56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports

by Kennedy, Kostya

  Sisler smiled broadly and congratulated DiMaggio on the streak and then later, before the game that night, he congratulated him again in a ceremony at home plate. Sisler was the greatest player in the history of the St. Louis Browns. “I hope Joe makes it 49 but with nothing more than a single,” Sisler said into a microphone to cheers and laughter from the stands. There were 12,682 fans in Sportsman’s Park, more than three times what a typical night game would bring. Thunder rumbled out over the Missouri plains and many people had umbrellas at their sides. Normally the Browns were the worst attended team in either league.

  DiMaggio singled before the game was 10 minutes old, in the first inning, on the second pitch he saw. The shortstop Alan Strange couldn’t get to DiMaggio’s ground ball deep in the hole. By the third inning lightning streaked the sky and in the bottom of the sixth the deluge arrived, stopping the game with the Yankees ahead 1–0 and DiMaggio’s base hit officially in the books. After half an hour, with rain still falling in sheets, the umpires sent everyone home. Gomez had pitched five innings for the win.

  During the game the next afternoon, water still soaked some areas of the grass and earthworms could be found in the miry edges of the outfield. It was on such days, if the Yankees were in high spirits—and as winners of 10 straight now they certainly were—that the players might conspire to play a little trick on young Phil Rizzuto.

  Scooter hated insects, worms, anything that crawled, and when he tossed his glove onto the grass behind shortstop at the end of each inning in the field, it lay there vulnerable to mischief. On his way in from leftfield Keller would furtively slip a fresh and slippery worm into one of the fingers of Rizzuto’s glove. The next inning the Yankees would all watch as Rizzuto slid the glove onto his hand and then after a brief look of puzzlement passed over his face, he would suddenly tear it off, frantic and fling it into the air and run from the spot where the glove had landed. How the Yankees laughed! Henrich doubled over in the outfield. The umpires snickered too. The joke echoed again each inning as Rizzuto, spooked and suspicious, picked up his glove and looked warily inside it—any more worms?—before carefully, fearfully putting it on. Scooter was one of the team now, batting better than .300 and himself on a nifty little hit streak of 14 games.

  At many times McCarthy would not tolerate such practical joking, seeing it as unprofessional, disrespectful even, and not in the Yankee way. But now the manager felt happy and relaxed. He was confident the Yankees would win the pennant. DiMaggio had lifted everyone. By the time the Yankees left St. Louis they had won 12 consecutive games, the longest streak of McCarthy’s tenure. DiMaggio had run his hitting streak to 50 straight by singling in the first inning, and then added two more singles and a ninth inning home run. His 20 home runs and 73 RBIs both led the major leagues. The next day he made it 51 in a row with a fourth-inning double over the head of Browns centerfielder Walt Judnich, a hit that scored the newly married Henrich and helped knock Elden Auker out of the game. “DiMaggio is liable to go on indefinitely,” McCarthy said.

  In Chicago, he extended the streak to 52 and then 53 games before a doubleheader crowd of 50,387, the largest at Comiskey Park in eight years. The irascible Jimmy Dykes, just back from a suspension for hurling particularly obscene and abusive language at an umpire, had saved his two best starting pitchers, Ted Lyons and Thornton Lee, so that they could take on DiMaggio and the Yanks. But DiMaggio had three hits in the first game, and a hard single to right centerfield off Lee in the nightcap. The Yankees won both games. The White Sox had fallen out of the pennant race, 13 games back of New York, eight back of the second-place Indians, four behind Boston. But the fans at Comiskey did not seem to much care about their team’s fortunes; they were there for the tingling they got when the game announcer took up his megaphone along the third base line and announced, “Now batting for the Yankees, Joe DiMaggio.”

  IN CHICAGO, AS in every big city in the country, the bestseller list included Blood, Sweat and Tears, a collection of speeches by Winston Churchill. The book’s title came from the short address he’d given to the House of Commons a year earlier, upon taking over as Britain’s prime minister. “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,” Churchill had said. “You ask what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war. . . with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us. . . against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime.” Now, as Churchill’s book weighed upon so many nightstands, the U.S. was sending cargo boats full of the rations that Britain so badly needed: milk, meat, eggs, cheese. On the docks in England hungry workers nipped immediately into the store, sucking eggs right out of their shells.

  In Washington, D.C., Congress was moving to extend the first term of service for draftees to longer than a year. A few days before, the U.S. Navy had taken over Iceland at that country’s bidding and as a means, Roosevelt said, of protecting America’s defensive frontier. Was there any stopping the Nazis as they heightened their attack on Russia, moving on three fronts to Moscow, Kiev and Leningrad? You could forgive the people if sometimes the news, the big, bold-type war headlines, and the sports stories with the ongoing drama of DiMaggio got jumbled together. Before the Yankees’ second game in St. Louis—game 50 for DiMaggio—two teams of soldiers stationed nearby had played an exhibition game on the field at Sportsman’s Park. In San Francisco the Call-Bulletin illustrated the shifting fronts of battle in a daily War-O-Graph; the Chronicle still ran its DiMag-O-Log.

  The hundreds of Italians now interned in Fort Missoula and other camps—those who had sabotaged a boat in a U.S. harbor, or who were suspected of spying or who had come over to work and stayed on illegally—were told they would not be allowed to leave and go home. As one British government official declared, the war did not now merely engage soldiers and sailors, but civilians too. The Washington Post ran stories that compared DiMaggio to other great Italian innovators: Dante, Donatello, Galileo. So if DiMaggio was Italian—and surely the green-white-and-red flags in bleachers on the road as well as at home were waved for him—he was a majestic Italian, freed by his achievement and his bearing from the prejudice and disdain of even the smallest-minded isolationists and bigots in the land. In the hearts of the people, he was America’s Joe. The bench jockeys on opposing teams held their harsh tongues now when DiMaggio came to bat. He belonged to everyone.

  In the flyspeck town of Glendive, Montana, in the white dawn of another day, a man walked into a small breakfast shack, a slapped-up place with maybe eight spots to sit. He wore a wide, dark cowboy hat and weathered boots and old blue jeans. He was tall with a broad back and a bow in his gait and a face like leather. He might spend all day and even the night out on the range. A step through the doorway of the breakfast shack the cowboy looked at the man behind the counter and nodded his head. Already by his presence the cowboy’s order was placed—griddle cakes, three eggs easy, coffee black. He shared a look with the counterman. “He get one?” the cowboy said. And the counterman nodded and put down the cup of coffee. “Yes. He did. He got one.” They didn’t even need to say his name.

  All across the Western expanse that summer—across the dustblown farm towns through Idaho, Oregon, New Mexico, Wyoming—DiMaggio made the papers, a short front-page report or a longer AP or UPI article with his name splashed across the top. Even in these places, tiny and remote, a base hit by DiMaggio could seem like local news.

  The baseball reporters were not referring to him as Giuseppe much anymore, preferring to reach into a stable of grander names: Jolting Joe or the Jolter, or the Yankee Clipper once in a while. They called him DiMaggio the Magnificent, or the Great DiMag or Joseph the Great or, simply, the Great Man. No longer did fans or scribes argue the merits of Mize or Foxx or Greenberg or Medwick or any other current ballplayer against DiMaggio. There was no competition. Instead, the writers argued in print whether or not DiMaggio now belonged in baseball’s alltime outfield, whether his preposterously long hitting streak on top of all e
lse he had done was enough to knock Tris Speaker out of centerfield and let DiMaggio stand between Ruth and Cobb.

  After he’d made it 53 straight games the Chicago Tribune ran an editorial titled MR. DIMAGGIO AS SEEN FROM OLYMPUS. Perhaps Joe wasn’t quite in a league with the Greek immortals, the article allowed, but by now he must have gotten their attention up there; if Zeus hadn’t actually been among that outsized doubleheader crowd at Comiskey Park, then surely, the Tribune’s writer concluded, “he had tuned in from time to time to Bob Elson’s” play-by-play report on WGN.

  Marie’s scrapbook swelled in San Francisco, and Maury Allen’s fattened in Brooklyn. A cartoon in the World-Telegram depicted an imagined office of baseball records, a man bent over a desk scribbling madly: the Yankees had won 14 straight, 18 of 19, 28 of 32. Papers and thick books were stacked high on the floor and the shelves around the scribbling man, and from the side of the office a secretary, Miss Phidgit she was named, called out: “We’re going to need a new filing cabinet for DiMaggio.”

  Keeler had now receded deeply into the background. A few stat-mongers had tried to raise the specter of the longest-ever professional hitting streak of 69 games set in 1919 by a guy named Joe Wilhoit playing for the Western League’s Wichita Witches; but that was a Class A circuit, a low-level minor league populated with ballplayers long forgotten or never known, so that record couldn’t truly rate. Really, the only long streak that did have some purchase, that still rang in some people’s minds, had occurred in California in the Pacific Coast League, a notch below the majors. It wasn’t the Show, not at all, but scores of good big leaguers and tough pitchers had played in the PCL. That league’s record hitting streak was 61 games long, run off eight years earlier by a highly touted rookie outfielder for the San Francisco Seals, an 18-year-old kid, Joe De Maggio.

  Chapter 24

  They Didn’t Know Then

  THE WORLD AROUND him was different then and he a different man—brand new to professional ball. It was a blur to him as it happened, and a blur in his memory now, and what he remembered most about that hitting streak of 1933 was the tiredness, deep and bony, that dug into him from all the games and the doubleheaders day after day after day: 61 games in eight weeks. I am not used to playing baseball every day, DiMaggio thought as that Seals season wore on. He didn’t much go for the long bus rides, nor for being on the road. The arc of DiMaggio’s baseball career was then much closer to his club team and to imposing his will upon the North Beach playground than it was to the major leagues. In winter and spring he’d head to Funston Park, just a block from Galileo High—where, at his age of 18, he might still have been enrolled—and spend a couple of hours chasing down balls for the older fellows, Joe and Louis Toboni or some of the regulars playing for the Mission Reds. They’d pay DiMaggio two bits for his trouble. He’d cop a couple of cigarettes off them too.

  With the Seals that rookie year he earned $225 a month. If DiMaggio—or his doubting Papa—had any question as to what kind of ballplayer he was, the proof was right there on payday. The Seals got their money’s worth and more, especially as the streak continued and DiMaggio neared and then passed the old Pacific Coast League record of 49 straight games held by the long-retired Oakland Oaks first baseman Jack Ness. The crowds grew at Seals Stadium and even then, in the bleakest heart of the Great Depression, as teams and leagues in other cities folded and disappeared, people plunked down a dime for a Seals scorebook. He’s Vince’s kid brother, huh? they would say, paging through. Not just his brother, Vince’s replacement too. (Vince now played down south for the Hollywood Stars.) At night games free bowls of soup were passed out in the stands and ladies got in free.

  By the time his hitting streak reached the high 30s, and the Ness record came clearly into view, Joe’s name began to appear in small headlines in the Chronicle’s SPORTING GREEN, the sports page that Giuseppe was just barely learning to read, or to make some sense of at least. When Joe hit triples in each end of a doubleheader to run the streak to 46 in a row, the news of it ran clear across the top of the page. Suddenly, three months into his PCL career, Joe was someone whom people thought they might remember for many years. The newspapers and most everybody else misspelled his name: De Maggio or DeMaggio. Joe never bothered to correct anyone.

  The club declared July 14, 1933, Joe De Maggio night at Seals Stadium and in the game he extended the streak to 50 straight. Flashbulbs went off when he came to bat. San Francisco mayor Angelo Rossi presented Joe with a gold, engraved watch and gave flowers to Marie and Rosalie. The Seals players chipped in to give Joe a small check in gratitude and the boys from Joe’s old neighborhood team, the Jolly Knights of North Beach, came out and presented him with a leather traveling bag. At some games, when one of his old Knights teammates called out to Joe from the seats behind the Seals dugout, he did not even turn to look. Often a sense of distance surrounded him—a quiet, incurious pride. It was as if he were somehow set apart. Sometimes around the locker room and in the dugout things were said that DiMaggio did not quite understand.

  He was young and skinny and callow, and in the hotel lobbies of Portland and Seattle and Los Angeles he wore yellowed T-shirts and torn leather shoes. Only later, when Joe began to believe that the money might stick, and began to hear whispers that a team in the major leagues, the Yankees even, might want to sign him did he agree to buy some real clothes. Then he visited with Joe Toboni, down at Toboni’s milliner’s shop on Market Street, and Toboni stood DiMaggio in front of a mirror and said he had something to teach him that he needed to learn. You pull the wide end down through here, then you tighten the knot like this. There you go Joe, that’s how you tie a tie.

  During the streak DiMaggio faced pitchers who were bound for or had been in the big leagues—young Johnny Babich and Buck Newsom, veterans Tom Sheehan, Frank Shellenback and others. It didn’t matter who the pitchers were, Joe didn’t think about that. Not ever. He took his bat and went up and swung.

  DiMaggio obeyed superstition that season because he thought that was what ballplayers were supposed to do. Don’t mess with anything when you’re going good, kid, the veterans said. So he kept his right thumb wrapped in tape for the whole length of the hitting streak, well after the bone bruise that had ached at the start of the run in May had healed and faded away. That’s it, don’t change a thing, the veterans said. He was summoned to City Hall and honored there for his streak by a local association of semipro ballplayers. At Cardinal Field in Sacramento, with the streak having climbed into the 50s, an Italian social club came out to honor him too.

  It was there, in Sacramento for games 54 through 60 of the streak, that the blur became dizzying. He felt his exhaustion might never leave him. The nights were too hot to get a good unbroken sleep. In games 59 and 60, a doubleheader, DiMaggio reached on infield hits that might have been ruled errors but instead extended the streak. “I’ve seen batters given hits on much easier chances than those of De Maggio’s,” the Sacramento Solons pitcher Ed Bryan would say after the game in Joe’s defense. But the Solons fans hadn’t seen it like that. They became irate. A few zealots stormed angrily toward the official scorer in the press box and police were needed to turn them away. To Joe all of this was strange. Confusing. That people should worry so much about a hitting streak! During games he did not react with excitement or disappointment and for the first time someone called him Dead Pan Joe. On the day in San Francisco that Oakland pitcher Ed Walsh Jr., the son of the fine White Sox righthander, stopped the streak at 61 games, DiMaggio was the last man up and his sacrifice fly won the game. “It will take a good man to beat what he has done,” Seals manager Ike Cavaney said of the hitting streak.

  From those eight weeks only soft and imprecise memories remained with DiMaggio. It seemed to him very long ago, and part of his younger, other self. In 1941, recalling that old Pacific Coast League streak gave the baseball writers another number to hold up to the light—DiMaggio chases De Maggio—and perhaps it gave evidence to any surviving cynics that this stre
ak of ’41 was no fluke; DiMaggio was of a special breed. For most people who followed the game, however, and certainly for DiMaggio, that minor league milestone of 61 games seemed unimportant and irrelevant. It was not a number that he spent time thinking about.

  In Chicago now the calendar turned to July 15 and DiMaggio’s big league hitting streak was a full two months old. Sometimes he felt keenly aware that at any moment it could come to an end. Other times it seemed to him that being on the streak was like traveling on a road that he himself was forging and that the road could go on forever.

  AT THE HOTEL Del Prado in Chicago, Lefty had to be careful when he opened the door of their room. He might find the hallway filled with children seeking autographs. Gomez would feign heart-stopping shock at the sight of them and then he would banter and suggest that maybe it was in fact his autograph that the kids were after, what with his won-lost record now up to 7–3. Anyway, wrong room. “DiMaggio’s not here,” Lefty would say although of course DiMaggio was there, lying on the top of the bed with his long legs stretched out and crossed, reading his Superman; or else standing silently beside the window, smoking. When DiMaggio went out in Chicago—maybe, weary of room service, he would try dinner at the Blackhawk or one of the other spots where there was enough buzz and music and distraction that he could, for a short time, be out in the hot night and shielded a little bit too—Lefty would do his best to make sure the hallway was free of lurkers. Then he would help Joe slip into the elevator, down to the hotel’s bottom floor and out the back way.

  Sometimes Joe would phone Dorothy and tell her about these crowds and the constant attention that was upon him, and that at times he felt uncomfortable with it all and wished that he could be with her. Dorothy knew this was true; she remembered the difficulty Joe had on the occasions that they went out with Dorothy’s Hollywood friends—especially the ones that DiMaggio didn’t really know. It was hard for him to sustain himself, to follow the bouncy conversation, to come off as glib. You might have expected Joe to be the worldly one, with his name and his fame, but, really, when there were new and clever people around and all full of talk, it was Dorothy who was at ease, and guiding him. Dorothy wondered whether, as time went on and Joe became more comfortable around different people and with the spotlight that burned ever more brightly, he would still need to rely on her to help him through.