Streak
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GAME 37: June 25
Joe DiMaggio extended his hitting streak to 37 straight against the Browns on June 25, and baseball fans began to murmur about his challenge to George Sisler’s modern-day record of 41 straight. DiMaggio settled things early with a two-run home run on a line into the seats in left in the fourth inning. The blast extended the Yankee home run streak to 20 games and knocked the Browns’ ace, Dennis Galehouse, out of the box. In the second inning of the game DiMaggio had hit one to the same spot over 450 feet to left center where Roy Cullenbine had snagged one on him the previous day. Cullenbine got this one as well. With two swings of the bat on different days DiMaggio hit drives totaling over 900 feet, and he had nothing to show for them but outs. Enough of his blows were clearing the fences in recent days, however, for him to take over the American League home run lead from Rudy York at 16. On his streak he had now hit 11 home runs, 9 of them in the last 20 games. St. Louis did much better before a small Wednesday afternoon Stadium crowd than they had the day before, but the Yankees scored three in the bottom of the eighth when Keller doubled and Gordon, Rizzuto, and Sturm followed with singles. Final score: 7–5. The win moved the Yankees into a virtual tie with Cleveland for first place, since the Indians were losing to the Red Sox and Lefty Grove, 7–2. Grove chalked up his 298th career win this day.
On the night of June 25 at the Polo Grounds in New York, the world welterweight champion, Fritzie Zivic, smashed Al “Bummy” Davis to a pulp in a nontitle fight. The past November Davis had been suspended for life for kicking the referee during his first fight with Zivic, and he fought again this night only through the good graces of a reprieve earned by a tour of duty in the Army. When he took his bruised body home on Wednesday night he no doubt felt the justice of his original suspension—the old kick delivered might well have prevented the new blows received. A prelim on the night’s card featured a young lightweight named Ray Robinson, Sugar Ray to his friends, against a New Yorker, Pete Lello. Robinson knocked his opponent all over the ring before the bout ended in the fourth. In November Ray would welter up, as it were, and smash hell out of the same Fritzie Zivic now celebrating victory in the main event.
While DiMaggio played long ball at the Stadium on June 25 and Zivic and Robinson played hard hit at the Polo Grounds, another mighty slugger was putting little round balls into orbit at the Commonwealth Golf Club in Massachusetts. Babe Ruth turned up for a challenge round with Tyrus Raymond Cobb. Though the Babe outdistanced Cobb off the tees, the lifetime major league batting average leader finessed the big fellow around the greens. Cobb came out on top, scoring 81 to the Babe’s 83.
In war news, the British had the Vichy forces in dead retreat in the middle east. The rout was complete as French generals tried to cut special deals for surrender. Along the Russian front, the awesome German blitz met head-on with masses of Russian troops and motorized divisions, but the Nazis took their first town in Russian-occupied Poland, Brest-Litovsk. German Panzer and motorized divisions pushed forward on a two-pronged attack toward Minsk in the central front. Tens of thousands of Russian troops found themselves trapped in a swiftly closing pincer move. To the south, the Germans advanced across the Dniester River into the region known as Bessarabia, bordering the Black Sea and the Ukraine. The Russians cleverly pulled back the bulk of their troops in this minerally and agriculturally rich region, a tactic that was to serve them well in their later heroic defense of Stalingrad.
America First officials all over the country screamed outrage when it began to sink in that the hated Soviets were about to become recipients of Roosevelt’s lend-lease largesse. From the isolationists’ point of view, the President’s directive had enmeshed us with an ally much worse than Hitler’s Germany. Former President Herbert Hoover, quiet by nature and even quieter during the depression of the 1930s in America, saw the German invasion of Russia as cause to come out of his isolationist closet and speak loudly against throwing our might against Germany. Hoover pinned his case on the recent Rudolf Hess escapade, claiming the Russian invasion had revealed the urgency of Hess’s guessed-at terms of peace for England. Friends in England told Hoover that the Hess proposals were reasonable and that it was irresponsible of Churchill to suppress them, especially now that Russia would prove an inescapable diversion for Hitler. The former President would have been less pleased, or at least less proud, to know that in his discussions with the Duke of Hamilton the day after his capture, Hess had dismissed the United States as a negligible British ally, no threat whatever to German military dominance.
Despite the new apprehensiveness in America about the widening scope of the war after the invasion of Russia, Lindbergh and Wheeler still found it difficult to get their rallies booked. The America’s Hall Association of San Francisco this day refused to allow the use of its auditorium for the America First Committee’s swing up the west coast from Los Angeles. A spokesman for the organization knew what was coming from Lindbergh, Wheeler, Lillian Gish, and company and stifled it with a simple “We don’t approve of your policies.” The country’s other famous aviator, Eddie Rickenbacker, back at his Eastern Airlines post after his terrible plane crash in February, picked this day to meet Lindbergh’s position head-on: “We are in the war and the sooner everybody knows it the better.”
The Chrysler Motor Corporation of America, stewing for several days about a Roosevelt request that they cut production and refit for defense, protested on June 25 that it had no intention of voluntarily cutting back on quotas in order to retool for war production. Leon Henderson of the Federal Price Control Administration threatened to fix the prices of all autos if Chrysler continued to refuse government requests under emergency powers for cutbacks. Chrysler officials responded that Henderson was simply a tedious meddler. Henderson claimed that never had he or his agency been treated so rudely and that Roosevelt would immediately receive a report on the entire matter. The very next day the President stood squarely behind Henderson and told Chrysler executives that they would have to do what they had no wish to do in this time of near war: bite the bullet. Having a couple of weeks earlier won a round against American labor, Roosevelt won another this day against American business. No special interest in the land was going to stand in the way of his defense plans in the summer of 1941.
GAME 38: June 26
The ball game at Yankee Stadium on June 26 provided the most exciting, electric moment of DiMaggio’s hitting streak so far and marked the day radio announcers all over the country began to bulletin streak news in earnest. St. Louis submariner Eldon Auker had not allowed the Yankee center fielder much all day. In the second he took a cut at an Auker 3–0 cripple and flied to left, and in the fourth he bounced one right at shortstop Johnny Berardino, who muffed it for an obvious error. Dan Daniel, who was the official scorer for the game, wrote about this play: “The Yankees themselves dramatized the DiMaggio effect. When he bounced a hot grounder to John Berardino they rushed out of the dugout to watch the official scorer. When that worthy held up the error sign, Joe Gordon acted as the semaphore man for the club and signalled violent displeasure and vehement disagreement.” That worthy, Daniel himself, had no choice. Any other call would have been a travesty.
In the sixth DiMaggio grounded out routinely to third, and never had the pressure mounted to the degree it had now. For one thing, it was not certain that DiMaggio would get another at bat; for another, Tommy Henrich and Joe McCarthy made the first strategic move of the streak calculated solely for DiMaggio’s benefit. The Yankees were ahead 3–1 in the eighth when they prepared for what seemed likely to be their final cuts at the plate. Sturm opened with a pop out. Red Rolfe, with the crowd screaming for him to do something just to get DiMaggio another chance at Auker, worked the Brown pitcher for a walk. DiMaggio appeared on deck to the relief of everyone in the park but Henrich, then stepping in to hit. Henrich first took a stroll over to the dugout for a chat with Joe McCarthy. What if the unthinkable happened and he hit into a double play? Maybe he ought to bunt. This seemed an odd
bit of baseball strategy with his team two up in the last of the eighth, but McCarthy went along with it; he wanted to assure another shot for his great center fielder. Henrich bunted to perfection, and when the roars subsided, Rolfe stood securely on second and DiMaggio came to the plate for a last whack at Eldon Auker.
Auker had already thrown him a lot of bad pitches, and the only visible sign of DiMaggio’s nervousness at this stage of the streak appeared in his eagerness to swing at anything around the plate near the beginning of the count. This was not an uncontrollable urge; DiMaggio knew what he was doing. A walk was no longer a free base but a missed opportunity. So Joe tried to swing with dispatch and avoid the kind of inevitable tension that would plague him if a pitcher worked the count to 2–2 or 3–2.
The submarining Auker took a look at DiMaggio in the box, swiveled for a glimpse at Rolfe on second, set, stretched, and delivered. DiMaggio’s left leg moved almost imperceptibly from his wide stance, his bat whipped ahead of a low inside strike, and he drove Auker’s first pitch on a line past Clift’s outstretched glove at third and into the left field corner for a double. The crowd cheered for minutes on end, and even the Yankees in the dugout joined the excitement by pounding their bats on the stone steps. Dan Daniel wrote: “When DiMag finally got his hit the Yankees rushed out on the field and put on a bigger demonstration than their 1927 predecessors did when Babe Ruth hit his sixtieth homer and the all-time mark.” For 3 weeks now the streak had been a recognized baseball event; now it began to edge toward permanent status as baseball legend. Marius Russo, who was working the game for the Yankees and also working on a potential no-hitter into the seventh, told me recently that this game had made him aware for the first time how riveting DiMaggio’s streak was for player and fan alike. Here he was throwing a no-hitter, and not a soul in the ball park gave a damn.
The tension surrounding DiMaggio’s final appearance at the plate this day even obscured the by now commonplace Yankee home run power. But Tommy Henrich, helping DiMaggio with a gentle sacrifice in the eighth, had already helped his team’s consecutive-game home run streak with a none too gentle shot out of the park in the sixth. That record stood at 21. The Yankee win against St. Louis ended a successful 12-game home stand that pushed the club into a 1-percentage-point lead for first in the pennant race. Cleveland kept pace by beating Boston in an 11–8 slugfest behind Bobby Feller’s sixteenth win of the year. Ted Williams fired out of his brief slump with five hits in eight at bats in his last two games and raised his league-leading average back to .412. During the run of DiMaggio’s streak, Williams logged in at .441 (63 for 143). DiMaggio’s 38-game average stood at .380 (57 for 150). In the National League, the Dodgers and Cards sat on top of each other and on top of the pack with identical 45–21 records. On June 26 the pennant races in both leagues were virtually dead even.
If all the tensions generated by DiMaggio’s streak, by the tight pennant races, and even by the new scope of hostilities in the war proved too much for the New York fan, he or she could perhaps gain some relief by dropping by the Café Pierre, where the extraordinary “Lu Cellia” opened as headliner on the night of June 26, billed as “the most primitive dancer in America, beating out savage jungle rhythms atop a giant native drum.” DiMaggio himself may well have reached the point where such a resource could have helped him shift the burden of anxiety. He began complaining that the streak was having an effect on the interior lining of his stomach.
With the Browns in the Bronx and with the Cards and Dodgers sharing the lead for the National League pennant this day, an item contoured for the St. Louis—New York rivalry appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. One William McChesney Martin, Jr., a Missouri draftee at 33 years of age, told the story of his attempts in basic training to do a “right about-face.” He just couldn’t get the moves down. The sergeant drill instructor told him, “You’re the stupidest man I’ve ever met. You’re lucky to be in the Army. You couldn’t make a living anywhere else. Where did you live? What in the world did you do before you were drafted?” Martin told his superior that at the time of his induction he had held a $48,000 job as president of the New York Stock Exchange.
From Hollywood on June 26 came an array of lesser known names that were destined for luminosity in later years. The Motion Picture Herald ran a list of 60 minor stars and starlets and asked its readers to pick 10 most likely to achieve fame and glory. Among the names from which readers had to choose—including Desi Arnaz, Lucille Ball, Victor Mature, Robert Stack, and Ronald Reagan—was a young actor, William Holden, who had just experienced an interesting week in Hollywood. Holden was known to take a nip on the set now and again, but his difficulties assumed a more bizarre shape when he accidentally shot himself in the hand with a blank while filming the western Texas. On June 26, he collapsed on the set from the effects of a tetanus shot for his gunshot wound; at least such was the version released by the studio for public consumption.
GAME 39: June 27
As the Germans continued to push toward Minsk this day, trapping entire Soviet armies en route, the Yankees left New York for what W. C. Fields might have thought just as reckless a venture: They headed for Philadelphia. From the way the A’s whined and brawled this day, and from the way their fans abused ump Bill Summers after a couple of close calls, Fields might have been right. The Yankees lost this hostile ball game—Yankee catcher Buddy Rosar at one point got into a fight with a contingent of Athletics’ coaches converging on the plate to protest a tag play—to Connie Mack’s club 7–6. DiMaggio, however, advanced the streak to 39 games without breaking a sweat, singling sharply to center in the first, opening up on the first pitch delivered to him by lefty Chubby Dean. In the seventh inning DiMaggio kept the team consecutive-game homer streak alive at 22 by unloading a drive deep to left that ricocheted far back in the bleacher seats. The blast moved him back into the American League home run lead with 17, just ahead of the A’s Indian Bob Johnson at 16, who himself had crept ahead of Rudy York with two home runs the day before.
From beginning to end, the game in Philadelphia proved a riot, capped off after a fashion when Yankee irregular Frenchy Bordagaray stopped a ball with his ear in the ninth, running smack into a relay throw after trying to score on yet another pinch hit by Yankee pitcher Red Ruffing. Frenchy staggered home in a state of semiconsciousness and fainted cold as he crossed the plate. All in all, the lead changed hands or the score was tied nine different times. Philadelphia finally won in the ninth when Dick Siebert doubled in Bob Johnson, who scored on another close, contested play at the plate. The Yankee loss, coupled with Cleveland’s 3–1 win over the White Sox, put the Indians back in first place. In the National League, the Cardinals took a half-game lead over the idle Dodgers by beating the Reds 5–3. Joe DiMaggio’s brother Dominic threw two runners out on the bases in Boston’s night game loss to the Senators and smashed a single as well, even though his draft board earlier in the day had declared him unfit for service because of poor eyesight. With the aid of glasses he was batting .318. Dominic, of course, would later join the armed forces for the bulk of the war when the need was desperate and the standards less severe.
On this day in June, with Joe DiMaggio’s streak in high gear, the United States Senate, after debating for less than an hour, passed a military appropriations bill of $10,384,821,624. This was the largest single money bill ever to enter and exit the halls of either house of Congress, surpassing a 1918 World War I appropriations measure by $153 million. To provide a sense of the scope of the bill and the increment of our forces, the appropriation contained a single line item of $3 billion for the construction of over 12,000 military aircraft, including the largest plane in the world, the B-19 bomber. The huge wingspan of this giant graced the front pages of newspapers all over America on June 27 as the plane flew its maiden flight for the benefit of photographers and aviation aficionados.
After another delay, Life magazine printed in its current issue the second installment of John Cudahy’s interview with Hitler at
his Berghof. Since the gist of Cudahy’s argument was that Hitler really wasn’t trying to worsen world affairs, Life threw another barb at its own correspondent by holding the piece until just after the Russian invasion. Cudahy’s version of Hitler betrays a strange mixture of awe and patrician contempt. He wasn’t about to praise the man, but he wanted to show Hitler’s scorn of Roosevelt’s notion that Nazi Germany’s policies were a threat to the western hemisphere. Here’s what Life’s readers saw of Hitler refracted through a weakening but still sizable isolationist lens in the summer of 1941.
His hair was a plastered mouse-brown mop, the mustache showing a few gray hairs and also there was a hint of gray commencing at the temple and back of the ears. The forehead showed a remarkable protuberance above the eyebrows, which the phrenologists call the perceptive cranial area. The upper forehead receded and did not indicate great contemplative capacity. The nose was thick and heavy, without clean-cut lines, and the lower face, although not heavily boned or projected, gave an impression of great energy and aggressiveness. When I spoke about the German menace to the Western Hemisphere, he laughed a harsh, strident laugh, disagreeable as a rasping automobile gear. His face looked as if spontaneous mirthful laughter had taken a long holiday.