Streak
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In Los Angeles on June 20, Charles Lindbergh and his America First cronies spoke before thousands at the Hollywood Bowl. Actress Lillian Gish joined the America First tour, fresh from her starring role in the Chicago production of Life with Father. Lindbergh wrote in his journal for this day how struck he was at the beauty of the bowl under the stars. He also distinguished in his journal between the intelligent looks of the people who came to see him speak and the barbaric shrieks and hisses of crowds at movie theaters during the Movietone News whenever Hitler or Mussolini appeared on the screen. Because he did not enjoy or feel comfortable around those who idolized him, Lindbergh related in his diaries how he spent a good deal of spare time while touring America at the movies, where, if his luck held, he would not be recognized. There he would listen in the dark to what he called the bloodthirsty sounds of an unthinking, hysterical populace. Lindbergh was either hard on the typical American movie fan or hadn’t yet gotten over the awful public spectacle surrounding the kidnapping and murder of his child nearly a decade before.
That night at the Hollywood Bowl, Lindbergh adjusted to Roosevelt’s new belligerence by expanding his own defeatism. He told the crowd we were capable only of defending our natural borders—we would lose to the Nazis on the high seas. Considering the relatively small size of the German Navy, the recent sinking of the Bismarck, and the new technological advances against submarine warfare, even Lindbergh couldn’t have really believed this claim. Like virtually all the aviator’s wartime forecasts, this one turned out to be dolefully mistaken.
GAME 34: June 21
Europe on Saturday was strangely calm, even though a sense of apprehension hung like a thick fog all along the Soviet border. In America reality temporarily gave way to mythology as the Saturday Evening Post featured a story reviewing the creation and history of Superman, just 4 years old as a money-making venture but approaching 9 as the kryptonic brainchild of a young Cleveland lad by the name of Jerry Siegel. One day in 1932 Siegel dreamed up Superman and spent the next several hours conjuring powers for him. Siegel and Superman now were grossing about a million dollars a year, with Joe DiMaggio doing his bit as an avid reader. The Nazis, too, had gotten hold of America’s Übermensch by 1941. The monthly magazine of Hitler’s elite Schwarze Corps published an article attacking the anti-Nazi role Superman played so actively in the comics. The magazine labeled the Superman myth a product of Jewish dementia and its creator Siegel “a clever little beetle that stinks.” So much for the Nazi perception of western truth, justice, and the American way at a time when they were about to try crushing a communist behemoth to the east.
Before a Saturday crowd of 20,067 on this first day of summer at the Stadium, the Yankees lost to Detroit 7–2, though for the third straight game DiMaggio ended any streak suspense early with a hit in the first inning, his eighth in a row over three games. His hit—a single—wasn’t much: Dizzy Trout jammed DiMaggio, who then blooped a handle shot over Rudy York’s head at first base. Even a more versatile fielder than York couldn’t have snagged this one. DiMaggio had now equaled George McQuinn’s 1938 streak of 34 games; Ty Cobb’s run of 40 in 1911 was next.
Trout had the Yankees under control all day, and he even got his team ahead for good in the second inning with a two-run single. The Yankees scored only once more all day, but that run proved to be telling: Phil Rizzuto, a most unlikely long-ball threat, laid into a fat one tossed up by Trout and put it 400 feet out of the park to left for his second major league home run. As Rizzuto rounded third a smile wreathed his entire face. The Yankees had tied the record for consecutive-game home runs by a major league team at 17, which had been set by the 1940 version of the Detroit Tigers. During Detroit’s long-ball binge the previous year, Greenberg, York, and company had hit 26 home runs in 17 games; this year the Yankees stroked 28. No other team hit so many home runs in so few games until the Cincinnati Reds of 1956, followed by the Maris-Mantle Yankees of 1961, who hold the current record at 32 home runs over a span of 17 straight games. Neither the 1956 Cincinnati powerhouse nor the 1961 Yankees, however, were able to match the full run of the 1941 Yankee consecutive-game home run streak. DiMaggio, Henrich, and Keller were simply too hot and too powerful for most of June this year for their performances to be quickly or easily duplicated.
An article for the issue of Esquire just hitting the stands on June 21 advocated an idea that would in due time gain some currency: designated hitters. For good measure, the article threw in a designated fielder or two. “I Want a Change” was the name of the piece, and its author, Felix Mendelsohn, Jr., was fed up with “all field no hit” rummies and big hitters who could barely fit their gloves over five thumbs. His solution was a modified platoon system with two or three positions designated as purely offensive or purely defensive. In 1941 almost everyone found this notion purely offensive. Not until 1973 would the American League produce a minimalist version of the proposal and introduce the designated hitter rule.
GAME 35: June 22
At 3:30 A.M. Sunday, sunrise in the Baltic, German armies crossed into Russian territory. With the release of his mighty forces at daybreak, Hitler made Russia his supreme project and, like Napoleon before him, his supreme folly. The size of the invasion even startled the führer, who marveled as the day progressed that never in its history had the world known or seen anything on so grand a military scale. Sunday, June 22, remains as significant a date for a great expanse of the European continent as another Sunday, December 7, 1941, remains for America.
German aerial and artillery barrages began the attack during the night, and by dawn an awesome total of 146 infantry, Panzer, and motorized divisions began pouring into Russian territory. The Germans also had at their disposal the entire Finnish Army, still smarting from its 1939 war with Russia. The Finns fought fiercely and got better as the weather got colder. Surely the Russians did not want to face these forces again, especially allied with several million Germans. In addition, 14 Romanian divisions, 28 reserve divisions, and Italian reinforcement units were available for the Axis onslaught. To provide a comparative sense of what was now happening along the Russian border, Hitler’s strength over the rest of the war zone consisted of but 38 divisions in all western Europe, 1 in Denmark, 7 in Norway, 7 in the Balkans, and 2 in North Africa.
According to the plan for the German attack, Hitler envisaged three thrusts into Russia: a northern one through the Baltic states and on to Leningrad, a central one through Smolensk and on to Moscow (or north to Leningrad as it turned out), and a southern one through the Ukraine to Kiev and Stalingrad. He intended a summer campaign of 10 weeks’ duration and had made few plans beyond that. The führer told Field Marshal von Runstedt, the commander of his army group of the south, “You have only to kick in the door, and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.”
The Russians were not exactly defenseless. They had more infantry divisions than the huge Nazi Army on their borders, but their tank and motorized divisions were no match in quality for the German forces. Worse, Russian defense plans for the western borders were helter-skelter. What Hitler and the world did not know—because Stalin’s police state kept Russia’s preparations secret—was the precise reserve strength of the Russian Army and the Russian production capacity currently gearing up in the region of the Ural Mountains.
Before the first day of fighting had concluded, the front stretched over a thousand miles. The Russians had masses of men in all areas, and they were faring much better in the battle’s early hours than the Germans had expected. The casualties on both sides were enormous. But the Russian commander of the central zone, General Pavlov, made the single greatest mistake of the day, and perhaps of the war, when he moved 50 Russian divisions in Belorussia smack into the middle of the German pincer advance. Over the next days these divisions virtually disappeared from the face of the earth. Pavlov found himself in irrevocable trouble, and before Joe DiMaggio’s streak edged into July Joe Stalin would have his general executed for this day’s tragic blun
der.
The Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, wasted little time in reading Hitler’s proclamation of war against Russia over national radio. The führer claimed that all efforts to ensure peace for the area had failed when he became convinced Russia sought to enter into a coalition with England to ruin Germany. Oddly enough, this is exactly what the deputy führer, Rudolf Hess, thought Hitler wanted to do with England to ruin Russia. The truth in 1941 was somewhat less complicated. England, especially Churchill, could stomach neither Hitler nor Stalin, though the prime minister pledged aid to Russia and responded to Hitler’s proclamation of war by calling him a “bloodthirsty guttersnipe.”
Germany’s invasion of Russia, though expected, was troublesome for America. Given the enormous anti-Soviet sentiment in this country, especially after the disgust with which even the extreme left had greeted the Stalin-Hitler nonaggression pact of 1939, Roosevelt did not know quite what to do on invasion day. As for America’s isolationists, they now had some powerful new arguments against war, arguments more convincing than those they had been enlisting. Did we really want to waste the lives of our youth by thrusting them into the maw of a monstrous conflagration on a scale never before witnessed, contested by two nations we could not abide? Roosevelt asked himself the same questions, and after June 22 he began looking a bit less eagerly for a technical act of naval hostility to get us into the fray. On the other hand, two fronts in Europe gave the British what they thought they needed, a fighting chance, with Stalin’s armies doing the bulk of the fighting and taking the bulk of the chances.
Amid all the excitement surrounding the invasion of Russia, the world barely noticed either the fall of Damascus to the British hours before Germany attacked Stalin or the RAF’s most sustained attack of the war against targets in Vichy France and the German Ruhr Valley. England now had the absolute upper hand in the middle east as Vichy officers and officials began to secrete themselves out of the area any way they could before the British attacked Beirut. And in the long run the saturation bombing of Germany would prove disastrous for Hitler with his supply lines stretched over the entire European continent.
The final game of the Detroit series at the Stadium on this dramatic Sunday, June 22, began as news just started arriving over the wires detailing the massive German assault across the Russian border. Nothing that happened at Yankee Stadium could rival the initiatory shock of the invasion, yet the Tigers and Yankees did what they could. The ball game proved a thriller for the 27,072 fans who arrived in the searing 94-degree heat, the hottest June 22 on record for the city. DiMaggio waited a few innings longer than he had in the previous three games to continue the streak. But in the sixth he slammed an outside pitch from Hal Newhouser 370 feet over the right field fence to keep the streak alive and help his team set a new consecutive-game home run record at 18. At the time DiMaggio’s home run put the Yankees up a run, 3–2, but Detroit came back in the eighth to chase Red Ruffing when the big fellow got himself in trouble by failing to cover first base on a grounder. The Tigers ended up with two runs in the inning and a 4–3 lead.
In the bottom of the ninth the Yanks looked completely wilted in the day’s heat. With no one on and two out, the bat boys began to collect the lumber. But Red Rolfe connected with one of reliever Bobo Newsom’s offerings and put it over the porch in right to tie the game. A rattled Newsom then hit Tommy Henrich with a pitch. After DiMaggio blasted a double to the corner in left, Dickey was intentionally walked to set up an easier force-out. But Bobo fritzed the Tiger strategy by walking in the winning run with no intent whatever. Already in a bit of trouble with Tiger management for his erratic behavior, Newsom was not a happy pitcher on June 22. The Yankees ought to have been kinder to him. A few years before, when he was pitching for the Browns, the Cleveland Indians arrived in St. Louis in a tight race for the pennant with the Yankees. The Indians razzed Newsom mercilessly, but Bobo walked to the front of the pitching mound and scratched one word in the dirt with his spikes: “YANKS.” He then looked toward the Cleveland dugout and chortled, “I hope you bums can read.”
Lefty Gomez left the clubhouse this day with a brand-new straw hat. A fan had tossed it onto the field after Rolfe’s home run. This was long before the days of million dollar baseball salaries; Gomez perched the hat on top of his head and wore it home even though it was about a size too small. In the National League on June 22, the St. Louis Cardinals went to bed that night with a headache worse than Bobo Newsom’s. Both the Cardinals and the Dodgers played doubleheaders, and a margin of four runs, one for each game, separated the winners and losers. Brooklyn won two in Cincinnati before a packed house at Crosley Field, taking the first 2–1 in 16 innings as Dixie Walker squeezed in Pete Reiser, and just managing to win the second game 3–2. Meanwhile, St. Louis lost two to the Giants. The Cards took a 3–1 lead into the ninth inning of the first game, but the Giants came up with three runs and a gift victory for their veteran lefty, Carl Hubbell. The Giants then won the second game 3–2, and the Cardinals’ lead over the Dodgers drifted back to one game. Although the Giants didn’t do much in 1941, playing under .500 ball, this day’s double win over St. Louis matched the same feat back on June 8, when they had beaten the Cards twice at the Polo Grounds. Mr. Durocher, managing the Dodgers, must have felt well disposed to Mr. Terry, managing the Giants, for these two black holes in the Cardinals’ firmament.
GAME 36: June 24
The Yankees did not play on Monday, June 23, as the world absorbed the full shock of the previous day’s invasion of Russia. The Germans advanced with blitzlike quickness through East Prussia into Latvia in the northern push. Even so, there appeared indications that the Germans themselves, in gauging the scale of the Russian defense, had miscalculated the time it would take to complete their massive operation. Stalin had not been idle in the months when the world thought Hitler was his ally. On June 24 he began sending messages to Roosevelt that served as a kind of collateral for the secret requests he now put to America for immediate aid. Stalin wanted $2 billion, plus 3,000 fighter planes and 3,000 bombers. The President was stunned, but he listened carefully as Stalin’s message also revealed that the Russians were currently training nearly 200 divisions in the hinterlands and gearing up to produce 1,800 planes and a thousand T34 tanks (perhaps the finest in any of the world’s armies) per month. If Hitler had any notion of Stalin’s plans, he might have provided his armies with more than a 10-week supply of gas—at the very least he might have supplied his troops with winter coats.
Roosevelt now had to begin the difficult public relations task of readying America to aid Russia, something the nation appeared less than willing to do. America’s usual policy was to aid any nation that asked for help in opposing Hitler’s forces, though Roosevelt quickly added that our immediate funds were all earmarked for Great Britain and that aid to Russia would have to be long-range. All we would do at this early juncture was declare publicly that the portions of our 1937 Neutrality Act forbidding trade with a warring nation were waived in regard to Russia. A White House directive this day authorized future arms shipments to Vladivostok under lend-lease.
In the middle of what seemed horrifying and destabilizing increments of modern warfare, the excitingly bad St. Louis Browns came back to New York City on June 24 to see if they could help the Yankees’ pursuit of the Indians for the league lead. Lefty Gomez had an easy time of it, coasting to a 9–1 win. Red Rolfe extended the Yankee consecutive-game home run record to 19 with a two-run blast in the second inning, but DiMaggio and his streak had a closer call. In the first inning, he tapped out on a grounder to Clift near third base; in the third inning, he fouled out to the catcher Ferrell; in the fifth, with Tommy Henrich on first, he put one of Bob Muncrief’s pitches into the open pastures of left center, with Roy Cullenbine drifting to a spot 457 feet from home to make the catch. Henrich, thinking DiMaggio’s blast was by that time somewhere near the Bronx Botanical Gardens, got doubled off first as Cullenbine relayed the ball back into the infield.
Only during a five-run Yankee rally in the eighth did DiMaggio get his first and lone hit of the game. He came up against Muncrief after Tommy Henrich had just cleared the right field fence with a two-run home run. Muncrief worked inside to DiMaggio, who fouled off the first pitch; then DiMaggio took a ball that backed him off the plate. With the crowd chanting “We want a hit” (nothing subtle), Joe finally rammed a curve on the inside part of the plate over Johnny Berardino’s head at short.
When asked in an interview after the game by Dick McGann of the New York Daily News whether he felt it jinxed him to talk about the streak, DiMaggio answered: “Heck, no. Voodoo isn’t going stop me. A pitcher will.” The Yankees’ win placed them a mere game behind Cleveland and into second place. With 12 wins in the last 15 games, the Yankees had the staid New York Times leading the cheering in the aisles: “Those Yanks are rolling.” This was a far cry from the derision of other New York papers the day DiMaggio’s streak began. Cleveland helped the surging Yankee cause by getting themselves shellacked in Boston on June 24, 13–2. The Red Sox blasted the Indians with 18 hits on the day, and no matter how much his teammates softened up Cleveland’s pitching staff, Ted Williams got none of them, taking the collar for the second game in a row and for the third time in the last four games. His average dipped, if that’s the word, to .403.
Dan Daniel caught up with Ty Cobb, who was on his way to play Babe Ruth in a Boston charity golf tournament, and asked him his opinion of DiMaggio. He framed the question for his New York World-Telegram column: Would he rather have Feller or DiMaggio on his club? Cobb dodged it with typical dexterity: “That is much too tough a question to reply to offhand. Feller certainly is the pitcher of the day. DiMaggio is the No. 1 outfielder, though I will admit I have seen this new sensation, Ted Williams, play only one game of ball. I would hate to be placed in the predicament of deciding to give up one for the other.” I showed Feller Cobb’s quote and asked him the same question. He dodged it too: “There’s good reason to have a pitcher who can give you a shot at winning every fourth day, but there’s also good reason to have a center fielder who can give you a shot at winning every day.” Feller said that Cobb saw him pitch in 1937 and told him: “You’re very good, son, but I would have hit you—I would have taken you to left field.” In another bit of baseball news, a young executive, the treasurer of the Chicago Cubs, had gotten wind that the Milwaukee Brewers of the American Association were in danger of folding. He and several other entrepreneurs rounded up $100,000 and cut a deal to buy the club. The young man asked the Wrigleys whether he could depart with their blessings. They blessed him. His name: Bill Veeck. This was Veeck’s first foray into the realm of baseball ownership in a long career that would produce wonders.