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

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  Harris was fine as a manager, easygoing in fact. But with MacPhail’s fist still in the pie, it felt uneasy, like someone else’s team—same as last year. Most of the pitchers (seemed like half the club) wouldn’t show up for MacPhail’s planes, but would hie themselves to train depots instead. When MacPhail demanded their attendance at dinners, charity events, and like promotions, a lot of guys simply didn’t show. The fourth outfielder, Johnny Lindell, told the rookies they shouldn’t have to go. The new general manager, George Weiss—the kind of guy who’d lie to you just to keep in practice—now had the players tailed by detectives (to find out where they did go).

  Late May, the sour bubble burst, when MacPhail sent cameramen—some “promotional newsreel” scheme Larry had—to shoot close-ups of the players, before a game. But the crew was late. DiMaggio was already in the batting cage, taking his licks. Of course, he told them where they could stick their lenses.

  Well, that was too much for MacPhail. He launched a memorandum. (Didn’t these boys know their contracts bound them to promote the club? MacPhail had inserted that clause himself!) . . . He would put an end to insubordination:

  From now on, any man who didn’t want to fly on Larry’s plane could travel by rail—at his own expense. Meanwhile, Lindell got fined fifty dollars for telling the rookies they didn’t have to show up. (Two rookies were fined twenty-five each, just for listening to Lindell.) Keller and Robinson would be fined fifty bucks each, for declining to pose for Larry’s “newsreel.” DiMaggio, as exemplar, got the big ticket: a hundred-dollar fine, to be docked from his pay.

  And that was the turning point: every man in that clubhouse looked to DiMaggio to see what the Big Guy would do. And DiMaggio did nothing—didn’t say a word. Writers milked the story for days—no, they tried for weeks: this emotional affront could wreck the Clipper’s year, and the Yankees’ chances. (You know, this could be like the missus dumping him—this guy’s a stew inside!) . . . But DiMaggio acted like it wasn’t worth talk.

  What he did was his job: if he worried, it was about the job; if he talked, it was about the job. The job was winning. The players understood first: DiMaggio would not let a game end with a loss. Over the next two weeks, he hit for an average of .468, with six home runs, four of them game-winners. In the first series after the fines were levied, DiMaggio wrecked the hated Red Sox—nine-for-sixteen in a four-game Yankee sweep. The next week, in Cleveland, it was four hits and two home runs (one a grand slam) in a single game (a Yankee win, of course). At the next stop—with the league leaders, Detroit—DiMaggio had seven straight hits to put his name atop the list of AL batters, and haul the Yanks onto the Tigers’ neck—only two games back.

  It wasn’t just what he did at the plate. His perfection in the middle of the defense anchored the machinery: suddenly, the Yanks were playing as a team. Berra only had to learn one thing about right field: “If I hear your voice,” DiMaggio said, “the ball is yours.” Berra could follow the logic: stay away from DiMag. “You had to play offa him,” was the way Yogi put it. When Henrich came back, things were even smoother. “If I want the ball,” as Henrich recalled, “then I call for it. And DiMaggio gives it to me every time . . . . But if I didn’t open my mouth, get out of the way. Because that ball ain’t going to drop. DiMaggio knows he’s home free. Get out of his way, because he’s going to get it.”

  With DiMaggio behind them, pitchers had a similar certainty. Spec Shea, who would become an All-Star as a rookie, remembered DiMaggio in center like faith in his own heart. “Joe’s pet thing was: ‘Make ’em hit the ball in the air . . . . I’ll catch ’em.’ ”

  That’s just what Spec could do.

  “It would be goin’ over the shortstop’s head, I’d say to myself: ‘Get goin’, Joe.’ And I’d turn around and there’d be that big gazelle. Boy, he took them big strides, you know. And when he’d catch it, he’d catch it just so easy. There was nothin’ to it.”

  When Spec couldn’t do it just right, Joe would sit him down for another little talk.

  “ ‘You know, we had a meeting before the game and you said you were going to pitch this guy inside,’ ” DiMaggio would scold him. “ ‘You pitched him outside a couple of times. And you had the outfield in the wrong position, the infield in the wrong position. And, therefore, we let that ball get through us in the infield and we had to break our necks to get over to keep him from going to two bases—because you made the wrong kind of a pitch!’

  “And, I’d say, ‘Well, the ball got away from me.’

  “ ‘It shouldn’t get away from you! You’re in the major leagues now. You’re here. And this is where you gotta do these things perfect.’ ”

  The point that every player got was, DiMaggio expected them to play like he did. McCarthy was gone. Joe was the senior man on the field. He was the keeper of the old-time religion. Maybe he would make them winners, maybe not. But he’d sure as hell make them Yankees . . . . No mistakes!

  What DiMaggio gave to that team was his person—literally, in the case of Joe Page. Here was a pitcher who had everything he needed: talent, size, power—a fastball that could knock the bat right out of an opponent’s hands. No one knew where Page’s fastball was going to move. Alas, Page didn’t know either. And the way he thought, he’d never get it over, he’d never make the right pitch, he’d screw things up . . . to make it short: Page was a head case. He was also sure that all the other Pinstripes reviled him—as McCarthy had—as a guy who’d never make it as a Yankee. And Page made his own predictions come true: he’d drink till he was blind, drink ugly. (He’d occupy two or three of Weiss’s detectives all by himself.) And sure enough, he wouldn’t be worth a shit for his next start . . . . Even the mild Bucky Harris had to demote Page to the bullpen. Page, of course, figured his next stop would be back to the coal mines. Then, DiMaggio took him as his road roomie. Page became Joe’s project, his number one hang-around buddy—and his number one gofer.

  See, Gomez was gone, and there was no one to take care of the Dago—run out for his papers, get him a beer, stay with him on the street . . . DiMaggio needed someone to protect him. Page was perfect: he had no friends, except DiMag. If he wasn’t with DiMaggio, the only thing you’d hear him say was, “Where’s Daig? Did anybody see the Dago come through here?” If Joe went to a movie, Page had to go, too. If Joe was going to sit around a hotel lobby, Page had the next chair. He dressed like DiMaggio—carried a trunk, with a dozen suits and as many pairs of custom-made shoes. And of course he had to superintend Dago’s bag, too. In the clubhouse, they made up names for Page: “The Shadow,” “The Porter,” or “Joe’s Bobo.” Page would never answer back. He’d be busy at his locker (next to Joe’s)—boning Joe’s bats.

  “It was a strange, pathetic relationship on Page’s part,” wrote the New York Post beat writer, Milton Gross. But there was something DiMaggio was doing for Page that perhaps the others didn’t see. At the Stadium one day, the Red Sox menaced a Yankee lead with two men on and nobody out, when Harris called Page in from the bullpen to face the fearsome Ted Williams. Page strode in, handcuffed the heart of the Red Sox order—three outs, inning over . . . Page was out of the doghouse. The other Yankees couldn’t believe it. The Problem Child started mowing ’em down. He became the American League’s number one reliever—fifty-six appearances and fourteen wins. Page was unhittable, and more: he became a threat that every other team had to fear. He became the man that the Yankees and their fans could depend on. What he’d absorbed from DiMaggio was the faith: Joe Page could be a hero.

  That’s what DiMag gave back to the Yanks, that year. It was the sense of what they could be. Spec Shea lived in the Edison Hotel, too, and he went to school on DiMaggio all year. “I used to go to the fights with him and Milton Berle and Toots Shor and them. Joe used to bring me along. He’d say, ‘Come on, we’ll go to fights.’ I’d say, ‘Where are you going to get the tickets?’ He’d say, ‘Don’t worry about the tickets.’ We’ll have them, you know . . . .

  “And on the wa
y up, he’d see somebody on the side of the road, and he’d say: ‘You see that, Frank?’ (He always called me Frank, never called me Spec.) ‘You see that? That guy could never be in the Yankee organization, because he wouldn’t live up to the standard. You got to live up to the standard.’

  “He told me, he said, ‘One thing you always got to remember’—he used to tell me all the time: ‘If you’re going to do something, do it so it’s done perfectly right or don’t do it at all.’ And, boy, I’ll tell you what, he was a great guy. A real great guy.”

  Frank was another special case with DiMaggio. For one thing, Shea (in his new Hudson) would drive Joe every morning, from the hotel at Times Square, up to the Stadium in the Bronx. They’d breakfast in the hotel—Joe would always pick up the tab. What the hell, it was cheaper than a cab. Then Frank would bring the car around:

  “Which way we goin’ today, Joe?”

  “Let’s take the West Side Highway, Frank.”

  Frank would head for the highway, Joe would open his mail. “He’d open up a check from Chesterfield cigarettes, for like twenty-five hundred, or from a T-shirt company for fifteen hundred. And one morning, I remember: ninety-two hundred dollars he got in checks that day. Most of the rookies were makin’ like five thousand. He got more than any one of us ever made for two years.”

  When Joe walked into the locker room, it was like the lights came on, as if a voice on the PA had announced: the team is here. Of course, he was impeccable: not just in a suit and tie, but the best suit and tie in America. He had a pal from Seventh Avenue who’d make the suits—whatever Joe wanted—and his tailor, of course, to put the finishing touches. And no hat: might obscure the face. It was funny about that face: the same features that had seemed so sharp and outsized in ’36—now he’d grown into them, they gave him distinction. A committee of artists actually named him on a list of America’s “ten most interesting faces.” But it wasn’t just the nose, the chin: what they saw was something that had marked DiMaggio even while he was a hatchet-faced boy. It was the composure—that sufficiency in his face—he needed no one to tell him who he was.

  He’d stride in, across the new carpeted clubhouse, with the paper under his arm. If there were fellows already getting dressed, Joe wouldn’t stop. “Good morning.” “Good morning, Tom,” he’d say as he passed—like an executive greeting secretaries on the way to his office. By the time he had his coat hung perfectly (now, it wasn’t just the old metal lockers—the Yankees had new wire-mesh cubicles—big, like a closet), Pete Sheehy would be running with the “half-a-cuppa-coffee.” Joe didn’t have to ask, anymore.

  DiMaggio would sit in his undershirt with his half-a-cup and a smoke, one leg thrown over the other. He’d open up the paper. The other players would sneak glances, to see if Dago was gonna say anything. They’d never talk to him first. Mostly they’d see his broad back—thick with muscle, like the withers of a racehorse—“like a dome of muscle,” as one Yankee described it. Other players would filter in, attending to their rituals and chores. There was a big table in the center of the room, with boxes of baseballs arrayed. Those were for the club, the owners, or some bigwigs. All the players had to sign them, except for the Dago. Pete Sheehy would sign for DiMaggio—perfect, just like Joe’s grade school script.

  The Big Guy could sit in stillness till he was ready to visit the trainer, get himself taped. After that, it was BP. Joe hit first. When Joe stepped into the cage, that’s when BP started. The pitchers all knew: Joe wanted the ball on the inside half, pecker high. Anything else, he’d let it go by. Players on opposing teams would linger in their dugout to watch him drive a few balls into the left field stands. Other Yankees, once they took their licks, they’d run to the outfield to shag some flies. DiMaggio would sit in the dugout shade. He knew how to catch. And he didn’t need any extra throws. His arm was hurting him enough already. After BP, the Yanks would return to the clubhouse, to put on fresh shirts—crisp, clean, like Yankees. Then, they could come out for the game: all the players, and then, DiMaggio.

  “Joe came out last, so he’d be alone,” his old sandlot pal Lodigiani noticed. “And all the people sayin’, ‘There goes DiMaggio.’ ‘That’s Joe DiMaggio!’ He made it a point to come out last, see.”

  But that was part of his job, too: to be Joe DiMaggio. If he gave the Yankees back their swagger, he also taught them how to back it up. Around the All-Star break, Joe hit safely in twenty-five of twenty-seven games. In one three-week stretch, he averaged .493. The Pinstripes took over first place in mid-June—and they didn’t just rest there. From June 19 to July 17, DiMaggio’s Yankees won nineteen straight. No team had ever done that, since the Cubs in the year Nineteen Ought-Six.

  The Yanks ran so far out in front that when his legs swelled up and started hurting, DiMaggio agreed he would sit out a week or two in the August heat. But he hated being forced to the bench—made him feel like a cursed nobody. “I wonder if I ever will play again,” Daniel quoted Joe, when the idleness got to him. “It seems as if a jinx has set out to ruin me.”

  The Yankees clinched by September 15—they’d finish twelve games up on Detroit, fourteen games ahead of Boston. Still, in September, there was DiMaggio, pounding across the grass in center field. See, it was on that field where the self-possession came to him. That was where perfection started. One time, Jimmy Cannon asked Joe why he was out there every day, when the pennant was all locked up, the games didn’t mean a thing. Why was he pushing himself so hard? As Cannon quoted Joe: “I always think, there might be someone out there in the stands who’s never seen me play.”

  Millions saw him for the first time that October: the first televised World Series. Joe DiMaggio was everywhere—in that little box!—at the same time he was in the Bronx, playing the Dodgers! In East Harlem, that famous future cop, Sonny Grosso, was coming home from school when a guy from the corner tavern invited him in to see Game One . . . . “It wasn’t in nobody’s house. But this guy had, like, an experimental television. And I remember, trying to figure out how I was seeing this game that was being played as I was seeing it. I could not comprehend that.” When Sonny told his friends, no one believed him. But the doubters soon saw for themselves the new glowing engine for the hero machine.

  In New York, that Series was a fever of excitement. The 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers were a formidable outfit, with their rookie star, Jackie Robinson, the most talked-about man in the nation. They had speed, defense, pitching—and they had something to prove. (No Dodger team had ever been champs.) . . . But in Yankee Stadium, they would have to face a team without doubt.

  In the first game, the Brooklyn ace, Ralph Branca, had matters all his own way—a no-hitter till the fifth—when DiMaggio beat out a ball to deep short, and the Yankees were awakened to score five runs that put the game away. In Game Two, the Yanks beat a tattoo on four Brooklyn pitchers, while the Yankees’ Allie Reynolds struck out twelve—Yanks 10, Brooklyn 3. The Bombers looked to have a grip on the Series, two games to none.

  But when the teams moved across the city, to Ebbets Field, Brooklyn clawed back. In Game Three, DiMaggio hit a single and a homer, knocked in three runs—but it wasn’t enough. The Pinstripes used up five pitchers in a 9–8 loss. The fourth game could have been a crusher for the Yankees, when their big right-hander, Bill Bevens, took a no-hitter into the ninth, and then lost the game on a two-out Cookie Lavagetto double that drove in the winner for Brooklyn.

  With the Series even 2–2, and the fifth game scheduled, once again, for Ebbets Field, advantage swung to the Dodgers. But DiMaggio made his own odds: he crashed a fifth-inning homer, while Spec Shea threw a four-hitter, for a squeaky 2–1 Yankee win. Joe was so happy in the clubhouse (“Frankie, you pitched a hell of a game!”) that he posed for pictures, giving Shea a kiss on the cheek.

  In Game Six, there were six Yankee pitchers in an alley fight in the Bronx. It was 2–0 Brooklyn, 4–0 Brooklyn, 4–4, 5–4 Yankees, and by the sixth inning, 8–5 Brooklyn. In the bottom of the sixth, the Jolter got his c
hance to do that one big thing that would break the will of the other team. With two on and one out, he came up against Brooklyn’s premier left-hander, the seventeen-game winner Joe Hatten. DiMaggio smashed a high line drive straight for the 415 sign, where a low chain link fence walled off the Dodger bullpen from the outfield. You could say he had launched the game-tying homer right at the Dodger pitchers out there: Here! You boys keep this one for a souvenir! . . . As DiMaggio rounded first, he could see the outfielder Al Gionfriddo dancing a spirited tarantella—unsure where to run, which way to turn, how to get under the ball. Joe was digging for second base, when Gionfriddo, in an act of God, stumbled under the ball, stuck his glove over the wire fence, and—Cazzo! Figlio di putana!—stole the home run away from DiMaggio. Seventy thousand fans in the ballpark and three million watching that miraculous little box saw DiMaggio do what he’d never done before. In frustration—disbelief—he kicked at the dirt in the basepath near second. The sports pages wrote it up like the Pope had pissed on the floor of St. Peter’s.

  “The Catch” might not have burned Joe up, if Gionfriddo hadn’t been out of position, clueless in that outfield, and a busher in the first place . . . but he was, he was, he was. And this was Joe’s ballpark. That was his moment. This Series was his stage. After the game, he didn’t answer questions, and told the photographers: no pictures. The next day, when one cameraman asked Joe to autograph a picture of that home run theft, DiMaggio snarled him away: “Whyn’cha get the other guy? He made the catch.”

  That was the day of the seventh game, with everything on the line. Joe didn’t get one hit—not even a loud foul. The Brooklyns jumped out to a 2–0 lead, but the Yanks kept banging away at the weary Dodger staff: a single run in the second, two in the fourth, one in the sixth, one in the seventh—they scratched their way to a lead of 5–2. Problem was, the Yankee pitching staff was all but played out, too. MacPhail had offered a thousand-dollar bonus to any pitcher who could make the start. Spec Shea took the challenge—but he only lasted one and a third. Then Bad Luck Bevens got a measure of revenge: he shut down the Dodgers for two and two thirds. By the fifth inning, Bevens was spent, too. And the skipper, Bucky Harris, went to the best man he had. For the fourth time in that Series, Joe Page strode in from the Yankee bullpen. He started in the fifth, got through the sixth. In the press box the writers were asking aloud—how long could he go? Page threw the seventh inning, then the eighth—Brooklyn still scoreless against him, the Yanks holding on at 5–2. On guts alone, Page pitched the ninth, all fastballs—and Brooklyn never could touch him. For five innings, he had stopped the Dodgers with one hit. Joe Page was the man who won the World Series—he was the hero.