Streak

by Seidel, Michael; Siegel, George ;

  Keltner told reporters that the incident had struck him as odd at the time. He still thought it was odd when I asked him about it in a recent exchange of letters: “DiMaggio rarely uttered a word on the field. He was very quiet.” Keltner went on to tell reporters on the night of July 17 that he recalled the June 1 incident precisely because the players that day first began to hear inklings of DiMaggio’s streak at game 18, even though the New York World-Telegram and New York Daily News had, without much fuss, picked it up a few games earlier. Johnny Sturm has a vague memory of Joe DiMaggio’s brother Vince mentioning the streak—perhaps by phone—to a Cleveland reporter he knew. In any case, Sturm knew the story was alive during the doubleheader in Cleveland because he remembers talking about it on the field and in the clubhouse.

  DiMaggio draws a blank on game 18 and on his one-way conversation with Keltner. But Keltner heard something on the day the streak became general news, and maybe DiMaggio muttered, “Another inch, Kenny, and I start all over,” as he passed Keltner on the foul line. Maybe he didn’t. The incident stays buried within the confines of the legend. Keltner at the time had another reason for telling this story. He said that the recollection of a hard ground ball skidding past him and a remark by DiMaggio he didn’t quite hear made him especially eager 39 games later, on the night of July 17, to play slightly deeper at third and guard the line. To recover what is recoverable of this incident is to provide a full effect for half a cause. And that effected happens to be the end of the streak.

  Talking with and writing to the ballplayers who had something to do with Joe DiMaggio’s streak in 1941 was a pleasure for me, and their help was instrumental in shaping this book. For example, in the same conversation with Dom DiMaggio in which I heard of the phantom catch that never was, DiMaggio began by saying he remembered almost nothing of those times so long ago. But when we began talking about his earlier days in minor league ball in San Francisco, Lefty O’Doul’s name came up, Dom’s manager with the Seals. O’Doul’s name triggered for me a story I had just read in a May 1941 issue of the Sporting News regarding an incident that occurred a few days before Joe DiMaggio’s streak began. O’Doul was with his Seals in Los Angeles to play the Hollywood Stars, and after the game Lefty got into a barroom scuffle with a fan about the relative merits or demerits of his ball club. O’Doul ended up hospitalized with severe lacerations that required delicate surgery after the fan smashed a cocktail glass in his face.

  Dom DiMaggio recalled the incident very well because he was on the east coast when he finally heard what happened and wanted to call O’Doul in the hospital. He got in touch around the middle of May. O’Doul told him about the piles of letters he had received, about the ballplayers who had called, about his version of the entire incident, and about the nature of the fight and injuries, including details not reported in the news stories. Lefty said the damage had been done after he thought the squabble was over—“Aw, the hell with it, this is silly”—and when he walked over to see if he could soften the bad feelings, he caught a glass full in the face.

  That the O’Doul episode took place at the time of his brother’s streak—a sequence he had thought about over the years with much more frequency than Lefty O’Doul’s brawl in a Hollywood bar—surprised Dominic DiMaggio: “Was O’Doul in the hospital then? My gosh. I remember that so well—exactly after all these years.” Something akin to the surge I heard in Dominic DiMaggio’s voice about a connection that is both coincidental and memorial attracted me to writing the record of the streak and the time that surrounds it. The O’Doul affair and its conjunction with Joe DiMaggio’s streak—events totally unconnected in Dom DiMaggio’s mind—had the effect of stimulating other memories. DiMaggio began to get interested or reinterested in the year. An hour later—we were on the phone—he said humbly, “Gee, I don’t know if I have been of any help to you.” The fact is, he had been of tremendous help not only about his brother’s 1941 major league record streak but about a younger Joe DiMaggio’s record 61-game streak in 1933 while Joe was playing for the San Francisco Seals, about the Red Sox in 1941, about ballplayers and the war, about Ted Williams’s run at hitting 400 that year. He was so much help that I didn’t have the heart to disabuse him about the great catch he supposedly made on the day his brother went beyond Keeler’s major league record. On the other hand, the details of the catch that never was helped me piece together the sequence that led to its invention.

  This is the way I have tried to recall these legendary 56 games: by reconstructing their details, by drawing on the recollections of others, by placing the entire sequence in the context of memories shared in various ways by all. I owe debts to those who have helped me do so, especially to the dozens of ballplayers willing to share their memories with me, primarily Joe DiMaggio himself, Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Dom DiMaggio, Ken Keltner, Charlie Keller, and Johnny Sturm. In preparing materials, I had a great deal of help from the professional staff at the Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown. Their knowledge, courtesy, and enthusiasm are resources that complement the library’s extensive holdings. A great deal of assistance was also provided by the New York Yankees, especially by David Szen and Ann Mileo in the front office. For additional research help I thank Alan Kifferstein, Aaron Schneider, Meryl Altman, Jillisa Brittan, and James Van Dyck Card. And for the sort of endless baseball talk on which fans and fanatics thrive, I owe much to Elizabeth Wheeler, David Quint, David Bromwich, Ron Levao, Paul Fry, Alfred MacAdam, Gerald Finch, Steven Marcus, Rick Wright, and even Edward Mendelson, who knows little about baseball but so much about everything else. As for my young boys, Daniel and Matthew, their endless baseball questions encouraged me to supply, after my fashion, endless answers. And whatever energy and effort went into the writing of this book was all repaid for me by the visible delight in my son Daniel’s eyes when he picked up the phone one day and heard Joe DiMaggio’s voice on the other end.

  Books are not only written; they are produced. I had early help in shaping this venture from a good friend, Catherine Schreiber, and from Jack Artenstein and Angela Hynes of RGA Publications. And I have had continuous help in readying it from my editor, Tom Quinn, at McGraw-Hill. His deftness and his tact are remarkable. I also thank others at McGraw-Hill for their efforts, especially Lori Glazer, Sue Raffman, Eric Lowenkron, and Richard Adelson. It was a pleasure to work with them all.

  Prologue

  I. A Hero’s Time

  The special distinction of the heroic is something that is nurtured over time. Heroes, or those perceived as such, possess a quality that strikes a primitive chord in millions who are simply aware of them, who seem to know them, who seem to miss them. A hero’s name becomes talismanic; it stands for something bigger, something better. Simon and Garfunkel surely understood as much about DiMaggio’s name in their bittersweet balladic refrain for the 1960s: “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”

  America in the ’40s had a more immediate and distinct sense of what resources might be expected from its heroes. At the tail end of the depression and just before World War II, the land distrusted the self-aggrandizing bluster of the roaring twenties and the heroic figure whose demeanor suggested the flamboyance of something already done and not the steely anticipation of something yet to be encountered. Quieter and subtler reserves of strength and potential had greater attraction for the 1940s. Whether in sports, the movies, or the armed services, the image of accomplishment in the uncertain months before war drew on the intense but not the hysterical, the skillful but not the boastful, the graceful but not the mannered.

  Tall, silent, to a notable extent shy, figures of consistency, endurance, and understated style—those represented, say, by the mild-mannered Clark Kent or portrayed by Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart in the movies—touched the land’s spirit before World War II and kept that spirit alive while the war raged. A Newsweek story on DiMaggio during the streak encapsulated the style of the epoch: “Close-mouthed, confident, steel-nerved.” Such a description
could well apply to others, including the great current heavyweight champion, Joe Louis, who was already a national symbol for efficiently dispatching the German idol, Max Schmeling, in their 1938 title fight and who in June 1941 responded to the prefight publicity surrounding Billy Conn by muttering, “He talks too much.”

  In what amounts to a tour de force monologue on DiMaggio, the colorful Toots Shor, at whose restaurant and watering hole DiMaggio spent most of his bachelor hours and a good deal of his married ones, remembers his friend during the 1940s. Maury Allen records Toots talking:

  There never was a guy like DiMaggio in baseball. The way people admired him, the way they admire him now. Everybody wanted to meet Joe, to touch him, to be around him—the big guys too. I’m not just talking about fans coming into the joint. Joe was a hero, a real legitimate hero. I don’t know what it takes to be a real hero like Joe. You can’t manufacture a hero like that. It just has to be there, the way he plays, the way he works, the way he is.

  Nothing is more eloquent than Shor’s simple “the way he is.” DiMaggio himself remembers something about the way he was in the 1940s. He recalls attending a game in Yankee Stadium one summer day in 1945, after the war but before he rejoined the team. He entered the park with his 4-year-old son, Joe, Jr., when someone in the crowd recognized them heading for their mezzanine seats. There were a few shouts of greeting—“Hey, Joe. Hiya, Joe”—and then a chorus of cheers and screams until the whole stadium was charged with excitement. The reaction spoke for more than 4 years of war; it spoke for an entire generation and a single ballplayer whose presence embodied prewar memory and postwar relief. The ovation and the chants—“Joe, Joe DiMaggio, DiMaggio”—moved the great Yankee center fielder to the quick. When DiMaggio tells the story he does so as much from the perspective of a father as from that of a hero. He remembers looking at his young boy, another Joe DiMaggio, and the tot saying, “See, Daddy—everybody knows me.”

  Everybody knows the name borne by father and by son. Dan Daniel, a baseball writer and official scorer for many Yankee home games during the streak, wrote with an intentionally archaic turn in 1941, as if none other were quite adequate: “DiMaggio is the hero of the populace.” Perhaps at a time when such a Roman tag had passed to the likes of Mussolini and Hitler, Daniel wished to reappropriate it for the proper modesty of a sports-loving republic. He surely was on the qui vive throughout the streak for those resonances which made it at once a symbol of its time and a heroic antidote to the times surrounding it.

  The great American poet Wallace Stevens knew from a more sustained vision what Dan Daniel sensed from a more limited one. Heroism adjusts its dimension to the imminent, especially when the imminent is war. Early in the 1940s he wrote in the prose statement accompanying his poem “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War” that the consciousness of war is “a consciousness of heroic fact, of fact on such a scale that the mere consciousness of it affects the scale of one’s thinking and constitutes a participating in the heroic.” Stevens went on to write that wartime crisis wills fact into heroic shape: “In war the desire to move in the direction of fact as we want it to be and to move quickly is overwhelming.”

  Amid the turmoil of world war and the preparation for our undetermined role in its conduct, the attention paid to DiMaggio’s streak and to that other legendary sequence of the summer. Ted Williams’s run at the .400 barrier, provided a heroic, factual focus for a land whose imagination seemed primed for increments of power. This is not to make either DiMaggio’s or Williams’s accomplishments overtly allegorical, which would destroy the uniqueness of their interest; rather, the streak and the assault on .400 were special achievements in a land receptive to the rhythms of their effort.

  Baseball could not and did not escape the wartime consciousness. No matter how seriously or frivolously one takes analogies between public affairs and American sports, one thing is certain: In 1941 the analogies were more unabashedly and urgently proffered than usual, perhaps in the face of or perhaps because of the gravity of the global scene. A huge front page illustration in a February issue of the Sporting News depicted the entire Yankee team trying to steam across the Atlantic as a freighter in the face of enemy torpedoes. The caption read “Battered Yankee Raider Being Rearmed for Flag Fight” with the goal of making “craft ‘Terror of the Seas’ again.” Later in the spring the Sporting News varied its own theme, offering a piece on the relief pitching corps of the major league teams with the header “Convoys for Starters.” The tallies of downed planes in dogfights over the industrial Ruhr Valley in Germany would appear in the newspapers of spring and summer under the rubric “Daily Box Scores.” In any of a hundred other ways the baseball season could not be separated from the experience of world war around it. Baseball magazine cut through the small pretense of metaphor and began the year in January with an article titled “Baseball and War—An Analogy” by James M. Gould.

  But more interesting than all the predictable terminological twists on offense, defense, strategies, reserves, corps, and the like was an article in the Sporting News (April 4, 1941) by the indefatigable Dan Daniel, that omnipresent commentator on the mood of the country in the spring and summer of 1941. He wrote on the magnitude of things in wartime; he had a much more global sense of the year than did any other sportswriter; and he saw very early that the way a nation thinks about itself is manifested on its playing fields. Daniel’s vision of sports and politics embraced the patriotic and flirted with the jingoistic, but he was not unintelligent. He recognized the time as confused and confusing, though he very much wanted to locate in American sports an attitude toward world events that was substantive in spirit even if preserved in innocence. Daniel wrote of the season’s opener in Washington, D.C., between the Yankees and the Senators.

  “Frivolous,” snorts Hitler. “Ridiculous,” gutturals Mussolini. “Marvelous,” says the American as he sees behind the curtain, as he grasps the things connoted by Mr. Roosevelt’s throwing out the first ball and remaining to watch the fight to its decision. Let all the men in baseball get wise to the fact that the Washington preview is not just a local happening; that the President does not come out to inaugurate a local season. He opens the American campaign.

  What did Hitler and Mussolini have to do with the opening of the baseball season, and what did Roosevelt’s remaining for the entire game have to do with the war? Nothing, really. But to understand the connection in Daniel’s mind is to understand something of the tone and temper of 1941: its commitment to endurance as the most timely heroic virtue. From the first pitch to the ninth inning, America, represented by its President, would be there for the duration. Daniel’s phrase “watch the fight to its decision” was equivocal enough in April 1941 to include even the isolationists who wished to do only that—watch—but following through to the end ultimately meant a commitment to the war against the Nazis. Baseball as an “American campaign” is in one sense an American League opener, in another a campaign that gripped the entire world.

  Daniel kept the connection between his version of the national game and world events at the forefront of his writing as DiMaggio’s streak steadily made its way into baseball history. In one Sporting News column (May 29, 1941) he commented on the pre-game national anthem line by line as its sound wafted up to him in the press box. The reporting here is the kind of patriotic reverie that H. L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun would have treated with savage scorn, but Daniel echoes the strains as he hears them in wartime.

  . . . “whose broad stripes and bright stars”. . . . You think back to that line. . . . The stars are blacked out over there, and the broad stripes are lash-marks on the backs of men in Poland. Starvation stalks and children die where the waltzes of Strauss used to be the theme song of gemüttlichkeit which has fled the world. . . . “And the home of the brave”. . . . The Yankees take the field and the first batter comes to the plate. They are dropping bombs again over London. . . . “Protect us by thy might, great god, our King”. . . . “Play Ball!”


  Baseball is played in counterpoint. And the bottom line is war: courage to face it, readiness to prepare for it. The lend-lease program initiated in March of that year was the most dramatic symbol of a nation gearing itself to massive increases in the production of arms and war matériel in part to replace the over 350,000 tons a month that German raiders and U-boats were sending to the bottom of the Atlantic. For an economy still moribund from the great depression, the business of the country was now war production. America would become Roosevelt’s “arsenal of Democracy.” Fortune magazine ran a springtime feature on nationwide construction of military installations for a draft army of well over a million that made the pharaohs’ public works projects in ancient Egypt look like sand castles. Life ran its “Defense Issue” during DiMaggio’s streak, charting with numbing precision the rate of increase in production for virtually every rivet in every airplane, every trigger on every gun, every decoration on every uniform. The spread was emblematic—it looked like a division on parade.

  Not only were there special defense issues and features in the print media, almost every daily newspaper pictorial supplement in city after city across the land offered rotogravure images of a nation readying for war: overhead shots of armored divisions, hundreds of production line and assembly views, mute but awful photos of stockpiled armaments. All was number, increase, accumulation in the spring and summer of 1941. The newspapers recorded the daily fetish and the pace of the count: draft lotteries; the largest series of defense outlays in the country’s history, supplying everything from pontoon bridges to pile drivers; huge tax increases projected to support the war effort; thousands upon thousands of new planes, tanks, and weapons pouring off production lines. Whatever question didn’t begin with “how much” in early 1941 began with “how long.” How long before we must enter the war? How long before England falters? How long can China hold out? How long until Hitler invades Russia? How long before Japan moves in the Pacific?