56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (43 page)

In the on-deck circle, DiMaggio rose and swung his two bats a few times and then tossed one away. Johnny Sturm led off from third base. Red Rolfe stood on second. Tommy Henrich took a step off first. In such moments, against the din of the crowd, DiMaggio’s wide unflinching stance appeared especially calm, ceremonial even. This would almost certainly be his final turn at bat. Bagby Jr. reared back and threw a fastball an inch or two outside for a ball. The catcher, Rollie Hemsley, complained through his mask that the pitch should have been called a strike. Bagby’s next pitch was another fastball, inside this time, that DiMaggio fouled off. Then came a curveball that broke wide. Two and one.

Now it was the fastball again, this one at the knees and DiMaggio swung and caught the top half of the ball, sending it on the ground right to Lou Boudreau, the birthday boy, at shortstop. A certain double play. Just before reaching Boudreau the ball struck something in the grass and leapt abruptly upward; Boudreau raised his glove to catch it at shoulder height, using his bare hand to help. He shuffled the ball to Mack who threw it to Grimes and the double play was complete and the eighth inning was over.

They watched DiMaggio then from the dugout: McCarthy, Rizzuto, Gomez, Dickey, Keller and the rest. As the Cleveland crowd roiled as loudly as it had all night and the Indians came bouncing off of the field—
all right fellas we’re still in this game!
—the Yankees looked to see what DiMaggio would do. The streak was surely finished. Yet he did only what he would have done at any other time. After crossing the first base bag, DiMaggio slowed from his sprint, then turned to his left and continued running out toward shallow centerfield where he bent and, still moving, plucked his glove off the grass. He did not kick the earth or shake his head or pound his fist into the saddle of his glove. He did not behave as if he was aware of the volume and frenzy of the crowd. He did not look directly at anyone or anything. Not once on his way out to centerfield did DiMaggio turn back.

For the rest of the game, in the dugout, DiMaggio remained by himself, the invisible cone around him. Before the end, he nearly had another chance. In the bottom of the ninth inning Gee Walker and Oscar Grimes singled off Gomez and then, with Johnny Murphy in to pitch for the Yankees, pinch hitter Larry Rosenthal tripled. The score was 4–3 with nobody out and if one of the next three Cleveland hitters could knock in Rosenthal the game would be tied; the Yanks, and DiMaggio, might come to bat again. But a ground ball to Sturm at first base kept Rosenthal on third for the first out. The next batter, Soup Campbell, chopped one back to Murphy who caught Rosenthal off the base and got him into a rundown. Out number two. Roy Weatherly’s groundout, also straight to Sturm, ended the game.

DiMaggio ran in briskly to the dugout and clacked up the runway to the clubhouse. Although the Yankees had won a tight and important game and had all but put a lock on the pennant, the room remained tentative and hushed. DiMaggio took off his cap and tossed his glove into his locker. The other players all made like they were attending to something important at their own stalls. Not even Gomez, high on his sixth straight win, had anything to say. Through the walls you could hear and feel the rumble of the fans, intoxicated by the night. DiMaggio sat on his stool.

“Well,” he said finally, “that’s over.”

It happened again, then, the towels thrown his way and the gloves tossed jauntily in the air and the guys gathering close and happy around him.
Tough luck, Daig, thought you had one past Keltner. But boy, that was a hell of streak!

“Suppose it had to end sometime,” DiMaggio said. McCarthy threw an arm around him. “You’ll start another one tomorrow,” he said. For the photographers Joe posed with his thumbs and forefingers held up in circles—zeros symbolic of his hitless night.

“I’m glad it’s over,” DiMaggio said to the press. “I’ve been under a strain.” Though a few moments later he amended. “I can’t say I’m glad that it’s over. . . certainly I was eager to continue.” DiMaggio went back and forth in this way. What he felt was not simple and clean. In one moment he was buoyant, in the next something gnawed inside his chest. It was true that a weight had come off of him, and it was also true, as he would later say, that by losing the streak he felt like he had lost his best friend. To his teammates DiMaggio appeared calm and unbothered.

The news spread over the radio, and the next day in New York and Cleveland and across the country, the end-of-the-streak headlines would run above all else. Page one, top of the page. A cartoon showed Smith and Bagby Jr. as submarines in the high seas, firing away at, and sinking, the Yankee Clipper. Everywhere there appeared small square photos—mug shots—of Smith and Bagby Jr. and often of Keltner too. Like three assassins. Smith looked particularly grim and unsmiling. The three players were linked now and would be linked to this night forever. For each of them, having a role in stopping the streak would be the defining event of their baseball careers, first-paragraph material in their obituaries.

In the Indians clubhouse, Keltner showered and dressed quickly. He brushed aside teammates such as Oscar Grimes who came up to salute him for the plays he’d made on DiMaggio. “We lost the game didn’t we?” Keltner said. “There’s nothing to congratulate me about.” Smith was just as brusque. Fans mustered noisily outside Municipal Stadium and when Keltner and his wife emerged shouts greeted them—some happy, some mad. The crowd started to move in close and a couple of policemen came over and escorted the Keltners to their car. DiMaggio had a lot of friends in Cleveland, the police figured, and you couldn’t be sure of what they might do.

People were reluctant to leave. An hour after the game many fans still hung about talking and rehashing while others were just beginning to trundle slowly over the wooden footbridge near City Hall. Cars inched through the forest of walkers and onto the Main Street ramp.

Gradually the Yankees clubhouse began to clear out. Joe, though, was slow to move. He sat on his stool with his uniform on and smoked a couple of cigarettes. The room had grown quiet again and the Indians’ clubhouse boy, an Italian kid named Frank, kept his eyes on DiMaggio. “Scooter, stick around for me, will you,” DiMaggio said. So Rizzuto waited as DiMaggio showered and shaved. Rizzuto was the last Yankee left aside from Joe. He would have waited all night if DiMaggio had asked him to.

Finally DiMaggio had slicked back his hair and buttoned his white shirt and clipped his suspenders and snapped straight the sleeves of his suit. They nodded goodbye to Frank, and then, more than two hours after the final play of the game, DiMaggio and Rizzuto stepped out into the night. The crowd had by now given up and gone home. There was no one hanging around to pester Joe. In silence DiMaggio and Rizzuto began to walk, through the moist night air, beneath the lampposts and up the hill toward the Hotel Cleveland. About halfway up there was a little bar and grill. DiMaggio stopped and reached into his pocket. “Shit. Scooter, I left my wallet in the locker room safe,” he said. “How much money have you got on you?” Rizzuto pulled out his wallet and opened it. You could hear voices from higher up on the hill, but around them it was quiet. The bar and grill was on the left hand side of the street. “Eighteen dollars.”

“Give it here,” DiMaggio said. He took the money from Rizzuto and turned to go inside, and Rizzuto followed behind him. “No,” said DiMaggio, “you go on. I’m just going to go in here and relax.” So Rizzuto continued up the hill and DiMaggio went inside the restaurant, alone, and began the rest of his life.

Often in the weeks and months and years that followed, DiMaggio would think back on the time of the streak—just as so many others in so many places would recall that hot strange summer before the war and would tell their children and their children’s children about what DiMaggio had done; and just as the record keepers would log the hitting streak above all others year after year after year and all through the decades of DiMaggio’s life—and he would know that in that time he had burst through the bounds of the game, and that he had made something that would live with him always, exalting. Something crowning and indelible. 56.

J
OE DIMAGGIO WON
10 pennants and nine World Series in his 13-year career. He was named Most Valuable Player three times and twice finished as the runner-up. He hit 361 home runs and struck out only 369 times. That ratio of 1.02 strikeouts to every home run is beyond extraordinary; of the 129 players who have hit at least 300 career home runs, most have a ratio in the neighborhood of 3 to 1. DiMaggio’s 1,537 career RBIs was, at the time of his induction into the Hall of Fame in 1955, 14th on the alltime list, and his total was achieved at the astonishing rate of .89 RBIs per game. He batted .325 over his career and played in 11 All-Star Games. Yet the first line on the Joe DiMaggio plaque that hangs in Cooperstown just to the left of Giants first baseman Bill Terry (the last player before Ted Williams to hit .400 in a season), just to the right of the White Sox supreme knuckleballer Ted Lyons and just above Cubs catcher Gabby Hartnett, reads:
HIT SAFELY IN 56 CONSECUTIVE GAMES FOR MAJOR LEAGUE RECORD 1941
.

What would DiMaggio’s baseball legacy be if, on one of those seemingly insignificant 1-for-whatever days in late May or early June, his hit had not fallen safely? Or if that ground ball to Luke Appling in game 30 had not taken an improbable hop; or if Bob Muncrief had decided to walk DiMaggio after all in game 36; or if Tommy Henrich had been unsuccessful in his bunt attempt and had indeed hit into a double play in game number 38; or if in that same game, DiMaggio’s line drive off of Elden Auker had whistled foul?

What if somewhere along the line—perhaps before the newspaper cartoons were drawn and clipped and before the poems were written, before George Sisler’s and Wee Willie Keeler’s marks were passed and before the song
Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio
had made its way into so many jukeboxes—DiMaggio had simply gone hitless for a day? He would be in the Hall of Fame now, certainly, and be remembered as an alltime elite player. But would he have ascended so singularly in his stardom? Would he have quite so dramatically extended his name beyond the circles of the game?

If DiMaggio had hit in only, say, 30 or 35 consecutive games in 1941 would he have even been named that season’s Most Valuable Player ahead of Ted Williams and his .406 batting average? Unlikely. No one had hit .400 in 11 years and no one had ever done it with anything like Williams’s power. At .406, Williams batted a full 49 points higher than DiMaggio in ’41 and hit seven more home runs than DiMaggio did. “It was the 56-game hitting streak which. . . doubtless clinched the verdict,” wrote John Drebinger of
The New York Times
after DiMaggio’s narrow win in the baseball writers’ MVP voting.

Without the far-flung, daily attention that the hitting streak brought him, and without DiMaggio’s ability to succeed beneath that glare, to meet and then surpass the expectations of millions day after day after day, would he have risen to the level of living legend? Or might he merely have been another great ballplayer, rather than a figure who for decades after his career ended would be entreated by people, famous and unknown, to, “Tell us about 1941. Tell us about the streak.”?

More relevantly to today’s perception of DiMaggio as icon: If he had not, in that summer of ’41 lured huge audiences and willed an anxious nation to turn its eyes—O.K., its lonely eyes—to him, would the idea of Joltin’ Joe as a quintessential, bygone hero nonetheless have presented itself to Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel 27 years later? (Of the imperishable lyric
Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you
. . . . in the song
Mrs. Robinson
, Simon has said, “The Joe DiMaggio line was written right away in the beginning. And I don’t know why or where it came from.”)

Paul Simon was hardly a baseball historian, any more than was Ernest Hemingway when, standing at his writer’s desk in the early 1950s, he gave DiMaggio literary life in
The Old Man and the Sea
as a symbol of courage (Santiago reveres DiMaggio for his ability to play through the painful bone spurs he endured near the end of his career) and a player who, as the old man says, “makes the difference.” The point is not that either of these writers had DiMaggio’s hitting streak top of mind, or even that they considered it at all, but simply that there is no doubting the impact that the 56-game run had on the wider perception of who DiMaggio was—that the
idea
of “Joe DiMaggio” was unquestionably colored, however subconsciously, by the streak and its lasting effect.

“That was the crossover event,” says Maury Allen who was nine in 1941, and who wrote
Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?
, a 1975 biography. “The hitting streak was the time when people who didn’t know baseball got to know Joe DiMaggio and when people who did know baseball saw that DiMaggio, in some respects, was in a league by himself. Those feelings never ever went away.”

Tom Villante, who was 13 years old and living in Queens in 1941 and who would serve as the Yankees bat boy in the ’43 World Series and then for two seasons afterward, says, in a sentiment echoed again and again by people who recall the streak from their childhood, “The thing about it is that it was there every day. It just went on and on and he kept doing it and people kept talking about it. He was just in your consciousness and you couldn’t help it. And then you started hearing the song about the streak and that made it stick even more.”

Consider this. Without the profound elevation in stature that the streak provided, would Joe DiMaggio have been regarded as worthy and appropriate, a real American hero, when, in 1952, he asked, through publicists, to have dinner with the rising movie star and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe?