56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (18 page)

Daniel was 51 years old in the summer of 1941 and he had been covering baseball for more than three decades. He typically worked games dressed to the hilt—full suit, vest buttoned snugly, handkerchief in his breast pocket, the most meticulously shined shoes in the house. He wore, as the writer Ray Robinson recalled for me, “everything but a homburg.” Daniel was then the president of the New York chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association and he regarded baseball and his role in it with a kind of sanctimoniousness. He took his assignment as an official scorer very, very seriously. For Daniel the history of the Yankees and of baseball, with all its gorgeous numbers, was very much a history of his own life; the integrity of the game occupied a central place in Daniel’s sense of self. He had covered Ruth and Gehrig and the hallowed manager Miller Huggins, and had relationships with them all. He had also covered and known for many years Combs and Roger Peckinpaugh, the venerated former Yankee players whose streaks DiMaggio would break by hitting in a 30th consecutive game. Is it possible that Daniel would choose to at once undermine the Yankee tradition he held in such august light, and to also diminish his own authority at the ballpark, the very thing that defined him, by making an intentionally bogus call at a high-profile moment? Sure, it’s
possible
. But not at all likely.
¹

Indeed, rather than being eager to award barely deserved hits, Daniel at times appeared reluctant to call hits on questionable plays during the streak. About a week after the Appling grounder, Daniel ruled an error on a DiMaggio ground ball to Browns’ shortstop Johnny Berardino that might have been judged a hit, thus incurring gestures of displeasure from several Yankees and forcing DiMaggio to go to his final at bat to keep the streak alive. In a piece that appeared in the
1942 Baseball Record Book
, Daniel maintained that he and all “scorers leaned backward in their determination to make the streaker earn every hit—and then some.”

Even if we accept that the hop was indeed untrue and that Daniel’s motives were pure, a third question still arises: Did Daniel simply blow the call? Despite the wicked bounce should Appling have been able to recover and make the play? Other reporters didn’t seem to think so. This was at a time when baseball writers frequently took an official scorer to task if they disagreed with a judgment. Then, as now, such second-guessing was part of the sports pages’ regular fare. Yet no one attacked Daniel’s ruling in print. The nearest thing to a quibble came from the
New York Sun
which said that the play was a “close decision.” Not a wrong decision. Just a close one.
²

Was Daniel’s call consistent with what another scorer might have ruled? The sections of the
1941 Baseball Rule Book
that relate to official scoring are full of vague, ambiguous and at times contradictory guidance, but one passage, a subsection of Rule 70, section 5, dictates that a base hit should be scored, “When a fair hit ball is partially or wholly stopped by a fielder in motion, but such player cannot recover himself in time to field the ball to first before the batsman reaches that base. . . .” Accounts of the play say that Appling was moving when he attempted to field the ball; that would call for a ruling of “hit.”

The rule book has been made steadily more specific and explicit as it relates to official scoring and in 1955 a note was added that sets clearer parameters. Rule 10.05c instructs the scorer to rule a base hit, “When a batter reaches first base safely on a fair ball which takes an unnatural bounce so that a fielder cannot handle it with ordinary effort.” A note at the end of entry 10.05 decrees that, “In applying the above rules, always give the batter the benefit of the doubt.” Again, by both of those standards the Appling ball would have been ruled inarguably a hit.

Would that ball be a base hit today? In an effort to get further clarity on what might go through a scorer’s mind, I spoke to Ivy McLemore, who has been an official scorer for more than 1,000 major league games, beginning in 1975. He works out of Houston. I did not tell McLemore that I was inquiring about a play that occurred during Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak, but merely described a hypothetical event, based on the numerous descriptions of the play. I said, “If a routine ground ball were hit to the shortstop and then took a bad hop that hit him in the shoulder, does that sound to you like a hit or an error?”

McLemore did not hesitate. “That would be a hit,” he said, “because that play had an X factor and that has to be weighed in your decision. Funny plays like that must be accounted for.”

“Would it matter to you who was fielding?” I asked. “Would it have any impact on your decision whether the shortstop were a Gold Glover as opposed to the league’s most stone-handed oaf?”

“No,” said McLemore. “I just ask myself: ‘Was that a play that an average major leaguer would make with ordinary effort.’ If the answer is no, I score it a hit.”

I also queried Michael Duca, a veteran scorer at San Francisco Giants’ and Oakland A’s games, and I described the play in exactly the same way. Duca also said that the ball “sounds like a hit.” While he agreed with McLemore that the skill level of the fielder would not impact how he scored the play, he said that the speed of the batter might. “A runner who can get down the line would be more likely to beat that long throw even if the shortstop was able to recover from the bad hop,” Duca said. “With a fast-moving runner I’d almost definitely have to rule it a hit.” DiMaggio had well-above-average speed. He was known for running as hard as he could on every play, regardless of the score or circumstances. In this case, in a close game and with his hitting streak on the line, it is hard to imagine that DiMaggio was coming down the first base line giving anything less than all he had.

IT IS THE
stature of DiMaggio’s achievement that has made the events of Game 30 worthy of inquiry. Imagine how often a highlight of the Appling play would be aired today. Upon closest inspection the ball seems to have been irrefutably a hit. But of course there is no way to know for sure. Certainly DiMaggio got a lucky break in that game, just as he did with his infield hit a day later—and just as he got an unlucky break when the White Sox’s Taffy Wright made the one-handed catch of his near home run in the eighth inning. But to view that good luck as any kind of diminishment or qualification of the validity of the streak is misguided, a captious complaint. As Stephen Jay Gould points out, “long streaks always are, and must be, a matter of extraordinary luck imposed upon great skill.”

There’s scarcely a long streak that does not have points of minor controversy or luck. Pete Rose’s 44-game run in 1978 was sustained when he dropped down a bunt in Game 32 with two outs in the ninth inning and his team leading 7–2. George Sisler was awarded a hit (by his hometown scorer) in Game 40 of his 41-game streak on a ball that bounced off the shin of the Yankees’ second baseman. The Florida Marlins’ Luis Castillo had 18 infield hits during his 35-game streak in 2002. In Game 34 of Chase Utley’s 35-game streak with the Phillies in 2006 Utley was 0 for 4 in the eighth inning against St. Louis when he got on base on a slow roller to the Cardinals pitcher. The play was ruled a fielder’s choice before Phillies p.r. man Greg Casterioto, as he recalls, “went crazy yelling at the official scorer.” The ruling was then changed to a hit.

In a more sweeping sort of “Yeah, but. . .” the Brewers’ Paul Molitor achieved his 39-game streak in 1987 entirely as a designated hitter and less than halfway through the streak was put permanently into the leadoff spot to help ensure more at bats. Wee Willie Keeler’s 44-game run in 1897? Forget it. Keeler played at a time when foul balls (except foul bunts and foul tips) were not counted as strikes, an incalculable advantage for the hitter. Even Lou Gehrig’s great consecutive-games-played streak was propped up in 1934 when, suffering from lumbago, Gehrig batted once as the leadoff batter—he singled, of course, being Lou Gehrig—and then came out of the game.

And so on, and so on, and so on. The
Mona
Lisa has no eyebrows.

To put what DiMaggio achieved in 1941 into further perspective, let’s imagine for the moment that he was indeed stopped in Game 30. Let’s also imagine—and this, as we’ll see, is far less of a stretch—that he got a base hit in the game in which the streak actually ended. DiMaggio went on to hit safely in 16 straight games after that streak-snapping night. So if as a lark we apply those two “what ifs,” DiMaggio in ’41 would have wound up with a 29-game hitting streak and then, immediately afterward, a 43-game streak, the latter still longer than any other hitting streak in the 109-year history of the American League.

________

¹
One strange tactic used to advance the theory that Daniel may have covered up for an Appling miscue draws on fielding statistics. Appling committed 672 errors over the course of his 2,359 career games, an average of one error every 3.51 games. Thus, some among the short-sighted suggest that the fact that Appling was charged with but a single error in the 12 games that the White Sox and Yankees played during the streak implies that something was up—that Daniel, with the hitting streak on his brain, was disposed to award hits over errors. (“Appling’s defence during the streak was adjudged three times more efficient than over the course of his career,” the
Walrus
essay intoned.) This argument, either willfully or naively, ignores a fundamental rule of probability: the decreased reliability of a small (in this case minuscule) sample size. Twelve games out of 2,359 mean nothing; they are statistically insignificant. Actually, over the course of that many games, there are hundreds of one-error-in-12-games samples, just as if you tossed a coin 2,359 times you would get many, many 12-toss sequences in which only two heads rather than the expected six came up. That’s no conspiracy, that’s randomness. Should we ascribe to dark forces the fact that in 1940 and ’41 Appling played 35 errorless games against the Detroit Tigers, 25% more than the 28 errorless games he played against the St. Louis Browns? Is some sorcerer behind the fact that Appling closed the ’41 season with just one error in his final 23 games (only one of which, for the record, was played against the Yankees)? Silly. Finally, even citing 12 games as a basis is a gross misrepresentation. Three of those games were played in New York at the very start of the streak when it was not a streak at all, that is, when there would be no reason to lean DiMaggio’s way on a close call. Six of the other nine games were played in Chicago where neither Daniel nor any other New Yorker worked as the official scorer. So in fact there were just three mid-streak games in which Appling played and that Daniel scored. To use these fielding statistics as evidence of Daniel’s reluctance to charge an error, or for that matter as evidence of anything at all, is simply false. Herrings have rarely been redder.

²
Two people who spoke to Daniel about the play years later told me that his ruling was influenced in part by the
Times’
John Drebinger whose immediate conviction was that the ball was a hit.

E
VEN NOW THE
sight of Joe in the newspaper quickened Marie and gave her a fleeting feeling of surprise.
That’s our Joe!
When she thought of him—and, too, when she thought of Vince or of Dommy—Joe was still a little brother, hardly older than her own darling Betty was now. She could remember playing games of catch with Joe when he was not yet six years old and how effortlessly, even then, he caught the ball in his little hands. Later he had lengthened, his teenaged legs and arms extending like slender stems. The boys at the playground called him
gambi
.

Joe was the gangliest of the DiMaggio sons but there had never been any awkwardness when he moved. Once, when Marie had been downtown, near the corner of Sansome and Market Street, she had come upon Joe and Dommy after they’d just finished selling their newspapers for the afternoon. They were throwing the wadded-up wrapper from one of their bundles of papers back and forth across the wide street, 30 feet maybe. The makeshift ball was the size of a small melon—although it was buoyant in the air—and the boys darted about the busy sidewalks making improbable catches. It was almost like a dance. Some people stopped to watch. Who would have thought that now, years later, both Joe and Dom would be playing centerfield in the major leagues, and that the newspapers being sold on that corner would carry articles about them.

The afternoon light came in through the big bay windows of her parents’ house on Beach Street, rays of orange sun slanting in above the rooftops across the way. The palm trees outside stood still. Marie was the fourth eldest of the DiMaggio children, the third girl. She had long, black hair and plenty of forehead and her face was round like their ma’s. She was eight years older than Joe.