56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports

by Kennedy, Kostya

  THE PRECARIOUSNESS OF a streak, along with the uncommon attention it receives, can impact not only the hitter himself but also his teammates, his manager and even the players and managers on opposing teams. When, if ever, should the pursuit of extending the streak alter the way that a game situation is played? On June 22, 2002, with one out and a runner on second base in the bottom of the ninth inning of a 4–4 game against the Tigers, veteran outfielder Tim Raines was called upon to pinch hit for the Marlins. Castillo, 0 for 4 with his 35-game hitting streak on the line, stood on deck. Raines felt unsure what to do; a hit would win, but also end, the game. “Should I bunt?” Raines asked manager Jeff Torborg. Said Torborg: “No, win the game. The team comes first.” Castillo was a very well-liked and extremely hardworking teammate—“We are all pulling for him so hard,” first baseman Kevin Millar had said a few days earlier—and on the bench the Marlins players felt torn. “I was hoping Raines would walk,” third baseman Mike Lowell said. But a wild pitch advanced the runner, Andy Fox, to third base, and then, on a 2-and-2 count, Raines hit a fly ball to centerfield deep enough that Fox tagged up and scored. The Marlins had won, but Castillo’s streak was over. As the Florida players celebrated at home plate, Torborg took a moment to put an arm around Castillo. “We had to play it that way, Luis,” he explained, and Castillo said that he understood.

  In the stands, boos of disappointment mixed with cheers for the Marlins dramatic win, which is more that can be said for the reaction of the Milwaukee crowd on the night of Aug. 26, 1987. Similarly to Castillo, Paul Molitor was 0 for 4 and waiting on deck with his 39-game hitting streak when Rick Manning singled home the winning and game-ending run to beat Cleveland in the bottom of the 10th inning. It was a thrilling and crucial victory for a team chasing the pennant but the hometown crowd was not at all pleased. The boos were loud and forceful, “and then,” recalled third base coach Tony Muser, “everyone was silent . . . as if somebody had passed away.” Rather than being able to bask in a hero’s postgame glow, Manning joked that he would have to wear a bulletproof vest to the next day’s game. Molitor quipped that, as soon as Manning’s ball went into centerfield, he’d started waving the runner, Mike Felder, back to third base so that Felder wouldn’t score and the game would go on.

  Earlier in that same game, Molitor’s streak had already exerted a clear influence on events; he had been granted what some observers deemed an extra at bat. The game was scoreless with two outs and a runner on second in the eighth inning when Molitor stepped up. On deck was Robin Yount, a fine hitter but not close to being the threat that Molitor was at that point. (Yount’s season batting average was then more than 50 points lower than Molitor’s.) The smart, by-the-book move was to intentionally walk Molitor and set up a force play. But Indians manager Doc Edwards, who had said publicly that he appreciated the class with which Molitor handled himself during the streak, did not want to deprive Molitor of a chance to hit in what was potentially (and, it turned out, actually) his last time up. “I had a gut feeling the percentages were running out on Paul,” Edwards said later. Damning the odds out of deference to the streak, the Indians pitched to Molitor. He grounded out.

  A similar act of kindness—or respect, or sportsmanship, call it what you will—did not go unpunished in 1969 when the Dodgers’ Willie Davis came up hitless and on a 30-game streak in the bottom of the ninth inning against the Mets. There was one out and the score was tied and the potential winning run had just been sacrificed to second base. Davis’s run meant nothing to the outcome of the game and walking him would have set up a double play. Even casual fans at Dodger Stadium were so sure that an intentional walk was coming that they began to boo before Davis even got to the plate. But Mets manager Gil Hodges, aware that the streak was on the line, elected to go ahead and give Davis the chance to hit. On the first pitch, Davis doubled to win the game. His streak was stopped the next night at 31 games.

  Those events, which dealt the Mets a painful—though ultimately not costly—loss in their improbable run to the 1969 pennant, made a deep impression on Steve Hirdt, now an executive vice president at the Elias Sports Bureau and then an 18-year-old Mets fan living in New York. “I just couldn’t understand how they could have pitched to him,” says Hirdt. “When Davis came up I was screaming ‘Walk him! Walk him!’ ”

  As Hirdt went on to devote his professional life to sifting through and analyzing sports’ magnificent minutiae, the Davis game stayed with him. He thought of it years later when he was asked about the 38th game of DiMaggio’s streak, and the possibility that Elden Auker might have chosen to intentionally walk DiMaggio his last time up, as Yankees’ pitcher Marius Russo and some others in the ballpark that day thought he would. “It wasn’t quite the same,” said Hirdt. “The game wasn’t on the line”—indeed the Yankees led 3–1 with two outs in the eighth inning, rendering the case for an intentional walk far less compelling than it was in Davis’s case—“but there was a sacrifice bunt that set things up, and DiMaggio might have been intentionally walked but wasn’t. The pressures that a hitting streak applies can give you a little window into the way baseball people think. If I had been alive and a Browns fan in 1941, I wonder if I would have been yelling, ‘Walk him! Walk him!’ then too.”

  ________

  1 While most players I spoke with were very familiar with DiMaggio’s streak, there were a few exceptions. A few days after the veteran outfielder Gary Sheffield hit his 500th career home run I met with him in the New York Mets’ clubhouse. As we talked Sheffield stood in front of his locker and pounded his right fist rhythmically into the glove on his left hand. I sought to engage him, in a general sense, on the meaning and weight of milestones and statistical achievement in baseball. During our conversation it became evident that Sheffield did not know what the record was for the longest major league hitting streak, nor who held it. He pointed out that as a power hitter he wasn’t likely to run off a hitting streak himself, and so, said Sheffield, “I’m not someone who follows that. Now someone who follows that, they would know. . . . But anyway,” and here he raised an eyebrow with interest, “what is that hitting streak record?” I told him. Sheffield stopped pounding his fist into his glove and stared directly at me. He didn’t say anything for several seconds. Then he said, “Man, that is a frickin’ long hitting streak.”

  2 Other comparisons tend to be minor and nondefinitive. Today’s travel is more extensive, but in 1941 the trips were less luxurious and took place on trains not on team planes. There were more day games then, arguably a benefit to a hitter’s sight, but then again most ’41 parks were without the blacked-out “batter’s eye” in centerfield that today yields an ideal background for picking up the pitched ball. And so on.

  3 This is not purely a function of the trend in pitcher usage, of course, but also a result of expansion; DiMaggio’s Yankees played against only seven different teams in 1941; Zimmerman’s Nationals played against 19 in 2009.

  4 Sisler did it in a 154-game season; Ichiro passed the mark in his 160th game and wound up with 262 hits while playing in 161 games on the year.

  5 Dominic DiMaggio, whose 34-game streak in 1949 ended when he lined out to Joe in centerfield, was among those who spoke up then. He said that a Rollins streak over two seasons, were it to extend past Joe’s record, should not be considered equal to what Joe had done, a touching—and to some surprising, given the history of the two DiMaggios—defense of his late brother’s legacy.

  Chapter 17

  The Street

  THEY ALL HAD summer jobs now, shelving items at the grocer’s or sweeping up at the drugstore, or stacking boxes and packages in the musty back room at the post office. Iceman Al Panza still helped his dad bring around the blocks of ice and Itsy had begun taking shifts behind the counter at his parents’ candy store a few blocks from the el. Some of the Hornets and Dukes worked in construction—there was plenty of that going on in Jackson Heights—and some threw morning paper routes on their bikes. Commie delivered local orders for the fis
h market, toting ice-wrapped sacks of striper filets, tuna steaks, clams by the dozen.

  On the evenings and weekends, they sometimes rode around in Frankie’s rumble seat, calling out to the girls they passed, or they’d clamber into Itsy’s old Chevy. No one cared how loudly the Chevy rattled along, or that the gas pedal kept getting stuck—Itsy had tied a string to it so that he could yank it back up. It was a car, and that’s all that mattered. They could have driven anywhere, to the Long Island beaches, say, or to the heart of Manhattan, but they rarely went far. Everything that the boys wanted that hot summer was close to home: the ball games and the meeting spots and the dances that were never more than a mile or two away. Their spending money went to the ice-cream shops (12 cents for a banana split, a nickel for an egg cream) and to burger binges at the White Castle. They’d take the Bettes to the movies at the Polk Theater (Clark Gable and Rosalind Russell starring in They Met in Bombay) and now and again the Hornets and Dukes might chip in with the older guys for a keg of weekend beer, to be drunk only after they’d played the league game or doubleheader, never before.

  “Hey, Petey’s at it again!” Commie cackled. Petey Morrell was the Hornets catcher—short, stocky, could throw from his knees—and during batting practice now he always did the same thing: whip it out and pee right there on home plate. Marking his territory as it were. He’d done it once many weeks before and the Hornets had won that game. And so Petey had peed there the next time out, against the 34th Avenue Boys, and the Hornets had won again. They were winning a lot this summer, on top of the standings, and Petey Morrell’s pregame ritual was, they all agreed, a good luck charm. “DiMaggio may have a 39-game hitting streak,” Itsy called out, “but Petey, you’ve got a streak just as long for pissing on home plate.”

  Often now there was talk of DiMaggio and the streak he was on. For Commie, it was the one thing that everybody he knew talked about, more than anything else. The boys were always talking to each other about Joe D, and they would scramble to get the evening paper when it came off the truck—“Good photo of his swing today,” the delivery guy would call out before the bundle even hit the ground. Mr. Ratner brought up DiMaggio when he sold the boys their frozen Pepsis. So did the old German guy who made the tuna salad sandwiches at the Bellefair. Commie’s father said that at his barbershop, there on the south side of 14th Street in Manhattan, DiMaggio was the “Number 1 topic of conversation,” bigger even than the weather and the war. You couldn’t give a guy a trim or a shave without him piping up something like “DiMaggio had a close call yesterday, didn’t he?” Even Commie’s mother would ask about the streak. Back from a day of work as a seamstress in the garment district she suddenly wanted to know. “Did he get one? Did DiMaggio do it again today?” Commie reasoned that if his mother was paying attention to the hitting streak—she wasn’t exactly one for baseball—that really meant it was big news.

  All around them that summer they could see Jackson Heights changing, expanding by the week it seemed. The garden apartments and the leafy streets, the “unhurried, congenial living” that the realtors touted, had made the neighborhood a popular destination point for families just moving to New York. You could get to Manhattan in 15 minutes by subway or through the Midtown Tunnel, so Jackson Heights was just right for commuters.

  Some of the men now climbing the steps to the train on Roosevelt Avenue wore military issue, the Army and Navy having dispatched thousands of deskmen to New York as the U.S. defense corps swelled. The men in uniform, greeting one another with salutes, were a regular reminder of the war. Some of the older guys the Hornets knew—Ponzo, Danny the Greek—had already been drafted. Billy’d gone into the Marines. Another round of draft registration was just a few days away, for anyone who had turned 21 since October. “Yeh, Charlie’s a 1-A,” Itsy would say, “He’s going in.” Or, “Maybe Rizos will get a 4-F with that limp he’s got.” They would talk standing outside the candy store in the late afternoon sun, or sitting on the stoop nursing their icy Pepsis and waiting for a little more of the day’s high heat to fall off.

  They played three-on-three stickball on 94th Street, maybe put a quarter each on the game. Some of the guys would take their position in the outfield, two sewers back from home plate, with a cigarette dangling from their mouths. Squeaks had learned that DiMaggio sometimes smoked while he was out shagging balls on an off day. Car fenders marked first and third base, a sewer cover was second base and they would chalk in a box for home plate. You stood with the broom handle held high and tried to hit the pink rubber ball on one bounce. The game’s progress was peppered with discussion about whether or not a batted ball had gone foul, or what to do when the ball got caught up in a fire escape, or whether to demand a do-over when some passer-by unknowingly walked onto the “field” and disrupted a play. After a while Mrs. McCarthy, Jack’s mom, would call out from her first floor window and then there would be fresh cookies for the taking on her sill, warm and with the fresh-baked smell. Just one was never enough. Neither, really, were the two that they each got.

  They would play for hours, switching around the teams here and there; their parents, or other adults, coming home from work carrying bags of groceries or just out on a walk, would stop and watch, pleased to see the boys and to see how much the games mattered to them and how happy they were in these moments. For the parents the stickball games played against the backdrop of darker things. They understood that there was more than just this week’s draft registration ahead of them, that there would certainly be other drafts and that the war, by the looks of it, would be long and that some or most or even all of these boys might have their numbers called one day too. Where will the war lead us? What will it cost? Watching the teenagers chasing after a bouncing pink ball in the bronze evening light, gay and unburdened, the adults would feel a sudden bolt of sadness and loss. It was, in the way one might feel upon seeing a row of red tulips in their plumpest April bloom, a realization of just how fleeting the sweet scene before them was. They were grateful for the boys’ stickball games, and for their weekend baseball league, and grateful too for the Yankees and the Dodgers and for the boxing matches and all the diversions. And of course for DiMaggio, a simple hero engaged in a simple if daunting feat that in this summer seemed to them so extraordinary and so important. Knowing rationally that what DiMaggio did or didn’t do in a baseball game was, in the deeper sense, inconsequential—would another hit matter, really, to any of their lives?—did nothing to dull the opposite sensation: that the hitting streak did matter and that there was something tangible and far-reaching at stake when DiMaggio came to bat. Everyone, it seemed, put some small measure of hope upon DiMaggio each day and then later scurried to find out if he had fulfilled it.

  The boys would look for him in the newsreels before the main feature at the movies. (And to the boys, if not to the Bettes, these newsreels were a lot more interesting than seeing Clark Gable and Rosalind Russell in a clinch.) A chronicling of Joe D’s hits might unfold among accounts of the latest Army buildup or of the old submarine, the O–9, that had gone down during a test in the waters off New Hampshire and had not come back up. There were images of soldiers firing guns on a practice range somewhere and then moments later of DiMaggio swinging his bat. For the Hornets and the Dukes it was all a sea of energy and experience, excitement, power, uncertainty and hope. For them, “Did he get one?” seemed as important as any question that anyone could ask.

  Chapter 18

  An Ornery Offering

  A TERRACED IRON HOME RUN wall towered 34 feet above rightfield in Philadelphia’s Shibe Park, running from the foul line to centerfield. It was now more than six seasons old. The Athletics’ owners had built it to block the view of fans who for decades had gathered by the hundreds to watch ballgames from the flat rooftops and second-story bay windows of the row houses along North 20th Street. Some homeowners had constructed bleachers upon those roofs and on game days charged admission and sold hot dogs and Coca-Cola, angering the Athletics who saw this only as a
skimming of their profits. The homeowners chafed bitterly against the building of the fence and the moment it went up—a forbidding expanse of unpainted corrugated metal that stung the neighborhood like a slap with the back of a hand—everyone in Philadelphia, and around the major leagues, called it the Spite Wall.

  The Spite Wall was a strange, ugly and, for outfielders, unpredictable thing. Fly balls that struck off those ribbed terraces might fall straight down or might bounce 100 feet back toward second base. When a ball was driven high and far over his head in rightfield Henrich would turn his back to home plate and face the wall, tense with uncertainty. Sometimes the ball hit the fence and bounded right to Henrich. Sometimes it ricocheted out near DiMaggio in centerfield. Sometimes Gordon or Rizzuto ended up with the baseball near the infield. A fly ball that soared toward the Spite Wall, some 330 feet from home plate at the rightfield edge, close to 450 feet away in center, caused all of the Yankee fielders to prepare for any crazy bounce.

  Shibe Park had other peculiarities as well. The tiny visitors’ locker room was dim and spartan, and one of the two showerheads invariably sputtered. There were just 20 steel lockers, not enough to accommodate a full team. Some of the newest Yankees, like Jerry Priddy and the pitcher Charley Stanceu, had to hang their clothes on nails driven crudely into a wall. The deep concrete dugouts flooded badly in heavy rains and pools of water collected inside the players’ tunnel that ran beneath the stands. But the field itself was always immaculately groomed, the grass a vibrant and unvarying green. The infield and the outfield produced the truest hops in the league. Perhaps because of that high wall, the sharp pock of a fastball arriving into a catcher’s mitt echoed uniquely in Shibe Park and could be heard even on the radio broadcasts that originated from a small balcony extending off the bottom of the upper deck.