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

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  September 14, still a half-game back, the Yankees went to Detroit for the showdown series—three games for first place. In the first game, Joe hit his twenty-ninth home run, and the Yankees won 7–5. The next day they lost, and fell behind the Tigers once more. So on the third day, the Yanks would have one last chance to take over first place . . . . Fifty-six thousand Detroit fans packed Briggs Stadium to cheer on their big right-hander, Dizzy Trout. The Yankees took the field behind a rookie southpaw who’d been called up from the minors in July. He was just a runt, at five foot eight (though the Yankees made it five ten in the program). But this kid—they called him Eddie Ford—had plenty of guts, and brought to the mound all the moxie of the New York streets where he’d learned to play.

  They matched zeroes for five innings: one of those games that could go on forever, and no one would have any fingernails left. But in the sixth, DiMaggio hit a ball four hundred twenty-five feet to left center—gone by a mile—and gave Whitey Ford a 1–0 lead. He held off Detroit through the sixth, and the seventh. But in the eighth, disaster—back-to-back doubles—and Detroit was even at 1–1. Ford was the first scheduled batter in the ninth. He figured he was gone for a pinch hitter, for sure. But lately Joe Page hadn’t been worth a damn—and Stengel hated him. So he let Ford hit, and Whitey drew a walk. That was the beginning of the end for Trout. The end of the end was DiMaggio, who came up with bases loaded. This time Joe didn’t try to knock down walls—but lined the first pitch he could reach for a single into left, for two runs, and the game. The Yankees would score seven times in that inning. Ford would finish as a winner, 8–1. That night, he would run out for the papers that announced in bold, black headlines: “Ford, DiMaggio Beat Tigers.” (He’d buy fifty, and mail ’em all home.) That night, the Yankees would leave town with first place in their grasp. And the Tigers would be also-rans for another year.

  Only Boston could threaten now. The Red Sox were coming to the Stadium for two games, September 23 and 24. They were two games back. They’d have to win both. But they never had a chance. First inning of the first game, Mel Parnell let one Yankee get on—and that brought DiMaggio to the plate. He hit a two-run homer, and that was all Lopat would need. The Yankees won the first game 8–0—won both games tidily, in fact—and Boston was finished. The Yankees would clinch another pennant without any more trouble.

  In six weeks since Joe had come off the bench, he had hit for an average of .376, with eleven home runs. He had knocked in thirty runs just in September . . . but it wasn’t enough—or might not be. The Yankees were supposed to be loafing through their last games, just tuning up for the Series. But Joe was still at war.

  “There was a game in Philadelphia,” as Jerry Coleman remembered, “right at the tag end of the season, maybe two or three games to go. And Joe was at two-nine-nine-point-six, or three-oh-oh-point-four—right on the borderline. Now, to me, .300 would have been, ‘Oh, that’s wonderful!’ If I hit .298, well, that’s good, too. DiMaggio was .300 or nothing. Because that represented great baseball.

  “And he hit a line drive to Eddie Joost, who was playing at shortstop for the A’s, and it was caught—last out of the inning. Now, I’m out at second base, and Joe comes by, out to center field. And he was mumbling. He always talked to himself a little bit. And he said, ‘How’d I look? How’d I look?’

  “I said, ‘Joe, you look great.’

  “And I’m thinking—my first reaction was: ‘Why’s he asking me? I can’t even hit .300.’

  “ ‘How’d I look?’ . . .

  “But I think he needed this confidence-builder from anybody, anywhere. You know, he just needed that comment, to hear that. ‘Joe, you look great.’ And I did say that.”

  The Yankees would face the Whiz Kid Phillies in a World Series that was over in a blink. DiMaggio would beat their ace, Robin Roberts, with a home run in the tenth . . . and that was all she wrote. There was another game the Yanks had to win in their last at bat, and Raschi had to win his start 1–0. But there was never much doubt who was going to win—in the end, it was four straight.

  And for a second straight year, the Yankee players had to hold a tribunal to decide how to divvy up the Series shares. (Fifty-three hundred dollars for a full share!) . . . Dago was the chief judge, as always—final authority. A few guys started joking around: maybe they’d cut Stengel to half a share! But the joke died. Daig didn’t join in. Most of the fellows didn’t know—hadn’t heard, with all the whooping and the singing after that last game—how Casey had come to the Big Guy in the clubhouse. Now that “Stengel’s Yankees” were in the record books as champions two years in a row, the old man went to DiMaggio’s stool, and told him: “Joe, we couldn’t have done it without you.”

  And those books would also show: DiMaggio had finished his ’50 season at an average of .301.

  NOW DOUBT AND DiMaggio would spend the off season together. Before he left New York, he told the writers, he didn’t know if he’d be back to play next year. He also gave them to understand, he didn’t much like the question. So nobody pushed. He said he’d see how his knees felt—they’d tell him whether or not to come back . . . . But he knew his knees wouldn’t tell him a thing. He’d tell his knees. It was will that made DiMaggio.

  The odd fact was, it was only because he’d had a bad season that he wanted to come back. He didn’t want the fans to remember him struggling. He wanted at least one more good year.

  He had the rest of his life to consider. And he was still counting cards. By that time, he’d tucked away a few aces for the long game. During that year, he’d signed up with CBS radio, for fifty thousand a year. He’d only done a weekly fifteen-minute show—answers for kids who wrote in with sports questions. But it wasn’t bad: Joe would speak his answers into a studio microphone, while the engineers cut a record of his voice. If he messed up, he could redo the answer. He did each one until it was perfect . . . . Between Frank Scott, the pioneer sports agent, and another new lawyer (this one was Rosenthal), Joe had more endorsement offers than he could handle. He was already doing cereal and cigarettes, a line of toiletries, T-shirts, sport shirts, rubber balls with his autograph stamped on, baseballs, baseball gloves and bats. (Lefty Gomez had a sweetheart arrangement with the Wilson Sporting Goods Co., and Joe knew he could have one of those deals in a minute—a matter of one phone call.) . . . He and Tom Meany were already under contract to do a new chapter for another edition of Lucky to Be a Yankee. DiMaggio had recorded an album of boys’ baseball stories—the ineptly titled Little Johnny Strikeout. He’d signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to play himself in a movie called The Angels and the Pirates. And he was holding MGM’s feet to the fire on terms for The Joe DiMaggio Story. (He didn’t mind being flown to L.A. for meetings with the movie bigs. That’s where Little Joe was in boarding school—and where Dorothy Arnold lived. DiMaggio hadn’t given up on making them part of his future, too.)

  In sum, he was fully involved in the business of being DiMaggio. The New York writers filled the winter sports pages with speculation on DiMaggio’s knees, his back, his heels, his shoulder, his batting eye . . . his relations with the skipper, with the owners, with George Weiss.

  Would he get another contract of a hundred thousand dollars? . . . Did he want to be a manager? . . . How could a man walk away from the money and the glory of the Great Game? . . . But they mistook the game Joe was playing.

  In November, Joe went with Lefty O’Doul on a goodwill mission to the troops in Korea. They were flown around to hospitals near the front, where Lefty would tell funny stories and Joe would sign autographs. There was a slap-up lunch and extravagant bonhomie from the commander of the U.N. forces, General Douglas MacArthur. There were medals for Lefty and Joe . . . and then a flight to Japan, where O’Doul-san was a Big Name.

  Lefty had first sailed to Japan to spread the gospel of the Game in ’31. Except for the war years, he’d made an appearance there almost every winter—more or less like Santa: he was Father Baseball. In 1950 Tokyo, where all things Am
erican were considered to be modern, correct, and highly fashionable (more than fashion—almost a state-sanctioned religion) . . . baseball and O’Doul-san were hugely admired.

  But what startled Joe was the adulation for DiMaggio-san. In Japan everybody seemed to know him. He was, for one thing, the spiritual son of Father Baseball (who had trained him, as a youth, with the Seals of San Francisco). But also, he was a great and victorious warrior of the diamond in his own right. Was he not the heir to the immortal Bay-ba Ru-tu? Was he not the exemplary samurai of the champion Yankees? . . . “DiMaggio! Banzai!” (“A thousand years!”)

  By the time he returned from the Orient, Joe had a trunkful of gifts, pottery, parasols, dolls, swords, and silk kimonos . . . he had medals and certificates attesting him a hero from the U.S. armed forces, the U.N. fighting forces, the governments of South Korea and Japan . . . he had a new and larger sense of his place in the world. He’d also lost about ten pounds. He thought he’d have a couple of months of golf with O’Doul, nights with his San Francisco pals, easy living with his mamma cooking, at home in the Marina. Then he could decide what he wanted to do. But things had changed while he was gone.

  Rosalie DiMaggio had taken sick. Doctors said it was cancer—not much they could do. Dominic came out for a while before Christmas. But he couldn’t stay. He had his own home and family now, in Boston. For that matter, Vince, too, had a happy marriage and a family of his own in the East Bay: he was still out of the Marina picture. Tom and Mike had their lives at the Wharf. Tom was still running DiMaggio’s Grotto. Mike was still fishing, going after salmon—sometimes he’d be away for months. If Joe stayed, he’d be the only one with nothing to do but watch his mother die. When Dan Topping called to wish Joe a Happy New Year, they came to an understanding within minutes. Weiss would send a contract a few days later—the standard hundred large. Joe was going back to his life, at the Stadium.

  He would join the club out west that year: Del Webb had finally gotten his way. The Yankees and Giants had swapped spring training camps. The Giants would train for the season in St. Pete. The Yankees would move for the first time to Phoenix. There they would enact the familiar and comfortable rituals: pictures of the Clipper, signing up for the new campaign (he’d actually mailed in his autographed contract from San Francisco, without delay) . . . glad welcomes from Stengel, Weiss, and the owners (who all predicted a fine year for DiMag and a third straight pennant for the Yanks) . . . and brave vows from Joe (“I’m out to surprise those who believe I am finishing up my career”) as he reassumed his accustomed place as the jewel in the Yankee crown.

  But it soon came clear, there would be little else familiar or comfortable in that spring of ’51. It had been four months since Joe and the Yanks had dispatched the Phils in the World Series. In this case too, things had changed while he was gone.

  “WAIT TILL YOU see this kid from Oklahoma,” the soft-spoken coach Bill Dickey told the Yankee players. Dickey had seen players come and go to and from ball teams since the mid-1920s. And he was not, by nature, given to tall talk. But he’d been at the Yankee rookie camp in 1950. And he’d been saying ever since: “Just wait till you see this kid.”

  “There’s never been anything like this kid which we got from Joplin,” Casey Stengel told his writers. “He has more speed than any slugger and more slug than any speedster—and nobody has ever had more of both of ’em together.”

  The final authority, Pete Sheehy, did his talking with the Pinstripes. He’d been Clubhouse Boy since the Babe’s broad back bore the Number 3. Gehrig, of course, wore Number 4. Pete gave DiMaggio Number 5. And for that spring, Mickey Mantle would wear Number 6.

  Well, the writers took it from there. By the time the Yankee camp opened officially on March 1, Mickey Charles Mantle was The Story. He was still listed as a shortstop—but all the writers knew he was moving to the outfield. (And the boldest among them suggested center field.) . . . He’d played only one full season at Class C, Joplin—but everybody knew he’d hit .383 there. (And home runs that never came down: they were still aloft over southern Missouri.) . . . Any normal nineteen-year-old would have to spend at least a year at finishing school—the Yankees’ top farm, Triple-A Kansas City. (But on that subject, Stengel was quotably coy: “Don’cha think he’d be safer spendin’ the summer with me in New York?”)

  Here was the replacement for Joe DiMaggio.

  Mantle, for his part, was cooperatively spectacular (or vice versa, from the writers’ point of view). He’d step into the cage (righty, lefty, didn’t seem to matter), pull his cap down over his blond brush cut, take a stance that was natural, balanced, relaxed—and then just crush the ball . . . over the field, over the stands, off the training ground. They disappeared! These were not the fierce, slashing line drives that DiMaggio was wont to hit. No, they were huge, soaring grandiosities—astonishing in their excess.

  Same way in the outfield, under a fly ball . . . well, no, take it back: he wasn’t under any fly ball. A fly ball would be dropping, when young Mantle, knees pumping up and down in a blur, would streak across the grass (at a pace none of those writers had ever seen on a ballfield) . . . to spear the ball before it hit the ground. Once again, this was nothing like the loping spare stride of DiMaggio, as he arrived to tarry, elegantly, at the place where the ball would come down. Mantle had no idea where the ball would come down. But he’d get there, with the raw muscular speed of those jet-cars on the Bonneville Flats.

  Here was the baseball star for the age of tail fins and the V-8.

  DiMag? . . . He hadn’t hit a solid line drive yet.

  He was also heartily sick of the stink about Mantle from the moment he arrived. Seemed like that was all he heard from the writers: What about the kid? . . . Joe! You think Mickey could play center field?

  Actually, they all seemed to have three questions—not one of which he cared to discuss:

  What about Mickey? . . .

  Does anything hurt, Joe? . . . and:

  Hey, Joe! How you doin’ with the wife?

  That’s what they mostly wrote about DiMag. It turned out, Dorothy Arnold wasn’t all that busy in Hollywood. She turned up in Phoenix, to watch the Yankees train. The Yankee writers might have given Joe a pass on that story—but not while they were getting scooped in papers across the country . . . .

  DiMag Hints

  Reconciliation

  Ex-Wife Is Good Friend

  He Tells Louella

  (By Louella Parsons)

  “ . . . I telephoned Joe, who is a good friend, to ask him if he and Dorothy were planning to reconcile and marry.

  “Not on this visit,” Joe said, “but there is a strong possibility that there may be a reconciliation later.

  “Dorothy and I are still very good friends. She will bring our son to visit with me in New York this summer, and it is very possible we may remarry then. However, it is a little premature to discuss this matter now.”

  The two people who have worked ceaselessly to bring them back together are their very close friends, Mr. and Mrs. Lou Costello.

  No wonder Joe decided he was news for all the wrong reasons—and he ought to make some news of his own. It was still early in the training camp—nighttime, at the hotel in Phoenix. Joe and Georgie Solotaire had knocked back a few belts apiece. They saw Benny Epstein, of the Mirror, in the lobby. They grabbed Ben and a guy who was with him—Jack Orr, from a little paper called The Compass. Then, they rounded up Jim Dawson from the Times—to give the story heft in New York. They didn’t call any other reporters. That might have alerted Joe Trimble from the News. DiMag would have eaten dirt before he gave Trimble a story. Screwing Trimble was what made this such a good idea . . . well, it seemed like a good idea. Dago and Georgie took the writers off to a room—and made news:

  This, said DiMaggio, will be my last year.

  He might as well have dropped a bomb on Times Square, the way those papers ran with the story. And the rest of the writers (Joe had shafted eight metropolitan dailies) were al
l rattled by “rockets” from the home office—telegrams or phone calls: What the hell’s going on out there? They followed up like they’d been goosed with a cattle prod.

  Weiss was wakened in his room at dawn. He didn’t know a thing about it—except that he didn’t like it: the biggest draw in the country was gonna take his marbles and go home? “DiMaggio has not discussed this with any official of the club,” Weiss said. “We regret to hear anything like this, and we hope he will have the sort of season that will cause him to change his mind.”

  Stengel was pinned at breakfast—he knew nothin’ from no one: “What am I supposed to do, get a gun and make him play? I don’t own him.”

  But Stengel wasn’t altogether displeased. He was tired of playing hostage to the Big Fella’s moods. And he’d seen a center fielder—his center fielder—under that blond brush cut. Now, Stengel took Mantle aside in the dugout for a fatherly chat:

  “Kid, you wanna play in the major leagues?”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy replied.

  “Well, do yourself a favor. You see that fella out in center field there?”

  “You mean DiMaggio?”

  “Yeah,” said the Perfesser. “You go out and have him teach you how to play that position. Because you’ll never be a shortstop.”