Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (8 page)

DiMaggio was not a man who boasted, but once, late in his career, he talked with a group of younger reporters and mentioned, almost shyly, that when he first came to the Yankees in 1936 the local newspapers were constantly criticizing McCarthy for finishing second. “Then we won three times in a row, and four times out of five,” he said. He paused for a moment before adding, “I had something to do with that.” It was a rare moment, thought Leonard Koppett, then a young sportswriter. DiMaggio had almost dared to be candid about his own abilities, wary as he always was of appearing to boast.

DiMaggio was aware that he was often a virtual prisoner of his own shyness. Some of his friends thought this was due to his fear of embarrassing himself. But it was also an innate reserve.

Once, early in his career, he was sitting with a few writers at Toots Shor’s when his friend Lefty Gomez, the most gregarious Yankee of that era, dropped by. Gomez did not join the table but stood and told a few stories, all of which delighted his listeners. DiMaggio watched him leave and then said, “What I’d give to be like that.”

On another occasion at Shor’s, he told Lou Effrat to stick around. “I’ve got a date,” he said, “and I need company.” DiMaggio’s date turned out to be a young actress. After Shor’s they went to “21” and then on to a few other places. Around three
A.M
. Effrat finally got away. The next day he asked DiMaggio why he had insisted that he stay around.
“Ah, Lou, you know me,” DiMaggio answered, “until midnight with girls I’m speechless.”

The stories of DiMaggio’s reserve were legendary. When he first joined the Yankees, he drove from California to Florida with Tony Lazzeri and Frank Crosetti, two veterans, neither famous for being talkative. They passed the first two days of the trip without talking at all, and then Lazzeri asked DiMaggio if he wanted to drive. Only then did DiMaggio say he did not know how to drive. It was simply not a subject that had come up before.

The three of them hung out together a fair amount that year, and Jack Mahon, a reporter for the old INS, ran into them while they were sitting in the lobby of the Chase Hotel in St. Louis. The three, according to Mahon, were watching the other guests come and go. “I bought a paper and sat down near them and after a while became aware of the fact that none of them had a word to say to the others. Just for fun I timed them to see how long they would maintain their silence. Believe it or not, they didn’t speak for an hour and twenty minutes. At the end of the time DiMaggio cleared his throat. Crosetti looked at him and said: ‘What did you say?’ And Lazzeri said, ‘Shut up. He didn’t say nothing.’ They lapsed into silence and at the end of ten more minutes I got up and left. I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

His teammates did not resent DiMaggio’s need to be private. Watching him play day after day, often under immensely difficult circumstances, they became the true advocates of his greatness. Some forty years later, Henrich, a proud, unsentimental man, would point out that when fans asked him to compare the Mantle and DiMaggio outfields, he always said that DiMaggio’s was better “because we had the better center fielder.” Then Henrich would point out an astonishing and revealing statistic about DiMaggio: By and large, such power hitters as DiMaggio have a high strikeout ratio. It is in the nature of the big swing. Reggie
Jackson, for example, has almost four and a half strikeouts for each home run. Even Hank Aaron, a marvelous line-drive hitter whose power came from his wrists, struck out twice for every home run. Ted Williams, whose eyesight was as legendary as his concentration, struck out 709 times against 521 home runs. But Joe DiMaggio, Henrich pointed out, hit 361 home runs and struck out 369 times.

His teammates understood that he put extra pressure on himself to live up to the expectations of the media and the fans. They knew that he pushed himself to his limits both physically and emotionally to carry the team. That being the case, they appreciated that he was different, that he worked things out for himself. Once when he was going through a prolonged slump, Bill Dickey, by then the hitting coach, explained to Mel Allen, the broadcaster, what he thought DiMaggio was doing wrong. “How does Joe react to what you’ve just said?” Allen asked. “Oh, I haven’t spoken to Joe yet,” Dickey answered. “Why not?” Allen pursued. “A player like Joe, when he’s in a slump, you don’t go to him. You wait until he comes to you. First he tries to work it out himself. Then if he doesn’t he’ll let you know he’s ready,” Dickey answered.

DiMaggio rarely dined with the other players on the road, even Keller and Henrich, with whose names his was inextricably linked in a thousand box scores. He led the league, his teammate Eddie Lopat once shrewdly noted, in roomservice. He sought out dark restaurants, where he would sit in the back, in a corner, so that he would not be recognized. If DiMaggio palled around with anyone on the team, it was usually the newer or more vulnerable players who hero-worshiped him and ran favors for him: there was Joe Page, the relief pitcher, whose behavior was erratic enough so that his place on the team was rarely secure; then, for a time, there was Clarence Marshall, the handsome young pitcher; and finally, at the end of his career, DiMaggio palled around with Billy Martin. Martin began his friendship with
DiMaggio by violating the most sacred rule of Yankee etiquette:
He
asked DiMaggio out for dinner. “Hey Joe, let’s go to dinner tonight” a statement so startling, a presumption so great, that his teammates long remembered it. DiMaggio was so amused by him that he assented, and the two became friends.

Some DiMaggio hangers-on were known as his Boboes, the phrase then popular for caddies. One who was proud to be known as a DiMaggio Bobo was Lou Effrat, the
Times’s
baseball writer. On occasion, Effrat would come in late to Toots Shor’s, the main wateringhole of baseball men and sportswriters, to be told by Shor himself that his presence was requested. “The Daig [for “Dago,” DiMaggio’s nickname] wants you,” Shor would say to Effrat. “What does he want?” Effrat would ask. “He wants to go to a midnight movie.” Effrat knew the drill. He would finish his meal, give his wife ten dollars to get home, and join DiMaggio for a late movie. Mrs. Effrat was not invited. Women, particularly wives, never were.

DiMaggio himself squired a series of beautiful show girls, but he was very discreet about it. He never participated in the endless locker-room discussions about women. He made it very clear to his friends in the press that he wanted nothing written about this part of his life, and so nothing was written.

There was a contradiction to DiMaggio’s shyness: He wanted to touch the bright lights of the city, but not be burned by them. When he made the scene, he was often seen with the most unlikely of his buddies—a man named George Solotaire. Solotaire, for a time, was his roommate and closest friend as well as his gofer. He ran his errands, took care of his clothes, and made sure that if DiMaggio did not want to go out to eat, sandwiches were brought in. Solotaire specialized in knowing where the action and the pretty girls were. He was also one of the city’s top Broadway ticket brokers; he liked to boast that he had once supplied
J. P. Morgan with a choice ticket for the same show for seven Saturdays in a row because he assumed that Morgan liked one of the show girls. Solotaire was forty-six years old, short, and stocky, and he spoke in his own Broadway shorthand: If he was out of money, he was in Brokesville; a boring show was Dullsville; a divorce was Splitsville; if he had to leave New York, he would tell friends he had to go camping for a few days; when he returned he would say that it was good to be back in the United States. He at one time wanted to be a songwriter, and wrote two-line jingles for the
Hollywood Reporter
that were, in effect, reviews of shows. Of a show with Ethel Merman he wrote: “The show is in infirm/but it’s still got the Merm.” Of
Fiddler on the Roof
he wrote: “Have no fear about
Fiddler
/This is a triple-A honest diddler.” Writing these couplets, he said, was better than sitting around all day with Freddy or Gladys (tickets for rows F and G).

Solotaire was absolutely awed by his friendship with DiMaggio, and they became the odd couple. Those who thought they knew Solotaire well were often surprised to find out that there was a Mrs. Solotaire, who apparently considered herself happily married and was the mother of their son. Instead, friends remembered Solotaire with DiMaggio, sitting at dinner in the Stage Delicatessen, an unlikely father-son act, the meal passing but no words spoken. Once Solotaire called up a young woman named Ruth Cosgrove and suggested that she be part of a foursome for dinner with the Yankee star. When she arrived at dinner she was pleasantly surprised to find that Solotaire, whose manners were not exactly exquisite, was pulling back a chair for her to sit down. Then she realized that Solotaire was not holding the chair for her, he was holding it for DiMaggio.

Dining with Joe DiMaggio, Ms. Cosgrove felt, gave her a remarkable insight into the male animal. The entire restaurant came to a halt for two hours. The chair of every
man was angled so that its occupant could keep an eye on her date. Each one, she noted, seemed to come up with an excuse for passing their table at least once. As for DiMaggio himself, she thought him kind and almost unbearably shy. He asked her out again, and she, who knew nothing about baseball, cemented their friendship by asking early in the evening, “Joe, what’s an error?” With that he was finally able to talk.

The possible loss of DiMaggio for the season put a considerable chill on the Yankees as they headed north. They were hardly a one-man team, but it was comforting to know that in big games Joe DiMaggio would hit in the cleanup slot and play center field. Tommy Henrich thought his very presence gave the Yankees a considerable edge.

Years later Charlie Keller could still see DiMaggio batting against the best pitcher in the league, Bob Feller. DiMaggio seemed to summon extra adrenaline for such moments: the best against the best. You could actually see the veins and muscles in DiMaggio’s neck stand out, Keller remembered. They were like taut red cords. His whole body was tensed. Bobby Brown recalled that on certain occasions when the Yankees really needed a run, DiMaggio would hit a ball that was not quite going to make the gap between the outfielders. Not much of a chance for a double on that one, Brown would think. Then he would watch DiMaggio go into overdrive, legs extended, going for two bases from the very start. He always made it. There might have been players in the league who were faster going to first base, but there was no player in those days who went from home to second or from first to third or from second to home faster, and no one could better calibrate the odds than DiMaggio. Years later, Frank Crosetti, who coached at third for much of DiMaggio’s career, said that DiMaggio had never been thrown out going from first to third.

The team had been built around DiMaggio. The question now was how much it depended upon him. During the
early part of spring training, before the seriousness of DiMaggio’s ailment had been diagnosed, the Yankees and the Red Sox were considered virtually an even pick, with the Red Sox the slight favorite. By Opening Day a poll of 112 major baseball writers showed that 70 favored the Red Sox, 37 the Indians, 4 the Athletics, and 1 the Yankees. Grantland Rice wrote a column saying that, based on McCarthy’s assurance that Hughson, Ferriss, and Harris were pitching well, he was picking the Red Sox. Harold Kaese, the
Boston Globe
baseball writer, after watching all of spring training, where the Red Sox looked more powerful than ever, predicted that the Red Sox would win an astonishing 124 games while losing only 30. That, he wrote, would tie them for first with the Indians. He saw the Yankees winning only 86 and losing 68, which put them 38 games out of first place.

For the first time in the DiMaggio years, the Yankees were afflicted with self-doubt, except for Stengel. After years of managing second-rate teams stocked with mediocre players, he could hardly believe the talent around him, even without DiMaggio. The backup outfielders—John Lindell, Hank Bauer, Gene Woodling (Woodling had led the Pacific Coast League in hitting with .385 the previous year), and Cliff Mapes—were good enough to play for most pennant contenders. The pitching staff was the best he had ever managed. “When I think of those other teams [I managed] I wonder whether I was managing a baseball team or a golf course—you know, one pro to a club,” he told one friend.

The team arrived in New York for a three-game exhibition series with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Usually exhibition games did not mean much. But the Dodgers were not only intracity rivals, they were now of championship caliber—the Yankees had faced them in the 1947 Series. The Dodgers won all three exhibition games. The Yankees played badly, and the pitching, except in the first game, was ineffective. In the last game, with Allie Reynolds pitching, Jackie Robinson
was on third base twice, and he taunted Reynolds with huge leads as if to say he could steal home anytime he wanted. It was Robinson’s audacity that Henrich later remembered: He had seemed to toy with a team that, even though it had not won the year before, still thought itself the champions. Stengel was furious when the series was over: “All of you guys, when you get into the locker room I want you to check your lockers. He stole everything out there he wanted today so he might have stolen your jocks as well.”

The next day the season was to start against Washington, and Charlie Keller called a team meeting. Keller was one of the quietest Yankees, but an intimidating man physically (given to picking up Phil Rizzuto with one massive arm and stuffing him in an empty locker when Rizzuto dared to call him “King Kong”). He was also a surprisingly gentle man, a farm boy who had gone to the University of Maryland.

After Keller’s senior baseball season at Maryland, the scouts had moved in quickly on him. There were other offers, but to Keller there was something special about the Yankees; the mystique because of Ruth and Gehrig was already there. The Yankees gave him a bonus of $2,500, plus $500 so that he could go back to Maryland after the season and get his degree. He was ticketed to play at a lower-level Yankee team in Norfolk, but he hit so well in spring training that the Yankees assigned him to their AAA team in Newark.