The reporters adored him, everyone did. One year, after signing a contract, Gomez pledged to donate part of his salary to an “asylum for southpaws,” or, better yet, “to a home for astigmatic writers.” It was Gomez who said of the stocky Charlie Keller, with his squarish head and dark eyes, that no scout had discovered him but rather that the famous exotic animal collector Frank Buck “had brought him back alive.” (For the rest of his career, Keller never shook the nickname King Kong.) Gomez had been known to stop, mid-windup, to gaze at an airplane flying overhead. He scooped up caps that fans tossed onto the field and kept them to wear himself. He needled Lou Gehrig even into Gehrig’s awful, final months, and Gehrig, you could tell by his smile, was grateful for it. Vernon Gomez, born in Rodeo, Calif., the son of an Irishwoman and a Spanish cowhand, married a movie starlet—the former June O’Dea before she gave up her career for married life. He named their first daughter Vernona.
Gomez, besides being nimble with a joke, was also exceptionally handy. One day near the end of the 1940 season DiMaggio found something wrong with his sunglasses. He brought them to Gomez in the dugout. “Think you can fix ’em, Lefty?” Sure enough after some fiddling Gomez had straightened them out. “That’s baseball for you,” Lefty griped good-naturedly as he handed the sunglasses back to Joe. “You start out being a great lefthanded pitcher and wind up your career being a valet to a lousy outfielder.”
OVER THE YEARS a change came gradually and naturally to the friendship of Lefty and Joe, even as their relationship deepened to include their wives and occasional day-trips into the country. DiMaggio began flowering as a superstar while Gomez’s career began to wilt. Gomez took to referring to DiMaggio as “the captain” of their hotel room, the one who set the night’s agenda. Lefty realized that now he needed Joe even more than Joe needed him. In 1940, bothered by injuries to his wrist and arm as well as a chronically aching back, Gomez won just three games and for the first time in the eight-year history of the All-Star game was not chosen for the American League team. The Yankees believed they had younger and better pitchers to take his place, and when the season ended they let it be known that they planned to trade Gomez or sell him to another club. But on a late December day, Christmas in the air, Lefty showed up at Ed Barrow’s office at Yankee Stadium and wheedled and cajoled and charmed and vowed and got himself a reprieve: one more year.
Gomez and DiMaggio knew that another lousy season would end the pitcher’s Yankees career and it seemed to their teammates that DiMaggio played with an added intensity on the days that Gomez pitched in 1941—and that Gomez recognized that effort and responded. DiMaggio is good for Gomez, is how the rookie first baseman Johnny Sturm saw it. Gomez began warming up earlier and more deliberately before his starts. He no longer threw near to 100 mph, but he pitched more purposefully, more carefully. Still, at 32, he had not shed his affection for whimsy. In one of Rizzuto’s first games—an exhibition against the Dodgers at a packed Ebbets Field—Lefty suddenly called the rookie shortstop to the mound in the middle of an inning. “How do you like being with the Yankees?” Gomez asked.
“Fine, I think it’s great,” Rizzuto said.
“Are your mother and father here today?”
“Yes, they’re here,” said Rizzuto, quizzically.
“Well just stand here,” Lefty said. “I want to talk to you a little while. Just think: Your parents can go home tonight and say that 40,000 people saw their little boy talking to the great Gomez.”
In Gomez’s five starts over the course of DiMaggio’s hitting streak the Yankees had not lost. Lefty was beginning a resurgence that would lead him to go 15–5, his best record in seven years. Like all of his teammates, and more than most of them, Gomez felt the excitement of the hitting streak. Now, with Joe trying to make it 36 in a row, Lefty was pitching against the Browns’ Bob Muncrief, a 6′ 2″ 190-pound righthander in his first full season in the major leagues. Muncrief was 25 years old and relied on a sharp, biting curveball—a kind of slider, really—as his out pitch.
DiMaggio grounded harmlessly to third base in the first inning and popped up a ball backward and into the glove of the St. Louis catcher Rick Ferrell in the third. It was a Tuesday afternoon and each time that DiMaggio came to the plate the Yankee Stadium crowd leaned forward and called out to him. All right Joe! Let’s get one off this bum. Before the game DiMaggio had been summoned onto the field and given a good luck gift—a small, smiling Buddha—from the Young Yankees, a team of Chinese boys who played in downtown Manhattan. The boys had stood around DiMaggio, seven of them, in their button-up uniforms and striped socks and looked at him in awe.
He thought he had his hit in the fifth inning, and so did just about everyone in the park. The high drive off DiMaggio’s bat flew to the deepest part of the Stadium, into left centerfield and more than 450 feet from home plate, a triple by the looks of it. But after a long and frenzied gallop, the fine fielding St. Louis leftfielder Roy Cullenbine got to the ball and reached over his shoulder to glove it. Henrich, on first base at the beginning of the play, was around third when Cullenbine made the catch. The Browns easily doubled him up.
Now, two innings later, DiMaggio stood in centerfield. Before each pitch he raised his right hand and shielded his eyes as he looked toward home plate. The sun was falling and DiMaggio knew that the time of the game was approaching when hitting became more difficult. Shadows would cloak the batters while the pitcher remained in light. He would have one more crack at Muncrief, he thought.
In the outfield DiMaggio repositioned himself before each batter and his doing so served as an unspoken cue. Henrich would look over from rightfield and Keller from left and by seeing where DiMaggio stood, they understood how to position themselves too. He felt fidgety. In six innings just one fly ball had come his way. Chances were he wouldn’t be up at bat again for a while. Mainly, he wanted a cigarette. He wanted Gomez to wrap up another inning so that he could put down his glove and go into the dugout and then disappear into the tunnel to that cavernous underbelly of the stadium and smoke there, out of sight of anyone. A few moments to himself. This wasn’t the first time during the hitting streak that DiMaggio had stood in the outfield and thought about having a smoke.
Gomez was pitching well—the Yanks led 4–0 after six—and then with the Yankees batting in the seventh inning an unlikely event occurred. Lefty hit a single. (“I have only one weakness: a pitched ball,” he liked to say of his batting prowess. Or, “I’m a good .150 hitter in any league, and I don’t care who’s pitching.”) So delighted was Gomez with his base hit that when he reached first base he put out his hand to umpire Harry Geisel and Geisel shook it, sending ripples of laughter through the crowd and the Yankees dugout. Even McCarthy had to laugh at that. And Joe.
Now it was the eighth inning and the game seemed salted away. Henrich had just hit a two-run home run and the Yankees were ahead 6–0. There was nobody on base. As DiMaggio came to the plate the fans in the crowd began to chant, “We want a hit! We want a hit!” They knew that this would almost certainly be DiMaggio’s last at bat of the game.
Muncrief looked over and saw Browns manager Luke Sewell emerging from the first base dugout. Was he coming to take Muncrief out of the game? Sewell had been on the St. Louis job for just a couple of weeks and he had an ornery side. “Walk him,” Sewell said when he got out to Muncrief. The pitcher looked at his manager in surprise. “But, why?” Muncrief said.
“Because I don’t want this son of a bitch to get a base hit.”
“Skip, I’m not walking him,” said Muncrief.
“You don’t walk him, I’m going to take you out of the game.”
Bob Muncrief was the child of sharecroppers—the family had gotten through the Depression picking cotton on other people’s land for pennies a day. They lived in Madill, Okla., and they kept a couple of cows and a couple of pigs. When Bob had a chance out of high school to go to college on a basketball scholarship, he instead accepted an offer of $60 a month to play in the Texas Lea
gue. That was more money than he or his parents had ever seen. Each month he sent $45 home and lived off the rest. Bob Muncrief was not someone to take an opportunity for granted. He had once pitched against the great Dizzy Dean in an exhibition game down in San Antonio. Not just pitched against him, he beat him 2–1. Winning that game may have been what really got Muncrief noticed, got him called up to the big leagues. Now Muncrief wanted to be the pitcher who stopped DiMaggio’s streak—there was nothing in that moment that Muncrief wanted more—but he wanted to earn it, to set DiMaggio down fair and square one more time. Not to end things with a walk.
“You take me out of the game and I’ll go up there in front of everyone and apologize to DiMaggio. He doesn’t deserve this. Let me get him out, Skip.”
Sewell looked out to the bullpen. He didn’t have much there. A righty named Jack Kramer was ready to go, but he’d been getting knocked around. And who knew if Kramer would listen to Sewell either?
“Get him out then,” said Sewell, rankled, and went back to the dugout.
Muncrief looked in to the plate. Ferrell set up inside. Some pitchers said that this was the best way to pitch to DiMaggio. Others said to go low and away. Either one struck the other Yankees as hilarious; DiMaggio crushed inside pitches, pulling them into leftfield. Outside pitches he drilled to right center. The only safe way to pitch to DiMaggio, especially going the way that he was going now, was to not throw the ball at all.
Muncrief’s fastball did come inside, so far inside that it nicked DiMaggio’s bat. Foul ball. 0 and 1. Better not get hit with a pitch. DiMaggio thought. Then it’ll be over. The second pitch came inside too and DiMaggio let it go by. 1 and 1.
The crowd’s chanting had not stopped. “We want a hit! We want a hit!” DiMaggio stepped back and wiped sweat from his right eye. He adjusted his cap and shook his bat once and then he stood in, ready. Muncrief raised his leg—he used a high and powerful kick—and let the ball go. Again the pitch came onto the inside part of the plate, a curveball this time, and DiMaggio ripped into it, whistling the ball over the head of shortstop Johnny Berardino and into the outfield. Base hit. The crowd rose and cheered and clapped as if the Yankees had just turned a defeat into victory. On the top step of the dugout the Yankee players rattled the bats in the rack and thwacked one another on the back. DiMaggio, again, simply stood at first base. This guy, thought Rizzuto. I cannot believe this guy.
After the game, a 9–1 final, Sewell again spoke to young Bob Muncrief. “So why wouldn’t you walk him like I told you to?” the manager demanded.
And Muncrief said, “That would not have been fair to him, or to me. He is the greatest player I have ever seen.”
Chapter 16
Not His Alone
IN THE SHADE-COVERED seats behind the Yankees dugout the men had taken off their jackets, laid their hats upon their laps and rolled their shirtsleeves elbow high. The afternoon was warm and windless and a vendor called out, “Peanuts here, peee-nuts! Last chance for peanuts!” He was a teenaged boy in a white hat and a white shirt and white pants. This was to be his final walk through the weekday crowd, a last soliciting of the men in their ties and the women up front in their collared dresses and their brimmed hats—the players’ girlfriends and wives, DiMaggio’s Dorothy among them and leaning in.
Tommy Henrich, standing on the trodden grass before the dugout, could hear from the crowd a restless, anticipatory rumble. He looked at the bat in his hands. It was one of DiMaggio’s, still the same bat he’d borrowed a few weeks back, 36 ounces and 36 inches long, and still serving him so well. Already Henrich had homered in the game, his second long one in three days. He always could hit Elden Auker, the Browns starter today, a righthander with a submarine pitching style—his knuckles all but scraped the mound—that got so many of the other Yankee hitters out of sorts. I must be batting .600 against this guy, Henrich thought. There was one out in the bottom of the eighth inning and Red Rolfe stood on first base; the Yankees had a 3–1 lead. Henrich was coming up and DiMaggio, due to bat behind him, still did not have a hit in the game. His streak was at 37 in a row, and this seemed sure to be the Yankees last turn at bat.
What if I rip a line drive to Heffner or McQuinn, Henrich thought looking over the infield. What if they double Red off of first base? No one sized up situations on the field more instinctively than Henrich did. He was like Crosetti in that sense: smart, ceaselessly attentive and always deep into the game. A good and reliable Yankee, a McCarthy type. They turn a double play here and that’s it, Henrich thought. The Big Dago’s streak is done.
He admired DiMaggio, cherished him almost. It didn’t matter that DiMaggio barely ever spoke to Tommy beyond the few clipped and necessary exchanges; that was just the Dago’s immutable way. It didn’t matter to Henrich that not once in more than four seasons as teammates had he and Joe eaten a meal together. Henrich had never been around a ballplayer like DiMaggio, and what he admired went beyond the majesty of DiMaggio’s great and conspicuous moments at the bat or in the far regions of centerfield.
Henrich saw the way that DiMaggio grinded through the game each day, a foot soldier engaged. DiMaggio would slide ferociously into a base, tearing his flesh so that the blood ran down his thigh and then moments later if the play called for it, slide into a base again with the same pure and unhesitant violence, tearing the flesh anew. All that mattered was being called safe. Henrich had seen DiMaggio win games by racing to cut off a ball in the gap to keep a runner from rounding third, or by beating out a slowly hit ground ball in an early, seemingly innocuous at bat and then a batter or two later coming in to score what would turn out to be the deciding run. It was those things Henrich prized, on top of DiMaggio”s long hits into the wide leftfield alley or over the rightfield fence just when the Yankees most needed them. No one, Henrich felt, found more ways to beat a team than the Big Dago did. “DiMaggio is the Yankees,” he would say to his friends.
Of course Henrich had never said anything to DiMaggio about this admiration and respect, and DiMaggio had never said anything of the sort to Henrich. DiMaggio’s own conviction that Henrich was the smartest ballplayer he had ever played with went unsaid. And yet these feelings were sensed between them. They covered ground side-by-side in the outfield, and they batted one after the other in the lineup. Henrich understood that DiMaggio respected the way that he played the game too. It had been Joe’s idea, seeing Henrich slumping, to lend him the bat.
“Give me a second, will you?” Henrich called out to umpire Art Passarella behind home plate. Then he turned and took a few strides back toward the dugout and caught McCarthy’s eye. “Be all right if I bunted here, Joe?” he asked. Immediately McCarthy saw it too. A bunt would keep them out of the double play, ensure DiMaggio another at bat. A slugger like Henrich did not normally put down a sacrifice bunt in a spot like this—not ever, actually. It didn’t make much sense, especially with one out. But it wouldn’t hurt them really, would it? To just move the runner along? A dugout full of Yankees, McCarthy among them, wanted to see DiMaggio get a chance to push his hitting streak another day. McCarthy nodded at Henrich. “That’ll be all right,” he said.
The Yankees were in first place now, just atop Cleveland. They had won 13 of their last 16 games; their early season struggles were distant and forgotten. The winning, though, had not taken hold of the people who followed the game in the way DiMaggio’s streak had. The day before, after he’d hit in his 37th straight, lining a fourth-inning home run into the leftfield seats, a photographer from the Associated Press had come to DiMaggio following the game and asked him to strike the double biceps pose—shirtless. DiMaggio’s picture was taken from the front and then from behind, so that newspaper readers all over could see in full flex the pale, defined muscles that, as the photograph’s caption read, powered the streak. It was as if DiMaggio were some kind of superhero.
The Stadium crowd barely noticed now that the Yankees, with their two-run lead, were on the verge of beating the badawful Browns again, or even tha
t Marius Russo, the New York lefthander who some said was on his way to being one of the best in the game, was pitching the masterpiece of his young career. Russo hadn’t given up a hit until the seventh inning when, with one out, the power-hitting St. Louis first baseman George McQuinn homered past Henrich’s wall-climbing reach and seven rows back into the rightfield stands to end the no-hitter and the shutout. Through eight innings Russo had faced just 25 batters. The Browns couldn’t touch him.
It was DiMaggio, though, that the people had left work early to see. He had struggled against Auker as he usually did, flying out to leftfield in the second inning and then in the fourth rapping a brisk ground ball that the St. Louis shortstop Johnny Berardino could not handle. The Yankee players came out of the dugout then, just as they had a week before, and turned to stare up at Dan Daniel in the press box, hoping that they might influence him, intimidate him even, into calling the play a hit. Daniel felt hot in his seat. In the still air, sweat had formed on his brow and along the sides of his face. He knew once again that his decision might determine the outcome of DiMaggio’s hitting streak, and he felt the many eyes upon him—the Yankees’, the other writers’, and the eyes of those keener fans who knew just where to look. Berardino had muffed it, Daniel felt. Sharply hit or not, Johnny should have made the play. Daniel put his forefinger and thumb in the shape of an O and leaned forward out of his chair. Error. The Yankee players shook their heads in disapproval and Joe Gordon gave to Daniel a curt and dismissive wave. DiMaggio was 0 for 2.
56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports Page 18