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

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  The other guys might get in a kid’s face: “Hey, Rook! You’re fuckin’ around with my money.” But DiMaggio would turn on the offender with one glance of icy disdain, and the kid would be mindful for a month, after that. Lopat remembered one day in Detroit, in ’48, when Berra popped up, and jogged disgustedly toward first base. But the ball fell in. If Yogi had been running, he could have made second. “Instead he gets into first, and because of that he doesn’t score, and we lose the game. I’m down in the runway below the dugout with Joe DiMaggio. Joe had a coffee and a cigarette between every inning. And Yogi comes back and he’s putting on his catching gear, and Keller says to him: ‘Yogi, are you feeling all right?’ And Yogi says, ‘Yeah, I’m feelin’ all right. Why?’ ‘Then why the hell didn’t you run it out?’ Yogi looks at DiMaggio, as if to say, HELP. And Joe gives him this really cold look. Then Lindell and Henrich came in, and they join in. And I’m thinking, ‘Now I know what makes this team. Now I know what makes this special.’ ”

  Yogi was a case worth Joe’s attention. True, he didn’t look like a Yankee (he won instant nomination as captain of the all-ugly team). Maybe his catching still looked sort of homely, too. But with a bat in his hands, the kid was beautiful. He didn’t know nuthin’ about the strike zone. Pitch in the dirt, pitch over his head—didn’t matter: he’d hit the tar out of it anyway. He was on pace to knock in a hundred runs that year—and he wasn’t even playing every game. As Joe saw it, that was part of the problem.

  August, a doubleheader in Washington: hot as hell, and you couldn’t even get a drink of water on the bench. They thought it was bad for you. They’d give you what they called “Florida water”—a towel soaked in ammonia to drape over your head. You could lose ten pounds in one afternoon. Guys would lose it all, and wake up on the trainer’s table with smelling salts under their nose. The Yankees won the first game, but the scoreboard said Boston won, too. Yogi caught that first game, but after that he was pooped. Harris wanted to rest DiMaggio for the second game, as well. But the Dago overruled him, and went out to play. Boston, Cleveland, and the Yankees were in a mortal fight, and the pennant hung on every game. But the Yankees lost the second game. At the end, Lopat and Allie Reynolds almost carried DiMaggio back to the clubhouse. That’s where he saw Berra—fresh as a daisy, after riding the bench. “Whatsa matter you TIRED?” DiMaggio almost spat out the word at him. “You’re twenty years old! What kinda fuckin’ bullshit is this—YOU CAN’T PLAY TWO GAMES? . . .” There wasn’t a sound in the room, except the Dago’s voice. He took the skin off Berra for ten minutes straight. If a look from DiMaggio lasted a month, this was a hundred times worse. Over the next eight years Berra would play an average of one hundred forty games—more than any other catcher in the league.

  But the everyday toll on DiMaggio was frightening. He confessed to friends, back in New York, that his right heel felt “like an icepick was stabbing me.” He ran on his toes and his knees swelled up. Then he got a charley horse in the left thigh: after games, he couldn’t lift that leg into a cab. But he’d be back next morning, extra-early for extra tape. How’s the leg, Joe? . . .

  “Fine.”

  The only respite from the pennant race was sorrow: on August 19, six thousand mourners filled St. Patrick’s Cathedral—and seventy-five thousand, who could not enter, stood out on Fifth Avenue in a soaking rain—to pay respect and mark their bereavement at the passing of Babe Ruth. Cancer had taken the Great Bambino at the age of fifty-three. Baseball had lost the greatest icon of the game’s joy. For the Yankees, it felt like even the glory of their past was under attack, and being worn away. The team was represented at the final rites by DiMaggio. But even that occasion betokened for him no pause. At the close of the funeral, he borrowed a limousine (Toots commandeered it, from the boss of CBS, Bill Paley) and raced to La Guardia, whence a plane flew him through the storm to Washington, D.C., where he took the field in the bottom of the third. His Yankees had a game to win. And the Senators led 1–0.

  Joe soon took care of that. He came up in the top of the fourth, and stroked a single that ignited the Yankees. (Dago’s back!) They scored six runs in the inning, and that was the end of the contest . . . . After that, he went on a hellacious tear, and the Yankees did, too. He was lining shots off the outfield walls (over the wall seven times), he was driving home a run per game—and the Yankees would win twenty of their next twenty-three. It was the same sort of furious streak on which he’d led the Yanks a decade back—1939, after disease took Lou Gehrig from the club.

  But Joe didn’t feel like he did ten years ago. When he wasn’t on the field, he could barely walk. Special shoes with high arches couldn’t stop the stabbing: he was on painkillers all the time—and he was exhausted. Every day Doc Gaynor had to wrap his thigh with a tight cinch of gauze and tape, and then another cinch around his midriff, to hold up the one on his leg . . . . But what could Joe do? The Indians and Red Sox wouldn’t fold. In fact, McCarthy’s Red Sox were winning twenty-two of twenty-six. For three weeks, into mid-September, the Yankees played .860 baseball—and didn’t gain a game in the standings.

  September 10, Boston: last game of a showdown series, and the Red Sox had already won two games. If the Yankees couldn’t take one back, they’d be dead—four and a half games behind. But it seemed like no one could take that game. It went to extra innings, with the score 6–6. Top of the tenth, the Boston reliever, Earl Caldwell, didn’t know where the ball was going: he walked two and hit another. But the Yankees couldn’t touch his fireball, either. Keller and the kid right fielder, Hank Bauer, both struck out. DiMaggio came up with two outs and the bases loaded. Caldwell had to throw a strike, and Joe was on it: his body whirled in the batter’s box, his bat was a blur, and . . . he missed it: a pop foul over the grandstand, onto the roof. Strike one. Caldwell threw another. Joe turned and smashed this ball—up, up, toward the Green Monster, the left field corner—out of the park . . . and foul. Strike two. The Boston fans took breath again, as Caldwell tried to make Joe chase, outside. DiMaggio didn’t offer. The pitcher threw another off the outside edge. DiMaggio just stared at him. Caldwell didn’t have another pitch to waste. He threw a fastball on the outer half, and DiMaggio swung again. That ball took off for the center field flagpole, soaring for an instant in a sudden silence. No one could even yell for brother Dominic, who was racing back, back over the grass . . . then, Dommie stopped, and watched the ball land halfway up the bleachers in dead center field. Grand slam, four runs—and the same old story: the Yanks were alive, as long as Joe was there.

  But now, the rest of the story made it into the press, too. There was a column in the New York Mirror that said DiMaggio was planning to hold out next year for one hundred twenty-five thousand bucks—and anyway, he’d likely be lame: he was already “playing on one leg,” and was sure to need another operation. When the beat writers tried to follow up, DiMaggio was enraged: the salary number was a fiction, he said. About the operation, even he didn’t know. One by one, he ticked off the places where he had to be taped: his charley horse thigh, the cinch around his midriff, a patch on his hip for a strawberry, a bandage on his left hand. “I’m playing,” he said. “I feel like a mummy.” But did they have to let the whole damn league know?

  There never had been a pennant race like it: one week before the season’s end, Cleveland, Boston, and New York were tied. Nobody even knew what to do—how could they run a three-way playoff? In the end, no one had to try. The Yankees were one game behind their rivals when they arrived in Boston for the last two games of the season. If the Yankees won both, they had a chance for the pennant. If they lost even one, they were finished.

  Ted Williams made the end short and sweet; at least for him and the Sox. In the first inning, he hit a two-run bomb that gave the Bostons a lead they’d never lose. (With that homer, Williams also clinched another batting crown—he was pleased DiMaggio was there to see that.) Joe drove in the only Yankee run with a double off the Green Monster. But the rest of the Yanks could do n
othing. Boston won the first game 5–1, to eliminate New York.

  That might also have ended DiMaggio’s season. There was no reason for him to play the last game—except Boston had to win one more, to get a share of the pennant. And his brother played for Boston: people might say he sat to give the pennant to Dom—or to his old skipper, McCarthy . . . . Of course, no one who said those things could have known Joe DiMaggio. The evening after that Yankee loss, Joe got a ride with Dominic to his home in the suburb of Wellesley. Dom was going to be married, right after the season. Mamma and Papa DiMaggio had come east for the occasion. There was to be a family dinner that night.

  As Dom told David Halberstam for his classic Summer of ’49, most of that ride passed in silence. At length, Joe turned to his brother, and announced: “We’ll get back at you tomorrow—we’ll knock you out. I’ll take care of it personally.”

  Dominic, who had suffered a lifetime of being known as “DiMaggio’s brother,” now took the occasion to remind Joe: “I may have something to do with that . . . I’ll be there, too.”

  Dominic was as good as his word: next day, he hit the home run that started the Sox on their winning rally. (Boston would win the right to meet Cleveland in a one-game playoff for the pennant, next day.) But Joe had meant what he said, too. He didn’t just suit up: he personally kept the Yankees in that game. Two singles, two doubles . . . one of his shots hit the Monster so hard, Dommie thought the ball would go through it. With his single in the ninth, Joe would finish at four-for-five, but the game was beyond reach: 10–5 Boston, the scoreboard said. Harris sent out a pinch runner to take Joe’s place on the first base bag. Head down, DiMaggio limped across the grass toward the dugout. And the Boston fans startled even themselves by standing—thirty-five thousand in that packed house, on their feet—to cheer their greatest opponent.

  As Dominic told his co-writer, Al Hirshberg, for the memoir Real Grass, Real Heroes, he couldn’t believe what he was hearing: “Out in center field, I listened, thrilled, fascinated and astonished . . . . My glasses clouded up and, as Joe reached the top step, I did something that, to me, was as involuntary as breathing. I reached up and took off my cap.”

  That year, Joe DiMaggio had played in a hundred fifty-three games out of a hundred fifty-four—played hurt in almost every one. He finished at an average of .320. He led the league with thirty-nine homers, and a hundred fifty-five runs batted in. Those were his greatest totals since 1937. But his impact couldn’t be measured by a line of numbers. In fact, his impact didn’t end with the Yankee season.

  The following day, in the playoff, the Red Sox took the field behind a right-hander, Denny Galehouse. No Red Sox fan (and no Red Sox player) could figure out why Galehouse got that start. He was only eight and eight that year, and had never scared anyone. He didn’t scare the Indians, either. They piled on him early and often. They won the playoff 8–3. And Boston cursed the name Galehouse, ever after. There were curses for McCarthy, too—the Skipper had put Galehouse out there. But the truth was even more pathetic. The previous day, in the season’s last game, McCarthy was so scared of Joe DiMaggio that he kept a right-hander heated up in the bullpen for six innings straight. That exhausted pitcher was Denny Galehouse.

  The day after Cleveland beat the Boston Braves to win the World Series, the Yankees once again became the talk of the Baseball Nation. The GM, Weiss, had fired the gentlemanly Bucky Harris. (A manager who couldn’t win with DiMaggio must not be tough enough.) The Yankees gathered the sporting press at the 21 Club, the famous speakeasy-turned-rich-man’s-restaurant, to introduce their new skipper, Charles Dillon Stengel.

  It was an inexplicable choice, a Galehousian mystery: at fifty-eight years of age, Casey Stengel had experience, but mostly of the wrong sort. He’d played outfield—with middling success—for five teams, all in the National League. He’d managed two NL clubs, Brooklyn and the Boston Braves, for a total of nine years—but never finished better than fifth place. His combined percentage as a big-league skipper was .439. The last time the Yankees had finished that badly, Babe Ruth was still pitching for an orphanage in Baltimore, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire owned half of Europe.

  What fame Stengel had garnered in the Great Game came mostly from his clowning. As a player, his most memorable act occurred when he caught a bird in left field, and tucked it under his hat. Then, when he made a nice running catch, he acknowledged the cheers with a tip of his cap—and the bird took wing, to the crowd’s delight. He entered briefly into Yankee lore when, as a member of the New York Giants, he hit a home run against the Yanks in the 1923 World Series—and trotted the bases thumbing his nose, and then blowing kisses, toward the Yankee dugout.

  Now this old Yankee-hater (steeriiike), this entertainer (strike TWOO), this loser (YER OUT!) . . . was revealed as the Bombers’ new commandant. No wonder the writers and cameramen (unappeased by a splendid 21 Club lunch) took the news as a bad joke.

  No wonder the club management asked DiMaggio to take the stage at Stengel’s side: the presence of the Yankee Clipper would dignify the proceedings, and forestall any speculation that the players might revolt. Alas, it also guaranteed that Casey would be asked how he felt to be managing an all-time great, like DiMag. “I can’t tell you much about that,” Stengel replied, “being as since I have not been in the American League so I ain’t seen the gentleman play, except once in a very great while.”

  That answer (and DiMaggio’s scowl) indicated two truths about Stengel. First, he would talk quotably and at any length, even if the answer boiled down to, “I don’t know.” Second, and more important: he had no idea how to get along with his star.

  The Yankee owners, Topping and Webb, had a pretty good idea how to get along: they were going to make DiMaggio the highest-paid player in baseball. Bob Feller, the Cleveland ace, was making eighty-five thousand a year. So the Yankee management had in mind ninety thousand for Joe. That would raise him, for the first time, past Babe Ruth (who topped out at eighty G’s)—in fact, past every player in the history of the game. It was Toots who cornered Topping and Webb in his saloon one day, and convinced them to make it an even six figures—the first hundred-thousand-dollar man! That would be history! That was promotion! Wasn’t that worth an extra ten large?

  Sure it was. Now, the only lingering question was whether the Big Guy could play. DiMaggio did his part. By November he showed up in Baltimore for another operation at Johns Hopkins. The surgeons had no trouble with the spur on the right heel. The jutting bit of calcium was excised, the wound was neatly sewn, Joe emerged with a cast and crutches, and said he would answer the bell, March 1, when the Yankees convened in St. Petersburg.

  So he did. He reported on time, without fuss. No one would get a chance to say he was undermining the new regime. But Stengel had to show how tough that regime was going to be: he ordered double workouts—even that first day. Joe did the work with the rest of the guys: did his stretches, ran in the outfield, shagged flies, took his licks in the cage, and . . . by March 2, DiMaggio could barely walk.

  This time the Yanks wouldn’t wait for God to breathe His balm on the Clipper’s heel. That day, DiMaggio was flown back to Baltimore. The sages of the Hopkins examined Joe and announced that he had broken adhesions in his right foot. They saw no need for another operation. Joe was back in camp the next day. Now, Stengel had seen a sobering vision—his last chance as a major league skipper, flying away with DiMag on that plane. Suddenly, Casey wasn’t quite so tough. He told Joe to get in shape at his own pace, in his own style: Whatever you commence to wanna do, Mr. De-Madge.

  That suited Joe to a T. That sojourn in Florida would be exactly his style. That year, Joe wasn’t joined in St. Pete by Jimmy Ceres—Peanuts was off the list. Solotaire had convinced Joe, that didn’t look right. Joe needed someone with class. So, Gentleman George went south with DiMag.

  In the mornings, Solotaire would drive Joe to Miller Huggins Field, and come with him into the locker room—make sure the Dago had everything he needed. Usuall
y, Georgie would hang around the clubhouse or the grandstand, while DiMag did some light work in the A.M. session. Joe would take all his hitting—and more: no one else got into the cage until Dago’d had enough. He’d take a few grounders in the infield, maybe a few fly balls just for timing. But no running, no slides, no sudden stops or starts. He was wearing sponge insoles, designed by his doctors, to keep his weight from landing on his heels. But the insoles caused blisters on his toes. The newspaper stories from St. Pete read like a primer on podiatry.

  Oftentimes, in the afternoons, Solotaire would show up at the clubhouse alone. All the fellows knew that meant Joe was “tied up”—with female company, back at their rooms. George went on ahead as a lookout, to make sure no one remarked too much about the Dago’s training schedule. One time the phone in the clubhouse rang: a call for Solotaire. George listened briefly and hung up with the glad news: Daig was on his way. Of course, Georgie said it in his own famous style:

  “I jus’ got the flash—

  “He’s done with the gash.”

  At night, George would take Joe out to the dog track—not to sit in the car on the backstretch—they’d walk right in. And take along some of the other players, too. Hell, Stengel said Joe could run his own camp. And DiMaggio took him at his word.

  When Stengel was confronted with the news, he had to crack down. He ruled that every man had to live with the team in the hotel. There was a new midnight curfew, and a seven-thirty morning call. But on the subject of DiMaggio, Casey was mild: “I’ll handle this situation in my own way.” That meant a friendly chat with the Clipper. Stengel imposed no penalties, and no fine. “DiMaggio admits he feels badly about it.”

  What worried Stengel wasn’t Joe’s betting, but the way he was playing ball. He still couldn’t dig in at the plate, couldn’t turn on the ball, couldn’t play a full game, and couldn’t, or didn’t, run.