56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (5 page)

For his part Harry the Hawk manned the outfield, or the second sewer in the stickball games, like a statue; he’d gotten his nickname not for any swiftness or sharp eye but because of a strange sound he sometimes made when calling for a ball. But Harry had a point. The allusion to defense was valid enough to dismiss not just Greenberg but first basemen Mize and Foxx as well.

DiMaggio covered the vast meadow of the Yankee Stadium outfield with long easy strides, a gorgeous gallop that on any day might lead to a game-changing play. Once, with Spud Chandler on the hill in a lopsided late-season game against Detroit at Yankee Stadium, DiMaggio took off after a high, colossal drive from Greenberg himself, racing on and on, out past the centerfield monuments and the flagpole, and deep into the graveyard, as the players called it, before catching the baseball more than 450 feet from home plate, two strides before the wall. DiMaggio had never even turned around, just looked up once, then flicked out his glove and snared the ball. Greenberg, envisioning an inside-the-park home run, was already at second base when DiMaggio made the catch, that’s how high and far the ball was hit; Greenberg just put his hands akimbo and stared mutely into the outfield.

The crowd wouldn’t shush for five full minutes after that ball came down. The play immediately became The Greatest Catch I Ever Saw for all of the Yankees and all of the Tigers and for the 13,000 more who were at the Stadium that day, and for the tens of thousands of others who were not at the Stadium that day but who later said they were. “I couldn’t make a better one,” DiMaggio said afterward. Joe would have doubled the Tigers’ Earl Averill off of first base too on the play if only DiMaggio hadn’t paused a moment before throwing the ball in, almost surprised himself, and even then if Crosetti’s relay throw hadn’t hit Averill in the back as he hurried to return to first base.

There were other DiMaggio catches, many, many others, improbable essays to render the uncatchable caught. Whenever a ball was hit deep, Gordon at second base or Crosetti at short would turn from the infield and see DiMaggio already with his back to the plate, already in full stride, his number 5 smoothly and swiftly receding. Then, though they’d seen it before, the infielders would nonetheless let out a soft and awestruck gasp, right along with the roar of the crowd, as DiMaggio turned and raised his weathered glove and casually plucked the baseball from mid-air like some upstate schoolboy taking an apple off a tree.

Yet even that defense was not above reproach. Late in the summer of 1939, Tris Speaker, the peerless centerfielder who’d gone into radio after ending his 21-year playing career in 1928 and whose spot in baseball’s alltime greatest outfield was secure between Ruth and Cobb, got ornery, saying that “Joe DiMaggio is good. Understand that, please. But he is not great … and he plays too deep.” DiMaggio, after all, had had a season in which he’d made 17 errors, another in which he’d made 15. Speaker alleged that he could name 15 outfielders better than DiMaggio—though that was a claim he would retract. Later, when Speaker was asked to choose between DiMaggio or the gap-hitting Cardinals leftfielder Ducky Medwick as the finer all-around player, Speaker’s response was curt: “I’d take Medwick.”

Other players got support too—lately people were saying that the skinny young kid with the big bat in Boston, Ted Williams, could one day wind up the greatest hitter of all. But deep down everyone, and certainly all the guys in Jackson Heights, even Gimpy, now putting on their club jackets and leaving their nickels on the table and getting up to walk out of the Bellefair and wend along the yellow-lit city streets to their boyhood rooms, knew that if they had to pick one player for their team, it would be DiMaggio. Finally, the numbers game fell his way: 691 RBIs in his first 686 big league games, two straight batting titles, and although he played in a ballpark so phenomenally spacious as to emasculate a righthanded batter, a season in which he hit 46 home runs. DiMaggio struck out a total of 71 times from 1938 through 1940. That was half of Mize’s total in that time, a third of Foxx’s. Greenberg typically struck out about 100 times
in a single season
.

The Yankees won one World Series in the seven seasons before DiMaggio arrived. Then they won it in each of his first four years. DiMaggio played every element of the game with a controlled and beautiful ferocity, a fullness that Cleveland’s Feller called “inspirational.”

If some fans were quick to detract, to say “Yeah, but… . ” and bring up Mize or Foxx or Greenberg or any of the rest, maybe it was because they still resented DiMaggio’s complaints about his contract. Maybe it was because people outside of New York were sick of the Yankees’ dominance. Maybe it was because DiMaggio didn’t yet have that single irrefutable achievement, something akin to Babe Ruth’s 60-home run season or Lou Gehrig’s 2,130 consecutive games played or Ty Cobb’s 4,191 career hits, to firmly exalt him. Maybe it was because DiMaggio could be shy and even aloof when the fans descended. Maybe there was also something else.

A
LL OF THE
Italian players got called Dago, not just Joe. When he’d first come up there were three of them on the Yankees: Tony Lazzeri, Big Dago; Crosetti, Little Dago; and DiMaggio just Dago. Now Lazzeri was gone, Rizzuto had come in, and he was Little Dago too. Sometimes the guys on the team—Gomez, McCarthy, Bill Dickey, any of them—got it mixed up: which Dago was which? Half the time even the Italian ballplayers called each other Dago, or Daig, bantering the word among themselves, diluting any sense of negativity with their own nonchalance. Some other nicknames, though, they were less likely to use.

In opposing stadiums and from out of opponents’ dugouts, all sorts of epithets came Joe’s way. Even as the Yankees went on to beat the Tigers 5–4 at the Stadium that afternoon—on Red Rolfe’s triple in the 10th inning (Del Baker’s strategy of pitching to DiMaggio and walking Keller had worked to help Detroit get out of the ninth)—and then beat them again the next day with DiMaggio singling in the seventh, Joe, as ever, heard it from the Tigers’ bench each time he came to bat: “You big Guinea, DiMaggio!” Or one chirper’s particular favorite: “Hey Spaghetti Bender!”

This was common jockeying and everyone was a target, especially if you could play. Guys would scream anything that they thought might distract a hitter, rile him up, get him thinking about something other than the pitch coming in. McCarthy always ordered a couple of Yankees backups to lean out of the dugout and ride the Tigers’ Greenberg—“Heeb” or “Jewboy” they’d hurl toward him—to try to push him off his game. Ted Williams heard it for being so damn skinny and for the way he fidgeted around in the batter’s box. Williams let it show when the jockeying rankled him, yelled right back sometimes.

DiMaggio, though, never looked over at the catcallers, not even the smallest glance. He just dug into his stance and stood waiting for the pitch, still as a photograph.

He’d been hearing the coarse names and letting them roll off for years. That’s what you did. Yet the needling felt different now, the words somehow sharper and full of implication. It wasn’t easy to be an Italian in America in the spring of 1941. Not with Italy and its fascist dictator Benito Mussolini allied alongside Hitler’s Nazis, and not with the U.S. invested in beating down the Italians in the war. Just a week earlier, mid-May, more than 80 Italian men had been rounded up in New York City, taken out to Ellis Island and held there before being deported. They were waiters and busboys, dishwashers and cooks (and even a lawyer too) seized at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and the Pierre and the Caviar Restaurant right there on 49th Street two blocks from Toots Shor’s where DiMaggio liked to go for a steak. They were young guys trying to make the start of a life, not wanting to go back to Italy, guys who had come to work at the Italian Pavilion at the World’s Fair and never left, illegally overstaying their permits. These men were not U.S. citizens—any more than DiMaggio’s father and mother were—and in these times America did not want them.
¹

More than one and a half million Italian-born immigrants lived in the United States, more than half a million in New York, packed closely in neighborhoods in each of the city’s five boroughs. Those numbers quadrupled when you added in the next generation, all those—like DiMaggio and his brothers—who had been born on U.S. soil to one of the millions who had left Italy in the first 15 years of the century.

For years, through the 1920s and ’30s, many Italian-Americans, especially among the older generation, had approved of Mussolini and of fascism. From afar, Il Duce gave to some of them feelings of pride and dignity. Italy, long seen as inept and bumbling, suddenly had a strong and seemingly competent government that was regarded seriously, if warily, by other nations. Italy wasn’t going to be a pushover anymore.

And if that affection for the new Italy had dissipated in recent years as many thousands of Italians began to flee their home country expressly to get away from Mussolini’s brutal intolerance and heavy fist, and if for many Italian-Americans Il Duce’s embracing of Nazism and anti-Semitism was now not a source of pride but rather of shame and anger—a betrayal that led them to enlist in the U.S. Army and prove their Americanism by joining the fight against their homeland—well, even still some of the old sentiments, along with that strange begrudging sense of respect that a bully like Il Duce can inspire, lingered on. Now, a flood of antifascist Italians might rally in New York City one day, but a gathering of profascist Italians might parade on the streets in New Jersey the next. The scores of Italian-language newspapers across the U.S. split themselves by necessity for their readers: A paper was either in support of fascism or against it. Black and white.

Being an Italian in America meant having to “overcome more handicaps than a pure Anglo-Saxon. Therefore he has to run twice as fast, or else he will be treated forever as a Wop … an alien,” wrote an Italian immigrant in
The Atlantic Monthly
in 1940. And yes, that prejudice was there, evident in the things people said, and read and did. An editorial in
Collier’s
decried the discrimination and mocked it: “You would think that from some of the talk in circulation that our Italians were getting ready to carve up our government and hand it to Mussolini on a spaghetti-with-meatballs platter.” In this climate many Italians changed their names to hide, as the writer Giuseppe Fappiano had done upon taking a job in sports at
The New York Times
some years before. He went by Joseph Nichols now.

In the
World-Telegram
, the same newspaper in which Dan Daniel tirelessly, passionately and sometimes eloquently covered DiMaggio and the Yankees, the popular news columnist Westbrook Pegler went on a kind of crusade, chastising not only those Italian immigrants who would congregate loudly in the city and cheer for the fascist cause, but also those who simply felt a fondness for their heritage, who dared to look homeward. Their country was a scourge, Pegler declared, and he wrote indignantly, “The Americans of Italian birth or blood have no reason to love Italy.”

Yet no break could ever be that clean. There was an affinity for the homeland and a kinship among Italian-Americans that crossed political lines; their bonds were sustained in part by the way Italians were so often lumped together in the jaundiced public eye, lampooned in songs and cartoons as good-for-nothing wine swillers and macaroni eaters. And now the Italian military, even under the tough-talking Mussolini, was being roasted anew for its ineptitude in battle, which had been made plain by Italy’s botched attempt to take Greece in late 1940 and early ’41. The invading Italian troops were summarily beaten back and tied down, helpless until the Nazi war machine arrived to save them. Earlier Italy had taken over powerless Ethiopia in ’35—causing riots in Harlem, to the south of Yankee Stadium, where African-Americans and Italians lived cheek by jowl—and had declared war against a badly weakened France in the summer of ’40.

For many Italians in America, whatever their thoughts on Mussolini, however virulently they might oppose Il Duce and the fascist ideal, there was still this: Someone back home was fighting on the Italian side. A brother or a cousin or a friend, or the brother of a friend, or someone else whose life could not be subsumed in a statistic—530,000 Italian troops trudging through Albania—but was valued and precious. Back home in Italy the men had to fight for Il Duce whether they believed in him or not. Soldiers died. For an Italian in America, the knowledge that on any day a letter might arrive, bearing news of a loved one’s peril or injury or death, complicated the allegiance to the United States even at the very moment the Italian immigrant planted an American flag in his front yard. When you prayed, what exactly did you pray for?

Little Gay Talese, nine years old and the son of an Italian-born and antifascist tailor in Ocean City, N.J., had uncles and cousins in Mussolini’s army. Whenever Talese, conspicuously olive-skinned in a schoolyard of fair classmates, saw pictures of the southern land where his father was from, or heard of some fine accomplishment by a famous Italian, he felt his own vicarious pride. Too many times, though, the news that filtered down through the papers and adult conversations to his young awareness was of Italian gangsters in America like Al Capone or the New York crime boss Frank Costello, men whom his parents reviled. The more palatable stories came from the boxing rings and the ballparks where Italians were staking a claim, and where now, above all else, lorded DiMaggio.

His father was no baseball fan, but Gay was falling in love with the game, and with a ballplayer, that spring. Though the Taleses lived just a short afternoon’s drive from the heart of Philadelphia where both Connie Mack’s Athletics and the woebegone Phillies played at Shibe Park, and though it was the Dodgers, alone among the New York teams, whose live-game broadcasts would sometimes float out over the radio waves and into the center of Ocean City, there was only one baseball team, the Yankees who played some 150 miles away, that Gay cared for and followed.