Streak

by Seidel, Michael; Siegel, George ;

  For several days now along the Soviet front the clashing armies had been consolidating their positions; the Germans those they had taken, and the Russians those they had remaining. On July 12 the Germans broke the momentary lull in the fighting with another devastating blitz. Nazi forces crashed through what was known as the Stalin line running north and south and connecting key positions from Leningrad to Smolensk, Kiev, and Odessa. The most severe German thrust occurred in the northern sector through Estonia to a position about 125 miles from Leningrad. In the central sector the Germans were now rapidly on the move beyond Minsk, pounding Russian positions on the Dnieper River near the Moscow road. In the south, the Germans and Romanians moved toward Kiev across the Dniester River. The only bad news Hitler received came from Vichy French military analysts who now believed they had hard information that Axis intelligence had underestimated Stalin’s reserve strength by as much as 6 million. Oops! Hitler was informed that Stalin had plans to put every available inhabitant of the Soviet hinterlands in a soldier’s uniform, even the Abominable Snowman if he could find him. He wanted to lure the Nazi armies into spending more time than they might have liked as guests of the Russian winter.

  GAMES 52 and 53: July 13

  As the Yankees left St. Louis for Chicago, Roosevelt launched a howitzer at Charles Lindbergh: He let his Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, loose against the famous aviator. Ickes always got his man. He called Lindbergh a fellow traveler in the fascist cause, claiming he “never heard this Knight of the German Eagle denounce Hitler or Nazism or Mussolini or Fascism.” Ickes was no kinder to Mrs. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, whose 1940 book, The Wave of the Future, seemed to him “the bible of every Nazi, Fascist, and appeaser” in America.

  Ickes was a jingoist, but he’d had a belly full of Lindbergh’s defeatism. The secretary’s none too kind reference recalled the medal presented by Göring to Lindbergh in 1938 on Hitler’s behalf. The precise name of the medal, which now hung like an albatross around Lindbergh’s neck, was the Service Cross of the Order of the German Eagle. Ickes savagely derided the image of the famous aviator as a Teutonic knight flying in the wrong cause, comparing him with the heroic volunteers of the American Eagle Squadron now flying missions over Germany for the RAF. Lindbergh stewed silently for the time being at the abuse dispensed by Roosevelt’s point man, but he would not be silent for long.

  The largest White Sox crowd—50,387—since the all-star game of 1933 filled Comiskey Park on Sunday, July 13, for the return of manager Jimmy Dykes after a short suspension for foul language, eager to see the doubleheader against the streaking Yankees and their streaking center fielder. DiMaggio’s hit in the opening game, which the Yankees went on to win 8–1, came in the second inning off Ted Lyons. He bounced one that Luke Appling muffed at short; the hit call by the official scorer was debatable. Appling was the closest thing in spikes to DiMaggio’s streak cousin. Several balls hit in his direction began as potential outs and ended up marginal hits. In this game DiMaggio took Luke off the hook for the gift hit by ramming a clean single to center on his next turn at bat in the fourth. The two hits, cheap and dear, were the first he had gotten off Ted Lyons during the streak, and the White Sox workhorse became the second pitcher to give up both a home run to Babe Ruth during his record 1927 season and a hit to DiMaggio during his record 56-game hitting streak in 1941. Lefty Grove had completed the trick at Yankee Stadium back on May 25.

  The veteran Ted Lyons was among the most durable pitchers ever to rub in the liniment and toe the rubber. He broke in with the White Sox in 1923, he took off a few years to serve a stint as a U.S. Marine during World War II, and then he returned to the White Sox and pitched a few more games as player-manager in 1946. The sixth inning of this day’s game might well have done something to prepare Lyons for the rigor of the Marines; the Yankees jumped all over him and his reliever Jack Hallett by sending 12 men to the plate and scoring 6 of them. Spud Chandler had no difficulty holding the lead his mates had given him for the easy win.

  In the second game, a much tighter and grittier 1–0 extra-inning affair won by the Yankees, DiMaggio sliced a single to right center in the sixth off a Thornton Lee curveball for the streak hit and then waited out the tense game as the left-handed Lee dueled with Red Ruffing. Ruffing ended up winning his seventh straight, but it took a scratch Yankee run in the eleventh inning to earn it as Sturm doubled, Rolfe bunted him to third, and Henrich punched a sacrifice fly to bring Sturm home. Phil Rizzuto could do little in the second game with Chicago’s Lee, and his ministreak ended at 16 games, though in those games he had hit a healthy .491 (28 for 57). Rizzuto was by far the most productive hitter for average at .368, aside from DiMaggio, during the Yankee center fielder’s streak.

  By taking the doubleheader, their sixth sweep in a row, the Yankees also won their fourteenth straight game, a new high for manager Joe McCarthy. In another baseball sequence, picked up in the back pages of the week’s Sporting News, the fans of Evansville in the Three-I League raved about the pitching of a 19-year-old lefty phenom. The kid had just pitched his fourth shutout in a row, and from June 23 to the present he hadn’t allowed a run in 40 innings. Maybe the lefty, by the name of Warren Spahn, had a future. Indeed, Spahn pitched in a couple of games for the Boston Braves in 1942 and after the war came back for 20 major league seasons in which he won more than 20 games 13 times.

  The weekly magazine section of the Sunday New York Times on July 13 ran its long profile on Joe DiMaggio by Pulitzer Prize—winning author Russell Owen. Owen had gotten close to DiMaggio and his loquacious roommate, Lefty Gomez. For the most part DiMaggio liked to listen to Owen and Gomez kibitz before and after the games. Gomez chatted away as if DiMaggio, head and ear cocked right beside him, were somewhere in another universe. He told Owen that when the team traveled, DiMaggio sent him to hotel lobbies to buy reading material—mostly adventure comics—because it would look perfectly natural for Gomez to be reading such stuff and perfectly ridiculous for DiMaggio. “‘Know what he reads?’ asked Lefty, with an impish look. ‘We go into a hotel, and get to the newsstand, and he whispers to me, “Hey, there’s a new Superman. Get it for me.” He doesn’t dare buy it himself, they all know him, you know. So he gets me to buy it for him. Superman and the Bat Man. That’s his favorite reading.’” Perhaps sensing that the comic book caper was too good a bit to keep out of the profile, DiMaggio turned to Owen and protested: “I like westerns too.”

  In his article Owen also revealed something of DiMaggio’s habits around the ball park, a combination of ritual and nervous energy. The general factotum of the Yankee clubhouse, Pete Sheehy, made sure that DiMaggio’s coffee cup was always half filled. No matter how much he drank, it was half a cup at a time. What the caffeine didn’t do, the nicotine did—DiMaggio was never far from his pack of Camels before the game and sometimes in the runway during it. After a game DiMaggio would take his sweet time before leaving, waiting for the fans to weary of hanging out around the clubhouse exit. He was always quiet, listening to the radio, perusing the papers that Sheehy got for him, and doing a bit of light reading: “Westerns, Mr. Owen, westerns.”

  This day in the world at war, Stalin brought the British beyond the point he had brought America. Of course, the British were declared combatants. On July 13, 1941, England and Russia signed a mutual aid accord with key provisions for the exchange of military personnel and equipment. More important, the accord contained stipulations barring a separate peace with the Nazis, a different version of the enticing prospect that had made Rudolf Hess fly to Scotland to see if he could make just such an arrangement against Russia on Germany’s behalf with the king of England. The signer of the pact for the Soviets was Stalin’s foreign commissar, Vyacheslav M. Molotov, of “cocktail” fame. Perhaps to prop himself and his nation in the glow of a new alliance, Stalin boasted that the German advance, particularly in the central region along the road to Moscow via Smolensk, was being rebuffed with huge Nazi losses. The German communiqués presented an enti
rely different picture, much closer to the truth. Panzer divisions had by now penetrated way behind the Stalin line and were engaged in the same tactics that had overwhelmed Minsk, moving in pincer formation behind Russian columns. Smolensk would soon face a difficult siege.

  GAME 54: July 14

  The Yankee winning streak came to an end at 14 this day against White Sox ace John Rigney, relaxed and at ease 3 weeks after dodging his June 20 induction date into the U.S. Army. Rigney held New York to eight hits and one run, with Chicago scoring a comfortable seven. The punctured eardrum that had gained Rigney his 4F didn’t seem to affect the quality of his pitching on July 14. The New York Herald Tribune, still on Rigney for his induction day shenanigans, wondered if he hadn’t punctured the drum by sitting next to his loudmouthed manager, Jimmy Dykes, in the White Sox dugout.

  DiMaggio had a time of it with Rigney on this day. A lazy pop fly in the second flopped out of Bill Knickerbocker’s glove behind second for an error, but it also broke Joe’s bat, the one returned to him after a ransom was paid to its kidnapper. Breaking a bat is hors de combat—nothing like getting it swiped. In the fourth DiMaggio walked, and in the sixth he took a big swing with another of his bats and topped a 2–0 pitch in the dirt toward third. By the time third baseman Bob Kennedy arrived to pick it up, DiMaggio had arrived at first. Rigney got him again in the Yankees’ lost cause, and DiMaggio’s streak average dropped a point from the previous day to an even .400 (86 for 215).

  The Yankee loss coupled with Cleveland’s and Bobby Feller’s 4–1 win over the Red Sox, his eighteenth win of the season and his hundredth career victory, allowed the Indians to pick up a game and come within four of first place. They had beaten Boston twice the day before to keep pace. In 2 days the Yankees would arrive in Cleveland for a crucial showdown, one that would in a sense determine the course of a pennant drive and a hitting streak. In the National League this day, Leo Durocher snuck a win for the team on which he sometimes played and for which he always managed. The Dodgers and the Cubs were scoreless in the ninth, when Durocher, with Ducky Medwick on third, pinch-hit himself for his pitcher. The Lip layed down a perfect squeeze bunt, and Medwick flew home with the winning and only run of the game. With the Cards losing to the Phillies, the Dodger lead popped back to 31/2 games.

  Hollywood had baseball on its mind this July 14. Samuel Goldwyn outbid David Selznick for the rights to the Eleanor and Lou Gehrig story, eventually called The Pride of the Yankees. Mrs. Gehrig had agreed to the deal with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, naming her choice for the lead: Gary Cooper. Samuel Goldwyn had already been dealing with Cooper for the role, though he kept all negotiations secret because the Sporting News was running a national poll to pick the best actor (or any facsimile thereof) to play Lou Gehrig; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer didn’t want to squelch the chance for a run of free publicity. The Sporting News’s list so far was fascinating. Near the top were Babe Dahlgren, now with the Boston Braves, who had taken over at first for Gehrig in 1939; Babe Ruth, who ended up playing himself in the movie; Hank Greenberg, the Detroit slugger currently playing for the U.S. Army Tank Corps; Ronald Reagan, who as a former sportscaster could call them better than he could hit them; newcomer Robert Stack; Eddie Albert; and an ex–minor league ballplayer, Dennis Morgan.

  By fall this list would grow to nearly 60 possibilities, with Samuel Goldwyn keeping his mouth shut and Cooper’s contract in his pocket. Given Cooper’s earnings during 1941, partially for his work on two roles, one an ex–bush league hobo in the Capra film Meet John Doe and another for his upcoming stint as Gehrig, he would garner $460,000 more as a celluloid ballplayer than the highest paid major leaguer did on the diamond. Of course, Cooper also earned the gratitude of the nation by winning a celluloid Congressional Medal of Honor in his role as Sergeant Alvin York.

  Winston Churchill spoke to England and to the world on July 14 and for the first time appeared convinced that Germany had made a devastating tactical mistake in invading Russia. Churchill sounded jubilant in claiming that the war effort had turned a corner, that England had staunched its losses at sea, that it was now in position to pound the Axis mainland with bombs day and night, and that Mussolini’s Italy was next on the agenda for saturation bombing. Bastille Day, July 14, was usually France’s most celebrated holiday, but this year it proved a grim affair. The Germans allowed the Vichy regime few patriotic displays and no Parisian parades. The French could contemplate what liberation might mean for their nation in the privacy of their homes or in the gloom of a quiet bistro.

  But America was under no Nazi constraints. Bastille Day became a kind of surrogate holiday here for what it was not allowed to be over there. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, addressing a Bastille Day rally of the organization France Forever in New York, continued hounding Charles Lindbergh. Ickes claimed that the flier’s “passionate words are to encourage Hitler and to break down the will of his own fellow citizens to resist Hitler and Nazism.” Warming to his subject, Ickes referred again to the “Knight of the German Eagle” and said of Lindbergh starkly, “He’s a menace.” Lindbergh and Ickes would crash into each other soon, the climax occurring on a crucial day for Joe DiMaggio’s streak, a fitting coincidence given the intermittent presence of Lindbergh throughout its many days.

  GAME 55: July 15

  In the first inning of the game on July 15, in which the Yanks edged Chicago 5–4, Luke Appling booted a DiMaggio double play ground ball. In the third inning DiMaggio, as if recognizing the contribution Appling had made all streak long to the record’s longevity, set his sights and drilled one in the direction of the White Sox shortstop, far enough to his left that second baseman Bill Knickerbocker also moved for it instinctively. Sure enough, it worked. Appling didn’t muff it; he dove for it and ended up splayed on the turf without the ball, looking Knickerbocker, who had also given it a lunging try, in the eye. Base hit. The streak moved to 55 straight.

  DiMaggio’s hit in the third came off lefty Edgar Smith, the same pitcher against whom he had begun it all 2 months before on May 15. For good measure, he added a double against Smith later in the game. The Yankees won on the strength of a four-run fourth inning and some clutch late inning pitching by Norman Branch in relief of Steve Peek. Chicago made it close on home runs by Moose Solters in the fourth and Joe Kuhel in the fifth. Cleveland’s 6–2 loss to Boston put the Yankees out in front by five again. In the National League, the Dodgers took a pair from the Cubs at Ebbets Field before 33,247 and the Cards outmarathoned the Phils 3–2 in a 16-inning game. St. Louis was headed for Brooklyn the next day for a showdown with the Dodgers, just as the Yankees were headed for Cleveland for what turned out to be the last really serious bit of pennant match play in the American League for the season.

  With all the action on the Russian front during June and July, the world had almost forgotten that English forces had driven the Vichy mandates in the middle east into a position where they had to negotiate surrender terms. On this day, British officials threatened to light a fire under the stalled negotiations in Syria by arresting the commander of all French forces, General Dentz. If Vichy balked at terms, the surrender would be treated as unconditional. In regard to Syria and Lebanon, a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune wired home a story whose observations on the area echo back through the centuries and reverberate to the present: “The area is a babel of thirty rabid sects where a thousand years of chaos promise little peace to any conqueror.”

  In America on July 15, the housecleaning operations against Axis interests that Roosevelt had begun in retaliation for the Nazi sinking of the merchant ship Robin Moor were concluded. A Navy vessel steamed out of New York with 450 ousted German and Italian consular officials and various other deported Axis citizens on board. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors proceeded against another group of 33 purported Nazi conspirators in an indictment handed down in Brooklyn. Curiously, a holdover case from before the time of the Russian invasion put 29 “Trotskyites” on trial in St. Paul, Minnesota, for conspiring to
instigate an armed revolution in America when the time was propitious. One thing was certain about America on July 15, 1941: The time was not propitious.

  GAME 56: July 16

  The daily DiMaggio streak bulletins on radio had become by now a national rhythmic fix. How long could he go on? Who might stop him? The answers were not yet available on this day, July 16, though DiMaggio made the number of this streak game—56—more famous in baseball annals than he could have guessed at the time or would have wanted to. Millions remember exactly what he didn’t do in game 57, yet only a few remember what he did do in game 56. He took his cuts this soon to be famous day within the comfy precincts of old League Park, where the Indians scheduled many of their home contests. DiMaggio settled things early. On his first at bat he singled sharply to center off lefty Al Milnar. In the third he looped a short fly to center off Milnar for another hit, and after a base on balls and a ground-out, he finished the day with a long double in the gap off Joe Krakauskas. DiMaggio’s three hits were representative of the range of the streak as a whole: one clean, one a little lucky, and one driven hard and far. Charlie Keller, breaking out of a brief slump, provided some additional Yankee muscle, homering and tripling in New York’s 10–3 romp over Cleveland. Reserve catcher Buddy Rosar provided the rest, slamming two doubles and a single to drive in half the Yankee runs for the day. In addition to his three hits, DiMaggio also scored three runs, including a mad dash from second base on an infield hit, sliding home ahead of shortstop Ray Mack’s throw.