programs, quiz shows, detective dramas—didn’t matter what was on: when Joe got his hit, that was a bulletin. For their trip south to Philadelphia and Washington, the Yankees had to put on an extra train car to carry all the visiting writers who arrived to watch Joe’s assault on the record.

  Most of them were writing about Johnny Babich, the Philadelphia A’s right-hander, who vowed he would put an end to Joe’s streak. Babich had history with the Yankees, and a score to settle with DiMaggio . . . from that Coast League game in ’33—Joe for the Seals and Babich for the crosstown Mission Reds—when DiMaggio (in the midst of his sixty-one-game rookie streak) broke up a 0–0 tie, took a shutout from Babich, and made him a loser. Of course Babich never forgot, as he never forgot when he subsequently tried out with the Yankees—and they sent him packing. In 1940, then established with the A’s, Babich had beaten the Yanks five times; by some accounts, he’d personally cost them the pennant. He liked his reputation as a “Yankee-killer,” and told the other A’s pitchers he knew how to handle DiMaggio. That June, 1941, Babich told the Philadelphia writers: he’d stop the big Dago, sure. He’d get DiMaggio out once, and then—well, he’d walk him three times if he had to.

  More than thirteen thousand living souls materialized in Shibe Park (where the ghosts of champions past usually dwelt undisturbed). Joe came up in the first with two Yankees already aboard. With the count three-and-one, Babich fed him a pitch he could hit. Joe turned, whipping his bat through, and finished in his trademark high follow-through. Alas, the ball went straight up in the air and came down in the glove of the shortstop, Al Brancato. The Yankee rally was held to one run. Babich had won the first duel—just as he’d predicted—and now, he could pitch around Joe all day. But the rest of the Yankees would give Babich no peace. (No bush-league .500 pitcher with a grudge was going to get famous on Dago’s back.) The Bombers plated two more runs in the second, and in the third Joe DiMaggio would be leading off.

  Babich wasted the first pitch, high and wide—no one could have reached it. The second, he threw well off the outside edge. But DiMaggio lunged, almost stepped across the dish. He caught the ball with the fat of the bat, and drilled it straight back at the Babich family jewels. The shot went low, through the pitcher’s legs. If Joe had hit the ball a few inches higher, Babich would have been a hurling soprano. DiMaggio compounded the insult by steaming nonstop into second base, where he slid, dusted himself off, and regarded the Yankee-killer on the mound: “Babich,” as Joe later gloated, “was white as a sheet.”

  By that time, DiMag wasn’t in the pink himself. The Yankees made for their train, south to Washington—where, in a doubleheader, next day, Joe would have his chance to tie and surpass Sisler’s modern record, forty-one games. The special chartered cars were packed with hungry writing press, but DiMaggio never showed among them. In fact, Joe and Lefty caught a different train, seven P.M., and snuck into the Shoreham Hotel. In the swampy misery of a Washington summer (a local headline announced: “Heat Kills Three . . .”), DiMaggio normally would have whiled time away in the lobby—where at least there was some air. He might have listened in, after supper, as Joe McCarthy smoked his cigar and held court for the writers. Or Joe and Crosetti might have staked out adjoining armchairs and sat, silent, watching the traffic all evening—till Joe could go to sleep. But now, Joe was simply too famous for the lobby: he was pinned in his upstairs bedroom, flopping around on sweaty sheets. His stomach was killing him—twenty-six years old and acid was eating away at his guts. Sleep? Forget it.

  But that was no fuel for the hero machine: the writers couldn’t U-turn now, and say Joe was human. How ’bout it, Lefty—how’s he sleepin’? . . . “You could hang him on a coat hanger in the closet and he’d fall asleep,” Gomez assured them. And so they wrote it: “Nerves of steel” . . . “Joe was probably the least excited guy in America.” . . . “Cool as a Good Humor man in Alaska.” For quotes, the press made do with the rest of the Baseball Nation, all talking about Joe. From the Brooklyn Dodgers, the nasty right-hander and maestro of chin music, Whit Wyatt, opined that DiMaggio would not have come close to a record in the National League: “In our league he would have to do most of his hitting from a sitting position.”

  From the halls of baseball history, Ty Cobb weighed in with his take on Joe: “DiMaggio is wonderful,” the Peach allowed. But of course, Tyrus Raymond Cobb had put together his batting streak (forty straight games, in 1911) with a mushy hard-to-hit ball. Could DiMaggio have hit the dead ball? Anyway, Cobb didn’t care much for hitting streaks—they hurt the team. “When a team’s leading hitter is after a batting streak record, I don’t care how good a competitor he is, he’s thinking about himself more than usual.”

  The most gracious comments came from George Sisler—the man whose record was under attack. “I would like to see Joe break my record. I’ll be the first to congratulate him.” But Sisler also knew it wouldn’t be easy on DiMaggio: “You can’t imagine the strain,” he was quoted in the Daily News. “The newspapers keep mentioning the streak. Your teammates continually bring it up. You try to forget, but it can’t be done. It’s in your head every time you step to the plate.”

  At Griffith Stadium, Joe couldn’t even get to the plate before the start of the doubleheader. Fans invaded the field and besieged him, trying to slap him on the back, yelling encouragement, asking how he felt, begging for autographs. They were hauled off the field by D.C. police, who then formed a wall with their bodies athwart the home plate cage, so Joe could take BP. Meanwhile, more fans stood in long lines that snaked around the ballpark. Thirty-one thousand
tickets would be sold. The Associated Press found fans from New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and points west and south of the District. “The capacity crowd we have is due to Joe, and nobody and nothing else,” said the Senators’ skipper, Bucky Harris. “Why, we couldn’t even draw flies for a few games before the Yankees came to town.”

  In the first game, Harris sent to the mound the Senators’ ace, Emil “Dutch” Leonard, the game’s foremost knuckleball artist. When he had his good stuff, even he didn’t know how the ball was going to dip and dance—and that day, Leonard had his blue-ribbon best. “Dutch had as much stuff as I’ve ever seen him have,” said the plate umpire Johnny Quinn. “He was pitching out of a background of white shirts, too.” . . . In the second inning, Joe jumped at the first pitch, caught a knuckler with the fat of the bat, and drove a liner over second base. But it carried in the air to the center fielder, Doc Cramer, who put it away amid a groan from the crowd. In the fourth, Leonard tried to tempt DiMaggio with three dancing knucklers, but Joe wouldn’t bite and he got ahead, three-and-oh. The third base coach, Art Fletcher, flashed the hit sign from the Skipper, and DiMaggio stood in to take a rip, if he got a fastball. And he did get one—but a beauty, on the inside corner. Joe could only catch the ball on his thin bat handle, and he popped it up to George Archie, the Senators’ third baseman. The crowd, which had sat in expectant stillness while Joe took his shot, exhaled another audible moan. In his book about Joe’s “Golden Year,” the editor of Sport magazine, Al Silverman, wrote of the strange crowd noise with DiMaggio at bat: