56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports

by Kennedy, Kostya

  And of course there was Ted Williams, who had bettered DiMaggio’s numbers in virtually every offensive category, outhitting him by 19 points, outhomering him by 160 and reaching base more than 48% of the time to DiMaggio’s nearly 40%. Williams had missed almost five full seasons in military service; DiMaggio three. While Williams was inarguably a much, much lesser fielder, he had accumulated his offensive numbers in lineups that were invariably far weaker than those DiMaggio enjoyed.

  Yet none of those players ever offered serious complaint about DiMaggio’s having the title and the media did little to stir up controversy. DiMaggio was the Greatest Living Ballplayer until the day he died.

  Who deserves the title of greatest living ballplayer today? Mays? Musial? Hank Aaron, with his 755 home runs and 2,297 RBIs, his good speed and good glove? Would anyone make a case for BALCO customer and seven-time MVP Barry Bonds, who, whatever enhancements he may have relied on, still had to actually hit all those home runs, draw all those walks, get all of those 2,935 base hits and play a peerless leftfield? Might some people say that admitted steroid user Alex Rodriguez, sixth on the career home run list at age 35, has a claim? Or Cardinals first baseman Albert Pujols, the only player aside from Al Simmons in the 1920s and ’30s to drive in more than 100 runs in each of his first 10 seasons? What about Ken Griffey Jr. who emerged through the steroid era untainted (at the time of his retirement), clubbing 630 home runs and, for the first 12 years of his career anyway, playing a Maysian centerfield? Would the outstanding Phillies’ third baseman of the 1970s and ’80s, Mike Schmidt, get votes?

  From 1969 to ’99, the last three decades of DiMaggio’s life, there was no doubt who wore the crown. And while he would have been in the running had he never reeled off his hitting streak—a feat, it’s worth noting, that DiMaggio himself called his most remarkable career achievement moments after receiving the Greatest Living Ballplayer award—there is little likelihood that he would have beaten the other candidates. “Everybody thought that Williams would win it,” recalls Allen, who was then working at the New York Post and who attended the event. “He just seemed to have the numbers and he was the Washington manager then. Myself, I voted for Musial, for what he did over 20 seasons—just for being that excellent for that long. So DiMaggio winning it was a surprise.

  “In some ways it was DiMaggio’s hitting streak versus Williams hitting .406 in 1941 and the voters weighing which one was the greater accomplishment,” Allen continues. “Both players did other important things in their careers, of course, but there is no way that DiMaggio would have been named Greatest Living Ballplayer without that hitting streak. No chance at all.”

  UPON RETURNING TO New York after the end of the streak, DiMaggio was so ardently and unceasingly besieged by autograph-seekers at his apartment that he agreed to set aside some time and hold a special signing session just for the people who lived in the building. A week later he made an afternoon appearance on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village where he would give out 1,000 baseballs and 600 miniature bats. He had made similar appearances in years past, and always to exuberant response, but never had it been anything like it was in 1941. The phenomenon of DiMaggio’s record-shattering streak burned brightly and he was then 12 games into what would be a 16-game streak that he began the day after being stopped in Cleveland. A line began to form on Sullivan Street 10 hours before DiMaggio showed up. Some kids wore T-shirts with Joe’s name and “56” written on them and when the supply of balls and bats ran out many hundreds of people were left empty-handed.

  That season and the next, spurred by a suggestion from an editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, some sportswriters advocated that DiMaggio change his uniform number from 5 to 56, a fitting reminder of his accomplishment, they said, and perhaps also a fated figure: during the streak, it was pointed out, he had scored exactly 56 runs. DiMaggio dismissed the suggestion without comment but it became an occasional lark in the clubhouse for a teammate to snatch Joe Gordon’s uniform—number 6—and hang it beside DiMaggio’s number 5. Photographers would try to catch DiMaggio and Gordon standing next to each other during batting practice, DiMaggio on the left, and shoot a picture from behind.

  Les Brown’s hit song Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio played regularly on the radio not only in 1941 but for years afterward. When DiMaggio was stationed in Hawaii during World War II he would cringe if the song came on, especially when the other soldiers sang along to the twee background chorus: We dream of Joey with the light brown bat. In 1970, upon DiMaggio’s turning 56 years old, his friend Reno Barsocchini threw a party for him at Reno’s bar on Post Street in San Francisco. This was a milestone, like anyone else’s 50th or 60th. Gomez came to the party, as did some of the old guys from North Beach. There were drinks on the house and a blonde hooker for the birthday boy. Joe DiMaggio only turns 56 once.

  Away from DiMaggio himself, the number became and still remains a hallmark, a point of absolute reference even beyond the game. Not a week goes by without public mention of DiMaggio’s streak, and often several mentions. Predictably, many analysts held up the streak for comparison when, at the 2010 Australian Open, Roger Federer reached the semifinals of a Grand Slam event for a record 23rd consecutive time. In a retrospective piece, the Los Angeles Times likened the track star Edwin Moses’s 122-race win streak from 1977 to ’87 to DiMaggio’s hitting streak, just as the Cape Cod Times invoked the streak in historical comparison to golfer Walter Hagen’s winning four straight PGA Championships from ’24 through ’27. Bassmaster Mike McLelland’s recent run of finishing in the money at 14 straight Elite Series fishing events was compared to DiMaggio’s streak, as was a club-record 11-game hitting streak run off in the summer of 2009 by infielder Shawn O’Malley of the Class A Charlotte Stone Crabs.

  In September of 2010, when Oakland A’s second baseman Mark Ellis put together his own 11-game streak, he announced: “I don’t think I’m going to break Joe DiMaggio’s record.”

  Modern observers are quick to refer to the streak in any number of contexts. After the Cleveland Indians traded away a reigning Cy Young Award winner for a second consecutive season (CC Sabathia to the Brewers in 2008, Cliff Lee to the Phillies in ’09), the Plain Dealer suggested that this was the Indians “organizational equivalent” of DiMaggio’s streak. When the U.S. luger Erin Hamlin won gold at the world championships to snap a run of 99 straight wins by Germany’s women lugers, USA Today compared Hamlin to DiMaggio’s streak-stoppers Al Smith and Jim Bagby Jr. Last year a New York Times writer suggested that the graceful demeanor of the star filly Rachel Alexandra as she raced against and defeated so many colts, was reminiscent of DiMaggio’s elegant bearing during his hitting streak. The streak has been leveraged in analogy during debate on the floor of the U.S. Congress and also in courtrooms, including—and this, you can be sure, required some convoluted logic—during the closing arguments of music producer Phil Spector’s 2009 murder trial.

  And on it goes. A writer for The Huffington Post suggested that when the 2010 movie Avatar exceeded the record for box-office sales set by Titanic 13 years earlier it was akin to a batter shattering DiMaggio’s mark. Not long ago an article appearing on popeater.com declared that ’N Sync’s U.S. record of 2.4 million copies sold in one week (of their 2000 album No Strings Attached), “may be as unbreakable” as Joe DiMaggio’s streak of 56 games.

  “That number, it is just. . . I guess it’s just so big that it’s hard to fathom,” said the veteran outfielder Adam Dunn, standing in front of his locker before a game. Dunn is a powerful hitter, although with his long swing and his affection for drawing walks, he is not the streaking kind. “In some ways even the name of the man doesn’t mean as much as that number does,” Dunn went on. “If some other guy had done it we would still know it and we would still look at the number like it was from another world. Everyone understands that Joe DiMaggio was a very good hitter—a very good player—but when you put that number next to him, it makes him, well it makes him different. It makes him better.”

/>   Then Dunn said something echoing a notion that had been expressed by other ballplayers on other afternoons, by the Yankees captain Derek Jeter, and by the Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn. “That streak,” Dunn said, “pretty much makes it so that DiMaggio won’t ever be forgotten.”

  ________

  1 Sometime in the 1990s DiMaggio was asked by his friend, the writer and boxing aficionado Bert Sugar, whether he thought he would have made the famous over-the-shoulder catch that Mays pulled off against the Indians’ Vic Wertz in the 1954 World Series. DiMaggio paused, then replied coyly: “Well, I wouldn’t have lost my hat.”

  The View From Here

  What Are The Odds?

  A distinguished collection of professional thinkers has long debated the likelihood and implications of a baseball player’s hitting in 56 consecutive games—Joe DiMaggio in particular, and any big leaguer in general. Scholarly articles have appeared, naturally, in the Baseball Research Journal, the flagship publication for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports. Other papers relating to DiMaggio’s streak were published in Sociological Forum, in the Journal of the American Statistical Association and in Chance, a magazine that explores the applications of statistics in society. General audiences have found probabilistic analysis of the streak in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Review of Books and other publications.

  The streak has been studied by mathematicians, economists, professors of finance, Ivy League sociologists and by a man who would later become the deputy director of the National Economic Council under George W. Bush. The Nobel Prize–winning physicist Edward M. Purcell took a long and detailed look at the streak, as did an evolutionary biologist so accomplished that the Society for the Study of Evolution has an award named after him—the Stephen Jay Gould Prize.

  In other words, some wicked smart people have gotten into this stuff.

  The streak examiners have devised algorithms, run computer simulations, and enlisted teams of undergraduate students to perform dice-rolling experiments. Some folks used a player’s game-by-game results as a basis for inquiry, others relied on a player’s cumulative statistics over the course of a season (DiMaggio in 1941 etc.), or over several seasons or a career. For some, DiMaggio’s batting average served as a point of reference; others factored in the walks that he drew. One man attempted to predict the probability of a hitter who is on a 30-game streak maintaining the streak for 26 more games by drawing upon the past performances of all players during long streaks. A paper on the general streakiness (or lack thereof) among ballplayers sought to weigh game conditions such as runners on base and the handedness of pitchers.

  The results? Well, a 1994 study deduced that a streak like DiMaggio’s will occur once every 746 years. A rebuttal to that one put it at once every 18,519 years. Other estimates have ranged from a probability of about .001 (or 1 in 1,000) that DiMaggio would have hit in 56 straight in 1941 to .000054 (a little more than 5 in 100,000). Another assessment said that while the chances of DiMaggio himself having hit in 56 straight were only 1 in 3,394, the likelihood that some major leaguer at some time, somewhere, would have done it along the way is a robust 1 in 16. A few years ago a student and a professor working together at Cornell suggested that there was a 42% chance of such a streak having occurred at some point in baseball history, an overly generous estimate that upon further review the professor himself has felt inclined to question.

  The data and statistics can be parsed and deployed in any number of ways to compute the likelihood of a hitting streak. All things considered there is only slightly more consensus on the probability of Joe DiMaggio—or of any major leaguer—having achieved a 56-game hitting streak than there is on the probability of life existing on other planets. Which factors are truly relevant and which are not? Given all the physical and psychological factors that come in to play on a baseball field, who really knows? To conundrums such as the Fermi Paradox and the Drake Equation, let us add The DiMaggio Enigma.

  THE SAME BREED of scholars who’ve pored over DiMaggio’s streak have also explored related concepts such as whether an athlete can get “hot” and whether or not there is such thing as a ballplayer who is predictably good in “clutch” situations. The analysts are looking at areas in which they can measure “the influence of chance or random events on the outcomes observed,” as the Harvard sociologist Stanley Lieberson wrote in his 1997 paper Modeling Social Processes: Some Lessons from Sports. As a whole, sports provides an attractive arena for such study because the results tend to be easily measurable and quantifiable (baskets sunk or not sunk, home runs hit or not hit, etc.) and because the games abide by governing rules that provide a degree of order and some limits upon what can and cannot occur. (A basketball player can’t play more than 48 minutes in a regulation game; a pitcher must stand 60 feet, 6 inches away from home plate and so on.) Compared to a lot of what makes up everyday life, ball games are a controlled experiment.

  Study of the “hot hand” in sports grew out of work done in the 1970s by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman (also a Nobel laureate) and Amos Tversky that examined the way that humans perceive and judge probability. Then in 1985 Tversky collaborated with another psychologist, Thomas Gilovich, on a paper that charted shooting patterns in actual NBA games. The study showed that a player having what we might call a “hot hand” had no bearing upon his chances of making a basket. That is, a shooter who has sunk, say, six of seven shots in a game is no more or less likely to sink his eighth attempt than if he had been successful on only one of seven attempts to that point. Just as flipping a coin and getting heads six of seven times does not make the coin any more or less likely to land on heads on the eighth flip than if it has landed on heads just once in seven previous flips. The odds, assuming the coin is perfectly balanced, are 50-50 either way. Similarly, a player’s likelihood of sinking that eighth basket (either from the field or from the free throw line; both situations were tested) corresponds to his or her overall shooting percentage.

  Subsequent studies tended to echo Tversky and Gilovich’s conclusions and similar work was done in baseball. A 1993 paper by Indiana University professor S. Christian Albright charted batters’ results over four major league seasons and “failed to find convincing evidence in support of wide-scale streakiness.” Sure, a .300 hitter will sometimes have a stretch of 11 hits in 20 at bats, and other times have a stretch of just one hit in 20 at bats, but that is what is to be expected by pure chance or random variation—again, in the same way that flipping a coin 1,000 times will give you some sequences of 15 heads in 20 flips and other sequences of five heads in 20 flips. (I know; I tried this.) Over a long enough trial, though, the proven .300 hitter will hit around .300 and the coin will land on heads roughly 50% of the time. (I got 509 tails and 491 heads over the course of my 1,000 flips.) Each at bat—like each coin flip and each foul shot—is by this reckoning an independent event unrelated to the at bats that come before or after.

  So, did Joe DiMaggio, a career .343 hitter entering the 1941 season, get “hot” when he batted .440 over the final 35 games of his hitting streak? Do any players truly have hot and cold stretches, or are they simply the beneficiaries and victims of randomness? Objective analyses say that hot streaks and slumps are a myth derived from faulty perception. “Ninety-nine percent of what observers see as a player being hot or cold is an illusion,” says Red Sox adviser Bill James, baseball’s emperor of statistical analysis. “There may be rare cases when a player makes an adjustment or is bothered by an injury, or some other factor enters in that actually changes performance beyond what is expected. But otherwise a hot streak simply is not real.”

  Of course if you make such a suggestion to a ballplayer he’ll look at you as if you have cream cheese on your face. “Whoever says something like that needs to get out from behind his calculator and play some ball,” says former NL batting champion Keith Hernandez. “When you are hot you feel hot. When you’re in a slump you feel lousy.”r />
  “There is no question that sometimes you’re going well and other times not so well,” says Wade Boggs, a career .328 hitter and a five-time batting champ. “That’s just how it is. You try to be consistent but sometimes your mechanics will get messed up or something will get in your way. When you’re hot you want to ride it as long as you can.”

  Batters swear that they go through stretches when the baseball looks to be the size of a grapefruit coming in to the plate, and endure other times when the ball resembles an aspirin. And they aren’t the only ones who believe this. Managers regularly strategize around the belief that an opposing batter is “hot,” and try to avoid pitching to him. As one of innumerable examples, the Los Angeles Angels felt this way about the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez during the 2009 ALCS. A-Rod had a playoff batting average of .429 and had hit four home runs in 21 playoff at bats before the Angels walked him seven times in his final 18 trips to the plate.

  So why would some scientists tend to trust statistical analysis over reports from the front lines? Why rely on untethered data and probability theory rather than on testimony from the players experiencing the events? This lack of trust in the participants brings to mind the old story of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who one day approached an acquaintance with a question.

  “Tell me,” Wittgenstein began, “why do people say that it was natural for man to assume that the sun went around the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?”

  His friend answered: “Well, obviously because it looks as if the sun is going around the earth.”

  And Wittgenstein replied: “But, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the earth were rotating?”