They’d troop into Stengel’s office and ask him. But Casey would commence to talk. (“Well, the Big Fella, you haveta say, he knows where the ballpark is, and he knows when to get there, and that’s the first thing ya haveta consider. Now there’s some ballplayers—and you could look it up . . .”) And after an hour, he hadn’t said a damn thing.
They’d ask their pals on the club—players their age. But if Joe said anything past Hello, those kids just stared like deer in the headlights. (He spoke to them!) As for asking—well, maybe, if a few guys were sitting around, after a game or on the train, maybe they’d ask the Dago about some play, or a pitcher, or something they were doing. They sure as hell weren’t going to ask what was wrong with him.
And the couple of coots in the press box, they were no help, as usual. Dan Daniel was still up there, in his vest and suit coat, still trying to tell the whippersnappers what Babe Ruth used to say about a slump, or what the great John McGraw once told him. But nowadays Daniel could also fall silent, with his head down, chin covering his tie, as he caught a snooze through the middle innings . . . .
The fact was, there were few men anywhere around the Yankees who knew what was eating at DiMag. Maybe a couple of coaches (the old Yanks—Dickey, Crosetti): they were the ones who were advising Stengel, don’t say anything about the Dago. The fellows in Joe’s network knew: Cannon probably, and Georgie for sure. Frank Scott knew, and Toots, of course. But they wouldn’t speak. That was how they stayed in. That, and they’d sit up with Daig into the wee hours—sympathizing.
How could the broad do this to him?
Sure, he went in the tank the minute the Yankees came home from Boston: that’s when Dorothy gave him the word—thanks for the dough, and adios—she wasn’t moving back in with him. She wasn’t even going to stay in New York. She was tired of New York—and what about her career? She was singing with a band again. Now she wanted to be in pictures. She was going to take the kid—soon as school was out—and move to Los Angeles. And not a damn thing Joe could do about it.
What about San Francisco? . . .
She laughed at him.
THE FIRST NOISE he heard came from Dan Topping: “Joe, we want to make a little change . . .” That’s what finished DiMaggio and his manager: Stengel wouldn’t talk to him, man to man.
In June, the Yankees had fallen out of first place—they went to Detroit and lost three out of four. Stengel was frantic. But how was Casey going to be a genius with his center fielder batting .250—and at cleanup? . . . Casey had kids who could hit—or they might hit. But all outfielders: How could he play ’em? What he didn’t have was a first baseman. Henrich had a knee that never would be right again. Mize couldn’t throw. Collins couldn’t hit . . . . But if Stengel put DiMaggio at first base, he’d get Bauer, Woodling, Mapes in the outfield, the bonus baby, Jensen, to fill in. Then, he’d have bats in the lineup, fresh legs in the field—and he’d have kids. Casey had commenced to think the unthinkable.
So Topping had to tell the Dago. Beginning of July—why don’t we have lunch? . . . Topping signed Joe’s checks. If you counted meal-money, that was eight grand and change, every two weeks . . . . So what could Joe do, but agree?
The experiment would begin July 3, at Washington. The writers were in an uproar. (“DIMAG MOVES TO FIRST BASE!”) Stengel told them all how he’d talked this over with the Big Fella—of course: “And DiMaggio is going to give it a try because he is that type of player. When I asked him whether he’d try playing the bag, he replied, ‘Certainly, I’ll play anywhere you want if you think it will help the club.’ ” For his part, Joe stuck to Gary Cooper lines: “Now, if someone will show me where first base is . . .” But when he left the locker room, and found photographers jostling for position at the first base bag, the role stopped there. No, he wouldn’t pose.
But he played it. And the papers said he did fine. He handled thirteen putouts without an error, and “looked as comfortable as a veteran first-sacker.” The players knew different.
Tom Ferrick pitched that day. There was a swinging bunt down the first base line. Ferrick hustled over. Joe raced in—but Ferrick yelled: “I got it!” . . . And DiMaggio put on the brakes, tried to scramble back. He fell near the bag, on his hands and knees. He almost got stepped on . . . . “He almost got hurt,” as Ferrick remembered. “But I knew it was shame. He was so furious to look clumsy. He was enraged.”
Henrich could tell from the dugout. He knew first base—and he knew the Dago. He could see Joe trying to think his way through . . . and burning. “He’s worried all over,” Henrich said. “He’s afraid of making a dumb play—because he’s not familiar with first base. It would have killed him to make a stupid play.”
The other thing Henrich remembered was Joe’s exhaustion, after that game. You could always sweat in Washington. But in the locker room, Joe was wet. His T-shirt was soaked. And that gray road-flannel must have weighed five pounds.
And just as Joe feared, the following day all the papers carried pictures of the Yankee Clipper, crawling around in the dirt . . . . Even so, fortune had smiled on DiMaggio. In that game, Bauer had sprained an ankle, sliding into second base—he’d be out of the lineup indefinitely. So, the next day, Joe was back in center field.
But Stengel was still thinking.
ONE WEEK LATER, Joe played in the 1950 All-Star Game: his twelfth straight selection, he had to show up. But he didn’t start. He didn’t deserve to. Anyway, he wasn’t right. Had a pulled groin muscle—that’s what they said. So he sat in the White Sox dugout in Comiskey Park, until the very end of that game—which was a thriller, extra innings. The Nationals had tied it in the ninth, and the two leagues matched zeroes till the fourteenth, when at last the Nationals pushed across another run. The AL had one more chance—and they got a man on—then, DiMaggio came up. He grounded into a double play, and that was the game. Joe was the goat.
That night, the locker room story out of Chicago was headlined:
DiMag Lonesome
Dejected Figure
“They wanted me to swing and I did,” said Joe, sitting alone and dejected in front of his locker. “Blackwell served up a slow curve ball, I went for it and just didn’t bite into it enough, that’s all. I don’t feel so good about it.”
But the rest of the stories were worse. This was the chance for the national press to tee off on the Great Man’s slump.
“The brutal truth,” wrote the AP’s sports feature writer, Whitney Martin, “is that the Yankee Clipper hasn’t much wind at his back as he sails toward the end of his career. Joe suddenly has been taken old.”
By the time Joe got back to New York, the Yankee writers had the news that DiMag had aggravated his pulled muscle, trying to beat out that double-play grounder. The Ol’ Perfesser said a few days’ rest should put him right.
So DiMaggio was sitting in the Yankee dugout, too. For four games he sat, and watched Johnny Mize batting cleanup—where the Big Cat went on a spree (thirteen-for-fifteen, with five home runs) . . . . When Stengel put Joe back in the lineup, Mize was still listed as the fourth batter. Joe DiMaggio, who’d batted in the cleanup spot since 1939, was shoved down the order, to number five.
Toots was in his box at the Stadium that afternoon. He saw the lineups posted on the scoreboard, and his heart ached for the Dago. “If Casey wanted to embarrass him by dropping him down in the lineup,” Shor recalled for Maury Allen, “he should have done it on the road, the dirty son of a buck . . . . I started to get up and leave when I saw the lineup. The fans wouldn’t have known but the writers would have. They would have written about it. Casey never said nothing to Joe. He just put Mize in there against this right-hander and Mize hit two homers. Joe got two hits and came in that night and he’s knocking over a belt.
“ ‘Sore, ain’tcha?’
“ ‘Yeah, I’m sore. The least he could have done was explain it to me.’ ”
Now, it was war.
Curt Gowdy, the young broadcaster who was sidekick to Mel Allen in
the Yankee radio booth, was out with his wife, Geri, that night. And of course, they wandered into Shor’s. Toots had always been friendly to them—ever since they’d arrived in New York, with the Big Sky of Wyoming still in their eyes. But on that night, as Gowdy remembered, Toots went nuts—started shouting at him:
“ ‘YOU AND THAT SON OF A BITCH . . . ’ ”
Gowdy said he finally figured out, Toots meant Stengel. “I said, ‘Hey, it wasn’t me!’
“ ‘Ah, you’re all with him!’
“Toots was all about choosing sides,” Gowdy said. “He was in the DiMag camp.”
For his part, DiMaggio essayed a silence so total and fearsome that it chilled the whole Yankee clubhouse. He would not acknowledge Stengel by word or deed. If Joe was in the dugout, and Casey started talking, DiMaggio would turn on his heel and walk away.
In fact, a number of players didn’t want to talk to Stengel. Or didn’t want to get caught talking to him. It would look like they were brownnosing. Everybody knew he played favorites. It was almost disloyal to your teammates if you sat and let him talk. Of course, there were times it couldn’t be avoided. Stengel would call a clubhouse meeting and talk for an hour and a half straight—like he was hungry to talk—like the silence just made him talk more. Even some writers walked away.
“Eh! He’s a bore,” Louie Effrat said.
But some of them listened—his writers:
“DiMaggio is sulking like a sophomore,” wrote Joe Trimble in the Daily News, on August 3. “No one denies this great player the right of his pride. But he is carrying things too far when he refuses to talk to the manager, curtly cuts the newspapermen who have been his friends for years and maintains a stony silence toward all but a few of his teammates.”
DiMaggio’s silence toward Trimble would last the rest of his life.
But if Joe thought he could make Stengel buckle with the icy stare, the evil eye . . . he was about thirty years too late. “So what if he doesn’t talk to me?” said Stengel with the clear concision that always signaled his bottom line. “DiMaggio doesn’t get paid to talk, and I don’t either. He gets paid to play ball. I get paid to manage. If what I’m doing is wrong, my bosses will fire me. I’ve been fired lots of places before.”
The real bottom line with Stengel was that all the clowning, the eagerness to entertain, the monologues and mispronunciations, the practiced old stories and “you could look it up” . . . all were accreted and deployed for decades to disguise a leathery survivor’s soul. He’d seen ballplayers come and go for forty years. But Stengel was still there. More than just there: he was in that All-Star dugout as manager of the World Champs, while the rest were home listening in on the radio—for instance, Joe McCarthy, who’d just got fired by the Red Sox . . . and some had to yell to the nurse to put the game on . . . and some, as Casey often pointed out, were “dead at the present time.” It would take more than DiMaggio’s evil eye to run Stengel out of his game.
The players got the picture little by little, in flashes, clear and hard. There was the day in Casey’s first year, when the Yankees were riding the train out of Philly after losing three straight to the woeful A’s. Some kids were at a dining car table, playing Twenty Questions. “I got a question,” Stengel said as he passed. “Which one of you clowns ain’t gonna be here tomorrow?” Henrich got the message later that year, when he raced back on a long drive to right, ran out of room and slammed into the outfield wall. He lay on the ground (as it turned out, with broken ribs), as Casey ran out to the wall on his old bandy legs. “Stay down,” Casey murmured softly, as he bent over his fallen player. “Just stay down.” Jeez, he really cares, Henrich thought. Still, he tried to get up. “Stay down, dammit,” Stengel ordered, “until I get somebody warmed up.”
But Joe DiMaggio, along with the rest of the startled Baseball Nation, got the picture that August 11, 1950, when for the first time in his career, the Yankee Clipper was benched. This time, there wasn’t the fig leaf of a pulled muscle—or anything else. Joe wasn’t hitting. (Four-for-his-last-thirty-eight.) Simple as that. And he was on the pine.
Stengel said DiMaggio would sit for the next six or seven games. No, he hadn’t talked to the Great Man—and didn’t need to. New York was still three back of Detroit. The Yanks had lost six of their last nine games—during which the Bombers had hit .186. “The way we’re hitting,” Stengel said, “I should bench the entire team.”
So Joe sat for six games, in silence. And he burned. And while he sat, the Yanks fell four behind.
God bless Bauer. He got hurt again—beaned by a throw as he slid into third and he had to be carried off the field. The next night, August 18, DiMaggio started in center field, and batting cleanup against the A’s. The game stayed tight into the ninth—a 2–2 squeaker . . . until DiMaggio caught a pitch from Lou Brissie and drove it into the left field seats—upper deck. A dozen Philadelphia kids jumped out of the stands and mobbed Joe at third base. He had to fight his way to the plate. The Yankees won 3–2. DiMaggio was back.
The next day it was 6–2 over the A’s again. This time DiMaggio got a double, two singles, and drove in two runs. Day after that . . . well, God was back in His heaven, and all was right on the sports page again. The Yanks would win ten of their next eleven games. They would take over first place from the Tigers. In those games DiMaggio would hit at a .400 clip, slamming shots off the walls, and over the walls, leading the club in runs batted in, in homers, doubles, slugging percentage . . . until his knees gave out. Then, he had to sit again.
He came back again in September—and he was still on a tear. He would hit in nineteen straight games. He had pushed his average through the .260’s, .270’s, and into the .280’s . . . another man would have been delirious with joy. But there was no joy for DiMaggio. The Yankees weren’t winning consistently—like Yankees—winning every game they had to win. A week into September, they lost three in a row and let the Tigers climb back into first. Worse still, two of those losses were to Boston—now, the Red Sox were only two games back. And whatever Joe did now, he was kicking himself. It wasn’t enough.
No matter how tough Stengel was, no boss was tougher on Joe than Joe. He admitted no ease. He’d get to bed late and wake up too early. He’d get to the locker room early, take off his pants, hang them in his locker, light a smoke, accept his half-a-cup from Pete Sheehy . . . and then just sit there—for hours—until he had to get taped. After games, he’d sit for hours again, sip a couple of beers and stare at the floor. Like the game had left him no strength to get dressed. There was no place he wanted to go. He stayed out of Shor’s. Any other joint was out of the question. Georgie would get him a sandwich at night. Often, Joe wouldn’t eat it. He had always spent two or three hours after games—until the kids with their autograph books had gone home. But now, it was longer—and it wasn’t the kids. After one night game, he stayed till two-thirty A.M. Sheehy always stayed with him. When Joe finally got ready to leave, Pete walked with him across the empty diamond and silent outfield to the center field gate—kids never figured that out. A cab would be waiting on the empty street, to ride Joe back to Manhattan.
Now, his isolation wasn’t so much forbidding—more like foreboding: Joe was in a fight that no one could help him with. The young Yankees would have done anything for him—they’d tell each other, or their friends, family, writers, what a thrill it was to be on his team . . . but they couldn’t tell him. Wouldn’t presume.
The one exception was that pop-off, Billy Martin. He was all presumption, anyway. Martin had gone back to the minors, mid-season. But now, in September, he came back, brash as ever. He’d walk into the clubhouse, and hang his pants in his locker (always the pants first)—and call to Sheehy: “Half-a-cuppa-coffee, Pete!” Sheehy would’ve thrown the coffee on him . . . but DiMaggio would just look over with a wan smile.
It was after games Joe couldn’t smile. If the Yankees didn’t win, he’d lost that game. If he got two hits, he should’ve had three. If he got three, he wanted that f
ourth so bad he could taste it. What he wanted was a .300 average—except for ’46, after the war, he’d never hit below that. If he couldn’t hit .300, it was over for him.
On the bench, they’d hear him swear at himself from the tunnel, where he sat and smoked. Hank Workman, the fifth outfielder, only got in a couple of games that year. But he had another job: as each inning ended, he had to light a Chesterfield, take one puff and have it burning for the Dago when he came in from center field. After Joe finished his smoke, he’d resume his place at one end of the bench, legs crossed, back against the dugout wall, arms crossed in front of his chest, as he muttered through his private war. Henrich was next to Joe one day, as they watched Bobby Brown knock a single through the right side of the infield. Brown always had bat control, and he was smart: got a lot of hits that way. Joe said softly, without turning his head: “How come his fuckin’ grounders go through?”
Then Joe would go to the plate and try to hit the ball through a wall. September 12, in Washington, DiMaggio hit three out of Griffith Stadium—first time anyone had done that, in the history of that old boneyard: it was four hundred and five feet to the left field corner . . . and he threw in a double and a walk for a perfect day. The 8–1 Yankee win brought the Bombers within a half-game of Detroit—and raised Joe’s totals for the year to twenty-seven homers, with more than a hundred runs knocked in—for the ninth time in his career. (Joe even went out for dinner that night.)
But next day, a doubleheader, there he was muttering again: for Joe, it wasn’t what you did one day, but every day, every play. Even in his private struggle there was something instructive in his every act—or the way he cared about his every act. One day in that stretch run, he came up with two Yankees on and hit a shot over third, a screamer . . . and the third baseman leapt into the air to make one hell of a catch. Just another loud out. Joe trotted back to the bench and launched a swift kick at the empty ball bag that hung in the Yankee dugout. There were always two leather bags hanging there—one full, one empty. Problem was, Joe made a mistake, and kicked the full one. It had to hurt like a hammer-blow; he could’ve broken his foot; there were balls rolling all over the field. A deep blush spread across DiMaggio’s cheeks. And there was silence—save for a couple of snorts—as the Yankee kids tried not to laugh. But that was the game: the Yanks erupted for a half-dozen runs, and put it away.
Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (Touchstone Book) Page 36