Streak

by Seidel, Michael; Siegel, George ;

  A local story began in New York City on June 27 that would soon sound another sort of discordant note through the land. A group called the Grand Central Red Caps won the statewide barber shop quartet contest sponsored by the Parks Commission in New York. The group was black, but in New York at least, the competition was open and immensely good spirited. All who participated, including the former governor of the state and former presidential candidate, Alfred E. Smith, the contest judge, joined in a rousing finale chorus of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” that rocked the concert hall. Next day the Grand Central Red Caps packed their bags for the national competition in St. Louis and a bitter taste of what it was like to be black in America in 1941. Second class was their only class, even for great black entertainers and legendary baseball stars such as Satchel Paige, Buck Leonard, and Josh Gibson, then in their prime, and youngsters on the way up such as Monte Irvin and Roy Campanella. So with the strains of “I don’t care if I never get back” still in their ears, the Grand Central Red Cap Barber Shop Quartet was about to meet something in St. Louis they wouldn’t like.

  GAME 40: June 28

  Baseballs bounced around old Shibe Park like billiard shots in Saturday’s game as the Yanks amassed 14 hits, 6 of them for extra bases, to take back first place with a 7–4 win over the A’s. The White Sox helped them do so when their rookie second baseman, Don Kolloway, struggling along at a meager .168 average, hit two home runs and stole home in the ninth to ensure a 6–4 Sox victory over Cleveland. At Shibe Park in the Yankee game, Philadelphia muscled a couple of doubles and a big three-run homer by Bennie McCoy but couldn’t recover from the damage inflicted by Charlie Keller’s home run in the seventh, a blow that extended the Yankee streak to 23 games. Of course, everyone’s focus remained on DiMaggio as he crept within one of George Sisler’s modern-day streak record of 41 straight. DiMaggio told reporters after the game that the pressure had now mounted for him more than he would have liked. He felt it each time at bat, though he was in no way volunteering to call it quits. The major league record was too close, and he still had his Pacific Coast League record of 61 in the back of his mind. When DiMaggio doubled in the third inning off right-hander Johnny Babich, one of the toughest and stingiest pitchers in the league against the Yankees, even the notoriously hostile Philadelphia fans demonstrated their raucous approval.

  Babich had beaten the Yanks five times in 1940 and had made it known that he intended to give DiMaggio garbage to hit at the plate whether ahead or behind in the count. Indeed, the count was 3–0 on DiMaggio in the fourth inning when coach Art Fletcher at third relayed the hit sign from McCarthy. Babich delivered what he thought was ball 4 outside, and DiMaggio reached out over the plate and slammed it on a line within inches of Babich’s crotch and on into right center for a double. Legend has it that Babich’s face was white as a sheet when DiMaggio rounded first base and kept going before the relay reached second; much more likely he was red as a beet. No pitcher likes to get hit 3–0, especially when the pitch is out of the strike zone. Whit Wyatt of the Dodgers this day, when asked to comment on Babich’s tactics, had a better idea. DiMaggio wouldn’t even get a chance to swing against him unless he could hit from a spread-eagle position in the batter’s box. The fruit sown by this interview would be reaped in the second game of the 1941 World Series, when Wyatt would put two balls under DiMaggio’s chin and the usually constrained Yankee center fielder would charge the Dodger pitcher after an exchange of insults. Baseball chroniclers have written a good deal about this abortive fight, but none have traced its origins to the famous hitting streak.

  DiMaggio’s hit off Babich this day and one a few days later off Dick Newsome of the Red Sox while going for the Keeler record pleased him more than any others. DiMaggio was genuinely miffed at Babich’s tactics because his experience around the league had shown him that most pitchers wanted to get him out with their best stuff, not walk him with their worst. The strain, at least on Babich’s side, might have gone back to 1933, though he never said so. Johnny Babich that year had been traded from the San Francisco Seals to their crosstown rivals, the Missions, just before a young Joe DiMaggio began his Pacific Coast League hitting streak. Babich was always especially keyed up when he pitched against the Seals during DiMaggio’s 1933 streak; the local papers at the time were filled with mutterings about what he intended to do to his former mates. He wanted to beat them badly, and DiMaggio, who was hotter than a pistol, made that difficult. Whatever Babich thought about DiMaggio’s current hitting streak, the days surrounding the earlier one had left a sour taste.

  After the game on June 28 the Yankees were getting ready to catch a train for Washington, D.C., when an official from Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia called the clubhouse and asked to speak to DiMaggio. He got a message through that a young boy, 10-year-old Tony Norella, who worshiped DiMaggio and was following the streak daily, had an incurable spleen ailment and only a day or two to live. Could DiMaggio pay him a visit at the hospital before leaving town? This is one of those stories which are often the stuff of press releases rather than genuine human impulses, but Lefty Gomez and DiMaggio ducked out of the clubhouse without any word to reporters and swung by the hospital in a cab before joining the team at the train station. DiMaggio told the boy to listen to the radio for bulletins on the streak—by now a summer feature—and promised that if he broke Sisler’s record in Washington, he would think of the lad. The bulletin, when it came, came too late: The boy died early next morning. DiMaggio’s gesture remained a private one until the boy’s doctor called a local Philadelphia radio station, at which time a predictable river of sentimentality gushed in full flow.

  In the wider world this day, the Germans continued to crush Russian resistance in the central sector of the invasion, while Stalin conducted the kind of ritual for which he was infamous. He purged his commanding general, Pavlov, and the bulk of Pavlov’s staff, setting up a trial date at which a conviction was a foregone conclusion. In a few days’ time a small squad of Russian soldiers would get the chance to do what an entire army would no doubt have liked to do: shoot its officers. The reorganization of the Russian defense lines that followed this brutal sequence allowed civilian provincial commissars to rise to prominence, among them one shrewd peasant-like Stalin crony by the name of Nikita Khrushchev.

  In America on June 28, another soon to be famous name, that of a shrewd, provincial Roosevelt protégé, made national news. The people of Texas were voting in a special runoff election for a vacated United States Senate seat. Twenty-four candidates were battling for the office. One, “Cyclone” Davis, lived under a viaduct and was against “Hitler, Hannibals, and corporation cannibals.” Another, Big Joe Thompson, favored awarding an automatic $50 a month to all old folks and $5 a month to every man, woman, and child in the country. The favorites were the governor of Texas, “Pass the Biscuits Pappy” O’Daniel, and a young politician, not so lean or lanky as when a raw New Deal member of Congress but just as hungry, Lyndon Baines Johnson. At the end of the day’s tally, it looked as if Johnson had brought home the Texas bacon with a 5,000-vote plurality. But no one would yet declare the count official; the next 4 days taught Lyndon Johnson a lesson he would never forget and gave him a grounding in political reality that he later turned to his own advantage.

  GAMES 41 and 42: June 29

  It was a sizzling but active day in the nation’s capital on June 29 as Joe DiMaggio went after George Sisler’s record. The Washington Post ran a front-page leader: “DiMaggio’s Drawing Power Packs in 31,000 in D.C.” The streak vied for space with other front-page stories: Roosevelt still brooding over Stalin’s enormous lend-lease request while dedicating the brand-new Hyde Park Presidential Library; a new draft call-up of 900,000 men; plans for massive increases in fighter and bomber airplane production; astonishing casualty reports from the Russian front; the death of the former premier of Poland and world-renowned concert pianist, Ignace Jan Paderewski; the arrest of 29 suspected Nazi fifth columnists in American cities;
and a broadcast on the war by Pope Pius XII from Vatican City (“the war is punishment for man’s sins”) in which he also attacked women’s short skirts.

  The large crowd that jammed Griffith Stadium did not come out in the hundred-degree heat for a suntan. They came to watch DiMaggio go after George Sisler’s record. In fact, one fan came all the way from Newark, New Jersey, for the spectacle; while on hand he stole DiMaggio’s streak bat. The saga of the crime and of the efforts by others to get the bat back for DiMaggio would take some elaborate turns in the next several days. Before the first game DiMaggio could barely reach the batting cage because of the crush of reporters and well-wishers on the field. He was clearly tense and showed his nerves early in the first game by questioning, if ever so slightly, a strike called on him as Dutch Leonard’s dancing knuckleball did its tricks. “Sorry, Joe,” said the ump, “it was right over.” DiMaggio was having his troubles with Leonard’s knuckler on his early at bats, but so was Leonard. His pitch was live this game, which meant that Leonard wasn’t certain where it was going to go. He threw it in such a way that he almost completely stopped the rotation; the dips and twists could be brutal.

  In his first at bat in the second inning, DiMaggio looked uncomfortable but finally got pretty good wood on a knuckler. He hit it on a line to Cramer in center, about shoulder high and right at him. In the fourth Leonard couldn’t get his knuckler over, though he thought he had, and the count went to 3–0. DiMaggio wouldn’t nibble, but he got the hit sign from Art Fletcher at third; if Leonard threw a straight ball, DiMaggio would whack it. Leonard did, a tough pitch on the inside, and DiMaggio popped it to George Archie at third. On a 1–1 count in the sixth Leonard tried to slip a fastball by DiMaggio on the outside corner, figuring the Yankee slugger would be guessing knuckler. Whether he figured right or wrong, a line drive rifled off DiMaggio’s bat into left center between Cramer and George Case. Case stabbed at it on the run, but the ball was by him, rolling 422 feet to the bleacher fence. The big crowd and the Yankees erupted as DiMaggio stood at second base, tied with George Sisler at 41 straight. In his dispatch to the New York World-Telegram Dan Daniel was ecstatic, even redundant, in his enthusiasm about the reaction of the Washington fans to DiMaggio’s hit off Leonard: “When Joe belted it mad bedlam broke loose.” In most instances, bedlam alone would have been enough. The eventual 9–4 loss to the Yankees meant much less to the fans than DiMaggio’s hit had, and his work in the first game gave the huge crowd more than enough reason to stick around in the devastating heat for the second.

  During the run of George Sisler’s 41-game streak in 1922, the Brown first baseman had hit .459, more impressive so far than DiMaggio’s .383 for the same number of games. Of course, Sisler went on to hit .420 for the season, but he didn’t go on to hit in game 42. When DiMaggio came out of the steaming clubhouse onto the steaming field for the second game to try doing what Sisler couldn’t, he discovered that he had been robbed. Ballplayers are by nature a superstitious lot—DiMaggio would always touch second base on his way to and from his position in center—but he lost more than a good luck charm when the streak thief made off with his bat, which had been slotted in a rack along the dugout box seat railings at Griffith Stadium. DiMaggio had his bat distinctively marked on the bottom of the knob with indelible ink for ease of recognition, and it was in the fourth position in the rack because the bat boys matched them to the order of the Yankee lineup.

  A bat is to ballplayer what sword is to samurai, a weapon of choice. Players have as many names for the bat—from simple stick to ethnic shillelagh—as a Trobriander has for coconuts. The merest of millimeters determines the difference between a bat’s sweet and sour spots, between drives and dribblers, shots and shanks. Though bats can crack, chip, splinter, and shiver with unsettling dispatch, no ballplayer likes to imagine anyone stealing them. But someone stole the streak bat. This did not make Joe DiMaggio a happy man. He tried to be philosophic when he talked about the bat later: “It was just a piece of wood, but the bench was like a funeral parlor.” The bench was right. DiMaggio had already told a few of the Yankees the story of his 61-game streak in San Francisco, when he had had a small bandage over a stone bruise on his hand the day the streak began. He made the trainer keep bandaging the hand in the same manner, even long after the bruise had healed, and didn’t cease the ritual until the streak had run its course. To break routine during a streak, even when one has to struggle to find a routine to break, is to tempt the imps of the gods.

  Tommy Henrich had a hunch. Back on June 10, Jack Smith’s column in the New York Daily News had told the story of how Henrich had borrowed a few of DiMaggio’s heavier bats, model D29 (36 ounces), for a May 21 game against the Tigers. He had been slumping and wanted a change. One of those he borrowed “had a good feel to it,” and Tommy now told DiMaggio to take his bat back. This was not so simple a matter. DiMaggio used to sand down the handles of his bats to his own specifications. In taking the same model from Henrich, he did not take a bat customized to his specs. Nonetheless, if Henrich had a hunch, DiMaggio was going to go along with it. Besides, Tommy was about to marry a girl named Eileen O’Reilly, and maybe Joe sensed the luck of the Irish lurking in the shillelagh.

  For a good while in this eventual 7–5 Yankee win behind rookie Steve Peek the bat did nothing for DiMaggio or his streak. He had everyone in the sweltering park on edge by going hitless in his first three at bats. He looped one to Lewis in right in the first inning off pitcher Sid Hudson, lined out to Travis at short in the third, and popped a harmless handle-hit weak fly to Cramer in center in the fifth. When DiMaggio came to the plate in the seventh against the Senators’ big right-hander Red Anderson, he didn’t know whether he would get any more chances on the day with Henrich’s bat or anyone else’s. Anderson’s first pitch was high and tight up around the chin, but DiMaggio, after leaning back from it, quickly jumped back in the box and set himself. He drilled Anderson’s next pitch, a fastball out over the plate, to left on a line for an emphatic single to set the modern-day hitting streak record at 42. The crowd responded with a tremendous rafter-shattering roar and another a moment later when DiMaggio crossed the plate on Keller’s triple. The Washington Post reported that the whole Yankee team leapt to the top step of the dugout doing “their version of a jig.” This was a great moment for DiMaggio. Sisler’s record streak meant more to him than that of Wee Willie Keeler, the very existence of which he had first heard about only a couple of days before.

  DiMaggio’s characteristic response to reporters after the game had an unspoiled, ingenuous ring to it: “Sure, I’m tickled. It’s the most excitement I guess I’ve known since I came into the majors.” The Yankee center fielder thanked McCarthy for giving the hit sign on almost every 3–0 pitch during the streak, including this day’s when he popped out: “He’s played tall with me all the way.” George Sisler’s comment on the day his record fell was succinct and sufficient: “I’m glad a real hitter broke it. Keep it up.” With several rainouts in 1922, Sisler took 53 days, from July 27 to September 17, to set his 41-game record. With less respite from the weather, DiMaggio reached 42 straight in 46 days. Sisler began off Joe Bush of the Yankees after Waite Hoyt had collared him, zip for five, the day before, a day on which Babe Ruth had helped hang a defeat on the Browns with two home runs. Joe Bush also stopped Sisler’s streak, holding him hitless in a game on September 18 before 32,000 who were in attendance at Sportsman’s Park for Sisler’s streak and for the red-hot pennant battle with the Yankees, who ended up taking the league championship from the Browns that year by a game. Sisler’s comment on Bush the day he lost his streak was as succinct as his comment on DiMaggio the day he lost his record: “I couldn’t touch him.”

  On the train from D.C. after the ball game, the mood was jubilant. DiMaggio went a round of beers for everyone. He was clearly satisfied: “I wanted that record.” The team’s pleasure over DiMaggio’s new record was such that hardly anyone realized the Yanks had extended their consecutive-game home run
streak to 25, though not without an anxious moment. Tommy Henrich waited until one was out in the ninth inning of the first game before hitting a home run with a man on base. That made it 24. In the second game Charlie Keller kept the streak going with a home run to right in the second inning. Their doubleheader win put the Yankees 11/2 up over Cleveland, who lost to Chicago 9–2 this day. In the National League, the Cards held on to a one-game lead, splitting their doubleheader with the Reds as the Dodgers split theirs with the Braves.

  Ty Cobb, fresh from his recent match play golf tournament with Babe Ruth, told the reporters covering the USO charity event that he still remembered Sisler’s arrival in Detroit during his 1922 streak, when Cobb managed and played for the Tigers: “George blistered my pitching staff.” Cobb was impressed with DiMaggio and happy for him; now Sisler knew how he, Cobb, felt when he lost his record of 40 straight set in 1911. Cobb got to chatting about his days as player-manager and told a wonderful story. Many years before, during a game between the Tigers and the Red Sox, Boston was threatening with runners on second and third and first base unoccupied. From center, Cobb signaled to his pitcher to walk the hitter intentionally. The pitcher nodded to Cobb and then blew a strike right past the startled batter. Cobb threw a fit in the field, kicking his hat, shaking his fist, and gesturing frantically to put the man on base. He then slapped his forehead in despair. His pitcher looked chagrined and nodded his head. The Tiger catcher stood at the plate with his glove extended. Whoosh! Strike 2 right down the middle of the plate. By this time all the fans in the park realized they had been witnessing a mime show in center field. The batter got back in the box, ready to swing at anything, and Cobb’s well-rehearsed Tiger pitcher fanned him on a curve in the dirt. Cobb had worked out the routine with his pitcher before the ball game and waited for a spot to pull it off.