Streak

by Seidel, Michael; Siegel, George ;

  In a sports-related event in America on June 29, the former University of Kentucky and New York Giant football player Shipwreck Kelly married an equally famous “café society girl,” former debutante Brenda Frazier. Brenda was the symbol of depression wealth, a lovely miss whose trademark strapless gowns appeared on the cover of Life magazine with her in them. In the late ’30s she invited an intimate gathering of 1,400 friends to the Ritz for her coming-out party, and, still as a teenager, she dallied with the mysterious Howard Hughes before settling in with her colorful Shipwreck.

  One of the lead stories that shared headlines with DiMaggio’s streak this day in Washington, D.C., was of such a different dimension as to be almost beyond comprehension. The first official figures had come out of the Berlin command on the Nazi invasion of Russia. The carnage along the Russian front was surreal. More than 50 Soviet infantry and motorized divisions were completely annihilated, with nearly half a million men killed, wounded, or captured. What the Berlin command did not say was that the Germans were butchering whole towns, lining up and killing thousands in long burial ditches in the local woods. Columnist Walter Lippmann, who didn’t know even a fraction of these horrors at the time, wrote that the world had never before seen savagery on such a scale. Had the Russians not been fighting with fortitude and tactical finesse in the crucial southern thrust of the front, Hitler might well have realized his dream and humbled Stalin’s massive country and its millions of citizens within a few weeks. As it was, the invasion of Russia set in motion the extirpation by the Nazi SS forces of minority populations, primarily European Jewry, in the territories already possessed and those soon to be possessed by the Germans. What had been sporadic slaughter in the tens of thousands before June 1941 became a systematic slaughter of millions after this date.

  GAMES 43 and 44: July 1

  The Yankees had a travel day on the last day of June but picked up a half game on the Indians anyway when Bobby Feller got routed 12–6 by the lowly Browns. On Tuesday, July 1, the Yankees played a doubleheader against the Boston Red Sox before a huge midweek crowd at Yankee Stadium. The heat was still savage, hovering in the mid-90s as 52,832 trooped into the Stadium to watch DiMaggio go after Wee Willie Keeler’s all-time major league hitting streak record of 44 in 1897. Dominic DiMaggio told me that he remembers joking with his brother before the games about where the writers had dug up this record: “Hell,” said Dom, “I thought they made it up.” He had been following Joe’s pursuit of Sisler, and then when he arrived with the Red Sox in New York, he discovered that Wee Willie had a streak on the books from the time when foul balls didn’t even count as strikes: “Well, maybe Joe would break that one too.”

  Artist and caricaturist Ed Laning was at the game this day, sitting near Mayor La Guardia; he made sketches for a large oil painting depicting the moment in the second game when DiMaggio tied Keeler’s record. La Guardia is the one full-faced figure in the painting, and he looks ecstatic or sunstruck. When Life magazine later ran a story on the painting just before the World Series, Laning said that “nothing that happened during the season, and nothing that can happen in the Series, is apt to be remembered longer than this historic moment.” Among these real and hypothetical “nothings” was Ted. Williams’s .406 season, but perhaps Laning was right then and still is. The thrill of DiMaggio’s record was tangible for him.

  The Red Sox played both games of the day’s doubleheader against the Yankees in a muggy stupor, losing a replay of an earlier 9–9 tie (May 23) 7–2 and falling in the nightcap 9–2 when darkness and thunder-laden skies shortened the game. Both the earlier tie and the replay counted as part of DiMaggio’s streak. The lapses of the Red Sox meant nothing to the huge crowd, for whom DiMaggio and the Yankee team home run streak were the only issues. Each time DiMaggio stepped to the plate in the first game the large crowd let go with tumultuous cheers and then, when he failed on his first two at bats against right-hander Mike Harris, groaned in despair. DiMaggio was an easy out in the opening inning on a foul pop to Lou Finney at first base and an equally easy out on a grounder to Jim Tabor at third base in the third inning. But on his next trip to the plate in the fifth off reliever Mike Ryba, he again grounded one to Tabor at third, who had considerable difficulty picking it up and even more woe trying to toss it to first. DiMaggio scampered into second as Tabor’s hurried throw got away from Finney. The official scorer in the press box, Dan Daniel of the New York World-Telegram, held up one finger, signifying a hit, but only those in the huge crowd who could see him knew for sure, since the scoreboard in 1941 did not flash HIT or E and the public address system at the Stadium was used only for lineup and battery changes. The crowd seemed strangely quiet—a few cheers, some sighs, and a kind of communal puzzlement.

  The hit was not a clean one. Writing later for the Sporting News, well before the conclusion of the streak, Daniel defended his call on Tabor’s play, adding more zip to the grounder than it had at the time: “DiMaggio pasted that ball with every ounce of his strength. He stumbled a little as he dashed for first. Tabor is playing deep. The ball almost knocks him over. Jim has to make a hurried heave. Joe has it beaten. It’s a HIT. The throw goes wild and Joe reaches second.” Daniel claims he was absolutely certain of this call: “As the pitiless spotlight was trained on Joe, official scorers, too, found themselves in the limelight. Scoring standards became the most stringent, the most exacting, under which a big-league hitter has performed over a long stretch of games.”

  Daniel remembers that what was stringent to him was bunk to a colleague in the press box who held his nose between his fingers; at the same time several Yankees craned their necks out of the dugout and smiled with approval when they saw the hit signal. On his next trip to the plate DiMaggio made Daniel’s call a moot issue by lining a smash to left off Ryba for a sure and pure base hit. The crowd this time roared without restraint, and as DiMaggio came back to the bag after rounding first, he too displayed a huge smile on his lean, distinctive face. He wanted his hits clean. The cheering went on a full 5 minutes.

  Something important did not happen in the first game of the day’s doubleheader. Though a man named DiMaggio hit a home run, the Yankee consecutive-game home run streak stalled at 25: The wrong DiMaggio hit it out, Dominic of the Red Sox. Only Phil Rizzuto’s line drive triple off the wall in left field, 2 feet from clearing it, came close to extending the Yankee record in the first game. Rizzuto’s unaccustomed long-ball power had enabled the Yankees to tie Detroit’s record at 17 games, but his drive just didn’t have enough mustard (or garlic) on it to clear the fence this time.

  The remarkable Yankee power streak generously distributed the glory attached to it, from Johnny Sturm, whose first major league home run began the streak against Cleveland on June 1, to Joe DiMaggio, whose total of 10 during the 25 games led the onslaught. DiMaggio just edged Charlie Keller and Tommy Henrich, both with 9. The pitching staff of the hapless St. Louis Browns took the brunt of the Yankee attack during the record by offering up 13 of the 40 Yankee home runs. Brown submariner Eldon Auker won the dubious honor of coughing up the most gopher balls at five, with his teammate Bob Muncrief on his heels at four.

  The Yankees’ record still stands. In 1956 the Cincinnati Reds made a run at it from August 4 through August 24, hitting a higher total of 41 home runs in 21 games (with Wally Post, Ted Kluszewski, and the rookie Frank Robinson doing most of the damage) but coming up empty on August 25, the same day the Yankees released Phil Rizzuto from their active roster and the same day that during an old-timers game in Yankee Stadium Tommy Henrich, Charlie Keller, and Joe DiMaggio showed up to take a few futile swings for the fences. It was during the Cincinnati streak in 1956 that Ted Williams, on August 7, let go a volley of expectorations and a few choice gestures at Boston fans in left field, not to mention hurling his bat 35 feet in the air after a walk. Tom Yawkey, Red Sox owner, and Joe Cronin, general manager, fined him five grand. For the next Red Sox game that summer the first 18 rows of the left field seats at Fenway were r
oped off. In a sense Ted’s fine bought out the section that was troubling him.

  The only other threat to the 1941 Yankee team consecutive-game home run record came from the Yankees of 1961, the great Mantle and Maris year, when those sluggers were joined by Bill Skowron, Bob Cerv, Yogi Berra, Elston Howard, and Johnny Blanchard for a brief demolition job on the rest of the league, blasting 32 home runs in a run of 17 consecutive games. At the time, Nikita Khrushchev, having first been elevated to a position of importance by Stalin in early July 1941, met President Kennedy at the 1961 Paris summit, and Adolf Eichmann, factotum of the Nazi Jewish “solution” in Europe from those very same July days of DiMaggio’s streak, was on trial in Israel for crimes against humanity.

  Joe DiMaggio still had the second game of the doubleheader to go on July 1 and the ancient record of Wee Willie Keeler before him; he wasted little time settling his account. He came to the plate in the bottom of the first against hefty Boston righthander Jack Wilson and lined an inside pitch over Joe Cronin’s head at short into left center for a single. The big crowd erupted again. DiMaggio had now tied the all-time major league streak record set before the turn of the century, when the day’s headlines recounted the chicaneries of the shady entrepreneur and robber baron, Jay Gould, lambasted the volatile politics of an island we were about to invade, Cuba, and worried over the death throes of Ottoman empire in Europe. Playing for the old Baltimore Orioles of the National League, Keeler had begun his streak on April 22, the opening day of the baseball season, and continued until June 17, when Pittsburgh left-hander Frank Killen collared him. At 5 feet 4 inches and 138 pounds, Keeler slapped the ball all over the place, though not very far: all but 21 of his 82 hits during the streak were singles. Of DiMaggio’s 66 hits so far, there were 12 doubles, 3 triples, and 12 home runs. His streak average stood at .379; Keeler in his 44 games had hit .408, coincidentally the same average DiMaggio would reach before his streak was over.

  The second game lasted only a merciful five innings. The Red Sox were out of it as the result of powerful hitting by Charlie Keller and Bill Dickey and pitiful fielding by Ted Williams, who let the tricky Stadium left field befuddle him for two errors. Despite his difficulties in the field, Williams picked up a hit in each game of the doubleheader, staying ahead of DiMaggio in comparative average during the days of the streak, .423 to .379. In the pennant race, the Yankees picked up another half game on the Indians, who beat the Browns 10–6. New York led by 21/2 games. In the National League on July 1, St. Louis held on to its slim one-game lead over the idle Dodgers by beating Pittsburgh 11–7.

  DiMaggio tied Keeler on a day when the spirit of the upcoming Independence Day celebration in America began early on several fronts, not merely at Yankee Stadium in New York. Secretary of the Navy Knox announced in Boston that “the time to use our Navy to clear the Atlantic of the German menace is at hand.” What he didn’t say was still top secret. On July 1 Iceland had officially requested through British diplomatic channels that we send troops and ships to protect the sizable island and its sea-lanes from German U-boats and battleships. This would be the first active participation of U.S. forces in the war effort, though another unit of American fighters, the famous American Eagle pilots, were set on July 1 to fly their first sorties over Vichy France and Germany under the command of the RAF. The American Eagles’ first venture would bag three German fighters in Axis airspace. The immense skill of these American fighter pilots produced impressive results for the British through the summer and fall of 1941.

  Overseas on July 1, western correspondents found out that Stalin had executed General Pavlov, commander of the sector around Minsk in Belorussia, on June 30. The rhetoric of the dispatch coincided with the finality of the thing done. Pavlov was terminated before the west knew he had been tried. With Russian armies in the central region of the fighting deteriorating or disappearing, the Germans continued to attack along two salients, trying the same pincer tactics near Smolensk that had worked so well at Minsk. This time what was left of the Russian forces pulled back, as they had been doing tactically in the south, and the Germans walked into the heavily Jewish populated city of Lvov. The wholesale slaughter of thousands of the city’s Jews began immediately as the German SS execution squads, the Einsatzgruppen, rounded up citizens, shot them, and dumped their bodies in ditches on the outskirts of town.

  The British War Office in London on this day closed another chapter of the disastrous campaign on the island of Crete when it announced the removal of Major-General Archibald Wavell from the middle east command. With the British victorious in Syria, Churchill had the breather he needed to dump Wavell, a man who had bedeviled him for months, particularly during those trying days on Crete near the beginning of DiMaggio’s streak. Churchill deposited Wavell in India and had a British knight, General Auchinleck, named to the middle east command. The New York Times guessed, somewhat tentatively: “On the surface it appears General Wavell is being shelved.”

  Charles Lindbergh finally said it straight out. Speaking in San Francisco for America First on July 1, he admitted that he preferred Hitler to Stalin as an ally, harping yet again on the sour geopolitical saw about superior and inferior races while echoing the Nazi position that the Europeans and Asians of the east were insidious by nature: “I would a hundred times rather my country ally herself with England, or even with Germany with all her faults, than with the cruelty, the godlessness, and the barbarism that exist in Soviet Russia.”

  GAME 45: July 2

  The blistering heat continued in the east as the Yankees beat the Red Sox 8–4 before a crowd much smaller than the one that had shown up for the Tuesday doubleheader. Those on hand watched DiMaggio try to break the major league streak record he had tied the day before, a mark that had graced the books ever since the gay nineties when whoever “they” were weren’t wherever “where” was when Wee Willie Keeler used to “hit ’em where they ain’t.”

  Because of the extreme heat in New York, DiMaggio spent much time out of the sun before the game chatting with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Russell Owen, who was doing a profile on him for The New York Times. Owen had won for his brilliant work on the Admiral Byrd expedition to Antarctica. Tom Connolly, chief of American League umpires, spotted DiMaggio with Owen near the clubhouse. Connolly had known Keeler but wished DiMaggio the luck of the Irish nonetheless in his broadest brogue: “Boy, I hope you do it. If you do you’re breaking the record of the foinest little fellow who ever walked and who never said a mean thing about anyone in his life. Good luck to you.”

  The few but noisy witnesses at Yankee Stadium on Wednesday afternoon had a great time of it. Lefty Grove was scratched because of the heat, and DiMaggio faced Dick Newsome instead. On his first time up he lined a ball hard and deep to right center. Stan Spence, who had taken a step in on the ball, turned to his right and raced back. Dom DiMaggio approached from center to back him up, but Spence speared the drive with a lunging desperate leap. It was a great catch. DiMaggio remembers the play so vividly, he added another like it with his brother Dominic making the catch on his second at bat. That play never happened. With any one of a dozen great catches on drives hit by Joe over the years to choose from, Dominic DiMaggio was ready enough to agree that he had speared this one as well, though he told me in a conversation that years later he and Joe kidded each other about whether he should have dropped it. In earnest or in jest, both DiMaggios have probably jumbled this play with an earlier one on May 24 when Dominic had dropped a fly at Yankee Stadium at the same spot deep in right center. “Please drop it” conspired with “I did drop it once” to bedevil the brothers DiMaggio. Over the years the phantom catch has become a family heirloom.

  When DiMaggio came up for his second time in the ball game, the only fly ball he hit was off a Newsome pitch he slammed a mile foul into the left field stands. He then hammered a grounder to Tabor, who threw him out. On his next at bat in the fifth, he took two balls from Newsome outside and then drilled a high fastball on a straight
line over the left field fence. Williams turned his back to the diamond to play the ball on the carom, but it shot over the wall. The liner was an arrow, out of the park so fast that DiMaggio had precious little time to admire his record-breaking streak hit and his eighteenth home run of the year. All the writers in the press box leapt up and joined the small crowd in a sustained ovation as DiMaggio trotted around the bases. After the game Lefty Gomez mimicked the famous sobriquet attached to pesky punch hitter Wee Willie Keeler: “Joe hit one today where they ain’t.” From here on all was gravy for DiMaggio, though fan interest in the streak kept growing through July as record crowds turned up in ball parks all over the American League whenever the Yankees were in town.

  Manager Joe McCarthy, who had been keeping his own counsel about the streak before DiMaggio broke the record, spoke this day in full unchecked admiration of his great center fielder: “I don’t believe anybody but a ballplayer is in a position to appreciate just what it means to hit safely in forty-five straight games.” Ted Williams made the same point. A streak allows for no intermittencies of mind or heart—there are no resting points, no breathers, no off days. The variables are just not visible to the fan in the stands. On this sweltering day especially, Williams marveled at the way DiMaggio not only beat the pressure of the streak but beat the heat. Williams told the writers covering the game: “I really wish I could hit like that guy Joe DiMaggio. I’m being honest. Joe’s big and strong and he can club that ball without any effort. These hot days I wear myself out laying into it, and I lose seven or eight pounds out there. When it’s hot, I lose my snap or something.”