By the time Joe attempted to pass Willie Keeler—at forty-five straight, Joe would stand alone, with the all-time record—Dorothy was thought to be such good copy that reporters were assigned to the Stadium club seats, to watch her through the game. Actually, they couldn’t spend the whole game with her, because she arrived, with her parents in tow, during the third inning. (A girl needs a bit of time to prepare, when she’s going to be photographed.) She came bustling in, asking “What’d Joe do?” and was informed that hubby had been robbed of a sure double when the Boston right fielder, Stan Spence, ran back and leapt to grab a drive in right center. “Too bad,” Dorothy said. Joe came to bat in the last of the third, and Mrs. Joe leaned forward in her seat. On the second pitch from Dick Newsome, DiMaggio slammed a ball down the left field line. Dorothy leapt to her feet, her bright red handbag tumbling to the floor. Joe’s drive hooked a mile into the seats—and foul. “Gosh darn,” Dorothy was quoted. On the next pitch, Joe grounded out to Jim Tabor, the Red Sox third baseman, and Dorothy slumped in her box seat to await the next chance.
In the fifth inning, Joe took two balls outside. Now, Newsome had to throw a strike, and Joe was ready—maybe too ready. The next pitch, a high fastball, might have been ball three, but Joe whipped the bat head through, caught the ball out in front of the plate, and launched a high arching foul pop into the second deck—where a struggle for the precious souvenir ensued. Even before most fans turned away from that scrap in the seats, Newsome pitched again, and—Crack! Joe lined a rifle shot to deep left field, where Ted Williams took a step back, gave up on running and turned, ready to play the carom. But the ball cleared the wall and disappeared from view. It all happened so fast, no one had much chance to react till Joe, in his quick trot, was around third and headed home. Then the huge crowd at the ballpark was on its feet, cheering, clapping, straw hats went sailing through the air. Even writers in the press box broke their cardinal rule of decorum and applauded. Joe DiMaggio had made history for them. The Yankee players poured onto the grass in front of the dugout, whooping and waiting to shake the Big Guy’s hand. They were winning their sixth in a row; they were three up on Cleveland—in first place. Joe DiMaggio had hauled them there. In the club seats, Dorothy was shouting, clapping and laughing with Mom and Dad, even after Joe disappeared amid the back slaps on the Yankee bench. Then, she turned with a radiant smile. Joe had made this spotlight for her! She said to the press, who would print her words by the millions: “Beautiful, wasn’t it?”
WHEN JOE DIMAGGIO loped past Keeler, and a standard of consistency that had stood for forty-four years, he was pushing into territory unknown—not only beyond the records, but beyond conventional reckoning. As the Baseball Nation prepared for the All-Star break, July 7, the midpoint of the ’41 season, no one had been able to stop DiMaggio for almost eight weeks. He had faced every big-name pitcher in the league, along with also-rans, rookies, relievers. And still he was hitting. Writers started diving into the old box scores, looking for some statistical undertow, to explain how DiMaggio could swim for two months against the tide. Here’s a bit of salvage they brought up from that ocean of numbers: at that point, DiMaggio had not struck out since June 8. In fact, over the course of his streak—two hundred twenty-three official at bats—DiMaggio would strike out a total of five times. There had been in the game only a handful of men who were that difficult to strike out—but they were singles hitters: guys who choked up on the bat and tried to slap the ball through the infield. In the history of the major leagues there had never been a hitter like DiMaggio, who struck out so seldom, and at the same time, in the same streak, hit fifteen home runs. What it meant, in theory: DiMaggio was assumed to have complete and otherworldly mastery over his bat and balance, his swing mechanics, his thoughts and emotions, and of course, the strike zone. When, in the tension of one record-tying game, DiMaggio actually turned his head to question a strike call, the home plate umpire gulped and blurted out: “Sorry, Joe, it was right over!” . . . What it meant, in practice, was this: the thirty, forty, fifty thousand fans who now crammed into ballparks to see this phenomenon could rest assured that with each new chance, each at bat—each time they saw him bend to scoop a bit of dirt to rub between his hands, and then step in with his strange, still stance—they were three times more likely to see DiMaggio hit a home run than to whiff and walk back to the bench. As for hits: they were eighteen times more likely to see him get a hit . . . . And especially when the Yankees were on the road, it also meant that the much-prayed-for third strikes were rarer, and as thrilling as any hit. Fifty-five years after the fact, there would be people who still remembered: they saw DiMaggio strike out!
Now, in the Baseball Nation, there was everyone else, and there was DiMaggio. No one had achieved that colossal Otherness for a couple of decades, since the Maestro of Mash bestrode New York. There were other great players, but that was something else. This was about star power, and Joe was unchallenged. For example, in that All-Star Game, Bob Feller took the mound for the Americans, and Ted Williams won the game with a thrilling last-ditch home run. But what people talked about was: They’d seen DiMaggio! (And he got a hit in that game, too!) Whatever Feller or Williams did—that was a part of the game. Seeing DiMaggio was an event in itself. Dan Daniel was at such pains to make this distinction that he could barely pause for breath: “Bob Feller has pitched 16 victories in 19 starts for Cleveland. Ted Williams is hitting around .400 for the Red Sox. But Bob, Ted and all the rest of the little army of major leaguers were forced into a shadowy background against which DiMaggio’s sustained string of batting feats were intriguing fans from coast to coast and dramatizing the major league situation with a thrill it had not experienced since Babe Ruth hit his 60th home run in 1927.”
After the All-Star break, the Yankee train pulled into St. Louis, to find that the town had been papered with handbills:
Sensational
JOE DI MAGGIO
Will Seek To Hit Safely In His
49th
Consecutive Game.
Thur. Nite, July 10
AT ST. LOUIS
Browns vs. Yankees
Sportsman’s Park—8:30 P.M.
Charlie Keller, a quiet Maryland farm boy, knew a traveling circus when he saw one. “It looks,” Keller said, “as if we’ve landed with the fat woman and the wild animals.” The hoopla did help the Browns at the gate, but in no other way: the Yanks took three straight (that made it twelve wins in a row); DiMaggio hit safely in all three games (for an average of .583).
In Chicago, more than fifty thousand fans packed into Comiskey Park for a Sunday doubleheader: two chances for the Pale Hose to put themselves in the history books—if they could only stop DiMaggio. But there’d be no such luck for the Midway moundsmen: Joe went three-for-four in the first game, sliced one clean single to right in the second—and the Yankees won both ends, to push their team streak to fourteen straight. You could say the whole team—in fact, both teams, everybody in the ballpark that day—was now on unfamiliar turf. For the Yankees, this was the longest winning streak in the decade of manager McCarthy. For Chicago, this was the largest gathering of baseball fans since the very first All-Star Game was played at Comiskey, in July 1933.
As for Joe, he was also being pushed onto strange new ground. Back in New York, that same day, the New York Times Sunday Magazine published its account of Joe’s record run, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Russell Owen. There wasn’t much new about Joe’s doings on the field—everybody knew that stuff, already. But how was he in the clubhouse? What did he say to teammates? Why was he always drinking coffee, smoking Camels? What did he do at night? As always, Gomez had run interference, tried to explain the silent star. But in the effort to protect Joe D., Lefty let slip about the loneliness, how Joe couldn’t go anywhere—how he spent his nights with Superman comics. And there was Joe, wanly protesting, “I like westerns, too.” DiMaggio had become a “personality” for us.
It wasn’t that the writers were trying
to nose into his business—quite the reverse. There was still plenty in Joe’s world that writers wouldn’t touch. For instance, there was the return of his bat. It seems that Joe’s man Peanuts, Jimmy Ceres, along with Joe’s friend the funeral genius, Jerry Spatola, found Joe’s stolen bat somewhere in Newark, or maybe it was Lyndhurst, New Jersey. Or in some versions of the story, they simply heard about the bat in New Jersey, and then had to travel somewhere to get it. The Newark News played up the amateur sleuthing—Peanuts, so the News claimed, spent five days investigating in Washington, before he tracked “the prized bludgeon” to New Jersey. Some writers said the bat had been returned willingly by the thief, who’d meant no harm. Others wrote about the thief’s change of heart, after he heard how much Joe missed his bat. Still others hinted that Jerry and Peanuts had to buy the bat back, or they took the bat back. And Newark papers said Joe had to give the thief some tickets to Yankee games. The point was, nobody ever found out—and nobody much asked. At least, they didn’t ask in print: Who stole the bat? How was the thief found? How did it happen that a middle-aged funeral director and a gofer for Newark’s First Ward rackets boss turned into such enterprising gumshoes? No . . . the point on the sports page was, Joe got his bat back—end of story.
Well, not quite the end: it turned out Peanuts and Jerry Spatola had done a service for the nation, because when “a courier” showed up at the Yankee locker room with Joe’s “Betsy Ann” (i.e., his bat), then Joe was able to ship out for auction the old bat he’d lent to Tommy Henrich. After all, that was the bat with which he’d broken the records—which was what he’d promised (for the benefit of the USO). So Joe autographed Henrich’s bat, then turned it over to Mayor La Guardia, who then staged a City Hall ceremony, during which he would turn over the bat to Polly Carpenter, a stewardess for United Airlines, who would personally transport the sainted swat-stick to San Francisco (where the Examiner would note its arrival “at 8:16 A.M. today”). There it would be turned over to representatives of the USO, who would raffle it off at Seals Stadium. With raffle tickets fetching twenty-five cents apiece, Joe’s blessed bastinado (actually, poor Henrich’s bat) would earn one thousand six hundred and seventy-eight dollars for the welfare of U.S. servicemen all around the world.
The treatment of Joe’s relics was the surest sign of his new saintly status. It wasn’t just the bat. Over the funeral parlor in Newark, Geta and Bina Spatola, Jerry’s daughters, were already saving Joe’s wine-stained shirt (alas, Mamma Rose had been unable to lift the spot). “You keep that,” Joe said, “as a remembrance of me.” Soon, the Spatola girls would receive the shoes Joe wore during the Sacred Streak—or as Geta insisted upon calling them, “The Spikes.” The two girls would have their coffin-maker fashion a beautiful encasement for The Spikes, which would then rest, in perpetuity, on rolled and tufted velvet, such as is seen in only the finest coffins. From time to time, over the years, the girls would bring out the velvet-lined encasement, so that Little Leaguers or Legion ballplayers (who were playing for the Spatola Funeral squad) could rub The Spikes for good and godly effect. But mostly The Spikes would remain in the reliquary of the Spatola home—that was the closet, where the DiMaggio-Arnold Wedding Cake was still perfect (not one ant!) in its tent of waxed paper.
But in July 1941, The Spikes were still digging into batter’s boxes, pounding through the grass in center field. For there remained one last act of the passion play—the finale that seals a sainthood—a proper martyrdom. The setting was Cleveland, in the gloomy and outsized Municipal Stadium, where some sixty-seven thousand congregants, the year’s largest crowd for any baseball game, assembled on the evening of July 17, to watch Joe push his streak to fifty-seven games.
In the aftermath of that famous night, people said there were signs: Joe was tired, or he’d started hitting into bad luck. Gomez said it was a Cleveland cab driver who put on the whammy, as he drove Joe and Lefty to the ballpark. Gomez quoted the cabbie—in suitably Delphic tones: “Make sure you get your hit the first time up,” the driver warned. “If you do not make it then, you will be stopped.”
Actually, all the signs for DiMaggio were good. After he broke Willie Keeler’s record, Joe said he meant to chase down “that Williams” and win another batting crown. Since then, Joe had been batting at a .540 clip, and now trailed Teddy Ballgame by only twenty points. The previous night—against that same Cleveland staff—DiMaggio had posted three-for-four. And tonight’s starter would not be the Tribe’s ace, Bob Feller, nor even the righty curveballer, Mel Harder (who, for DiMaggio, was always harder), but Al Smith, a lefty who held no particular terror. So much for the omens: they said Joe DiMaggio was doing fine.
He almost got a hit in his first chance—a screamer headed for the left field corner. But the third baseman, Ken Keltner, was playing so deep that he snagged the drive on a hop, near the chalk in short left, and from the grass in foul ground whipped a long throw across to beat Joe at first base. In his second at bat Joe drew a walk (as Smith was lustily booed by his home crowd). For his third chance, Joe hit another hard shot toward Keltner—who was now playing even deeper—and again, Joe was narrowly nipped at first. After that, he didn’t come up again till the eighth—when he almost squeaked through. A bouncer toward Lou Boudreau at short took a bad hop and almost went into left field—but not that night: Boudreau got his glove up, grabbed the ball and whipped it to second base to start a double play. Even then, there was still hope in the stands. The huge crowd screamed for the Indians to tie the game, send it on to extra innings—and another chance for Joe D. In the ninth inning, Cleveland closed the gap to 4–3. The tying run, Larry Rosenthal, was on third base—with no one out. But the Yankee reliever, Fireman Johnny Murphy, wiggled out of the jam. The Yankees won, closed it out in nine innings. DiMaggio’s chances, and his streak, were no more.
In the mobbed visitors’ clubhouse, DiMaggio said he would have liked to beat his own minor league mark of sixty-one straight. But at least the pressure was off now. Yes, Keltner had made great plays. Yes, Boudreau was a great one, too. Yes, those Cleveland pitchers did great . . . . Joe was polite to all questioners; he even posed for the cameramen with his thumb and index finger forming a ring (to denote the goose egg). Then he escaped to the shower room, and stayed there for a long while.
There were thousands of people waiting outside the players’ gate. Keltner and his wife had to walk through the crowd with police protection. (You never knew, with some of them Dagos, said the Cleveland cops.)
Joe waited hours before he would chance it. By the time he, at last, poked his head out the door, the only Yankee left with him was the rookie Rizzuto.
“After the reporters left, Joe asked me to wait for him,” Rizzuto told Maury Allen, for Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?
“I don’t know why, I guess to keep some fans away. Lefty had pitched the game and he was gone. Now Joe gets dressed and we walk out of the gate together. He doesn’t say a word. We just start walking back toward the Cleveland Hotel. We go about two blocks. I don’t know what to say to comfort him so I say nothing. Finally he looks up at me with a little smile. ‘Do you know if I got a hit tonight I would have made ten thousand dollars? The Heinz 57 people were following me. They wanted to make some deal with me.’ Then he reached into his back pocket. ‘Son of a bitch. I forgot my wallet. I left it in the park. Phil, how much money you got?’ I reached into my pocket and pulled out my wallet. I had eighteen dollars. ‘Let me have it.’ I gave it to him and he turned toward a bar. I started in and he turned back toward me. ‘No, you go on back to the hotel. I want to relax a bit.’ I just left him and walked back.”
Joe would say later that the deal with Heinz 57 was just talk. But maybe he did believe, that night, that he’d lost ten grand. (That Heinz outfit knew how to promo: they once mounted a fifty-foot-long green neon pickle high above Madison Square.) The way Joe figured, they could have done the deal if they’d wanted to: as he would later note, somewhat peevishly: “I hit in the All-Star Game, too.”
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But all that ballyhoo was over for him. That was the good part. Now he could do his job. Now, Joe vowed, he would make the pitchers come to him—he wouldn’t have to reach for bad balls, trying to avoid a walk, trying to swat at something: “Now,” Joe said, “I’m really going to do some hitting.” And so he would. In fact, he would begin only sixteen hours later, by touching up the fabled Feller for a single and a double in the next day’s game. After that—well, why not?—Joe would hit in the next fifteen games, too, to stretch his hit-streak summer spree to seventy-two out of seventy-three. Not bad for two and a half months’ work.
And meanwhile, during The Streak, the Yankees had won three out of every four games. They were now in first place by six games. Joe had carried the mail. But no one would ever hear that from him.
It would be up to the other Yankees to say that. But now, they went quiet, too. It seemed like they didn’t want to bring The Streak up—might bother Joe (or spook his new streak). The teammates lay low through August, till they had their pennant wrapped up—all except for the ribbons. And even the Dago, who’d turned his ankle, was taking it easy, sitting out a series with the Senators in D.C. On the evening of August 30, Gomez and Joe were headed out to dinner—when Lefty, inexplicably, started dawdling around. “C’mon, Lefty. I’m starved,” DiMaggio was complaining. Finally Lefty said: “I just gotta stop in Selkirk’s room for a minute.”
Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (Touchstone Book) Page 23