56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (31 page)

Sweat soaked through DiMaggio’s flannel uniform—up and down his pantlegs as well as across his chest and back. He was sweatier even than most of his teammates, though this seemed paradoxical. That quality of DiMaggio’s game, which other ballplayers often called gracefulness and fluidity, was at its core simply an economy of movement. Just as all of DiMaggio’s swing was captured completely inside the batting stroke itself—nothing extra before or after—so was he equally efficient when running the bases or making his swift, yawless errands to chase down balls in centerfield. There was nothing superfluous about DiMaggio in the things that he did. Still he sweated heavily in the heat. And when that first game ended—Yankees 9, Senators 4—DiMaggio felt very much in need of a shower.

Fans had already jumped onto the field by the time he reached the dugout for the break between games; again pens and scorecards were thrust upon him. A longtime U.S. Senator from California, Hiram Johnson, had also come around. His aides and some photographers wanted DiMaggio to come over so that the two could pose together. Johnson had been California’s governor the year DiMaggio was born. But there were so many people, everywhere, and more coming over the rail. His teammates were disappearing into the tunnel toward the clubhouse. With the second game still to play DiMaggio felt tired and sticky-wet all over. He could come back for the senator, he thought, and so he asked the photographers if they wouldn’t mind waiting, and then he pushed through the swarm of bodies to the clubhouse.

DiMaggio showered and pulled on a fresh uniform and said a few words to the newspaper reporters about the low pitch that he had hit for the record-tying double. When he slipped back out to the field where autograph seekers still milled around, and looked for Senator Johnson and the cameramen they were gone.
Don’t they still want me to pose?
DiMaggio wondered.
Are they sore with me now?
Maybe the Senator felt slighted. DiMaggio hoped this wasn’t so and hoped the incident would not put him in a poor light. It wasn’t his fault! He’d needed to cool his body and get away from the frenzy on the field. It really had been a hectic scene. So great was the commotion between games, in fact, that someone among the busying crowd had slipped into the Yankees dugout and stolen DiMaggio’s bat.

“TOM!” HENRICH TURNED
back to the dugout to see who had called his name. “Tommy, you got my ball bat?” It was DiMaggio. Henrich, out on the grass and preparing to hit in the first inning of the second game of the doubleheader, did have a DiMaggio model—the same one he’d borrowed and been swinging for weeks. But he did not have the bat that DiMaggio was using in the games, the one Joe had sanded down just so. The bat was not with the others in the rack. Nor could it be found leaning against a dugout wall, or lying beneath the bench. The bat was gone.

So when DiMaggio, facing Sid Hudson in the first inning, swung at a waist-high fastball and looped a fly ball that the rightfielder Buddy Lewis came forward to catch, DiMaggio did so using a reserve piece of wood. Who knows? Had he been swinging his usual ball bat maybe that fly ball would’ve dropped in safely. DiMaggio entertained this thought himself. Baseball is a subtle game.

He used that same bat his second time up, in the third inning, and when Hudson dropped down to whip in a sidearm curve, DiMaggio was not fooled. His line drive reached the shortstop Cecil Travis before DiMaggio had gotten out of the batter’s box and Travis, without moving his feet, caught the ball at shoulder height. 0 for 2. The game wore on and the heat did not wane. DiMaggio sat by himself on the bench, and the Senators brought in Arnold Anderson to pitch. Anderson weighed 210 pounds and stood 6′ 3″, an Iowa farm boy with auburn hair and a freckled face. His best pitch was the heater. Everybody called him Red.

In the fifth inning against DiMaggio, Red came inside with the fastball on the first pitch, then missed away with the curve. When he came back inside with the fastball one more time DiMaggio could only get the handle of his bat on the pitch and the ball never really had a chance, dying in Cramer’s glove in short centerfield. The fans in Griffith Stadium sat back down. The sun had fallen lower in the sky.

The score was tied at 4–4 when the Yankees scored twice in the top of the sixth to take the lead, but if ever a game-turning rally seemed beside the point, it was this one. The fans and many of the players had one thought on their minds: DiMaggio was 0 for 3. Joe never did the things that some ballplayers do when they’re nervous on the bench. He did not scratch the side of his face, or finger his lower lip, or rub his hands together. DiMaggio only sat and looked in front of him. Unless something happened that called for his attention, he did not turn to the left or to the right. He stared straight ahead.

No one in the Yankees dugout would speak to Joe at all. But when the seventh inning arrived and with it, perhaps, DiMaggio’s final turn at bat, Henrich came over. He suggested that DiMaggio try using the bat that Henrich was using—it too was DiMag’s bat after all, and the other one Joe had used today hadn’t had much luck in it. DiMaggio agreed and took the Henrich bat with him to the plate. Again Red Anderson started off high and close with his fastball, this time forcing DiMaggio to jerk back out of its way. Maybe Red, in his first full major league season, got cocky. Or maybe the fastball was the only pitch that he trusted. Whatever the reason, on 1 and 0 he threw it again—this time over the plate.

You could have heard the crowd’s roar on Georgia Avenue, past the trolley tracks and way up the hill, when DiMaggio hit that ball, a hard, clean single into leftfield. At first base Earle Combs slapped DiMaggio on the back and first baseman Mickey Vernon shook his hand and DiMaggio gave Vernon a pat on the rump. There would be no enforcing of the league’s antifraternization rule today. When the first base umpire, Bill McGowan, strolled over he gave DiMaggio a tap on the behind himself. The joyful scenes repeated themselves in the Yankee dugout—caps tossed in the air, players dancing. And now DiMaggio did smile, broadly and without reservation. He looked around and hitched his pants. Suddenly children—“the urchins” as the Yankee players laughingly called them—ran onto the field and toward DiMaggio. In the crowd, the bedlam (and this was the word that the newspaper writers would use) did not quickly subside. Joe touched the bill of his cap, once and then a second time. Several minutes passed before the game could start again.

And when Keller tripled, bringing DiMaggio home to score, the crowd stood and hollered anew as he arrived at the dugout, greeted before the first step by Johnny Sturm, and then by Lefty and Twink, and Dickey and Henrich and Rolfe and then by all of his teammates as he stepped down among them, all of them wanting to envelop their Joe. McCarthy grinned and Rizzuto hopped about and DiMaggio was filled with relief and happiness.

The euphoric mood continued in the locker room after the game as the reporters came rushing in. DiMaggio sat naked on a trunk, laughing and unabashed. Players tossed towels at him and even tousled his sweating black locks. All of this was O.K. to do now. When McCarthy came over and shook DiMaggio’s hand the manager would not let go. His smile was unrestrained as he looked at Joe and an understanding passed between them. DiMaggio knew that McCarthy had compromised his game strategy more than once in deference to the streak. This was no small thing for a manager like McCarthy. The divide that had existed between the two men ever since McCarthy had toed the Yankee line over DiMaggio’s contract, now seemed forgotten and closed. “I don’t deserve the credit all alone,” DiMaggio told the writers first thing that day. “You have to give Mr. McCarthy some of it. He allowed me to hit that 3 and 0 pitch and it brought me many a good ball to swing at.”

Before long a 10-word telegram arrived at the clubhouse from Sisler in St. Louis: “Congratulations,” it read. “I’m glad a real hitter broke it. Keep going.”

DiMaggio spoke as expansively as he could to the writers. “Sure I’m tickled, who wouldn’t be,” he said. “It’s a great thing.” It was impossible for him to measure every word. There were many questions and they came fast. “When I got so close to Sisler’s mark I didn’t want to stop,” DiMaggio said. “I never felt so much on the spot before. . . . It is the most excitement I guess I’ve known since I came into the majors.”

By then the news had traveled to all the ballparks in baseball. And in New York, New England and California, and across the middle states, some version of this news report burst through the radio broadcasts: “The Nazis, continuing their march, are now said to be just 225 miles from Moscow.” Then a pause. “And this has just come in from our nation’s capital: Joe DiMaggio has done it! The Yankee slugger has hit in 42 consecutive games, a new record.”

In San Francisco customers ordered Scotch highballs at the Grotto and Giuseppe felt relieved and all aglow. And who said he couldn’t joke around in English? A reporter from the
Chronicle
spoke to Papa DiMaggio and transcribed his words this way: “Joe, he waited too long. He waits until da seexth inning before he ties da record of Seesler. Then he waits until da seventh inning before he breaks Seesler’s record in da second game. He makes his papa worry too long. Why cannot my son Joe do it in da first inning?”

In Jackson Heights on the bench outside the White Castle on Northern Boulevard—the joint where big Eddie Einsidler once knocked back 35 of those little burgers in a sitting, putting the rest of the Dukes and Hornets to shame—Squeaks Tito was keening, his voice now at a pitch, as Commie and the rest of the guys joked, that only a dog could hear. The radio sung the words from Washington: His Joe DiMaggio had come through.

Twenty-one-year-old Ray Robinson was a summer morning clerk at the Lake Stafford Hotel in Keene, N.H.—afternoons off, tennis, swimming, tanned young women up for a lark. Truly, Robinson wondered, could a guy have a better job? When he got the news, he hurried to spread it around.

A shout went out in Bensonhurst where Maury Allen and the rest of the young stickballers stopped their game and ran to the first radio they could find.

The main street buzzed in Ocean City, N.J., and little Gay Talese, his parents scarcely aware, felt thrilled, empowered even, by what DiMaggio had done.

In South Jamaica, Queens, the radio hummed on the grocery store counter and Mario Cuomo sat on the milk box, fiddling with his pea shooter, and all ready to go. It was a hot Sunday night, and often on hot Sunday nights Mario and his parents and his brother and sister would all get into the wood-paneled station wagon and drive out to Rockaway Beach. They would park right on the sand and put the tailgate down and sit together in the back of the car listening to the water lapping in, and talking, perhaps, about the things that had happened in the ball games that day. The sun slipped to the horizon and you could hear the voices from the boardwalk. There was not the hubbub here of a place like Coney Island with its roller coasters and the Wonder Wheel, and the air-rifle shooting galleries where now, in a nod to the times, the tin ducks had been replaced as targets by little models of Nazi paratroopers. At Rockaway Beach the night was quieter; there was just noise enough. Mario could fall asleep under the blankets, the sea breeze upon him, full of sweet anticipatory giddiness, knowing that the next day his ballplaying hero Joe DiMaggio would be all over the newspapers. The hitting feat would be there for Mario to feast upon just as soon as dawn arrived and they awoke to the sounds of the seabirds and rubbed the salt from their eyes and drove back into South Jamaica to open up the store.

A
T FIRST DOMINIC
thought the newspaper story was a joke. Wee Willie Keeler? In 1897? Where did they come up with this stuff? For a couple of weeks now the news he’d been getting in Boston or on the road was about Joe’s trying to catch George Sisler at 41 straight. Now Joe had done that and, it seemed to Dominic, a longer record had suddenly materialized. Sisler, they were now saying, only held the “modern” record. Keeler had run off 44 consecutive games for the Baltimore Orioles more than four decades earlier, before the turn of century. Dominic hadn’t spoken to Joe in many weeks and was thinking about what he could say by way of congratulations when, soon after he and the Red Sox had arrived at the Hotel Commodore in New York for a doubleheader, with Joe’s streak at 42 games, Dom saw the headline:
DIMAGGIO WILL AIM FOR ALL-TIME HITTING RECORD
. So it’s true, Dom thought.
Joe still has a few games to go. It isn’t a put-on
.

Dom paid attention to the streak, of course, as did Vince, with the Pirates. In fact Dom could not have avoided it if he’d tried: On the radio and in the bars and restaurants, the streak was on everybody’s lips. Even in the Red Sox dugout these days, when someone said “DiMaggio” they were often referring not to Dom but to Joe. When Dominic called home it was Joe’s streak that his father always got around to before long. Sometimes Dominic would be out somewhere, at a grocery shop or by a newsstand, and hear for the umpteenth time a lady ask some guy, “What did DiMaggio do today?” It was all Dom could do not to lean over and say, “Oh, I got 2 for 4 and thanks for asking.”