56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (12 page)

ATHLETES OFTEN DESCRIBE
themselves as being “in the zone,” which is the same sensation that analysts in numerous disciplines call having “flow.” The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, now a professor at Claremont Graduate University in California, conceived the term and popularized it in his 1990 book,
Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience
. “Flow” describes a mental state marked by a diminishment of self-consciousness along with a heightened sense of involvement with an environment or task. You become extremely focused on doing something without realizing it.

The subconscious and one’s learned, automatic responses are central to flow, as is the idea that gratuitous or “irrelevant” information is prevented from entering your mind. (The thought that you need a base hit to extend a consecutive-games hitting streak, for example, is irrelevant to the information you need to strike the baseball well.) In a state of flow, Csikszentmihalyi believed, experience is intensified and performance is maximized.

“The idea of flow is applicable to hitting a baseball,” says Gordon Bower, a cognitive psychologist and professor emeritus at Stanford who also pitched for Case Western University and in semipro leagues during the early 1950s. “You want the hitting skill to be automated, so that you are responding to a particular cue, or to a small set of cues, without necessarily being aware of what you are responding to. You’re just subconsciously remembering what to do. If you start bringing in an extra cue, such as needing to perform the task in a particular way, that interrupts the response.

“We see this on memory-retrieval tests. If you get subjects to think about something negative—‘Oh this test is so hard’ or ‘My parents will kill me if I mess up this test after what they’re paying for me to go here’—they’ll probably perform poorly on the test. The same thing holds true if you get them thinking about something good, such as ‘After this test, I’m going on a vacation with my fiancée’ or ‘My professor is about to give me the assistant teaching position I’ve been trying to get.’ They’re more likely to screw up the test under those circumstances too. The crucial point is that getting them to think about something else gets in the way of their normal performance, and that is clearly applicable to muscle memory and to hitting a baseball.”

George Brett, one of the game’s great hitters, had a 30-game streak with the Royals in 1980, the same season he batted .390. He likens the feeling you get during a hitting streak to being at basketball practice and having the coach say to you as he heads to the locker room: “O.K., just hit 10 straight free throws and you can quit.”

“You’ll drain the first four or five no problem,” says Brett, “but then you start thinking about it, thinking ‘I can’t miss.’ And that’s when shooting suddenly gets tricky. A hitting streak is like that because until you get your hit that day you’re thinking ‘I need to get one. I need to get one.’ ”

To see how an automated, hindbrain process can be interfered with by the forebrain, try this: take a few moments and make yourself intentionally conscious of your breathing. Pay close attention to how you bring the air in, then let it out; invariably the breathing becomes less fluid, awkward even—a shallow breath here, a deeper one there. You breathe most naturally when you don’t think about breathing. Self-awareness has not simply influenced the process, it has weakened it.

This is the same kind of thing that cuts to the heart of one of the oldest tricks on the links. The buddy you’re playing against for a case of Pabst is pulling away late in the round when you suddenly say, “Wow, man, you’re playing great today! Are you doing something new with your grip?” Or you point out cheerily, “You know if you can just keep it to two over par on the next three holes, you’ll beat my best score on this course.” Then watch him fade.

In 1986 Roy Baumeister and Carolin Showers published a paper in the
European Journal of Social Psychology
titled, “A review of paradoxical performance effects: Choking under pressure in sports and mental tests.” The notion of choking has received a fair amount of attention among social psychologists, virtually all of whom agree with Baumeister’s and Showers’s suggestion that an athlete failing to perform in a pressurized environment (in this case that would mean going hitless for a game and thus killing the streak) “may result from distraction or from the interference of self-focused attention with the execution of automatic responses.” That’s the forebrain getting in the way of the hindbrain again.

So, there’s that. In addition to the inherent difficulty of getting a hit off a major league pitcher, there is the simple but inescapable matter of being overly aware of what you are trying to do. That little piece, cited by ballplayers like Baylor and Brett, by behaviorists like Bower, and by psychologists like Goldberg, has been enough to derail the barely formed hitting streaks of many, many players, including some of the best hitters in the game.

At 20 games, or thereabouts, news of Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak had yet to make it back to San Francisco, was hardly a topic of talk in New York City, was barely noticed in the Yankee clubhouse, was little more than the stuff of sidenotes for the herd of daily writers. And yet it had already firmly attached itself to the man himself. DiMaggio knew that with a hitless day he’d be back at zero, starting over again. Or, looking at it the other way and perhaps more significantly, he knew that with another handful of successful games, maybe a good week or so, he could have something truly powerful in the works. A long hitting streak is the most captivating and dramatic of all baseball events—then, now and always—and DiMaggio, by dint of his own experience, knew that as well as just about anyone.

“All the other stuff—the media being on top of you and people asking you about it and all the outside reminders—that all works against you when you’re in a hitting streak,” says Goldberg. “But to mess things up with too much conscious thinking? For that, all you really need is yourself.”

Joe and his father Giuseppe, San Francisco, 1937

Photograph by Bettmann/Corbis

Joe with older brother Vince (left) and younger brother Dominic

Photograph by AP

DiMaggio and Lou Gehrig, 1936

Photograph by MLB Photos/Getty Images

T
HE CROWD WAS
sparse at Sportsman’s Park, as usual. Even on a comfortable Saturday afternoon in St. Louis; even now with the Browns on an improbable three-game winning streak (the best of the year for the ever-lousy club) and with their exuberant, newly installed manager Luke Sewell vowing better days ahead; even on this Ladies’ Day at the ballpark, and even with so many kids being allowed in for free (all you had to be was nine years old, breathing and enrolled in a school somewhere and you could get a pass that let you into any Browns game anytime); even now with a chance to come and watch the mighty Yankees, Lefty Gomez on the bump; even so, only 2,300 people had paid their way to see the game. The St. Louis Browns had won 16 and lost 29 on the season and they were 12 games out of first place. Sometimes it felt like the Cardinals played in a one-team town.

DiMaggio didn’t mind the emptiness of the ballpark. Nor had he ever minded the unusual, jerry-rigged look to the old place, with its roofed, double-deck grandstand. He’d always hit well here. The dimensions were fair and the Browns’ pitching was generally unthreatening. Today too it felt good to be anywhere but in Detroit where, for three days, heavy clouds had sat dark and unmoving. In the second of the two games at Briggs Stadium, despite DiMaggio’s RBI triple in the sixth and then a dramatic Henrich homer in the ninth, the Tigers had won 5–4, in 10 innings, to complete a rain-shortened sweep.

Now in St. Louis, out of the Book-Cadillac and into the Chase Hotel, Gehrig’s death had become more a hard fact and less an emotional shock. McCarthy and Dickey were back with the team and the Yankees were up against a tall, righthanded rookie named Bob Muncrief. The young pitcher, though, did not last long. Four relievers were needed to follow him in the Yankees’ eventual 11–7 win. Keller hit a grand slam, DiMaggio three singles. His hitting streak was now at 22 games; one more, he knew, and he’d equal the 23 straight he’d run off the season before.
I could get past that in the doubleheader tomorrow
. DiMaggio’s neck and shoulder no longer ached. He was leading the American League with 65 base hits.
I’m beginning to feel it now. I’m beginning to feel like I can smash that ball to pieces
.

And the next day in the doubleheader, DiMaggio all but did that, belting three home runs, two in the 9–3 rout by the Yankees in the first game and another in the second game that clattered onto the roof of the hokey rightfield pavilion and closed the scoring in an 8–3 win cut short after seven innings by approaching darkness. DiMaggio had seven RBIs that afternoon and almost had a fourth home run; he drove a double in the second game that crashed into the screen above the rightfield wall. It was not only DiMaggio who carried the Yanks in their series in St. Louis; Keller, back from a pointed four-game McCarthy benching, homered twice; Red Rolfe had five base hits and scored five times in the three games. But it was DiMaggio that every Yankee moved to. “The boys are just waiting for Joe to show ’em how to do it,” McCarthy had told the writers a few days earlier. The 1941 Yankees were Joe DiMaggio’s to lift and to bear; McCarthy knew it, they all did. And so it was DiMaggio’s hits—seven of them in the three games—that sent the real electricity through the bench, that had his New York teammates nodding and squeezing their hands into happy fists, their emotions hot but reserved, as McCarthy demanded.
The Big Dago’s stirring, boys, the Dago’s coming alive!
They could feel it, they all could.

The rookie Rizzuto, still tethered to the bench day after day, absorbed it all, his eyes following DiMaggio as he strode up to bat, as he swung, and then as he charged out of the batter’s box.
He’s outdoing himself
, Rizzuto thought.
Everything he hits is like a bullet
. If DiMaggio hit a home run, Rizzuto watched him as he rounded the bases, his gait slow and even but never without intensity, a firm and unchanging pace that delivered DiMaggio on stride to the plate. Rizzuto watched. He watched DiMaggio’s silence, for in DiMaggio silence could be seen. Often it was a literal silence: He would remain wordless for long stretches, and his body moved soundlessly. Then too there was an underlying silence to DiMaggio, even as he came down the dugout steps and accepted the congratulations of his teammates with a short deep laugh and a few words of thanks—even then there was something unspoken, unreckoned, silent. He would stand at the fountain and fill a Dixie cup with water and drink it there, not spilling a drop, and then he would sit down. Rizzuto watched. After games he would hang around late, just as DiMaggio did, and maybe get to leave the ballpark with him.