At a time when the preparation for war could not be severed from the threat of falling just short, the performance of Joe DiMaggio on the ball field helped buoy a nation forging a new and necessary myth of its own potential. On the very day that DiMaggio’s challenge to George Sisler’s modern-day streak record of 41 games straight made front page news in The Washington Post, a parallel headline boasted that American airplane production would soon be outstripping the Nazi production of 2,000 planes a month. In double columns, side by side, DiMaggio eased by Sisler as the United States prepared to ease by Germany.
Once the media began characterizing DiMaggio’s streak as part of a larger myth of iteration, many began to view him as marking time for a year whose finale, like the streak itself, would be even greater than the sum of its parts. Time magazine ran a profile on DiMaggio that heightened the land’s fascination with the streak, almost rivaling its concern with the war abroad: “In 102 years of baseball, few feats have caused such nationwide to-do. Joe’s hits have been the biggest news in U.S. sport. Radio programs were interrupted for DiMaggio bulletins.”
In the best piece of writing so far on the streak, an article for Sports Illustrated in 1961, Dave Anderson talked about the prewar tension that marked America in 1941 and the way the hitting streak provided partial release for many. Individual games tested DiMaggio’s endurance and fascinated a nervous land: “For the fans there was no escape from the magnetic force that drew them to their radios to hear the news announcer report the grim but still dreamlike news of the war in Europe and then, at some point in the program, add, ‘and Joe DiMaggio got his hit today to extend. . . .’” Dan Daniel in 1941 even hinted that there was a lesson in the streak for our barbarian enemies: “The eyes of the fans of the nation—yes, of the civilized world and some uncivilized parts, as well—were turned on the Yankee Clipper.” And the Alan Courtney lyric—composed on a napkin in an upstate New York motel the night of the day DiMaggio broke Wee Willie Keeler’s record at 45—implied more than baseball in its refrain when it asked for DiMaggio’s presence, as it were, on the winning side.
From Coast to Coast, that’s all you hear
Of Joe the One-Man Show.
He’s glorified the horsehide sphere,
Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio.
Joe. . .Joe. . .DiMaggio. . .we
Want you on our side.
He’ll live in baseball’s Hall of Fame
He got there blow-by-blow
Our kids will tell their kids his name,
Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio.
II. Springtime with Hitler
Baseball, like the spring training that initiates it, is seasonally liberating. Its reappearance in the east and north once the season begins in mid-April enjoys the same implicit relation to the prime of the year as does daylight savings time. But even in February baseball starts to edge football memories and hockey scores to the rear of the local sports pages. At best, Frank Leahy, rookie Notre Dame coach for the upcoming season, hawked Keds tennis shoes in ads that promised a free book on the fundamentals of football. The 1940 Heisman Award winner, Tommy Harmon, posed in his letter-man’s sweater at the University of Michigan, enrolling for a last semester before the pomp and circumstance of a June graduation. A few football fans still chuckled over Sammy Baugh’s response to a reporter’s question after the Redskins 73–0 shellacking at the hands of the Chicago Bears in the 1940 championship game: “Would it have made any difference if Charlie Malone held on to that touchdown pass early in the game?” “Yeah,” said Baugh, “the score would have been 73–7.”
When baseball went south in the spring of 1941, Hitler cranked up his war machine in Yugoslavia and Greece. The Italians continued fouling the peripheries of the Nazi onslaught, stalling in east Africa in the spring of 1941 the way they had stalled the year before in Greece. In the far east, the situation was brutal and macabre. Chinese armies under Chiang Kai-shek held out against the Japanese in the highlands but were powerless in the flatlands and in China’s bomb-ravaged cities. Meanwhile, the German Luftwaffe bombarded England while Nazi U-boats and raiders terrorized the shipping lanes of the northern Atlantic. Through the huge lend-lease program, America was in the war by proxy and seemed to suffer its indignities on the same terms; a local news story in March related how a Pittsburgh tavern owner dropped dead of a heart attack when a customer looked up at him wearing a Hitler mask.
Baseball felt the pressures of the year early. A few weeks into spring training, players and fans alike sensed that this was the last year of normality before the lottery draft, already 500,000 strong, would create a kind of wartime diaspora. Early in the year the Sporting News, after requesting that all ballplayers in the armed services send in a picture, began a feature, “From the Army Front,” posting the whereabouts of minor league (and a few major league) ballplayers scattered throughout much of the country and some of the world. Bobby Feller of the Cleveland Indians, Cecil Travis of the Washington Senators, and Johnny Rigney of the Chicago White Sox all held early draft call-up numbers. The great slugger Hank Greenberg would soon take his name off the Detroit Tiger roster and sign on the dotted line for Uncle Sam’s draft army. On May 6, shortly after the season began, Greenberg hit home runs off Yankee pitchers Ernie Bonham and Atley Donald in the Tigers’ 7–4 win. On May 7 he prepared to wake up to the call of the bugle at Camp Custer, Michigan, giving up the highest salary in the majors for the pathetic wages of a buck private. “I’m not crying about being dropped from $55,000 a year to $21 a month.” said Greenberg. The contrast carries as much meaning as the sentiment.
Larry MacPhail of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ front office harangued any federal official who would listen that the staggered draft call-up was a disaster for baseball. A late summer number would involve the loss of a ballplayer’s services for two seasons. Like many others, MacPhail had no inkling of Pearl Harbor and the interlude that would extend through the bulk of the decade. The Yankees’ president, Ed Barrow, was more militant on the subject of the draft than on the outrages of world war. He argued that the European hostilities were holding baseball hostage. When Joe DiMaggio sat out part of spring training angling for an extra $5,000 to edge his salary even with that of Cleveland’s Bobby Feller at $40,000 a year, Barrow complained that if the war heated up with the pennant races in August, the military draft would deplete every major league roster. All the high-priced stars in the league would be wearing the same uniform: battle fatigues. Why should he cough up for DiMaggio, who would only spend the money buying clothes he wouldn’t need? John Lardner in a spring training issue of Newsweek had just reported that DiMaggio had been named among the best-dressed athletes of the nation: “That DiMaggio is a poem.” Indeed, why should Barrow shell out high salaries for anyone if during the heat of the pennant race major league rosters would consist of only the blind and the lame? Woody Allen would later parody a similar notion in a wonderful bit on baseball from his film Radio Days.
The concern in 1941 was for the most part premature, since all major league teams stayed virtually intact. DiMaggio had a marriage exemption and would play through 1942, though in that year his Italian father, never having applied for U.S. citizenship, would be classified a wartime alien and would be barred from his shipping boat in San Francisco harbor. Ted Williams held a late call-up number and, according to his own recollection, was so absorbed by the thing he did best in 1941—hit a baseball—that he had little idea that a significant war was raging in the world until the bombs actually fell on Pearl Harbor. Of course, Mr. Barrow of the Yankees was still at it in 1942. He tried to use the war, on this occasion an impending wartime wage freeze, to keep DiMaggio and six other stars on his World Series championship team from seeking raises. Barrow understood more than most that players on the field appear as if they are managed but are treated in the front office as if they are owned.
Another baseball issue festered in the spring of 1941, tangentially related to the war but more centrally focused on team revenues: night baseball. Dan Da
niel, mixing vexing and perplexing metaphors, wrote in a spring issue of the Sporting News that “night ball is the most vexing source of perplexity confronting the major leagues.” The question turned on whether to increase each team’s home allotment of night games beyond the seven then allowed. President Roosevelt wanted the number of night games doubled to help the war effort by discouraging the sneaky but traditional escape to the ball park during afternoon work hours. When war finally broke out, he put this request into writing to baseball’s commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
For their part, most of the owners who within the past two years had purchased lights for their privately owned parks enjoyed the potential extra cash on the barrelhead from night ball: The 77 night games played in 1941 would draw over a million and a half customers, average over 20,000 a game, and fill parks like Cleveland’s huge Municipal Stadium with over 67,000 fans on the night DiMaggio tried to take his streak to 57 games. But among those in 1941 who grew apoplectic at the very thought of night baseball, Yankee president Ed Barrow again found himself in the forefront. Barrow might have remembered the time he managed at Paterson, New Jersey, near the turn of the century, when, in a night game played with the aid of candlelight, his great shortstop and personal discovery, Honus Wagner, had a firecracker thrown at him by the opposing pitcher. The incident literally ignited a full-scale riot.
What would Barrow have thought of domed stadiums and artificial turf? Actually, in the spring of 1941 a whimsically named writer for Esquire, Felix Mendelssohn, Jr., predicted that in several years most major league ball in America would be played indoors, with temperature automatically controlled and lighting artificially produced. Mendelssohn didn’t worry about—or even contemplate—replacing grass with an artificial carpet. So much the better. Only by the license of metaphor can a carpet represent grass in the first place.
Despite the strain of the draft and the controversy over night ball, baseball came as a relief in spring of 1941, some of it comic. Along with the art deco shots of palm-lined Florida streets, the Sporting News ran a full-page ad taken out by Al Schacht, “the Clown Prince of Baseball”: “Dear Club Owner: Increase your attendance anywhere from 100% to 500%—I sincerely believe my record for the past four years on tour established these facts beyond a shadow of a doubt. . . . Time is flying. Write, wire, or phone today.” While Schacht hustled up business, the Yankees in St. Petersburg hoped to avenge their miserable midseason plummet in 1940 that had allowed Detroit to grab the pennant. If only they could beef up an at once aging and infant pitching staff and fill a first base spot vacant in body and spirit since the disheartening illness of Lou Gehrig, they could make it back.
With rumors of Gehrig lying so ill in New York that he couldn’t lift a cigarette, the Yankees began by wiping the slate clean and selling their resident first baseman, Babe Dahlgren, to the Boston Braves in the first week of spring training. Manager Joe McCarthy had the notion of moving Joe Gordon to first and starting his rookie double play combination up from Kansas City, Phil Rizzuto and Jerry Priddy. When Dahlgren left camp, McCarthy remarked that “his arms are too short to play first.” Babe was hurt: “What’s he think I’m a freak or something?” Dahlgren posed for pictures in the papers measuring his arms against those which happened to be hanging around the Braves’ training camp. Later in the year Babe got revenge of sorts when a poll in the Sporting News selected him as the most obvious candidate among active ballplayers to play the part of Lou Gehrig in Sam Goldwyn’s movie The Pride of the Yankees. Goldwyn had other ideas.
Meanwhile, in the National League in spring 1941, the Brooklyn Dodgers, with a team literally purchased by Larry MacPhail in 3 years of wheeling and dealing, set their sights on displacing the world champion Cincinnati Reds, whose ace right-hander, Bucky Walters, was at the top of his game. Little did they know that it would be the Cardinals, not the Reds, with whom they would be gripped in a death-lock pennant struggle for all 154 games of a thrilling season. Would the Dodgers cry uncle yet again?
A feature story in The New York Times Magazine, “Why Is a Dodger a Fan,” considered the Dodgers’ chances in terms of the team’s zany history and wondered at the mysterious and compelling nature of rooting for the Dodgers, which, “like all great loves, is born out of suffering.” The article offered a nostalgic review of great moments in Dodger absurdity: Hack Wilson getting hit on the head by a fly because he was busy arguing with a fan in the stands; Babe Herman’s pants catching on fire when he absentmindedly put a lit cigar in his back pocket; three Dodgers in a Mack Sennett moment sliding into the same base at the same time.
Miraculously, the Dodgers would make it through the season only to face another agonizing moment in their history: Mickey Owen’s passed ball in game 4 of the World Series with the Yankees. For now they played the Yanks in spring in a game that had a different sort of historic resonance. On April 8, at Durham, North Carolina, Larry MacPhail made all his Dodgers wear an experimental contraption, a protective lining inside their hats that MacPhail himself had patented after getting the idea from jockey skullcaps. MacPhail offered his patented invention to any major league team for the asking. No one asked until midseason, when Cleveland’s Roy Weatherly got badly beaned and the Indian front office decided to take MacPhail up on his offer. Most players, however, shunned the device.
MacPhail had been a busy man inside and outside of baseball for many years. He not only brought lights and night ball to Crosley Field and Cincinnati in 1935 and the pennant to Ebbets Field and Brooklyn in 1941, but in 1918 he participated in a wild scheme to kidnap Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm after the cease-fire ending World War I. MacPhail and his cadre wanted to hold the kaiser hostage for favorable treaty negotiations. The raiding party got as far as Wilhelm’s temporary Belgian residence, whereupon MacPhail stole an ashtray as a memento of the crazy escapade.
Around the leagues in 1941 other great teams and players shed winter fat and loosened springtime muscles at the balmy resorts of Florida: Luke Appling, Lou Boudreau, Joe Cronin, Jimmie Foxx, Charlie Gehringer, Lefty Gomez, Hank Greenberg, Lefty Grove, Gabby Hartnett, Carl Hubbell, Joe Medwick, Mel Ott, Red Ruffing, Ted Lyons, Paul Waner. Many of these players, whose names now grace the Hall of Fame, could not and did not survive the hiatus of the war years. To get an idea of the talent in the majors in 1941, the Sporting News profiled players by position. One feature looked simply at shortstops, singling out among others Appling of the White Sox, Boudreau of the Indians, Cronin of the Red Sox, Reese of the Dodgers, Rizzuto of the Yanks, Travis of the Senators, and Vaughan of the Pirates. This incredible suite of players combined to hit just under .300 (.299) in 1941 and, in a marvel of consistency, .297 for their combined careers, over 110 years in all at short.
Hope springs eternal in Florida: Alexander Pope sprung the phrase, Ponce de Leon the concept. In 1941 the Sporting News ran the usual stories on the year’s most promising rookies, the most notable of whom—including rookie umps Jocko Conlon in the National League and Art Passarella in the American—were Pete Reiser, center fielder for the Dodgers, and Phil Rizzuto, shortstop for the Yankees. Reiser was only technically a rookie in that he had played in 58 games for the 1940 Dodgers, hit .293, and almost had the at bats to qualify for his sophomore season. But Rizzuto was raw, charged up, and innocent. In the midst of a long interview, the veteran writer J. G. Taylor Spink asked Rizzuto about his springtime love life. “How are you in the cupid league?” Rizzuto responded, “Cupid League? I never played in that circuit. I broke in with Bassetts in the Bi-State League, then went to Norfolk in the Piedmont, then Kansas City in the American Association, and then the American League.” For the young at heart, baseball is all-absorbing.
The most highly touted prospect still in the minors early in spring training was a young man named Buddy Blattner playing for the Sacramento Solons of the Pacific Coast League. Pepper Martin, his manager, claimed Blattner was the new Frankie Frisch, but despite a couple of decent years after the war, he is best remembered as Dizzy D
ean’s sidekick and “podner” on the NBC television game of the week. Other minor leaguers were playing in obscurity when the season began but would be heard of one way or another before it ended. In April the Sporting News ran a piece on a phenom playing for Springfield of the Western Association who worked as a grocery clerk in Donora, Pennsylvania, during the off-season. He had just demolished St. Joseph with seven hits in a three-game series, including three home runs and a double. The youngster would briefly be called up to the Cards when the rosters expanded in September and would get in a few licks. It’s a fine trivia question: What famous left-handed batter outhit Ted Williams in 1941? Answer: Stan Musial, who batted .426 for the Cardinals in 12 games.
Whatever else marked the year—Grove’s 300th win, Ott’s 400th home run—the 1941 baseball season would belong to a 22-year-old in his third year with the Red Sox and a 26-year-old in his sixth year with the Yankees. During spring training, Joe McCarthy heard some minor leaguers working at the Yankee camp talking about hitters. One youngster ventured, “Everybody’s got a weakness somewhere—I’ve just got to figure out where.” “There are two fellows in the bigs who don’t,” said McCarthy, “DiMaggio and Ted Williams. They hit anything. You can’t get them out.”
In 1941 the best pitcher in baseball, Bob Feller, told the Sporting News in the spring how he would pitch to DiMaggio and Williams, though he admitted that thinking about getting them out was not the same as actually doing it: “Keep them in and hard on DiMaggio; throw Williams as much breaking stuff down and away as possible.” Feller said that DiMaggio approached the plate all business whereas Williams appeared jaunty and gladdened at the prospect of taking his cuts. He even smiled at the plate, which some pitchers might find either a bit daunting or a bit depressing.
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