Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America

by David Halberstam

  He did not try to be a flake. He was a flake. The Boston sportswriters were calling him Mickey, and he announced that he wanted to be called Lefty because he thought and felt like a Lefty. He sang at local nightclubs and told writers he would rather be a singer than a pitcher. Having been poor all his life, he loved to throw money around now that he was making a big-league salary, albeit a very small one. Everywhere he went he bought new suits and new shoes. “I led the league,” he once said of that rookie year, “in stolen hotel towels and buying suits.” He bought shirts and wore them only once. He often left clothes behind in hotels. “Mickey,” said his roommate Mel Parnell, “half the bellhops in the hotels in the American League are going around wearing your clothes.” “That’s just fine, Mel,” he answered, “let’s go out and buy a new suit.” He also seemed on his way to setting records in food consumption. He would go into the dining car on the train, eat one dinner, then order another. One day Tom Dowd, the road secretary, caught him doing it. “All right, McDermott, that meal’s on you,” Dowd said. “Why, because Tom Yawkey can’t afford it?” McDermott said. “No, kid, because you just had the biggest dinner of anyone on the team an hour ago,” Dowd replied.

  His first few starts were impressive. Early in the season he had talked with the great Hal Newhouser. “Harold,” he had asked, “when am I going to learn?” “Someday you’re going to walk out on that mound and it’s going to feel like you own it,” Newhouser had answered. That seemed to be happening now. Suddenly a team that had been surviving with two pitchers had a third starter, one that batters feared. He dominated almost every game he was in. His control was better than expected. On July 5, at the lowest point in the season for the Red Sox, now twelve games out, McDermott started for Boston. He allowed the Yankees only four hits, struck out seven, and won 4-2. It was his third victory in four decisions (the defeat being the game in which DiMaggio had beaten him in Boston), and his power seemed to promise more for the future. On the last day of July, he shut out Cleveland 3-0. It was his fifth victory in seven starts. The Boston writers were ecstatic, BEST BOSTON ROOKIE SINCE DAVE FERRISS, said one headline. There were comparisons with other great pitchers of the past and how they had fared at a comparable moment in their careers (Lefty Gomez at nineteen had been 2-5, Hal Newhouser at nineteen had been 9-9, Bob Feller at seventeen, 5-4). But even with McDermott’s victory, the Boston players left New York with a feeling that any vestige of luck had deserted them.

  Dominic DiMaggio thought that, given the way the Yankees were playing, it would take 98 games to win the pennant. That meant that the Red Sox for the rest of the season would have to be 63-20, a record of over .750, as close to perfection as one could imagine for baseball. Actually, The Little Professor, as DiMaggio was called by sportswriters because he wore glasses, was slightly off—it would not require 98 games to win the pennant; it required only 97.

  In those darkest days Ted Williams kept saying they were a hot-weather team and he was right: Boston was a team of good hitters, and by the middle of the summer the other teams’ pitchers had worn down. In the vernacular, they lost a yard or two on their fastballs. That helped the hitters, but it was a condition to which the Boston pitchers were not immune. Catching the Yankees appeared at that moment an impossible task.

  It was Dominic DiMaggio, as much as anyone, who started the Red Sox comeback. He was probably the most underrated baseball player of his day, in part because of his size—he was smaller than most outfielders, and he hit with less power—in part because he wore glasses, and mostly because he played in the shadow of his brother Joe, and also that of Ted Williams. But he became one of the premier center fielders of his day. He was chosen in eight All-Star Games and played in seven (missing one because of injuries). In the American League only his brother Joe was as good a defensive outfielder, for Dominic DiMaggio played center field like an infielder. He charged balls fearlessly, holding runners back from extra bases. He had speed and range and the special DiMaggio knack of anticipating the play, to get an exceptional jump on a ball. He was a good hitter, perhaps not a great one, but he studied pitchers almost as closely as Williams did. He knew that his job was to get on base, and he was probably the best lead-off hitter in the American League. He was an unusually intelligent man who could easily have run a baseball team, and he went on to become a remarkable financial success after his playing days were over. He did this not, as often happens, by cashing in on his name, but rather by starting a second career as the owner of a plastics manufacturing company in New England.

  There was about Dominic a sense that he was different, more serious than other players. It was not just the glasses, which made him look different, almost scholarly, it was his demeanor, his language, his comportment. Once he was called out on strikes on what he clearly thought was a bad pitch. He turned to the umpire in rage, stared at him, walked angrily back to the bench, and then, poised on the top step, yelled, “I have never witnessed such incompetence in all my life.”

  The Yankees were aware of Dominic’s value to the Red Sox. They believed they had to keep him off the bases. Not only was he a good contact hitter and a good base runner, but Johnny Pesky hit right behind him in the number-two slot. Pesky was a much better hitter with men on base, and was one of the best hit-and-run men in the league. If Dominic got on, the Yankee pitchers believed, it guaranteed that Ted Williams would come up with men in scoring position. Then they would face the choice of having to walk him and risk an even bigger inning, or pitching to him and risking several runs.

  Even while the Red Sox were losing in June, Dominic DiMaggio had already hit in 8 straight games. He was to hit in 26 more games, for a total of 34, before his streak ended on August 9. That remains a Red Sox record. More important, it helped turn a sagging team around. He would get on base, Pesky would move him around, and Williams, Junior Stephens, and Doerr would bring them home.

  Dominic was the youngest and smallest of the DiMaggios. By the time he passed adolescence, it had become acceptable within the DiMaggio family to be a professional baseball player. Both Joe and Vince were playing professional ball, and Giuseppe DiMaggio had not only changed his mind about a career in baseball, he positively basked in Joe’s fame. “And when are you going to play baseball?” Giuseppe asked Dominic when he was still in high school. The old world had finally accepted the mores of the new one.

  The boys’ mother, Rosalie DiMaggio, her youngest son was sure, was the real engine in the family’s drive for success and a better life. Giuseppe DiMaggio was a good man, a hard worker, but he would have been content with his life in the Old World. He was a man who accepted what was around him. She did not. She was the one who pushed her husband, first to move to the small fishing village of Martinez in the Bay area, and then to San Francisco; once in San Francisco, she pushed to find better houses in better neighborhoods with access to better schools. Schools were important, for she had been a schoolteacher in the old country. It was understood that the DiMaggio men of the next generation were to be more than fishermen. That was what all the sacrifice was for.

  However, the fame that came to engulf her children somewhat perplexed Rosalie DiMaggio. She was pleased that they did well, but it was more important to her that they were respected as men, not just as players. She was, thought Dominic DiMaggio, a wonderful old-fashioned woman of immense strength, yet she never raised her voice. She was guided by an unshakable religious faith. She told her children stories from the Bible, all with a proverb, all with a purpose. She constantly set standards of behavior that they were to live up to.

  When Dominic was a newsboy, he once found a roll of crisp new bills worth thirty-five dollars. There was no wallet, and no way to return it. Dominic brought it home, somewhat pleased with himself. But his mother did not share in his pleasure. “Dominic, I feel badly about this,” she said. Dominic asked why. “I feel badly for the man who lost it—it is surely his week’s pay.” The lesson was clear: There was nothing else they could do, no way to return the money to t
he rightful owner, but there was to be no pleasure in this small windfall.

  Dominic was the runt of the family. He was always eager to prove that he was as strong as his older brothers. He worked hard on the fishing boat, claiming that he liked it in order to show that his size was not a problem. Joe, by contrast, hated the boat, hated even the smell of fish, and he made no secret about it. At Galileo High School, Dominic did not play until his last year, and he batted ninth. He hit .400, but had not even played enough to get his full varsity black “G”; instead, he got the lesser “G” in a scroll, which he did not choose to wear. He was still small—five feet seven and 135 pounds—and a professional career seemed unlikely. But he liked the game and there were the footsteps of his two brothers in which to follow. So after graduation he kept playing, for the Presidio-Monterey Army team. He played shortstop and qualified for his availability by working as a lifeguard for the army.

  He began to grow bigger and stronger and took a job with the Simmons Bed Company as a laborer. There he clamped springs onto mattresses. He was paid 40 cents an hour—which meant he was drawing a check of $19.20 for 48 hours of work. He also played for the Simmons semipro team on Sunday. He often thought about a professional-baseball career, and decided that what he wanted was just one season in the major leagues. That would be enough to prove he could do whatever he wanted. In those days the Cincinnati Reds and the San Francisco Seals, an independently owned unaffiliated Pacific Coast team, held an annual joint tryout for local boys. They alternated which team got first pick each year, and in 1937, when Dominic was just twenty, he decided to go to the camp. Being a dutiful son, he talked it over with both parents, and he went to his boss and explained about the tryout: The camp would last about two weeks. His boss said that his job would be waiting if he did not get a contract.

  There were 143 kids at the tryout, but Dom DiMaggio was the best player there. The Seals decided to sign him. Dom thought of himself as an infielder, but Charlie Graham, who was the principal owner of the Seals, took one look at him and said, “With those glasses we better get him in the outfield.” Graham’s fear, Dominic realized, was that a sharp infield hit might take a bad bounce and break his glasses.

  Because neither of his parents spoke English, his older brother Tom negotiated the contract. Tom DiMaggio wanted to protect his younger brother, and was very tough with the Seals. Above all he did not want him playing in Tucson in the terrible Arizona heat, as Vince had done. “You can’t send him out to Tucson,” Tom said. “He’s so small and it’s so hot there, you’ll have to wipe him up with a blotter.”

  The real burden was not so much Dom’s size, but the fact that he wore glasses. In that pre-contact lens era, wearing glasses was unthinkable. Hitters had to see, and they had to have great vision; if a player wore glasses, it was a sign that something more than just eyesight was missing. “Four-eyes” the schoolyard taunt went. It was about manhood as well; perhaps he was not really tough enough to play in a man’s game. Occasionally a pitcher—pitchers did not hit—was allowed to wear glasses. Dominic DiMaggio could not, however, remember any other regular ballplayer who wore glasses at the time he broke in.

  But Dominic had great confidence in himself; he knew he could see the ball and make contact. He was fortunate in his first season because Lefty O’Doul, who had managed his brother, was still managing the Seals. He was the best hitting instructor that Dominic ever saw. O’Doul recognized both the talent and the flaws in this young player. He saw power in the chest and arms, and he worked hard in spring training to improve Dominic’s swing, above all to keep him from lunging at the ball. DiMaggio, self-conscious about his lack of size, lunged because it seemed to promise greater power. O’Doul showed him that power was dissipated that way. He was to wait for the pitch and then swing, turning his hips into the ball, not lunge with his body. O’Doul was a patient teacher with a good eye. He would stand for hours behind the tiny batting cage they used in those days, armed with only a fungo stick, which was an unusually long bat. When DiMaggio moved his body, O’Doul would jab the fungo stick in his butt as sharply as he could.

  One day Joe DiMaggio, who was already a star with the Yankees, dropped by the Seals camp and took some batting practice. Someone had an early movie camera and photographed both Joe and Dominic at bat. It was, thought Dominic years later, quite possibly the first use of the camera as a teaching vehicle in baseball, and it was an unusually dramatic one. When Joe was at bat, there was everything O’Doul had been preaching: The bat was cocked, and his entire body was still, as if frozen. The ball arrived, and Joe swung at it. His head did not move more than an inch, and the rest of his body did not move at all—except for his hips as they went into the ball. Thus his whole body was channeled into the swing.

  Then there was the movie sequence with Dominic: As he waited for the pitch, his shoulders moved, the trunk of his body moved, and, worst of all, his head moved forward twelve inches. All the things O’Doul had said were true: It was a body unfocused. So Dominic paid attention. For a time his hitting got worse, because he was undoing what he knew and trying something different. But a few weeks later they were playing in a small mining town near Monterey, and Dominic was taking batting practice. Suddenly he was hitting balls over the fence, and he knew it had finally worked for him. Without the help from O’Doul, he would probably not have made the major leagues, he later decided.

  Dominic DiMaggio hit .306 in his first season. But very early on the comparisons with Joe began. A sportswriter named Tom Laird, who wrote for the San Francisco Daily News, often praised Joe DiMaggio as the greatest player he had ever seen, and wrote that Dominic DiMaggio was a poor player cashing in on Joe’s name. Nothing had ever stung Dominic more, and nothing made him more determined to make the major leagues. (Among those who concurred with Laird was Joe DiMaggio. He told the Boston sportswriters in Dominic’s rookie year that at first he had thought the same thing. Only when he saw his younger brother play was he converted.)

  By his third year, 1939, Dominic hit .361 and became the league’s most-valuable hitter. The next year, 1940, he was in the major leagues and hit .301.

  For a long time the comparisons with his brother remained difficult. He met every challenge, overcame the problem of his size, showed that glasses were not a problem. Dom was a consistent .300 hitter, yet he was always somehow made to seem lacking in comparison with Joe DiMaggio. For a time, when he was in the minor leagues, it spurred him and made him work harder. Then, when he arrived in the major leagues and still did not get the recognition he felt he deserved, he became bitter. But gradually he overcame it. The war years helped. In the service he learned that there was a great deal more to life than baseball, and slowly he learned to ignore other people’s expectations. That was his greatest victory—to accept his own talents and limitations and to live happily with them.

  In July 1949 his hitting streak did not surprise Dominic DiMaggio. He knew that he was, above all else, consistent. He had two other streaks, both of 27 games, and he knew that his final batting average was usually between .285 and .305. (One reason he lost about ten points a year on his average was that the Red Sox catchers were unusually slow and batted in front of him. When one of them was on base, it cost him an infield hit from time to time.) He knew that he needed his hits earlier in the season because the length of the season and the heat wore him out. He might be hitting .330 in mid-July, but slowly his weight would drop, and then so did his batting average. In those long hot summers, his batting average always came down 20 or 30 points.

  That summer he had been hitting about .325 when the streak began. He was on base in every game at a time when many Red Sox players had lost their concentration and come apart. He brought back the excitement that helped bring them alive. When it was over he was hitting .340 and Boston was no longer twelve games out of first place. The Red Sox were playing well; the pitching was improving; and they were sneaking back into the pennant race.

  Then in August, Boston became a hot team. Parn
ell was pitching his best baseball of the year. Kinder was in the midst of a prolonged winning streak. Kramer, virtually useless until then, was beginning to pitch well, and Stobbs pitched regularly and started winning.

  Ted Williams was enormously confident. He studied the box scores every day, and he noted that the Yankee pitchers were struggling just a little. Raschi was on a losing streak. Reynolds was not finishing his games. They were worn thin, Williams thought. He was not surprised. Even when the Red Sox had been ten games out, Williams was sure that they would make a run at the Yankees. There was just too much talent on the Boston team not to. Boston was a hitter’s team, not a pitcher’s team, and July and August belonged to the hitters. Playing constantly in hot, muggy weather became a test of the mind over an unwilling, sluggish body. Sometimes on those suffocating days Williams would feel worn down. After all, he was not relaxing in the dugout—he was on base more than half the time, and that was tiring. Then he would look at the opposing pitcher. It is hard on me, he thought, but he’s the one really paying for it. The heat, he knew, would disappear for him in the sheer pleasure of baseball.

  On August 8, the Yankees went into Fenway for a three-game series. Boston was six and a half out. The Red Sox badly needed to win at least two: That would make it five and a half out, instead of seven and a half out if the Yankees won two. In the first game it was Kinder against Raschi. Dominic DiMaggio, who had hit in 34 games going in, was stopped by Raschi in the first game. He made five trips to the plate and the last time up he was sure he had a hit. He lined a pitch hard, right past Raschi’s ear, and as he broke out of the batter’s box he thought, I’ve got it. But the ball kept carrying until finally it reached his brother in center field. He had hit it too hard. After the game one of the New York writers suggested to Joe DiMaggio that he had made a good catch, but he dissented. “If I hadn’t caught it, the ball would have hit me right between the eyes.” Dominic DiMaggio’s streak was over.