56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (40 page)

Sisler smiled broadly and congratulated DiMaggio on the streak and then later, before the game that night, he congratulated him again in a ceremony at home plate. Sisler was the greatest player in the history of the St. Louis Browns. “I hope Joe makes it 49 but with nothing more than a single,” Sisler said into a microphone to cheers and laughter from the stands. There were 12,682 fans in Sportsman’s Park, more than three times what a typical night game would bring. Thunder rumbled out over the Missouri plains and many people had umbrellas at their sides. Normally the Browns were the worst attended team in either league.

DiMaggio singled before the game was 10 minutes old, in the first inning, on the second pitch he saw. The shortstop Alan Strange couldn’t get to DiMaggio’s ground ball deep in the hole. By the third inning lightning streaked the sky and in the bottom of the sixth the deluge arrived, stopping the game with the Yankees ahead 1–0 and DiMaggio’s base hit officially in the books. After half an hour, with rain still falling in sheets, the umpires sent everyone home. Gomez had pitched five innings for the win.

During the game the next afternoon, water still soaked some areas of the grass and earthworms could be found in the miry edges of the outfield. It was on such days, if the Yankees were in high spirits—and as winners of 10 straight now they certainly were—that the players might conspire to play a little trick on young Phil Rizzuto.

Scooter hated insects, worms, anything that crawled, and when he tossed his glove onto the grass behind shortstop at the end of each inning in the field, it lay there vulnerable to mischief. On his way in from leftfield Keller would furtively slip a fresh and slippery worm into one of the fingers of Rizzuto’s glove. The next inning the Yankees would all watch as Rizzuto slid the glove onto his hand and then after a brief look of puzzlement passed over his face, he would suddenly tear it off, frantic and fling it into the air and run from the spot where the glove had landed. How the Yankees laughed! Henrich doubled over in the outfield. The umpires snickered too. The joke echoed again each inning as Rizzuto, spooked and suspicious, picked up his glove and looked warily inside it—
any more worms?
—before carefully, fearfully putting it on. Scooter was one of the team now, batting better than .300 and himself on a nifty little hit streak of 14 games.

At many times McCarthy would not tolerate such practical joking, seeing it as unprofessional, disrespectful even, and not in the Yankee way. But now the manager felt happy and relaxed. He was confident the Yankees would win the pennant. DiMaggio had lifted everyone. By the time the Yankees left St. Louis they had won 12 consecutive games, the longest streak of McCarthy’s tenure. DiMaggio had run his hitting streak to 50 straight by singling in the first inning, and then added two more singles and a ninth inning home run. His 20 home runs and 73 RBIs both led the major leagues. The next day he made it 51 in a row with a fourth-inning double over the head of Browns centerfielder Walt Judnich, a hit that scored the newly married Henrich and helped knock Elden Auker out of the game. “DiMaggio is liable to go on indefinitely,” McCarthy said.

In Chicago, he extended the streak to 52 and then 53 games before a doubleheader crowd of 50,387, the largest at Comiskey Park in eight years. The irascible Jimmy Dykes, just back from a suspension for hurling particularly obscene and abusive language at an umpire, had saved his two best starting pitchers, Ted Lyons and Thornton Lee, so that they could take on DiMaggio and the Yanks. But DiMaggio had three hits in the first game, and a hard single to right centerfield off Lee in the nightcap. The Yankees won both games. The White Sox had fallen out of the pennant race, 13 games back of New York, eight back of the second-place Indians, four behind Boston. But the fans at Comiskey did not seem to much care about their team’s fortunes; they were there for the tingling they got when the game announcer took up his megaphone along the third base line and announced, “Now batting for the Yankees, Joe DiMaggio.”

IN CHICAGO, AS
in every big city in the country, the bestseller list included
Blood, Sweat and Tears
, a collection of speeches by Winston Churchill. The book’s title came from the short address he’d given to the House of Commons a year earlier, upon taking over as Britain’s prime minister. “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,” Churchill had said. “You ask what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war. . . with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us. . . against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime.” Now, as Churchill’s book weighed upon so many nightstands, the U.S. was sending cargo boats full of the rations that Britain so badly needed: milk, meat, eggs, cheese. On the docks in England hungry workers nipped immediately into the store, sucking eggs right out of their shells.

In Washington, D.C., Congress was moving to extend the first term of service for draftees to longer than a year. A few days before, the U.S. Navy had taken over Iceland at that country’s bidding and as a means, Roosevelt said, of protecting America’s defensive frontier. Was there any stopping the Nazis as they heightened their attack on Russia, moving on three fronts to Moscow, Kiev and Leningrad? You could forgive the people if sometimes the news, the big, bold-type war headlines, and the sports stories with the ongoing drama of DiMaggio got jumbled together. Before the Yankees’ second game in St. Louis—game 50 for DiMaggio—two teams of soldiers stationed nearby had played an exhibition game on the field at Sportsman’s Park. In San Francisco the
Call-Bulletin
illustrated the shifting fronts of battle in a daily War-O-Graph; the
Chronicle
still ran its DiMag-O-Log.

The hundreds of Italians now interned in Fort Missoula and other camps—those who had sabotaged a boat in a U.S. harbor, or who were suspected of spying or who had come over to work and stayed on illegally—were told they would not be allowed to leave and go home. As one British government official declared, the war did not now merely engage soldiers and sailors, but civilians too.
The Washington Post
ran stories that compared DiMaggio to other great Italian innovators: Dante, Donatello, Galileo. So if DiMaggio was Italian—and surely the green-white-and-red flags in bleachers on the road as well as at home were waved for him—he was a majestic Italian, freed by his achievement and his bearing from the prejudice and disdain of even the smallest-minded isolationists and bigots in the land. In the hearts of the people, he was America’s Joe. The bench jockeys on opposing teams held their harsh tongues now when DiMaggio came to bat. He belonged to everyone.

In the flyspeck town of Glendive, Montana, in the white dawn of another day, a man walked into a small breakfast shack, a slapped-up place with maybe eight spots to sit. He wore a wide, dark cowboy hat and weathered boots and old blue jeans. He was tall with a broad back and a bow in his gait and a face like leather. He might spend all day and even the night out on the range. A step through the doorway of the breakfast shack the cowboy looked at the man behind the counter and nodded his head. Already by his presence the cowboy’s order was placed—griddle cakes, three eggs easy, coffee black. He shared a look with the counterman. “He get one?” the cowboy said. And the counterman nodded and put down the cup of coffee. “Yes. He did. He got one.” They didn’t even need to say his name.

All across the Western expanse that summer—across the dustblown farm towns through Idaho, Oregon, New Mexico, Wyoming—DiMaggio made the papers, a short front-page report or a longer AP or UPI article with his name splashed across the top. Even in these places, tiny and remote, a base hit by DiMaggio could seem like local news.

The baseball reporters were not referring to him as Giuseppe much anymore, preferring to reach into a stable of grander names: Jolting Joe or the Jolter, or the Yankee Clipper once in a while. They called him DiMaggio the Magnificent, or the Great DiMag or Joseph the Great or, simply, the Great Man. No longer did fans or scribes argue the merits of Mize or Foxx or Greenberg or Medwick or any other current ballplayer against DiMaggio. There was no competition. Instead, the writers argued in print whether or not DiMaggio now belonged in baseball’s alltime outfield, whether his preposterously long hitting streak on top of all else he had done was enough to knock Tris Speaker out of centerfield and let DiMaggio stand between Ruth and Cobb.

After he’d made it 53 straight games the
Chicago Tribune
ran an editorial titled M
R
. D
I
M
AGGIO AS
S
EEN FROM
O
LYMPUS
. Perhaps Joe wasn’t quite in a league with the Greek immortals, the article allowed, but by now he must have gotten their attention up there; if Zeus hadn’t actually been among that outsized doubleheader crowd at Comiskey Park, then surely, the
Tribune’s
writer concluded, “he had tuned in from time to time to Bob Elson’s” play-by-play report on WGN.

Marie’s scrapbook swelled in San Francisco, and Maury Allen’s fattened in Brooklyn. A cartoon in the
World-Telegram
depicted an imagined office of baseball records, a man bent over a desk scribbling madly: the Yankees had won 14 straight, 18 of 19, 28 of 32. Papers and thick books were stacked high on the floor and the shelves around the scribbling man, and from the side of the office a secretary, Miss Phidgit she was named, called out: “We’re going to need a new filing cabinet for DiMaggio.”

Keeler had now receded deeply into the background. A few stat-mongers had tried to raise the specter of the longest-ever professional hitting streak of 69 games set in 1919 by a guy named Joe Wilhoit playing for the Western League’s Wichita Witches; but that was a Class A circuit, a low-level minor league populated with ballplayers long forgotten or never known, so that record couldn’t truly rate. Really, the only long streak that did have some purchase, that still rang in some people’s minds, had occurred in California in the Pacific Coast League, a notch below the majors. It wasn’t the Show, not at all, but scores of good big leaguers and tough pitchers had played in the PCL. That league’s record hitting streak was 61 games long, run off eight years earlier by a highly touted rookie outfielder for the San Francisco Seals, an 18-year-old kid, Joe De Maggio.

T
HE WORLD AROUND
him was different then and he a different man—brand new to professional ball. It was a blur to him as it happened, and a blur in his memory now, and what he remembered most about that hitting streak of 1933 was the tiredness, deep and bony, that dug into him from all the games and the doubleheaders day after day after day: 61 games in eight weeks.
I am not used to playing baseball every day
, DiMaggio thought as that Seals season wore on. He didn’t much go for the long bus rides, nor for being on the road. The arc of DiMaggio’s baseball career was then much closer to his club team and to imposing his will upon the North Beach playground than it was to the major leagues. In winter and spring he’d head to Funston Park, just a block from Galileo High—where, at his age of 18, he might still have been enrolled—and spend a couple of hours chasing down balls for the older fellows, Joe and Louis Toboni or some of the regulars playing for the Mission Reds. They’d pay DiMaggio two bits for his trouble. He’d cop a couple of cigarettes off them too.

With the Seals that rookie year he earned $225 a month. If DiMaggio—or his doubting Papa—had any question as to what kind of ballplayer he was, the proof was right there on payday. The Seals got their money’s worth and more, especially as the streak continued and DiMaggio neared and then passed the old Pacific Coast League record of 49 straight games held by the long-retired Oakland Oaks first baseman Jack Ness. The crowds grew at Seals Stadium and even then, in the bleakest heart of the Great Depression, as teams and leagues in other cities folded and disappeared, people plunked down a dime for a Seals scorebook.
He’s Vince’s kid brother, huh?
they would say, paging through.
Not just his brother, Vince’s replacement too
. (Vince now played down south for the Hollywood Stars.) At night games free bowls of soup were passed out in the stands and ladies got in free.

By the time his hitting streak reached the high 30s, and the Ness record came clearly into view, Joe’s name began to appear in small headlines in the
Chronicle’s
S
PORTING
G
REEN
, the sports page that Giuseppe was just barely learning to read, or to make some sense of at least. When Joe hit triples in each end of a doubleheader to run the streak to 46 in a row, the news of it ran clear across the top of the page. Suddenly, three months into his PCL career, Joe was someone whom people thought they might remember for many years. The newspapers and most everybody else misspelled his name: De Maggio or DeMaggio. Joe never bothered to correct anyone.