56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (20 page)

The White Sox were gone and the Tigers were in New York now and they were sending out their ace, the hefty righthander Bobo Newsom. Bobo—they’d called him Buck in the minors back on the West Coast—threw about as hard as anyone south of Feller. He’d gone 21–5 in 1940 and won two more games in the Series. Newsom was 6′ 3″, 220 pounds and sometimes it looked like he had a couple of chins. He earned a star’s salary, $35,000, and Ol’ Bobo Newsom from Hartsville, S.C., was this kind of pitcher: During the third inning of a game in 1935, a line drive off the bat of the Indians’ Earl Averill broke his knee cap. Newsom finished the game, winning it, then wound up in a cast for five weeks. Another time, in 1936, he was on the mound for Washington when a throw to first by the third baseman caught Newsom in the face and broke his jaw. He pitched six more innings and finished that game too.

Ol’ Bobo, as he liked to call himself, would sure be pleased to put an end to DiMaggio’s streak before Joe could get his name next to Hornsby’s. No doubt about that. Back in 1933 in the PCL, before pitching against a streaking DiMaggio (Joe was 30 some odd games into that streak too), Newsom had proclaimed. “I’m gonna stop him tomorrow.” He hadn’t, though. Nor had he stopped Joe when he faced him again during that same streak two weeks later. Nor had Newsom lived up to his boasts during DiMaggio’s first season with the Yankees when Newsom vowed that he would cool off the rookie. “I know Joe’s weakness,” the pitcher said. Against Ol’ Bobo that day Joe had a weakness for doubles; he hit three of them.

Today it was Newsom, tomorrow somebody else would want to be the guy to try to stop the streak and get his name in the headlines. It was June 20, and the Bronx sky was thick with white-gray clouds. DiMaggio tested the firmness of the ground in centerfield, gauging how ground balls might play. He was shagging flies, maybe an hour before the game. Over in rightfield Henrich was climbing the wall again. Every so often Henrich had Earle Combs hit him fly balls just to that spot, so that he had to climb up the short rightfield fence and stand on top of it for an instant, to catch the ball and take away a woulda-been home run. When rookies first saw Henrich at it they thought he was just goofing around. But he wasn’t. “I need to practice this,” Henrich said. “One of these days I’m going to have to go up and catch a ball like that in a game.”

That was the kind of thinking and devotion to detail that McCarthy loved. Any edge you could get was worth taking. Before games McCarthy and the head groundskeeper, Walter Owen, would tailor the field. When the banjo-hitting Senators came in with their swift outfielder George Case, for example, McCarthy would have Owen cut the grass short so that bunts or soft-hit grounders would reach the Yankee fielders more quickly. Then again he might have the grass along one edge of the first baseline left a little long so that a visiting runner like Case might be slowed even just the slightest bit.

Such subtleties were the stuff of McCarthy’s every-day machinations—
there are so many ways to win a ballgame besides pitching and hitting
, he felt—and part of why his players revered him. Yet with these power-hitting 1941 Yankees, the finer points were often little more than salt sprinkled on the deep wounds they inflicted upon their opponents. The Yankees rocked Newsom that day: four runs in the first inning when Henrich hit his 11th home run of the year and “King Kong” Keller clubbed his 14th, on the way to a 14–4 win. DiMaggio was in it from the start, singling hard in the first inning against Ol’ Bobo and getting three additional hits. He went 4 for 5 with a run batted in. His batting average was up to .354, fifth in the league—if still nearly 70 points behind the amazing Williams. Over the past two weeks DiMaggio had batted .468. He needed one more day of hitting to leave Rogers Hornsby behind.

That evening a photographer from the
Daily News
came by the apartment to shoot Joe and Dorothy together after his big and record-tying game. For the photo, Joe wore a crisp white shirt, suspenders and a tie, and he sat in his desk chair reading the newspaper. He wore his wedding ring.

The headlines in the papers now were about the more than 50,000 New Yorkers who were expected to volunteer to become local air raid wardens, just as citizens had done in London; they would be taught what procedures to follow when an alarm sounded or, heaven forbid, if bombs fell on New York City. The Nazi barrage had not slowed, and that day the Italian high command released a statement declaring that it was “battering British troops in North Africa.” The German and Italian consuls across the U.S., per Roosevelt’s order, knew they now had less than a month to officially close up. The President had dispatched a terse note to Italy demanding “the removal of all Italian nationals in any way connected with organizations of the Italian government in the U.S.” Lines were being clearly drawn.

When Joe spoke to Rosalie and Giuseppe by telephone now—broken English on their side, scraps of Italian on his—they talked often about the nearness of the war, and whether the waterfront in San Francisco might be at risk. Rosalie fretted. What would war mean for an Italian alien? She and Giuseppe had been thinking about finally trying to become U.S. citizens after all these years, if only they could learn to read English well enough to pass the test. Joe was all for that, he said. Then Giuseppe told Joe about how the fish were running for Mike, and Joe said that he would call Tom to ask about business at the Grotto, and Giuseppe said that they were all following his hitting streak, of course.

Dorothy dressed fine for the newspaper photograph too, a print dress and flowers in her hair, just a little bit of powder on her cheeks. At the photographer’s bidding she stood and rested her arm on the back of Joe’s chair, and then as he tilted his head upward and to the side, smiling all white teeth, Dorothy leaned down and put her lips to the side of his face. On the front page of the
Daily News
the next day, beneath a photo of a woman filling out a form to be an air raid warden at a police station on East 67th Street (she was one of 64,000 who would sign up in all), that picture of the DiMaggios appeared. “Joe DiMaggio got himself four hits out of five chances yesterday making it the 33rd straight game in which he hit safely,” the photo caption read. “The Missus was so pleased she gave him this kiss.”

After the photographer left and the two of them were standing close in the living room, Dorothy brought up to Joe how important this hitting streak seemed to be, how from what she was hearing in the stands, and starting to read in some of the fan mail, it felt to her like the streak could be something that really set him apart. She said this in a light and encouraging tone. Still, Joe found himself irritated by Dorothy’s words. As if he didn’t know. As if he could possibly be unaware that people were now attaching such significance to what he was doing. As if, because he didn’t talk to her about the streak, that meant it was never on his mind. Joe looked unsmilingly at Dorothy and walked silently out of the room. Dorothy’s eyes fell, and her hands dropped to her sides. She had only wanted to talk.

When Joe was away from Dorothy he sometimes missed her so much that a melancholy came upon him. He felt it most deeply in the night, and when he awoke in the morning. No hotel room, not even with Lefty or some gal in it, ever felt like home. He missed the way that Dorothy looked at him when he walked through the door and the way that her arms wrapped around him. He missed falling asleep beside her, and opening his eyes in the early morning and moving his body close to hers. He called her from the road and sometimes they lingered on the phone for a long time.

Joe was always happy to hear something from home, news about the doorman, say, or whether figs—DiMaggio adored them, a treat growing up—had come in to the market, or that June, Lefty’s wife, had stopped by for lunch. Joe and Dorothy would talk about the baby and about the things they would do together when he got home, how they would spend his off day and their evenings and nights. When Joe was away he preferred that Dorothy stay at home. And especially now that she was pregnant, she usually did. The first few days of Joe’s homecoming were always happy and busy. Dorothy cooked and came early to the games and they were constantly together. But gradually Joe would be reminded of the things that bothered him about Dorothy: that she laughed too loud; that she still thought about restarting her acting career when the baby grew old enough; and, mainly, that she always wanted to talk and talk. About whatever.

There could at times be a kind of tone deafness to Dorothy, Joe felt—like when she had started in on the significance of his batting streak—and often she said things that Joe wished she hadn’t said. She asked him questions that he felt too tired or uninterested to answer.
Who do you talk with in the locker room?
Or,
How come we haven’t heard from your brother Vince in so long?
Dorothy always wanted to learn more about Joe. She was always trying to get closer to him, closer than he could let anyone get—even his wife who was bearing his child. Joe would then need some time on his own or with a pal who didn’t care whether he said anything about anything. He might call Lefty, or have Peanuts bring the car around, or just go down and see Toots on his own.

At other times, on the good nights between them, Joe and Dorothy would come out of the shower together and get dressed at the same time, she finally tightening his tie just a last little bit, he fastening her necklace behind her neck, so that they both looked impeccable and ready to go out together into the night. Sometimes they went to one of the spots that she favored, El Morocco or the Copacabana, where the show business and Hollywood people would turn out. June and Lefty sometimes made it a foursome.

But on this night Joe didn’t feel like any of that. Impatience and irritation had taken hold of him and something chewed at his stomach. That newspaper poem by Cohane was true: DiMaggio didn’t betray any mental strain on the field. No situation on the baseball diamond, no matter how large, changed the way he played, not when he was a rookie, not when he was in the World Series and not now. As a teenager in the Pacific Coast League he had been tagged with the nickname Dead Pan Joe for his unflinching stoicism, and the name still stuck. Before DiMaggio’s first year with the Yankees, Ed Barrow had cautioned him about the heavy attention he might receive in New York and warned him not to get overanxious; DiMaggio, then 21, said, “Don’t worry. I never get excited.” And he never did, not on the outside. The things that mattered to him—winning, surpassing expectations, making money, pleasing his father, never looking foolish or beaten—he thought about in his own quiet way. But often these days his stomach hurt.

DiMaggio was glad the next afternoon against the Tigers when his base hit came early. That meant that nothing hung over him for the rest of the game, neither the pressure of needing a hit to keep the streak alive nor the nagging thoughts that came with it—that taking a base on balls might help the team but would undermine his chances, say; or that the innings were drawing late.

He came to bat with two outs in the first inning and Red Rolfe on third base. Sweat already soaked through the uniform of Detroit pitcher Dizzy Trout. Henrich had just hit a ground ball to second base that had gone Gehringer to Croucher to York for a double play, dampening the Yankees’ rally and hushing the crowd. But when DiMaggio lined a single to rightfield, the more than 20,000 fans at the Stadium, among them groups of uniformed soldiers that the Yankees (just like the Dodgers and the Giants and all the major league clubs) now let into games for free, rose in loud ovation.
Way to keep it going Joe! That’s 34!
Combs came over and put a hand on DiMaggio’s back.

The news that he had extended his streak to 34 games was sent immediately to press boxes in Philadelphia, D.C., Chicago, Brooklyn and everywhere else a major league game was being played that day. The crowd kept cheering and the players in the Yankees dugout applauded, and DiMaggio stood at first base, arms akimbo, placid and accomplished, knowing he had done something no righthanded batter had ever done before.

________

¹
Bill Dahlen, a righthanded hitter with the Chicago Colts (now the Cubs), hit in 42 straight games in 1894. This streak was either overlooked or dismissed by those covering the game in 1941. Hornsby’s 33 games was uniformly regarded as the righthanded and National League record; Sisler’s 41 games as the overall modern mark.

W
HERE WAS JOE
?

Dorothy stood by the bedroom window, looking downtown over the building tops. There was still some daylight left and there would be for an hour or two more. A warm breeze came into the room. Dorothy put her hand on her belly and rubbed the back of her neck. Joe had left without saying goodbye.

She wondered what would happen when Joe came home, whether he would he speak to her or not. At times after they had fought, or after she had merely done or said something that had struck Joe as bothersome or wrong, he could go without saying anything to her for a long time. Hours. Days even. It felt like forever. Early on in their time together, she had teased him when it happened.
You’re like a clam!
But even then the teasing hadn’t changed anything; Joe would meet it only with a remote look. Now when Joe stopped speaking to her, Dorothy just stayed quiet too. She too had pride. Dorothy might break the silence to ask Joe about something that, practically, needed to be asked, or to tell him if somebody had phoned. And Joe, if the situation demanded, might say, “yes” or “no” or “later” but that was the whole of it. Joe would go about the house, his movements terse, looking away when he passed her, going out the front door without a word. The argument was in the silence itself, and the silence itself was a weapon, remorseless and blunt.

Until at some point—over breakfast or as they lay in bed or if he was looking for his tie with the gray-blue squares and needed Dorothy’s help in finding it—Joe would speak to her and they would begin to talk again just like that, as if nothing had happened, joking lightly to define the new mood. But for Dorothy something
had
happened and had not gone away. Joe’s silence could sit inside her for days after it ended, like something cold.