56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (26 page)

Thirty-eight games in a row, and now George Sisler’s record was right there before him. DiMaggio clattered through the tunnel and up the few, steep steps to the Yankees’ locker room, hearing his teammates’ happy voices echoing through the belly of the Stadium. The streak was not his alone, DiMaggio realized, and it wasn’t just something that enthralled the fans. The streak belonged to his Yankees teammates too. Henrich had laid down that bunt just for him. And though the players had steered wide of DiMaggio as his hitless game went along, he had seen them standing to glare at Dan Daniel, and he had felt his teammates at his back when they gathered at the top step of the dugout, expectant and engaged, as he stood at the plate his last time up.
They’re all on my side
, he thought.

A ballplayer might have picked up some superstitions during a streak like this, but not DiMaggio. Nothing to add to the little kick he always gave to the back of his left heel with his right toe before settling into his batting stance, or to his habit of stepping squarely on second base each time he ran in from centerfield at the end of an inning. “Hoodoos aren’t going to stop me, a pitcher will,” DiMaggio had declared a few days before. Some of his teammates, though, had lately adopted superstitions on his behalf. A few of them wore the same pregame shirt day after day. The kid Rizzuto kept the same stale and sugar-spent wad of gum stuck beneath the bill of his cap. Nobody wanted to be the one to turn DiMaggio’s luck.

They came around him in the clubhouse to grip his hand and pound his back, the coaches Fletcher and Combs and the players one by one or in small groups. Everything was bubbly and the solemn quiet that so often attended the clubhouse was gone. DiMaggio shook their hands, grinned wide and boyishly and said, “Thank you, fellas” in his deep voice. And guys went off to the showers, loose and snapping towels. For Joe, this was perfect.
It’s like I’m one of them
, he thought. And he was, even as he remained the player around whom the Yankees sun revolved.
Everybody is on my side
.

DiMaggio did not want these sweet, clear and happy times after the games to end. He lingered in the clubhouse, the last man out of the shower, the last one to get his watch and cufflinks and wallet from his box in the old valuables chest by the locker room’s front door. He was in no rush to go, to meet Dorothy and Jimmy and step into the Cadillac and leave the ball field behind. For all the tension the streak sometimes caused DiMaggio—the stomach, the sensation, as he would say, that he was “dying inside”—these moments with the other Yankees in the clubhouse, when he was at once the favored hero and one of the guys, were precious and rare. He was warmed by a feeling he would not forget even long after the streak ended. Years and decades later, after so many fine and defining events—the birth of his son that fall, the big contract in ’49, even then the golden courtship of Marilyn before things went bad—he would still remember the feeling he had now, and he would say to people that these moments in the locker room, the streak freshly extended for yet another day and his teammates all abuzz, were the very best moments of his life.

N
ine players in major league history have run off
hitting streaks of more than 35 games in a season. Four of them—the Boston Braves’ Tommy Holmes in 1945; the Reds’ Pete Rose in ’78; the Brewers’ Paul Molitor in ’87 and the Phillies’ Jimmy Rollins in 2005—have done it in the 70 years since DiMaggio set his mark. Rollins, who hit in 36 consecutive games to end the ’05 season then added two more at the start of ’06, broke into the majors in 2000. For years he abided by an annual springtime ritual in which he would tell his younger brother Antwon: “This is the season I’m going to break Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak.” I asked Rollins recently why he set his sights on that particular outsized achievement—why didn’t he vow to hit .400, say? Or steal 100 bases? Or get 250 hits? Or score 150 runs? Rollins replied, “Because people say that those things can be done. Why not go for the Golden Grail?”

DiMaggio’s record retains a deep resonance for ballplayers today in part because of its remarkable endurance and also because any time that anyone gets on a hitting streak of even moderate length, DiMaggio’s name and the enormousness of the accomplishment come up. As Mets third baseman David Wright put it, “How big of a deal is DiMaggio’s streak? Ryan Zimmerman got halfway there [in May of 2009] and it was on the front page of every sports section and led every sports highlight show. He was halfway. Halfway! Think about that.”

Mention DiMaggio’s streak in a modern baseball locker room and a look of reverence often passes over players’ faces. It’s a bit like saying “Harding’s ascent” to a group of rock climbers at Yosemite, or “Escoffier’s soufflé” among young chefs at a culinary institute. There is something sacred to it, and something surreal. “Pfffft, that’s one of those Bugs Bunny numbers,” Ken Griffey Jr. said to me, shaking his head. “People do that in cartoons, not in real life.”
¹

“It is huge and it is humbling,” Yankees captain Derek Jeter said of DiMaggio’s streak. “Get a hit for two straight months? It’s hard to get a hit for two straight days.”

But really, is it
that
hard? Couldn’t it be done by a player today? In its simplest breakdown, all that a batter needs to do is go 1 for 4 or even 1 for 5 each day. DiMaggio’s feat feels tantalizingly attainable, unlike some of the old and now hard to fathom pitching accomplishments such as Cy Young’s 511 career wins, or Jack Chesbro’s 41 victories in 1904. In the past 35 years only the retired knuckleballer Phil Niekro has even
started
41 games in a season, but today’s hitters have essentially the same opportunities and same limitations in pursuing a consecutive-games hitting streak that DiMaggio had in 1941, that George Sisler had in ’22, that Rose had in ’78. “Same game, same challenge,” said Giants outfielder Aaron Rowand. “Though today you might face three or four pitchers in a game—that’s one thing that could make it harder now.”

In comparing the game as it was in 1941 to the game as it is today, baseball people often echo Rowand’s thought—that the current use of fresh and often specialized relief pitchers can work against a hitter putting together a long streak.
²
It might be pointed out, for example, that over the course of DiMaggio’s streak he faced a total of 55 different pitchers. In what wound up as a 30-game hitting streak in 2009, Zimmerman faced 66.
³
Zimmerman, a third baseman for the Nationals, was less likely than DiMaggio to see a pitcher three or four times a game, and Zimmerman was much more likely to have to contend with a live and unfamiliar arm out of the bullpen. (Still, as Zimmerman said, “Getting a hit off the
same
pitcher for that many days in a row would be tough.”) Intuitively, the idea that pitching variety makes a streak more difficult seems clearly correct. And yet there is no evidence at all to support that notion. In fact there is evidence to the contrary—the highest preponderance of long streaks have occurred in the era of pitcher specialization. Of the 44 hitting streaks of 30 games or more in the past 135 years of the major leagues, 12 of them, or 27%, have come since 1997, just 13 seasons.

The implication of the impact of pitching specialization is not simply that it is more difficult to maintain a hitting streak these days but that it is more difficult to hit, period. Yet again, on a comparative basis, this does not appear to be true. In 1941, hitters were statistically just as likely to get hits as they are today. The major league batting average of .262 in ’41 is consistent with the National League averages over the past five seasons that have ranged from .259 to .266. (I use the NL—rather than the AL or the entire MLB—as the point of modern reference because National League numbers have not, with the exception of a handful of interleague games, been distorted by the designated hitter.) And it’s worth noting that for every stingy closer such as Mariano Rivera or Joe Nathan, or even a nasty lefty specialist such as Darren Oliver, you have today many lesser known and highly ineffective bullpen guys who might surrender an average of 12, 13 or even 14 hits per nine innings.

Whatever the baseball era, the players who reel off long hitting streaks are almost always extraordinarily talented. These are not random or lightning-in-a-bottle events. An average ballplayer does not simply get lucky and put together a long streak the way that, say, journeyman outfielder Mark Whiten tied a standard with four home runs in a game for the Cardinals in 1993, or that Rennie Stennett went a record 7 for 7 one day for the Pirates in 1975. Ordinary hitters may chance upon any number of other streaks: The thoroughly mediocre Dale Long has the National League record of hitting a home run in eight consecutive games, while in 2009 the Florida Marlins’ Jorge Cantu, a career .274 hitter, had an RBI in 14 straight games to challenge Ray Grimes’s major-league record of 17 in a row.

Consecutive-game hitting streakers, however, are a breed apart. Of the nine over-35-game streaks, six were achieved not just by Hall of Famers but by elite Hall of Famers—DiMaggio, Wee Willie Keeler, Sisler, Ty Cobb, Molitor and Rose. (Yes, I include the banished Hit King as a Hall of Famer; in my book he is certainly that.) Then there’s Rollins, a three-time All-Star and the 2007 NL MVP and Tommy Holmes, who hit .302 over the course of 11 seasons. Of the nine, only former Chicago player Bill Dahlen, a .272 career hitter who ran off 42 straight games, appears to have been a fluke—and he did it in 1894, when foul ball rules made hitting success easier to come by.

No active player seems more likely to mount a seriously long hitting streak than the Mariners’ Ichiro Suzuki, who in 2004 broke Sisler’s 84-year-old record of 257 hits in a season.
⁴
With a total of 2,244 hits over 10 major league seasons and a .331 career batting average, Suzuki has been by far the most prolific and consistent hit producer of his time. He batted .372 in 2004 and he has had seven hitting streaks of 20 games or more, one shy of the record held by Cobb, Keeler and Rose. In 2009 Ichiro hit in 27 straight games, a personal best. After setting the Mariners franchise record and drawing a standing ovation with a hit in Game 26, Ichiro was clearly moved. “I wish that I would have asked my wife, Yumiko, and my dog, Ikkyu, to come to the game today,” he told reporters in the postgame press conference.

Throughout his major league career Ichiro has been asked to rate the difficulty of putting together a streak the length of DiMaggio’s as compared to baseball’s other famously elusive offensive hallmark, batting .400 in a season, which also has not been done in 70 years. “Hitting in that many games in a row is definitely tougher than hitting .400,” Ichiro said. “That hitting streak is the toughest of all the records.”

Almost every hitter that I asked agreed with Ichiro’s assessment. “Hitting .400 would be very, very, very hard but you could have some days when you went 0 for 2 with a couple of walks or a sac fly and then you could make it up with a couple of hits in your next game,” reasoned the Rockies’ Todd Helton, who in 2000 batted .372. And from former Royals third baseman George Brett, whose .390 batting average in 1980 is the highest since Ted Williams’s .406 in 1941: “There is no question that DiMaggio’s hitting streak is harder than hitting .400—for a lot of reasons. One thing is that while pitchers pitch around you when you’re going for .400 that doesn’t necessarily hurt you; it could even help to draw the occasional walk. Pitchers tend to pitch around you when you’re on a hitting streak too, even in the early innings, and that can be enough to finish you off.”

A STREAK IS
by nature unrelenting, a quality that sets it apart from so many other pursuits in sports. As Helton suggested, you never get a game off. Not physically, and not mentally. On the night in 2002 that Marlins second baseman Luis Castillo extended his hitting streak to 35 games—a record for a Latin-born player—he reached first base on an infield single. Two batters later Castillo made it around to third, where he looked at coach Ozzie Guillen and said, “My God, I’ve got to do this shit again tomorrow night.”

By then Castillo was no longer watching sports highlights on TV. After games he would return home to his family and sit quietly sipping beer. He had trouble sleeping. He fretted about the weather. (“It rained a lot in Florida that year,” he recalled. “And I was afraid that if I didn’t get my hit early in the game we could get rained out and I’d lose my chance.”) A speedy and pesky player, Castillo plotted and schemed. Each time up he considered bunting. “Every day I would think about the situation,” he said.

For some batters being on a streak leads inevitably to superstitious behavior, or at least to forming habits that they’re unwilling, for the duration of the streak, to change. As
Bull Durham
catcher Crash Davis put it: “A player on a streak has to respect the streak.” When Phillies’ second baseman Chase Utley got deep into the throes of what would end up a 35-game run in 2006—he and Rollins are the only teammates ever to have streaks of 35-plus games—he became increasingly withdrawn and enigmatic. Reporters would ask him after a game about one of his at bats and Utley would respond, “I think Jon Lieber pitched well for us and we played some good defense,” deflecting with non sequiturs any talk that might touch even incidentally upon his batting streak. He kept that up for weeks. Utley refused to change his cleats throughout the streak and, although temperatures ranged above 90° for some July and early August games, he came to the ballpark each day wearing the same stocking cap that he wore when the streak began in late June. “My way of dealing,” Utley explained years later. “The things I was doing worked so I stuck with them.”