56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (25 page)

“Because I don’t want this son of a bitch to get a base hit.”

“Skip, I’m not walking him,” said Muncrief.

“You don’t walk him, I’m going to take you out of the game.”

Bob Muncrief was the child of sharecroppers—the family had gotten through the Depression picking cotton on other people’s land for pennies a day. They lived in Madill, Okla., and they kept a couple of cows and a couple of pigs. When Bob had a chance out of high school to go to college on a basketball scholarship, he instead accepted an offer of $60 a month to play in the Texas League. That was more money than he or his parents had ever seen. Each month he sent $45 home and lived off the rest. Bob Muncrief was not someone to take an opportunity for granted. He had once pitched against the great Dizzy Dean in an exhibition game down in San Antonio. Not just pitched against him, he beat him 2–1. Winning that game may have been what really got Muncrief noticed, got him called up to the big leagues. Now Muncrief wanted to be the pitcher who stopped DiMaggio’s streak—there was nothing in that moment that Muncrief wanted more—but he wanted to earn it, to set DiMaggio down fair and square one more time.
Not
to end things with a walk.

“You take me out of the game and I’ll go up there in front of everyone and apologize to DiMaggio. He doesn’t deserve this. Let me get him out, Skip.”

Sewell looked out to the bullpen. He didn’t have much there. A righty named Jack Kramer was ready to go, but he’d been getting knocked around. And who knew if Kramer would listen to Sewell either?

“Get him out then,” said Sewell, rankled, and went back to the dugout.

Muncrief looked in to the plate. Ferrell set up inside. Some pitchers said that this was the best way to pitch to DiMaggio. Others said to go low and away. Either one struck the other Yankees as hilarious; DiMaggio crushed inside pitches, pulling them into leftfield. Outside pitches he drilled to right center. The only safe way to pitch to DiMaggio, especially going the way that he was going now, was to not throw the ball at all.

Muncrief’s fastball did come inside, so far inside that it nicked DiMaggio’s bat. Foul ball. 0 and 1.
Better not get hit with a pitch
. DiMaggio thought.
Then it’ll be over
. The second pitch came inside too and DiMaggio let it go by. 1 and 1.

The crowd’s chanting had not stopped. “We want a hit! We want a hit!” DiMaggio stepped back and wiped sweat from his right eye. He adjusted his cap and shook his bat once and then he stood in, ready. Muncrief raised his leg—he used a high and powerful kick—and let the ball go. Again the pitch came onto the inside part of the plate, a curveball this time, and DiMaggio ripped into it, whistling the ball over the head of shortstop Johnny Berardino and into the outfield. Base hit. The crowd rose and cheered and clapped as if the Yankees had just turned a defeat into victory. On the top step of the dugout the Yankee players rattled the bats in the rack and thwacked one another on the back. DiMaggio, again, simply stood at first base.
This guy
, thought Rizzuto.
I cannot believe this guy
.

After the game, a 9–1 final, Sewell again spoke to young Bob Muncrief. “So why wouldn’t you walk him like I told you to?” the manager demanded.

And Muncrief said, “That would not have been fair to him, or to me. He is the greatest player I have ever seen.”

I
N THE SHADE-COVERED
seats behind the Yankees dugout the men had taken off their jackets, laid their hats upon their laps and rolled their shirtsleeves elbow high. The afternoon was warm and windless and a vendor called out, “Peanuts here,
peee-nuts!
Last chance for peanuts!” He was a teenaged boy in a white hat and a white shirt and white pants. This was to be his final walk through the weekday crowd, a last soliciting of the men in their ties and the women up front in their collared dresses and their brimmed hats—the players’ girlfriends and wives, DiMaggio’s Dorothy among them and leaning in.

Tommy Henrich, standing on the trodden grass before the dugout, could hear from the crowd a restless, anticipatory rumble. He looked at the bat in his hands. It was one of DiMaggio’s, still the same bat he’d borrowed a few weeks back, 36 ounces and 36 inches long, and still serving him so well. Already Henrich had homered in the game, his second long one in three days. He always could hit Elden Auker, the Browns starter today, a righthander with a submarine pitching style—his knuckles all but scraped the mound—that got so many of the other Yankee hitters out of sorts.
I must be batting .600 against this guy
, Henrich thought. There was one out in the bottom of the eighth inning and Red Rolfe stood on first base; the Yankees had a 3–1 lead. Henrich was coming up and DiMaggio, due to bat behind him, still did not have a hit in the game. His streak was at 37 in a row, and this seemed sure to be the Yankees last turn at bat.

What if I rip a line drive to Heffner or McQuinn
, Henrich thought looking over the infield.
What if they double Red off of first base?
No one sized up situations on the field more instinctively than Henrich did. He was like Crosetti in that sense: smart, ceaselessly attentive and always deep into the game. A good and reliable Yankee, a McCarthy type.
They turn a double play here and that’s it
, Henrich thought.
The Big Dago’s streak is done
.

He admired DiMaggio, cherished him almost. It didn’t matter that DiMaggio barely ever spoke to Tommy beyond the few clipped and necessary exchanges; that was just the Dago’s immutable way. It didn’t matter to Henrich that not once in more than four seasons as teammates had he and Joe eaten a meal together. Henrich had never been around a ballplayer like DiMaggio, and what he admired went beyond the majesty of DiMaggio’s great and conspicuous moments at the bat or in the far regions of centerfield.

Henrich saw the way that DiMaggio grinded through the game each day, a foot soldier engaged. DiMaggio would slide ferociously into a base, tearing his flesh so that the blood ran down his thigh and then moments later if the play called for it, slide into a base again with the same pure and unhesitant violence, tearing the flesh anew. All that mattered was being called safe. Henrich had seen DiMaggio win games by racing to cut off a ball in the gap to keep a runner from rounding third, or by beating out a slowly hit ground ball in an early, seemingly innocuous at bat and then a batter or two later coming in to score what would turn out to be the deciding run. It was those things Henrich prized, on top of DiMaggio”s long hits into the wide leftfield alley or over the rightfield fence just when the Yankees most needed them. No one, Henrich felt, found more ways to beat a team than the Big Dago did. “DiMaggio is the Yankees,” he would say to his friends.

Of course Henrich had never said anything to DiMaggio about this admiration and respect, and DiMaggio had never said anything of the sort to Henrich. DiMaggio’s own conviction that Henrich was the smartest ballplayer he had ever played with went unsaid. And yet these feelings were sensed between them. They covered ground side-by-side in the outfield, and they batted one after the other in the lineup. Henrich understood that DiMaggio respected the way that he played the game too. It had been Joe’s idea, seeing Henrich slumping, to lend him the bat.

“Give me a second, will you?” Henrich called out to umpire Art Passarella behind home plate. Then he turned and took a few strides back toward the dugout and caught McCarthy’s eye. “Be all right if I bunted here, Joe?” he asked. Immediately McCarthy saw it too. A bunt would keep them out of the double play, ensure DiMaggio another at bat. A slugger like Henrich did not normally put down a sacrifice bunt in a spot like this—not ever, actually. It didn’t make much sense, especially with one out. But it wouldn’t hurt them really, would it? To just move the runner along? A dugout full of Yankees, McCarthy among them, wanted to see DiMaggio get a chance to push his hitting streak another day. McCarthy nodded at Henrich. “That’ll be all right,” he said.

The Yankees were in first place now, just atop Cleveland. They had won 13 of their last 16 games; their early season struggles were distant and forgotten. The winning, though, had not taken hold of the people who followed the game in the way DiMaggio’s streak had. The day before, after he’d hit in his 37th straight, lining a fourth-inning home run into the leftfield seats, a photographer from the Associated Press had come to DiMaggio following the game and asked him to strike the double biceps pose—shirtless. DiMaggio’s picture was taken from the front and then from behind, so that newspaper readers all over could see in full flex the pale, defined muscles that, as the photograph’s caption read, powered the streak. It was as if DiMaggio were some kind of superhero.

The Stadium crowd barely noticed now that the Yankees, with their two-run lead, were on the verge of beating the badawful Browns again, or even that Marius Russo, the New York lefthander who some said was on his way to being one of the best in the game, was pitching the masterpiece of his young career. Russo hadn’t given up a hit until the seventh inning when, with one out, the power-hitting St. Louis first baseman George McQuinn homered past Henrich’s wall-climbing reach and seven rows back into the rightfield stands to end the no-hitter and the shutout. Through eight innings Russo had faced just 25 batters. The Browns couldn’t touch him.

It was DiMaggio, though, that the people had left work early to see. He had struggled against Auker as he usually did, flying out to leftfield in the second inning and then in the fourth rapping a brisk ground ball that the St. Louis shortstop Johnny Berardino could not handle. The Yankee players came out of the dugout then, just as they had a week before, and turned to stare up at Dan Daniel in the press box, hoping that they might influence him, intimidate him even, into calling the play a hit. Daniel felt hot in his seat. In the still air, sweat had formed on his brow and along the sides of his face. He knew once again that his decision might determine the outcome of DiMaggio’s hitting streak, and he felt the many eyes upon him—the Yankees’, the other writers’, and the eyes of those keener fans who knew just where to look. Berardino had muffed it, Daniel felt. Sharply hit or not, Johnny should have made the play. Daniel put his forefinger and thumb in the shape of an O and leaned forward out of his chair. Error. The Yankee players shook their heads in disapproval and Joe Gordon gave to Daniel a curt and dismissive wave. DiMaggio was 0 for 2.

He grounded out weakly in the sixth, and when the bottom of the eighth inning began he was due to be the fourth man up. The Yankees needed a base runner for DiMaggio to even have a chance. So after Johnny Sturm led off with a pop-up to second baseman Don Heffner for the first out, an uneasiness settled onto the Stadium. “Hey, streak-killer,” one of the writers called over to Daniel. The Yankees’ dugout was quiet and unanimated and the fans around the infield shifted in their seats. Dorothy sat with her hands tightly clasped. And so it followed that after the next batter, Red Rolfe, worked Auker deep into the count and finally drew a walk, the fans rose and cheered as mightily as if Rolfe had clubbed a grand slam.
DiMaggio’s gonna get up!
It was now that Henrich saw the danger of a double play before him and chose to lay down a bunt. On his second attempt the bunt stayed fair and Henrich was thrown out at first base; Rolfe made it safely to second and with two outs in the Yankees’ final turn at bat, Joe DiMaggio began striding to the plate.

Maybe Auker will walk him
, Marius Russo thought in the dugout. He always took the game apart with a pitcher’s mind now, after more than two years of McCarthy being on him. “Are you in the game? Are you in it?” the manager would ask inning after inning, game after game. He’d remind Russo to think about the batters who were coming up, to think about what he would do if one of them got on base, to consider not just the batter but the inning and the score and the game as a whole.
This whole sacrifice bunt thing is a little crazy
, Russo thought.
I bet Auker walks him
.

Auker had gone to 3 and 0 on DiMaggio in the second inning, had run the count full in the fourth, but walking him intentionally now, or even pitching around him, was not a thought that came into the righthander’s mind. He’d always handled DiMaggio well; he knew Joe didn’t like his submarine style. Get him out and the inning’s over and the Browns come up with one more chance to make up the two runs, maybe steal him a win. Walk DiMaggio instead? So that another power hitter, the lefthanded-batting King Kong Keller could come up with two men on? That was not Auker’s kind of thinking.

The crowd rumbled and the players came to the front of the dugout to watch. All of the infield was in shadow. Elden Auker—bringing that sneaky underhanded stuff for nine major league seasons now, and for 11 years since he’d fatefully separated his shoulder playing college football in Kansas—had a chance to make headlines, to be the streak-stopper. DiMaggio stood in, motionless, and a hush fell on the Stadium. The peanut vendors and the Cracker Jack vendors stopped in their routes. Auker brought his glove forward and then swung it back below his waist and then he threw his curveball to the plate.

The line drive was past third base, a white blur six inches above Harlond Clift’s head, before Auker could even turn. The ball rolled deep into the leftfield corner as the fans hollered and whooped, realizing they would have this to tell when they got home, and then again the next morning—
I was there!
The Yankees players applauded and rattled the bats in the bat-rack and Rolfe stepped emphatically on home plate and Gomez, capless, danced a little jig in the dugout. Auker looked over to see DiMaggio pulling in at second base, implacable, imperious, cool.

The thrill never left the crowd that day, not after the eighth inning ended nor as Russo set the Browns down, in order once again, in the ninth. After the final out some of the fans came down onto the field and ran to slap Joe on the back as he jogged in from centerfield—
Way to go Joe! You’re the best!
It was their last chance to have him in their midst before the Yanks went down to Philadelphia and Washington for a weekend on the road. DiMaggio kept one hand on his cap.