56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (24 page)

DiMaggio and Peanuts stepped out of the barbershop and the kids gathered around. DiMaggio signed a baseball, a glove, someone’s scrapbook. The heat had broken from recent days and the high sun fell through the fluttering leaves of the ginkgo trees, casting shadows onto the street and reflecting off the polished Cadillac. An old horse-drawn ice truck clomped and rattled by.

Across the Hudson the struggling St. Louis Browns were arriving in New York for three games and DiMaggio knew that the newspaper guys would soon be asking him about his hitting streak. He did not look forward to it. Sometimes writers phrased things in such a way that DiMaggio didn’t understand at first what was being said. He would take a few moments to be absolutely sure of the meaning of a question before he answered it. Teammates could see DiMaggio pause, his face stiff and the faintest look of uncertainty, even suspicion, in his eyes. The crucial thing to DiMaggio was to not have what he said come out wrong, to not have it betray any sense that he was somehow confused, or overmatched. He often feared that his words might make him seem like a rube—or worse, dumb. He hated the thought of being embarrassed in this way.

It was the same reason he’d never even taken a chance on making it through Galileo High; surely the other students would have laughed at him when they saw him struggling to understand. And how would he have looked next to Dom, for whom the reading and the studies came easy?

At Yankee Stadium, the writers sometimes spoke quickly, back and forth, bantering. Lefty or Henrich or Crosetti, or even the rookie Rizzuto seemed to have no trouble bantering back. For Joe, the words were sometimes unfamiliar, or he recognized them but wasn’t sure what they meant. He was getting better though. DiMaggio read the newspapers—headlines and parts of the stories anyway—and tried to make sense of the way the language was being used, tried to make mental notes to carry with him. His goal was to learn two new words from the dictionary each day, a practice he had begun while with the Seals in San Francisco. He preferred to learn big words for the most part. They sounded smarter. “Hey Joe, where’ve you been?” one of his Seals teammates might ask in those days. And Joe would reply, “Oh, I’ve been nonchalantly meandering down the pike.”

He envied Dorothy that she had no troubles with such things. Just like Dom, Dorothy always seemed to know just what to say and how to say it. For Joe, when he was asked to speak to a group or at any other formal gathering, he became nervous. He brought Lefty along to banquets.

He had decided that the best thing to do before speaking to reporters was to prepare and rehearse. It was good, he felt, to appear completely cool and unbothered by the hitting streak. As ever, Dead Pan Joe. On the day before the first of the three Browns games, he was asked whether chasing Sisler’s record was causing him concern; DiMaggio said, “Why should I worry? The only time to worry is when you’re not hitting. I’m not worried now—I’m happy. It’s no strain to keep on hitting, it’s a strain not to be hitting.” DiMaggio did not mention to the reporters that sometimes his stomach hurt; it was better to keep emotions to yourself. He was sure of that.

The Yankees clubhouse, before games and certainly after a loss, could be quiet and serious. There was work to be done. If DiMaggio had an exceptional fluidity on the baseball field, a grace that made it seem as if playing baseball was the reason he was put on earth, he could in the game’s social circles be inartful and stiff. In the locker room, he preferred less conversation, less repartee. This was fine with McCarthy. The raucousness and joviality that had characterized the Yankee clubhouse when Babe Ruth was at the center of it had long since faded. Sometimes guys would complain among themselves that the place had grown as quiet as a church. But that was the tone DiMaggio set, and no one wanted to behave in a way that would lead him to cast his fish-eye upon them, that look of displeasure that might mean he was shutting you out. The players by and large kept the joking and the banter to small groups and to appropriate times.

Of course none of this applied to Lefty Vernon Gomez—Goofy, El Goofo, the Gay Caballero—who could break any silence, liven any mood, cut through DiMaggio’s shield with a simple quip. Lefty was willing and eager to lampoon anyone, to put humor into any situation, to talk an endless stream, and in 1941 he was probably the best friend that Joe DiMaggio had.

When DiMaggio first came to New York in ’36, Gomez was the Yankees’ ace, one season removed from a record of 26–5 and as effective as just about any pitcher alive. McCarthy instinctively put the two of them together to room on the road, the silent rookie and the garrulous lefthander. Jack Sprat and his wife, the manager figured, and he figured right. The pitcher had a lightness and an ease about him that held DiMaggio in thrall. “I wish I could be like Lefty,” Joe would say, watching his friend hold court at the end of a bar. “But I can’t.”

Lefty loved to go out at night, but the next day he came to the ballpark and won his game. He had been with the Yankees for six full seasons, had beaten the Cubs in the ’32 World Series, had roomed, for a while, with the Babe. Gomez, McCarthy made clear, was to look out for DiMaggio in the Big City. He made DiMaggio laugh and protected him as best he could from the favor-seekers and the hangers-on. When DiMaggio returned to the Yankees clubhouse early in the 1937 season wearing a suit, still sidelined after having had his tonsils and adenoids removed, Gomez hammed it up for the cameras, performing an impromptu “examination” and peering soberly down into DiMaggio’s throat. Nothing ever seemed dire when Lefty was around.

The reporters adored him, everyone did. One year, after signing a contract, Gomez pledged to donate part of his salary to an “asylum for southpaws,” or, better yet, “to a home for astigmatic writers.” It was Gomez who said of the stocky Charlie Keller, with his squarish head and dark eyes, that no scout had discovered him but rather that the famous exotic animal collector Frank Buck “had brought him back alive.” (For the rest of his career, Keller never shook the nickname King Kong.) Gomez had been known to stop, mid-windup, to gaze at an airplane flying overhead. He scooped up caps that fans tossed onto the field and kept them to wear himself. He needled Lou Gehrig even into Gehrig’s awful, final months, and Gehrig, you could tell by his smile, was grateful for it. Vernon Gomez, born in Rodeo, Calif., the son of an Irishwoman and a Spanish cowhand, married a movie starlet—the former June O’Dea before she gave up her career for married life. He named their first daughter Vernona.

Gomez, besides being nimble with a joke, was also exceptionally handy. One day near the end of the 1940 season DiMaggio found something wrong with his sunglasses. He brought them to Gomez in the dugout. “Think you can fix ’em, Lefty?” Sure enough after some fiddling Gomez had straightened them out. “That’s baseball for you,” Lefty griped good-naturedly as he handed the sunglasses back to Joe. “You start out being a great lefthanded pitcher and wind up your career being a valet to a lousy outfielder.”

OVER THE YEARS
a change came gradually and naturally to the friendship of Lefty and Joe, even as their relationship deepened to include their wives and occasional day-trips into the country. DiMaggio began flowering as a superstar while Gomez’s career began to wilt. Gomez took to referring to DiMaggio as “the captain” of their hotel room, the one who set the night’s agenda. Lefty realized that now he needed Joe even more than Joe needed him. In 1940, bothered by injuries to his wrist and arm as well as a chronically aching back, Gomez won just three games and for the first time in the eight-year history of the All-Star game was not chosen for the American League team. The Yankees believed they had younger and better pitchers to take his place, and when the season ended they let it be known that they planned to trade Gomez or sell him to another club. But on a late December day, Christmas in the air, Lefty showed up at Ed Barrow’s office at Yankee Stadium and wheedled and cajoled and charmed and vowed and got himself a reprieve: one more year.

Gomez and DiMaggio knew that another lousy season would end the pitcher’s Yankees career and it seemed to their teammates that DiMaggio played with an added intensity on the days that Gomez pitched in 1941—and that Gomez recognized that effort and responded.
DiMaggio is good for Gomez
, is how the rookie first baseman Johnny Sturm saw it. Gomez began warming up earlier and more deliberately before his starts. He no longer threw near to 100 mph, but he pitched more purposefully, more carefully. Still, at 32, he had not shed his affection for whimsy. In one of Rizzuto’s first games—an exhibition against the Dodgers at a packed Ebbets Field—Lefty suddenly called the rookie shortstop to the mound in the middle of an inning. “How do you like being with the Yankees?” Gomez asked.

“Fine, I think it’s great,” Rizzuto said.

“Are your mother and father here today?”

“Yes, they’re here,” said Rizzuto, quizzically.

“Well just stand here,” Lefty said. “I want to talk to you a little while. Just think: Your parents can go home tonight and say that 40,000 people saw their little boy talking to the great Gomez.”

In Gomez’s five starts over the course of DiMaggio’s hitting streak the Yankees had not lost. Lefty was beginning a resurgence that would lead him to go 15–5, his best record in seven years. Like all of his teammates, and more than most of them, Gomez felt the excitement of the hitting streak. Now, with Joe trying to make it 36 in a row, Lefty was pitching against the Browns’ Bob Muncrief, a 6′ 2″ 190-pound righthander in his first full season in the major leagues. Muncrief was 25 years old and relied on a sharp, biting curveball—a kind of slider, really—as his out pitch.

DiMaggio grounded harmlessly to third base in the first inning and popped up a ball backward and into the glove of the St. Louis catcher Rick Ferrell in the third. It was a Tuesday afternoon and each time that DiMaggio came to the plate the Yankee Stadium crowd leaned forward and called out to him.
All right Joe! Let’s get one off this bum
. Before the game DiMaggio had been summoned onto the field and given a good luck gift—a small, smiling Buddha—from the Young Yankees, a team of Chinese boys who played in downtown Manhattan. The boys had stood around DiMaggio, seven of them, in their button-up uniforms and striped socks and looked at him in awe.

He thought he had his hit in the fifth inning, and so did just about everyone in the park. The high drive off DiMaggio’s bat flew to the deepest part of the Stadium, into left centerfield and more than 450 feet from home plate, a triple by the looks of it. But after a long and frenzied gallop, the fine fielding St. Louis leftfielder Roy Cullenbine got to the ball and reached over his shoulder to glove it. Henrich, on first base at the beginning of the play, was around third when Cullenbine made the catch. The Browns easily doubled him up.

Now, two innings later, DiMaggio stood in centerfield. Before each pitch he raised his right hand and shielded his eyes as he looked toward home plate. The sun was falling and DiMaggio knew that the time of the game was approaching when hitting became more difficult. Shadows would cloak the batters while the pitcher remained in light. He would have one more crack at Muncrief, he thought.

In the outfield DiMaggio repositioned himself before each batter and his doing so served as an unspoken cue. Henrich would look over from rightfield and Keller from left and by seeing where DiMaggio stood, they understood how to position themselves too. He felt fidgety. In six innings just one fly ball had come his way. Chances were he wouldn’t be up at bat again for a while. Mainly, he wanted a cigarette. He wanted Gomez to wrap up another inning so that he could put down his glove and go into the dugout and then disappear into the tunnel to that cavernous underbelly of the stadium and smoke there, out of sight of anyone. A few moments to himself. This wasn’t the first time during the hitting streak that DiMaggio had stood in the outfield and thought about having a smoke.

Gomez was pitching well—the Yanks led 4–0 after six—and then with the Yankees batting in the seventh inning an unlikely event occurred. Lefty hit a single. (“I have only one weakness: a pitched ball,” he liked to say of his batting prowess. Or, “I’m a good .150 hitter in any league, and I don’t care who’s pitching.”) So delighted was Gomez with his base hit that when he reached first base he put out his hand to umpire Harry Geisel and Geisel shook it, sending ripples of laughter through the crowd and the Yankees dugout. Even McCarthy had to laugh at that. And Joe.

Now it was the eighth inning and the game seemed salted away. Henrich had just hit a two-run home run and the Yankees were ahead 6–0. There was nobody on base. As DiMaggio came to the plate the fans in the crowd began to chant, “We want a hit! We want a hit!” They knew that this would almost certainly be DiMaggio’s last at bat of the game.

Muncrief looked over and saw Browns manager Luke Sewell emerging from the first base dugout. Was he coming to take Muncrief out of the game? Sewell had been on the St. Louis job for just a couple of weeks and he had an ornery side. “Walk him,” Sewell said when he got out to Muncrief. The pitcher looked at his manager in surprise. “But, why?” Muncrief said.