56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports

by Kennedy, Kostya

  Gomez was at the Conn fight too, and so was McCarthy somewhere. The manager felt partial to Conn, and not, he said with a grin, just because he was Irish. For many people Conn had the underdog’s charm. “Louis has been a great champion, but it’s time for someone else to begin getting the gravy,” McCarthy said.

  Louis made it through the 12th and even after the bell the crowd scarcely quieted. The outcome of the match, the changing of the belt, felt inevitable. When the 13th round began all Conn had to do was to jab a little and dodge, stay away from Louis, just as the men in his corner were telling him to. Three rounds of staying upright and the heavyweight title would be his. But Conn instead brought the fight straight to the champ, wanting a knockout and believing, after the way he had just shaken Louis, that he had the power to get one. For Billy Conn this was a matter of pride. He stood in there and traded punch after punch with Louis. The 13th round was like a brawl. Conn was full of energy and completely unbowed; Louis, the great champion, fought back. DiMaggio could not take his eyes off what was happening.

  And then in the final stages of the round Louis delivered: suddenly, precisely and brutally. He hit Conn with a hard right to the jaw. He caught him once on the ear. Conn grew unsteady on his feet and his body angled forward into Louis. That quickly, the fight had changed. Now it was Louis who was zeroing in. It was almost like seeing a man rise from the dead. Toots grew suddenly quiet and unusually stiff and the smile ran away from his heavy face. Now Louis connected once and then again, to Conn’s belly and to his chest, and then came the short hard righthand blow that landed on the back of Conn’s skull and sent him to the ground. Louis went to his corner. Conn was unable to get to his feet quickly enough. When he was counted out there were two seconds left in the 13th round and Joe Louis was still the heavyweight champion of the world.

  Louis walked past Conn at his stool. “I knew you’d screw it up, you crazy Mick,” said Louis. “The title was yours.” He was saying it with a kind of sympathy and bewilderment; Louis liked Billy Conn. Later Conn, still his endearing self, would say of his failed strategy, “What’s the use of being Irish if you can’t be thick?”

  The fight stayed with DiMaggio, as it did with McCarthy, powerful and rankling; the result did not seem in any way amusing to them. How could anyone be so daft as to do what Conn had done? How could anyone take a certain victory and throw it away? DiMaggio thought too about Louis and how when the match had been the hardest, Louis had been his best. That was a thing that great men, great athletes, did.

  But in his apartment that night as he uncuffed his sleeves and slipped off his belt in the yellow light of the hallway outside the bedroom, and as he glanced in at Dorothy, five months pregnant and asleep on her side, something else came into DiMaggio’s mind. When he had entered the Polo Grounds, and first been noticed, the people around him had broken into sustained and exuberant cheers, all 54,486 standing and applauding it seemed. Then there were suddenly police officers surrounding him, helping him move through the crowd, keeping the groping fans away. He had not anticipated this. It had never crossed DiMaggio’s mind that he would inspire such a reaction, or anything beyond the usual and moderate fuss. DiMaggio had at once felt the blood rush to his face and a little flip in his stomach and then the stoniness rise inside him. He wondered if anything were now expected of him. He raised his hands in acknowledgment and the noise of the people in the Polo Grounds grew louder still. It was as if DiMaggio were at Yankee Stadium having just hit a home run to win a game. But all he was doing was walking to his seat, a spectator on a night that belonged to other men.

  It was only later, here now in the narrow apartment hall, at about the same time that Louis was being mobbed at his Harlem hotel and that Conn was making off with his sweet colleen, that the realizations came to DiMaggio. That in these times, doing what he was doing at the ballpark, he was a man on the minds of others, and that for a charged-up crowd at a boxing match, the joy of the moment was plain: Joe DiMaggio, with his 31-game hitting streak, was among them.

  The View From Here

  Everybody Needs A Little Luck

  Over the decades, as DiMaggio’s streak has gone unbroken and unassailed, some fidgety historians have sought to explain away, or at least to bring into more natural order, an accomplishment so phenomenally singular that the eminent evolutionary biologist and baseball fan Stephen Jay Gould called it “the most extraordinary thing that ever happened in American sports.” How could anyone unfurl a hitting streak that extends so extravagantly past all others?

  There is, however, meager grist for the skeptics, and scant rationale to insert the “Yeah, but. . .” that often attaches itself to monumental statistical achievement. And so it is that the flukishness and the minor ambiguity of the base hit that DiMaggio got in Game 30 of the streak—that bad-hop ground ball to Luke Appling that Dan Daniel fretted over before officially ruling it a single—has been occasionally brought into question. Did DiMaggio really deserve a hit in that game? Or should Appling have been given an error and the streak potentially stopped? One relatively recent and nicely synthesized version of the argument that Appling may have committed an error appeared in the October, 2007, issue of the Canadian magazine, The Walrus, and was written by David Robbeson. The issues raised in that essay were subsequently picked up and debated in various news outlets—the topic earned a spot on ABC news for one—and a few of the baseball wonks I talked with made mention of the piece. People will always gather to watch a building torn down.

  The case for an Appling error essentially boils down to two separate but related questions: Did the baseball truly take a bad hop or was it simply, as Robbeson writes, “adjudged bad by Dan Daniel”? More intriguingly: Was Daniel consciously generous in awarding DiMaggio a hit—that is, was the official scorer a willing and crucial conspirator in keeping the streak alive?

  To the first point: Let’s look at some of the accounts of the play as written by eyewitnesses other than Daniel that appeared on the evening or morning after the game. The New York Daily News called it, “a lucky, bad hop single.” The New York Times wrote that “a ground ball that was labeled an easy out in the seventh suddenly took a bad hop [and] hit Luke Appling on the shoulder.” The New York Post observed that DiMaggio “kept his hitting streak alive on a grounder that took a bad bounce in front of Appling.” The Journal American said that DiMaggio, “led off the seventh with a ground ball that took a bad hop over Appling’s shoulder.” And, the paper added: “If DiMag has a sense of gratitude he will search out the pebble that caused that hop and have it stuffed and mounted.”

  Other, independent accounts describe the play in much the same way and at least one observed that the bounce was so sharp and unexpected that the baseball hit Appling in the face.

  No one who was at the game and reported on it suggested that the ball took anything but an unusual and difficult-to-handle hop. Is it possible that after the game Daniel—whose piece in the World-Telegram said that the ball, “took a bad hop over Luke Appling’s left shoulder”—went around the press area and as his competitors on the Yankees beat banged out their stories on deadline cajoled each one of them to say that there was a bad hop when there was not? Sure, it’s possible. But highly implausible.

  The more titillating suggestion is that Daniel was biased toward DiMaggio and thus awarded a hit where an objective observer would have determined that the play was an error. Like many reporters at the time Daniel got treated well—“taken care of”—by the Yankees who, in the custom of the day, paid for many of his and other writers’ expenses. He was also on friendly terms with DiMaggio, just as most reporters were with many players. Daniel, though, was not a DiMaggio chum or a night-out-at-Toots’s pal, as was a writer such as Jimmy Cannon (who was not among those who covered the Appling game). It is not at all evident that Daniel was any closer to DiMaggio than he was to other Yankee players or even, say, to Earle Combs the Yankees first base coach whose record DiMaggio was chasing. Yet the question is: Are those relati
onships, with the Yankees and with DiMaggio, enough to suspect Daniel of some complicity?

  Daniel was 51 years old in the summer of 1941 and he had been covering baseball for more than three decades. He typically worked games dressed to the hilt—full suit, vest buttoned snugly, handkerchief in his breast pocket, the most meticulously shined shoes in the house. He wore, as the writer Ray Robinson recalled for me, “everything but a homburg.” Daniel was then the president of the New York chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association and he regarded baseball and his role in it with a kind of sanctimoniousness. He took his assignment as an official scorer very, very seriously. For Daniel the history of the Yankees and of baseball, with all its gorgeous numbers, was very much a history of his own life; the integrity of the game occupied a central place in Daniel’s sense of self. He had covered Ruth and Gehrig and the hallowed manager Miller Huggins, and had relationships with them all. He had also covered and known for many years Combs and Roger Peckinpaugh, the venerated former Yankee players whose streaks DiMaggio would break by hitting in a 30th consecutive game. Is it possible that Daniel would choose to at once undermine the Yankee tradition he held in such august light, and to also diminish his own authority at the ballpark, the very thing that defined him, by making an intentionally bogus call at a high-profile moment? Sure, it’s possible. But not at all likely.1

  Indeed, rather than being eager to award barely deserved hits, Daniel at times appeared reluctant to call hits on questionable plays during the streak. About a week after the Appling grounder, Daniel ruled an error on a DiMaggio ground ball to Browns’ shortstop Johnny Berardino that might have been judged a hit, thus incurring gestures of displeasure from several Yankees and forcing DiMaggio to go to his final at bat to keep the streak alive. In a piece that appeared in the 1942 Baseball Record Book, Daniel maintained that he and all “scorers leaned backward in their determination to make the streaker earn every hit—and then some.”

  Even if we accept that the hop was indeed untrue and that Daniel’s motives were pure, a third question still arises: Did Daniel simply blow the call? Despite the wicked bounce should Appling have been able to recover and make the play? Other reporters didn’t seem to think so. This was at a time when baseball writers frequently took an official scorer to task if they disagreed with a judgment. Then, as now, such second-guessing was part of the sports pages’ regular fare. Yet no one attacked Daniel’s ruling in print. The nearest thing to a quibble came from the New York Sun which said that the play was a “close decision.” Not a wrong decision. Just a close one.2

  Was Daniel’s call consistent with what another scorer might have ruled? The sections of the 1941 Baseball Rule Book that relate to official scoring are full of vague, ambiguous and at times contradictory guidance, but one passage, a subsection of Rule 70, section 5, dictates that a base hit should be scored, “When a fair hit ball is partially or wholly stopped by a fielder in motion, but such player cannot recover himself in time to field the ball to first before the batsman reaches that base. . . .” Accounts of the play say that Appling was moving when he attempted to field the ball; that would call for a ruling of “hit.”

  The rule book has been made steadily more specific and explicit as it relates to official scoring and in 1955 a note was added that sets clearer parameters. Rule 10.05c instructs the scorer to rule a base hit, “When a batter reaches first base safely on a fair ball which takes an unnatural bounce so that a fielder cannot handle it with ordinary effort.” A note at the end of entry 10.05 decrees that, “In applying the above rules, always give the batter the benefit of the doubt.” Again, by both of those standards the Appling ball would have been ruled inarguably a hit.

  Would that ball be a base hit today? In an effort to get further clarity on what might go through a scorer’s mind, I spoke to Ivy McLemore, who has been an official scorer for more than 1,000 major league games, beginning in 1975. He works out of Houston. I did not tell McLemore that I was inquiring about a play that occurred during Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak, but merely described a hypothetical event, based on the numerous descriptions of the play. I said, “If a routine ground ball were hit to the shortstop and then took a bad hop that hit him in the shoulder, does that sound to you like a hit or an error?”

  McLemore did not hesitate. “That would be a hit,” he said, “because that play had an X factor and that has to be weighed in your decision. Funny plays like that must be accounted for.”

  “Would it matter to you who was fielding?” I asked. “Would it have any impact on your decision whether the shortstop were a Gold Glover as opposed to the league’s most stone-handed oaf?”

  “No,” said McLemore. “I just ask myself: ‘Was that a play that an average major leaguer would make with ordinary effort.’ If the answer is no, I score it a hit.”

  I also queried Michael Duca, a veteran scorer at San Francisco Giants’ and Oakland A’s games, and I described the play in exactly the same way. Duca also said that the ball “sounds like a hit.” While he agreed with McLemore that the skill level of the fielder would not impact how he scored the play, he said that the speed of the batter might. “A runner who can get down the line would be more likely to beat that long throw even if the shortstop was able to recover from the bad hop,” Duca said. “With a fast-moving runner I’d almost definitely have to rule it a hit.” DiMaggio had well-above-average speed. He was known for running as hard as he could on every play, regardless of the score or circumstances. In this case, in a close game and with his hitting streak on the line, it is hard to imagine that DiMaggio was coming down the first base line giving anything less than all he had.

  IT IS THE stature of DiMaggio’s achievement that has made the events of Game 30 worthy of inquiry. Imagine how often a highlight of the Appling play would be aired today. Upon closest inspection the ball seems to have been irrefutably a hit. But of course there is no way to know for sure. Certainly DiMaggio got a lucky break in that game, just as he did with his infield hit a day later—and just as he got an unlucky break when the White Sox’s Taffy Wright made the one-handed catch of his near home run in the eighth inning. But to view that good luck as any kind of diminishment or qualification of the validity of the streak is misguided, a captious complaint. As Stephen Jay Gould points out, “long streaks always are, and must be, a matter of extraordinary luck imposed upon great skill.”

  There’s scarcely a long streak that does not have points of minor controversy or luck. Pete Rose’s 44-game run in 1978 was sustained when he dropped down a bunt in Game 32 with two outs in the ninth inning and his team leading 7–2. George Sisler was awarded a hit (by his hometown scorer) in Game 40 of his 41-game streak on a ball that bounced off the shin of the Yankees’ second baseman. The Florida Marlins’ Luis Castillo had 18 infield hits during his 35-game streak in 2002. In Game 34 of Chase Utley’s 35-game streak with the Phillies in 2006 Utley was 0 for 4 in the eighth inning against St. Louis when he got on base on a slow roller to the Cardinals pitcher. The play was ruled a fielder’s choice before Phillies p.r. man Greg Casterioto, as he recalls, “went crazy yelling at the official scorer.” The ruling was then changed to a hit.

  In a more sweeping sort of “Yeah, but. . .” the Brewers’ Paul Molitor achieved his 39-game streak in 1987 entirely as a designated hitter and less than halfway through the streak was put permanently into the leadoff spot to help ensure more at bats. Wee Willie Keeler’s 44-game run in 1897? Forget it. Keeler played at a time when foul balls (except foul bunts and foul tips) were not counted as strikes, an incalculable advantage for the hitter. Even Lou Gehrig’s great consecutive-games-played streak was propped up in 1934 when, suffering from lumbago, Gehrig batted once as the leadoff batter—he singled, of course, being Lou Gehrig—and then came out of the game.

  And so on, and so on, and so on. The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.

  To put what DiMaggio achieved in 1941 into further perspective, let’s imagine for the moment that he was indeed stopped in Game 30. Let’s als
o imagine—and this, as we’ll see, is far less of a stretch—that he got a base hit in the game in which the streak actually ended. DiMaggio went on to hit safely in 16 straight games after that streak-snapping night. So if as a lark we apply those two “what ifs,” DiMaggio in ’41 would have wound up with a 29-game hitting streak and then, immediately afterward, a 43-game streak, the latter still longer than any other hitting streak in the 109-year history of the American League.

  ________

  1 One strange tactic used to advance the theory that Daniel may have covered up for an Appling miscue draws on fielding statistics. Appling committed 672 errors over the course of his 2,359 career games, an average of one error every 3.51 games. Thus, some among the short-sighted suggest that the fact that Appling was charged with but a single error in the 12 games that the White Sox and Yankees played during the streak implies that something was up—that Daniel, with the hitting streak on his brain, was disposed to award hits over errors. (“Appling’s defence during the streak was adjudged three times more efficient than over the course of his career,” the Walrus essay intoned.) This argument, either willfully or naively, ignores a fundamental rule of probability: the decreased reliability of a small (in this case minuscule) sample size. Twelve games out of 2,359 mean nothing; they are statistically insignificant. Actually, over the course of that many games, there are hundreds of one-error-in-12-games samples, just as if you tossed a coin 2,359 times you would get many, many 12-toss sequences in which only two heads rather than the expected six came up. That’s no conspiracy, that’s randomness. Should we ascribe to dark forces the fact that in 1940 and ’41 Appling played 35 errorless games against the Detroit Tigers, 25% more than the 28 errorless games he played against the St. Louis Browns? Is some sorcerer behind the fact that Appling closed the ’41 season with just one error in his final 23 games (only one of which, for the record, was played against the Yankees)? Silly. Finally, even citing 12 games as a basis is a gross misrepresentation. Three of those games were played in New York at the very start of the streak when it was not a streak at all, that is, when there would be no reason to lean DiMaggio’s way on a close call. Six of the other nine games were played in Chicago where neither Daniel nor any other New Yorker worked as the official scorer. So in fact there were just three mid-streak games in which Appling played and that Daniel scored. To use these fielding statistics as evidence of Daniel’s reluctance to charge an error, or for that matter as evidence of anything at all, is simply false. Herrings have rarely been redder.