56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (11 page)

It was decided that McCarthy and Dickey would leave the team to attend the funeral, McCarthy right away, and Dickey after that afternoon’s game—a dreary one at which the flags flapped at half-staff and the outcome, a 4–2 Yankee loss despite DiMaggio’s fourth-inning home run, scarcely had meaning. There was none of the usual bench jockeying that day. When the Yankees players passed through the Detroit dugout on the way to their own, the Tigers just nodded solemnly and said “Tough about Lou” or “What a man Lou was, really.” Rudy York, the Tigers’ slugging first baseman whom Lou had taken time to mentor here and there, felt especially low.

The sky was a blackish gray and some rain had fallen, and the crowd of barely 3,500 was smaller than any for a Yankee game at Briggs Stadium in five years. Before Dizzy Trout’s first pitch of the game both teams and all those hardy fans stood in silence, hands or caps over their hearts, for a full minute. The flags hung at half-staff in every ballpark in the major leagues.

Gehrig had died in the Bronx, at home and in his bed, with Eleanor and his parents and his mother-in-law and a doctor beside him. Ed Barrow had been the last Yankee to visit him, three days before. They had sat together by the window and watched the Hudson River rippling by. As the Yankees president prepared to leave the house that afternoon, he kissed Gehrig on the head in farewell and Lou looked up at him the best he could and said in the voice that had gotten thick and raspy in the last few months: “I’ll beat it, Boss. Keep those Yankees up.”

The night before the funeral more than 5,000 people stood on the streets outside the tiny Christ Episcopal Church, just two blocks from Gehrig’s home, waiting to see his body as it lay in state. Children and oil-stained truck drivers and men in business suits and women in long dresses all filed heavily past the bier. Gehrig lay in a mahogany coffin with roses all around.

In the morning, Dorothy attended the funeral with Lefty’s wife, June. The women were good friends, both of them actresses of some stature before they’d married into baseball. On this day they shared a single umbrella. They wore dark clothes and simple hats, and before Dorothy and June even got to the Christ Church on that soggy morning to join the group of friends—a small, intimate group as the Gehrig family wished—Dorothy had wept. She knew what Joe thought of Lou, the respect that Gehrig had earned from everybody. Dorothy had heard that when the telegrams arrived at Gehrig’s house from the Yankee players, each man having sent his own, the stack of them as thick as a drugstore novel, Eleanor had finally collapsed. She had lived for two years knowing that Lou would die. Now Eleanor sat bereft and stoic, her topcoat still on, holding her handbag tightly to her side.

Oh, poor Eleanor
, Dorothy thought.
To go through that and now the loneliness. Poor Eleanor
. Dorothy stayed near June all day. She was four and a half months pregnant now.

Among the honorary pallbearers were McCarthy and Dickey and members of the New York Parole Commission—where Gehrig had worked, appointed by Mayor La Guardia, for the last years of his life—and Bill (Bojangles) Robinson. Timmy Sullivan, the Yankees’ bat boy who played first base at practice, sat in a pew. “We need no eulogy because you all knew him,” said Reverend Gerald V. Barry, and soon the service was over and a phalanx of 20 cars drove out to a crematory in Queens beneath a steady, pelting rain. It had rained all morning on the vine-cloaked church, just as it had rained steadily in Detroit, washing out the Yankees-Tigers game. The Yankee players sat joyless in the big hotel and remarked at how fitting the downpour and the cancellation were. “They’re burying Lou along about now,” someone said. And it was hard, even if you didn’t go much for sentiment, not to look outside into the grayness and imagine that the sky was weeping too.

So it was in early June of 1941. Lou Gehrig was dead, and the United States stood on the precipice of war. A few days before, many millions of people had turned out for Memorial Day parades across the country, more than 500,000 in the heart of Manhattan alone, a showing unlike any since the first World War. President Roosevelt had just announced a call for a second mandatory draft registration, for those men who had turned 21 since the first registration, eight months before. That call-up had enlisted nearly 17 million potential soldiers. Now another 750,000 or more would soon be signing up.

On the day of Gehrig’s funeral, in Washington D.C., a congressman from New York City’s East Side, M. Michael Edelstein, stood up in the House and rebutted, passionately and angrily, the argument by the Mississippi congressman John Rankin that a “group of our international Jewish brethren are attempting to harass the President and Congress into plunging into the European war.” Edelstein responded swiftly and to the point, dismissing Rankin’s charge, chastising him for his ignorance and for using Jews as a scapegoat just as Hitler would do, and closing tersely with a reminder to that gentleman from Mississippi that “all men are created equal regardless of race, creed or color.” Then, even as the applause for his response still echoed through the House, M. Michael Edelstein walked out of the chamber and into the corridor and fell straight down, dead from a heart attack at age 53. Some 15,000 New Yorkers would come out for his funeral two days later. The reverend at Gramercy Park Memorial Chapel called Edelstein a “martyr at the altar of democracy and true Americanism.”

That was all part of the biting strangeness that hung over New York in those late spring days. A strangeness hung over the third-place Yankees too, an unquestionable void. And an uncertain feeling was settling upon all of America, upon Ocean City, N.J., where volunteers with binoculars patrolled the boardwalk looking out for suspicious boats; upon the smacks in San Francisco Bay, where state police had now begun to guard the waterfront, and upon so many other places in between.

Buffeted by the portentous Saturday newsreels (“In California, U.S. soldiers test the world’s largest war plane. . .”) and the sober newspaper headlines (
ARE WE READY FOR WAR
?) and the radio bulletins from home and abroad, the country still sought to maintain the rhythms of life. Millions of people listened on Sunday nights to Jack Benny and his whimsical comedy skits. They tuned in to Martin Block’s
Make Believe Ballroom
and danced along. Teenagers, the Hornets and Dukes and Best Bettes of Jackson Heights among them, hummed the radio hit,
I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair
on their way to school. Grown-ups packed into the movie theaters to see
Citizen Kane
, gripping and ingenious—a masterpiece, the critics agreed. In the daily comic strips, from Los Angeles to St. Louis to Cleveland and New York, people followed Popeye and Blondie, Flash Gordon and the Lone Ranger.

Some people followed the horse races and the great thoroughbred Whirlaway, who was galloping out to win the Triple Crown. Many followed boxing and the much anticipated Joe Louis-Billy Conn heavyweight title fight that was now just a couple of weeks off. Many, many people followed baseball, attendance having ticked upward again after the worst of the Depression years and more radio stations than ever were broadcasting the sport.

It was good to have all of those things, Benny’s wisecracks, Block’s frisky tunes, ballplayers like Feller and Williams and Joe DiMaggio and the suddenly surprisingly competent Brooklyn Dodgers; it was good to think about those things when you didn’t want to think more about the heavier matters at hand.

Many newspaper readers, on the same morning they had read about Gehrig’s death and learned about a bomber boat that had crashed, killing four in a test outside San Diego Bay, also read about the Yankees and their 7–5 loss in Cleveland. In
The New York Times
, coverage of that game appeared in a narrow single-column article by James P. Dawson. The story was succeeded by a series of brief and random notes about the team, including, at the very end of the piece, just above the box score, a blurb that many readers surely missed or scarcely registered, which read in its entirety: “DiMaggio, incidentally, has hit safely in nineteen straight games.”

I
n its earliest stages, a hitting streak—Joe DiMaggio’s or
anyone else’s—is not really a hitting streak at all. A batter has simply hit safely for a handful of games in a row. Only after a streak has reached a certain length (in DiMaggio’s case about 20 games) does the hitter really start to think about it—and that, as those in the game can tell you, will almost certainly work against him.

“If a player didn’t know that he had a hitting streak going on, he’d be able keep it up longer, no doubt,” Colorado Rockies hitting instructor Don Baylor said when I visited with him during a Rockies series against the Diamondbacks. Baylor was sitting in full uniform at a desk in the coaches’ office. He leaned back in his swivel chair, crossed his cleated feet and smiled slowly, in thought. At 61, he is an avid student of the game. “The problem comes when you start thinking about it too much.”

Baylor, a powerful righthanded hitter who was the Most Valuable Player in the American League in 1979, has worked as a major league coach and manager since he retired as a player after the ’88 season. He is relaxed and insightful in discussion and his teaching method draws in part on the styles and techniques of successful hitters throughout baseball history. After Baylor and I spent some time together, I agreed to swap him some footage I had of DiMaggio hitting in exchange for one of his Ted Williams’ discs. He planned to show the DiMaggio clips to his righty batters; he likes Joe’s follow-through and the consistency of his swing. Baylor told me that DiMaggio’s currency in the minds of today’s young hitters comes in large part from his hitting streak, “a record that has stood out there so far in front for so long it’s almost holy,” he said. Baylor himself never had a streak longer than 14 games.

“You just want your guys to be hitting, and hitting with the right form,” Baylor went on. “A big part of it is for guys to just hit the way they can, naturally, without thinking about what they’re doing when they’re in the box. A hitting streak makes you worry about things that you shouldn’t be worrying about.”

Many of the players I spoke with agreed. Keith Hernandez, the former Cardinals and Mets first baseman and a perennial .300 hitter, said, “I never knew when I was in a hitting streak until I picked up the newspaper in the morning. I’d read a note that said: ‘Hernandez has hit in 13 straight games.’ Then that night I’d be sure to go 0 for 4.” (Hernandez’s career-high streak: 17 games in 1987.)

Rockies second baseman Clint Barmes, a career .254 big league hitter who once hit safely in 30 consecutive games while playing at Indiana State, says he now starts noticing that he’s on a streak when he’s gotten a hit in “10 or 12 games in a row; for me that’s pretty good. But then you start thinking about it and you have to keep yourself from going outside your hitting zone to try to get a knock to keep it going. That’s exactly how you get yourself out. I expand my zone too much anyway, and if I have a hitting streak going I may
really
expand it. It’s not good.”

Sports psychologists hear that kind of talk all the time. “We don’t want you out there thinking consciously, but rather
operating
unconsciously,” says Alan Goldberg, a former sports psychology consultant for the University of Connecticut athletics department who has worked with hundreds of athletes through his Massachusetts-based practice Competitive Advantage. Think of the brain as having three parts, Goldberg says, simplifying to help make his point: the forebrain, which processes information consciously and uses words and logic; the midbrain which is involved with emotional states; and the hindbrain which is more about knowing than about thinking. The hindbrain handles involuntary actions and works outside of conscious thought; you understand things in the hindbrain through your experience.

“When you’re hitting a baseball you want to be operating as much as possible from the hindbrain,” says Goldberg. “The forebrain is analytical and slow and judgmental—it will tell you ‘you should really keep your elbow back, you know’ or ‘you can’t get a hit in yet another game, that’s crazy.’ The forebrain will have you thinking about the speed of the pitcher’s fastball and your own statistics and so on as if it’s putting together a 100-piece puzzle piece-by-piece. The hindbrain uses muscle memory and it’s instantaneous. It coordinates the whole so that you’re seeing the 100-piece puzzle at once, all put together. At the beginning of a hitting streak you can be working from the hindbrain but once you’ve become aware of the streak, the forebrain inevitably comes more and more into play.

“The actual doing is in the hindbrain,” Goldberg added. “The potential outcome is fodder for the forebrain.”

Or as Rockies All-Star Todd Helton—a potent slugger whose career longest hitting streak is just 17 games despite his .324 batting average—suggested: “When you know that you’re on a hitting streak, you might start to think about the result rather than the process, and that’s the wrong way around.”