56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (15 page)

And, of course, there was Joe DiMaggio. Ever since Dad had started bringing Joe around, and the girls had realized exactly what a big deal he was, Bina had begun keeping a DiMaggio scrapbook, pasting in newspaper stories and photographs of events like the time Dad went on the field at Yankee Stadium before a game to present DiMaggio with a diamond-studded wristwatch. The watch was given on behalf of the Crippled Children’s Welfare Committee, in thanks to Joe for coming around to visit, and during the little ceremony McCarthy and a lot of the Yankees players gathered on the field. Jerry, with Peanuts right beside him, stood in the middle of it all. The scrapbook made Bina feel closer to DiMaggio. She looked for him in the newspaper every day. That the Spatolas knew Joe DiMaggio made Bina feel special among the girls in her class.

The Yankees were back in New York now and Bina was sure that she would see Joe soon, even if he just stopped by the house before going out to dinner. Maybe this time he would bring Dorothy with him. Bina had never been around a more glamorous woman. No one could wear a hat the way Dorothy could, completely without airs, as if she’d forgotten it was there—as if this gorgeous, flamboyant, frilly, red or white or yellow thing belonged naturally on the top of her head.

Dorothy would hug Bina and her big sister Geta when she greeted them and she’d ask what was going on at school. Dorothy asked as if she really wanted to know, maybe not about schoolwork exactly, but she wanted to hear something, a little story about one of the teachers maybe, or some gossip from the neighborhood. They would chat and Dorothy would tease.
She’s not so much older than us
, Bina would think, and then she would think again that, really, Dorothy was a world away. She was beautiful and kind and whenever the Spatolas did something for the DiMaggios—not just a favor for Joe, but after Rose had cooked a meal for the two of them, say, or after the family had sent their engagement gifts—an envelope would soon arrive at 240 Mount Prospect Avenue, and inside it would be Dorothy’s tidily penned note of thanks.

Bina understood that for Dorothy things weren’t always quite as charmed as they seemed—Mom had let her and Geta know about that. Dorothy felt pressures, Rose said, and told the girls about how when they were all out to dinner, Dorothy would eat and eat, voraciously, unselfconsciously, until everything was gone from her plate. And then, soon after, Dorothy would slip off to the ladies’ room. Once, Rose told them, she had gone into the bathroom after Dorothy and found her there, over the toilet, a finger in her own throat, throwing up the meal she had just finished. Maybe that’s what you did if you were a Hollywood actress, Rose said, and shrugged, leaving it at that.

Still, to see them together, Dorothy was the perfect girl for Joe, Bina decided. They
looked
perfect. Joe always cut so fine a figure in his tailored pinstriped suit, his crisp white shirt clasped through the wide cuffs by gold or bejeweled links, the handkerchief in his left breast pocket setting off his tie just so. His black hair lay shiny and unruffled, parted sharply through the right side, cropped above the ear.
Bella figura
, the Italians said of a man like this. Seeing Joe beside Dorothy, she in a long dress, black gloves on her slender hands, and the way they walked, tall and just that close, they seemed like royalty.

The Italians in Newark, the people all around the Spatolas, didn’t agree on everything then, certainly not on the right way to do “business”—Jerry could vouch for that—and not always about the war. Just then, some Italian shipmen were on trial in the federal courthouse for having intentionally damaged a boat as it lay docked in Port Newark. The charge was sabotage. During the trial they gave the fascist salute right there in the courtroom. Maybe these were traitors, lock them up for 20 years, or maybe they were just countrymen confused about their loyalty who’d done something dumb. You could see it different ways, just as you could feel different ways about being an Italian-American in this difficult time.

When it came to Joe DiMaggio though, well, there was only one way to look at him if you were Italian: he made you feel proud when you watched him play ball, and he made you feel especially proud if you knew him. Jerry had told Bina that Joe was on a hitting streak, to look out for fresh news for her scrapbook.

AT THE STADIUM
the day after defeating Feller, the Yankees won again, and once again with close to 44,000 people in the stands. DiMaggio hit a giant home run into the upper leftfield bleachers to make the difference, the 3–2 final score achieved as well on the strength of Red Ruffing pinpointing his fastball and his hard sinker. (“I don’t throw curves,” Ruffing said plainly.) The Indians finished with just six hits in the game, the Yankees but five, and one hour and 45 minutes after Ruffing threw his first pitch, he threw his last. It was as fast a game as there had been at the Stadium all year.

Joe was jogging in after the final out, nearing the Yankees dugout and wending through a small grove of fans that had spilled onto the field. He sensed the boy an instant before it happened, glimpsed him reaching up awkwardly and then, faster than DiMaggio could duck away, plucking the cap clumsily off DiMaggio’s head. The physical contact was the most unsettling part. And the cap, worn-in for a while, had fit fine. DiMaggio chased straight after the boy, barely went a few strides before he was hard upon him and the kid stopped in fear. DiMaggio glared coldly and took his baseball cap back.

It wasn’t the first time he’d had fans get so close to him like this. It had happened when he first burst into the major leagues and again at some of the World Series games. He hated the feeling of strangers’ fingers poking at him, or their hands on his back. The past couple of years, though, the fans had been letting him alone, as if they’d gotten used to him or some of the excitement had worn off. Why, just a few weeks ago they’d been booing him!
No one tried to grab my cap then, did they?
Now the Yankees had won seven games in a row and DiMaggio, his streak at 28 games, was providing a reason to cheer every single day. At Yankee Stadium the announcement of DiMaggio’s name again brought loud applause. Things had changed.

In the mornings at home, and sometimes after the games, DiMaggio liked to read the newspapers, sitting outside on one of the wicker chairs or splaying the pages out upon his desk. He sifted as best he could through all the news. Now U.S. divers were planting mines in the waters around the city to protect the harbor; now Roosevelt had ordered the closing of the Italian and German consulates. There was talk of a subway strike.

In the
Daily News
DiMaggio came across an article about George Sisler, the great retired first baseman of the St. Louis Browns who in 1922 had batted an audacious .420. That was also the year in which Sisler had hit safely in 41 consecutive games, and that streak was the real subject of the article, pegged to the idea that DiMaggio, although he was still nearly two weeks of daily hitting away, might be able to reach it.
A little ahead of themselves aren’t they?
DiMaggio thought. Sisler, in the story, was asked to remember those weeks of ’22. “Sure I’m proud of it,” he said. “I went through an awful lot to make it. You’d be surprised at the strain a hitter is under. . . . I tried to forget about the streak but it can’t be done. It’s in your head every time you step to the plate.”

George Sisler’s streak. Could you imagine?
It seemed far away and from a different time. DiMaggio was seven years old then.
Nobody hits .420 anymore.
After finishing with the newspapers DiMaggio sat a while and smoked, thinking about what he’d read.

The hitting streak record for a Yankee—beckoning now—was 29 games, set in 1919 by the shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh, matched 12 years later by centerfielder Earle Combs.
¹
Both would be in the ballpark for the next game, Monday afternoon against Cleveland in the finale of the three-game series, to see DiMaggio try to tie it: Combs as the quiet but razor-sharp Yankees’ first base coach, Peckinpaugh as the Indians’ manager. The two men were links to Yankee history. Combs had batted leadoff on the Yanks’ great 1927 World Series team and Pecks had been a Yankee captain for years before Ruth even arrived.

These days you could almost feel bad for Pecks with all the heat that was on him. The previous season, 1940, the Indians had disintegrated under manager Ossie Vitt, relinquishing a September grip on first place and finishing behind the Tigers by a single game. Vitt had by then alienated the team with his harsh, often gratuitous criticisms. He would chastise players in front of the rest of the team, even belittling Feller on those rare occasions when he proved fallible.
If Vitt doesn’t respect us, why should we respect him?
the Indians players reasoned. Then they stopped letting him lead. Vitt once came out to the mound to make a pitching change only to have the first baseman Hal Trosky talk him out of it, leaving the just-arrived reliever to trudge into the dugout without having thrown a pitch.

It became known that some of the Cleveland players had gone directly to the Indians owner, Alva Bradley, to sound off about Vitt. After that the team was often mocked by fans, derided as prima donnas and called by many the Cleveland Crybabies; during a series in Detroit, people threw baby bottles onto the field. This was Peckinpaugh’s inheritance (Vitt, as expected, was fired at season’s end), but he had also inherited a highly talented team, still the team to beat some said. Already in 1941, the Indians had led the American League by as many as five games, but now that lead was down to two. It had not taken long for the hollering to begin: “Here go the Indians, folding again!” A third straight loss to the Yankees and the first-place cushion would be just one game. The problem, some of the writers who covered the Indians decided, was that Peckinpaugh, the anti-Vitt, was simply too nice a guy.

At the end of the fourth inning, with the score tied and DiMaggio still without a hit, a steady rain began to fall. The umpires stopped the game and the teams went back inside to wait. In the clubhouse DiMaggio set down his cap and loosened the laces on his cleats and sat on the stool in front of his locker. He smoked cigarettes and drank black coffee—half a cup at a time so that it would stay hot until he finished it. “Cup of coffee, Pete,” Joe would say, and in a moment Pete Sheehy, the clubhouse guy, would have a half-filled cup in DiMaggio’s hands. During a delay like this Sheehy might answer a knock on the clubhouse door to find Ed Barrow there, then go and lean into McCarthy’s office to tell him that Barrow wanted to see him. The manager and the general manager would sit quietly together at the little table at the Harry M. Stevens serving area outside the locker room, have coffee and maybe a slab of pound cake, and talk about the team. Which players were really pulling the weight of their salary and which were not?

The league deadline for making a trade had just passed and the Yankees, after stalking a first baseman—the White Sox’s power-hitting Joe Kuhel had been in the offing—had chosen instead to stick with the rookie Johnny Sturm, who could certainly pick it around the bag, and who was also getting on base enough that McCarthy had him hitting first in the order. Sturm’s lack of power, Barrow and McCarthy now felt, could be overcome by the lineup behind him: Rolfe, Henrich, DiMaggio, Gordon, Dickey and Keller. Crosetti batted eighth, though today that was suddenly, if perhaps temporarily, Rizzuto’s spot. Before the rain arrived that afternoon, Cro had been spiked at second base on a slide by Trosky and taken a slash across his right middle finger that sent him from the game to get stitches and a splint. The doctor said he’d be out five days. Within an inning after replacing Crosetti, Rizzuto had already singled and scored. McCarthy had a good feeling about the kid.

It was not uncommon for Barrow and McCarthy to meet this way, or for the players to see them there, Barrow listening intently beneath his thick eyebrows or suggesting something to the manager in his stern and serious tone. Barrow, and this can be said for him, never came into the clubhouse itself. The team in its nest, he agreed, belonged to McCarthy.

Inside now some of the Yankees players went over and got change from the old wooden chest where they’d stowed their valuables before the game and called over to Pop Logan for something to eat. Logan sometimes went by a nickname—“Nickelhamsandwich”—and on this nickname he now delivered. The guess was, one of the umpires had said, that they would be sitting around the clubhouse for an hour or more waiting for the rain to pass.

Beside DiMaggio’s locker, Gehrig’s flannel number 4 hung in his empty stall; around the corner hung Ruth’s number 3. Tying the Yankee hitting streak record, if the game ever started up again, would mean something. DiMaggio figured he had two more times at bat, three if the Yankees opened things up. At the Feller game Ruth had been in the stands, and been showered with such applause and such unceasing adoration that a policeman had to stay near the Babe all game to keep the fans away. Ruth was 46 years old, retired six seasons, and still it seemed the game of baseball, and certainly Yankee Stadium, belonged to him. Still he loomed large, larger than life. The rumor was that Ruth would star as himself, alongside Gary Cooper, in a movie based on Gehrig’s life.