56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (14 page)

Those boys were real movie stars now. DiMaggio had met them years back through Dorothy and had hit it off, especially with Lou. He’d even brought Lou out to Newark to visit the crippled children’s hospital as a favor to Spatola. A few minutes inside and Lou would be breaking everybody up.

So he and Dorothy could go to the movies one evening, have Jimmy drive them down to a theater on Broadway and get them in the back way. They’d sit in the air-conditioned cool, have some laughs. He’d get out at night with Lefty here and there too. The Joe Louis-Billy Conn fight was at the Polo Grounds next week. On Thursday, Dorothy would make him spaghetti and meatballs, more than even he could eat.

A gibbous moon glowed above the Yankees’ Pullman as it rolled along: Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York. For DiMaggio it felt good to be going home.

“O
NE MORE AND
he ties his own record, longest streak he’s had in the big leagues.” Squeaks had gotten it from somewhere, from one of the newspapers the others hadn’t seen or from one of “his guys” he was always talking to about DiMaggio. Joe’s previous 27-game run wasn’t really official, Squeaks explained, because 19 were spring training games. “But this one counts fellas. And if he gets a few more in a row he’ll have the longest ever for a Yankee.”

Following the Yankees, and Joe, was a rite for all of the Hornets. News and opinion were currency—you had to be up to speed. But no one, even among all the boys in Jackson Heights who imitated Joe’s batting stance, his haircut, the deepness of his voice and the plainness of his speech, no one had it for DiMaggio quite so much as Squeaks Tito. DiMaggio was everything. Once when the Hornets had picked out their latest uniforms, Squeaks made off gleefully with number 9. “What are you so hot about getting Charlie Keller’s number for?” Commie asked. “You’re a third baseman.”

“Keller? Nah, nine’s the number Joe D wore when he came up in ’36,” Squeaks had sniffed. Now it was a Friday night and he was talking about DiMaggio and this new streak. “You know if I ever saw DiMaggio walking down the street and he didn’t say ‘Hi’ to me I think I might go over and punch him in the nose,” Squeaks said to Commie.

“Why?” Commie was laughing now, along with his big brother Sal. “You think that because you spend so much time thinking about him, he should somehow know you?”

“Yes!” said Squeaks and his voice, tinnier and tighter than any other that any of the Hornets had ever heard, pinched higher still. “That’s exactly how I see it.”

Sometimes Commie and Sal called Squeaks the mystery man. No one seemed to know just where he lived or what his parents did. He wouldn’t answer questions. He’d simply appear for games, or to hang out. He was always around until he wasn’t. Squeaks had quick hands—he was becoming a Golden Gloves boxer—and a barrel chest that he willingly used to knock down the hot ones at third, and he had a good arm for someone his size. He went with a girl that everyone knew as The Moose.

Some of the guys had bought loosies from the news dealer and they were standing in front smoking them: Camels. The El train rattled and creaked into its stop above Roosevelt Avenue and the latest herd of commuters clattered down the steel steps to the street. A cool, light rain fell and on the sidewalk among the pack of green Hornets jackets mingled a few blue-and-white ones too; some of the Dukes were hanging around. There was talk about a dance that night over at the Knights of Columbus. The Bettes were going: Eileen, the two Marys, maybe Janette. “Let’s meet at Bickford’s in an hour,” Joe Party Time said. And Gigilo announced he was going home first to get dressed. About a week left of school before summer break was all, and a weekend of ball in front of them if the rain held off, under the lights on Saturday night, then a couple of games at Hornets Field on Sunday. “I hear Panza’s going to see the Yankees tomorrow,” Commie said. “If he can get off work.” Panza was a few years older, Janette’s big brother. They all called him Iceman because he and his father delivered blocks of ice.

“That’ll be Feller pitching for Cleveland, right?” Sal said.

“Yep.”

“He’d
better
get off work,” Squeaks said. “For a game like that. . . .”

Everyone wanted to see the Yankees, and Joe, meet up against Bobby Feller. There wasn’t a pitcher anywhere that stirred the fans like Feller did—still just 22 years old, but already in his sixth major league season. At 17 he’d come off the Iowa plains, from a homespun ballyard on his daddy’s dusty farm—hogs, corn, a few cows—and struck out Cardinal after Cardinal after Cardinal, eight of them in three innings of an exhibition game. That was July of 1936. In early September, Feller struck out 17 Philadelphia A’s. In October he went back for his senior year at Van Meter High. At the same time DiMaggio was making his first mark in the majors, and like DiMaggio, Feller hadn’t let up since. Every year he struck out more batters than anyone. He’d gone 24–9 in ’39, 27–11 in ’40, and now, two months into the ’41 season Feller already had 13 wins, the most in the majors and more than a third of the games the Indians had won in all. Cleveland was holding on to first place, four games up on New York, and when Feller was on the mound, every fourth day as steady as the milkman, they were the best team in baseball. During one stretch already this season he had pitched 30 consecutive innings without allowing a run.

He was dubbed Rapid Robert and you knew about his famous fastball, the heir to Walter Johnson’s. Brother, the way that fastball juddered and juked as it sped in. It was the pitch that people turned out to see. Or maybe just to hear as it thudded into the catcher’s mitt loud enough, in some ballparks, to make an echo. Feller had a curveball that killed too; it came in hard and still broke two feet, a pitch that many hitters dreaded even more than the heat. Feller would throw the curve anytime—behind in the count, runners on, didn’t matter. Some overthinking scientists were suggesting that the curveball, anyone’s curveball, was merely an optical illusion. None of them had ever come to bat against Bob Feller. The Yanks’ Charlie Keller said Feller’s curve “behaved like an epileptic snake.”

Feller was the big draw in baseball, a reason to come see the game even when the Indians weren’t in a pennant race. With Feller, you never knew what you might see. He was like Babe Ruth in that way, ever given to the spectacular. Like on the last day of the 1938 season, when the Tigers came into Cleveland along with Hank Greenberg and his 58 home runs. Thirty thousand fans turned out to see if Greenberg could get up to Ruth’s home run record, 60 in a season, or whether Feller could keep him down. (Five hundred miles away most Yankee fans were Feller fans for the day:
Protect our Babe
.) The crowd did see a record in Municipal Stadium that afternoon, they saw Rapid Robert Feller strike out 18 men—including Greenberg twice—surpassing himself for the most ever in an American League game.

Then there was Opening Day of 1940, gray and bitter and barely 40° in Chicago, when Feller looked around him in the ninth inning and realized he had not allowed a base hit. His parents and his sister had come in from Iowa for the game. Three outs later Feller was striding off the field at Comiskey Park a 1–0 winner, the no-hit feat complete, his Indians teammates backslapping and cheering while every Chicago player returned to the clubhouse with exactly the same batting average—.000—that he had when the game began. White Sox manager Dykes, because of the chill in the air or because of the outcome of the game, or both, applied a hot water bottle to the side of his head.

When the Yankees and DiMaggio faced Feller, though, the crowd learned it might see something else. Sure Feller could beat New York—he’d done it twice already in ’41—but Joe gave him trouble. People still talked about the game in Cleveland in 1937 when DiMaggio tripled against Feller (who was just 18 years old at the time) and then later doubled against him and then, with the Yankees and Indians tied at 1–1 in the ninth and DiMaggio down 0 and 2 in the count and the bases loaded, how Feller had come with the curveball, just a little too high and DiMaggio had driven it into the leftfield stands. The grand slam silenced the big crowd and made winners of the Yanks. DiMaggio had hit Feller pretty well ever since.

The Yankees didn’t need to have the nation’s ace visiting in order to lure a crowd to the Stadium on a Saturday in June, not with the team and DiMaggio streaking. Still, Feller made for something special, something rich. It was the third inning now and more than 44,000 looked on. The Yankees had a 1–0 lead after another home run by Henrich—that made seven homers in two weeks for Tommy; DiMaggio’s old bat was serving Henrich well. Two on, two out and up came DiMaggio for the second time. He’d walked in the first. Now he was digging in, like always, his back foot clawing a rugged patch into the dirt, making the batter’s box his own. A lot of righthand hitters wouldn’t stand in so firmly against Feller, on account of the fact, they said only half-joking, that they didn’t want to get maimed. In addition to everything else, Feller could be plenty wild, more than wild enough to keep most hitters in a state of unease, literally on their toes. Joe was not that way. And though he would never admit to it, his teammates believed that DiMaggio eyed the mound with a little extra purpose when Bob Feller was standing upon it.
So, let’s see who’s the best
. Keller said that he could see the veins in DiMaggio’s neck bulge out as he waited for Feller’s pitch.

Whoever the pitcher, DiMaggio always dug right in. His stance was unvarying, powerful and mute. He was six feet, two inches tall and he weighed 193 pounds. He stood at bat as if something were coiled inside. He stood stiller than it seemed possible a hitter could stand.
Why waste energy moving around until you have to? Get set and hit
.

His cleats were always wide apart, four feet or so between them, and his stride was improbably slight. His back leg bent gently at the knee, his front leg held straight as a stanchion. He stood as deep as he could in the batter’s box, right foot on the chalk. He held his bat back, the barrel a few inches off his shoulder and he did not choke up on the bat handle at all. “I have always taken that stance since I have been playing ball,” DiMaggio said. “And I keep my head steady all the way through. Nobody ever told me to do it that way. It just seemed the natural thing to me.”

The baseball men thought it unusual for a hitter to stand and stride in this fashion, particularly for a hitter who generated such power. Babe Ruth had been pigeon-toed, his front foot curled back and pointing toward the catcher before he unwound. Hank Greenberg took a healthy stride to meet the ball. Mel Ott wound up for his swing with a kick that was like stepping over a fence. What Joe conveyed in his sheer flat-footed stillness—what he had always conveyed, even on his semipro teams and in the Pacific Coast League back home—was the feeling of complete and unyielding control. From his unblinking stance DiMaggio rarely flinched or checked his swing.
If Joe wants to swing at a pitch he goes and gets it
, noticed the young hitter Bill Rigney, who was a few years behind Joe in the PCL.
If he doesn’t want it, nothing moves
.

When DiMaggio swung, his whole body leaned in and his fingers riffled quickly as he began to move the bat. His front foot rose maybe two inches, moved maybe two inches forward before setting back down. Then with a sharp swivel, DiMaggio’s bat came whipping around. He had very strong wrists. “This is the source of my power,” he said.

Gehrig had had a wide stance and Dickey too. But no stance in the major leagues was quite so wide or so motionless as Joe DiMaggio’s, except, that is, the stance of his brother Dominic in Boston. “No, I didn’t teach him to do it,” Joe said, and Dom preferred not to talk about this coincidence at all.

DiMaggio stood in now against Feller, with a chance to lengthen the Yankees lead. Feller ran the count to 3 and 0, but DiMaggio did not want to take a walk. Not with Rolfe leading off of second base, Henrich off of first. When the next pitch got enough of the plate, DiMaggio lashed into it, sending the ball hard into right centerfield. Rolfe came around to score, Henrich held at third. The Yankees had a 2–0 lead and DiMaggio pulled in at second base.

That night at Aces Field in Jackson Heights the boys would talk about the Yankees’ 4–1 win (“Forget Feller, Atley Donald pitched sharp dint he?”) and about the team moving closer to first place and about DiMaggio now hitting in 27 straight. The girls would come out to watch the game, the Hornets versus the Dukes, and so would some of the moms and dads, and the little brothers and a few other folks in the neighborhood. When the players passed the hat in the middle innings, people dropped in a coin or two, money to be spent on new balls or bats or bases, with enough sometimes to get ice cream for both teams after the game. When the boys came up to hit in the chalky artificial light, some of them—Commie and Squeaks, Harry the Hawk, Eddie (Flip) Coyne, the Hornets centerfielder—would get into a stance that you wouldn’t have seen so often a few years back. They stood flat-footed, feet spread wide, bat handle back, front elbow just in front of the top of their ribs, quiet and still, and waited for the pitch.

S
CHOOL DAYS COULD
feel never-ending in the spare classrooms at Newark’s Saint Vincent Academy, especially with summer vacation so near. By the late afternoon Bina would get distracted, feel her eyes drifting away from the nattering nun at the head of the class to gaze instead out the window at the slender trees bending gently in the wind. She thought about getting home. Maybe she could catch Dad at the funeral home before he went out for the night, sit with him a while and hear the latest bits of neighborhood news, or any new stories he had to tell. Dad knew everyone: the mayor, the police captains, the ministers, the men in the suits with the new cars. Also the bakers, tailors, butchers, restaurant owners and everybody else, it seemed, who worked anywhere around the blocks. Every guy in Newark had something to see Jerry Spats about.