DiMaggio’s last chance of the night came when he hit against reliever Jim Bagby in the eighth inning with one out and the bases loaded. The Yankees had already scored two in the inning to bounce Smith and go ahead of Cleveland 4–1. DiMaggio hit a fastball on a 2–1 count hard and deep to Lou Boudreau at shortstop. He might have been better off with his lucky charm, Luke Appling, at short, but the Yankees had just left Chicago. The ball took a nasty hop anyway—almost as if Appling were there—but not nasty enough to leave the scope of Boudreau’s radar. In fact, the new trajectory was shoulder high, just right for the fast double play that ended up nipping DiMaggio at first on the relay from Mack to Grimes.
Boudreau’s play looked like curtains for DiMaggio, but there might have been another chance, one the Indians would have been all too ready to extend to him. Cleveland had a shot at tying the game in the ninth, and if they did so, DiMaggio would bat in the tenth. The tying run was indeed sitting on third base with no one out after Larry Rosenthal tripled in two runs off fireman Johnny Murphy to shrink the score to 4–3. The huge crowd yelled itself silly at this quick turn of events. Not only were the Indians still in the game, DiMaggio would get another whack if only a simple run could be picked up from third. And Cleveland had three outs to play with.
Pinch hitter Hal Trosky was the first to try. He slammed a grounder to Sturm at first, but a hesitant Rosenthal remained on third. No sense taking a risk. Sturm made the play, keeping an eye cocked on Rosenthal. Next Soup Campbell, hitting for Bagby, bounced a shot back to Murphy that Murphy speared on a hard hop. No stopping Rosenthal this time; he was off for the plate. When he realized his folly, it was too late: Murphy had Rosenthal properly pickled between home and third. Campbell sat on first viewing the rundown, though he ought to have lit for second to get into scoring position. But Roy Weatherly made everyone else’s poor baserunning moot by grounding out to end the game. The collective moan of the huge crowd when Murphy closed the door served both the hometown Indians and the streakless DiMaggio.
Joe DiMaggio’s brother Dominic, who had hit a home run at Yankee Stadium the day the Yankee team consecutive-game home run streak ended, homered, tripled, and drove in three runs for Boston on July 17 against Thornton Lee of the White Sox on the day his brother’s hitting streak ended. Too bad family property is not transferrable in baseball. Phil Rizzuto remembers leaving the park with a pensive DiMaggio after the game. His compare asked him for a twenty—DiMaggio had left his wallet in the visiting team’s clubhouse. Rizzuto complied silently, and DiMaggio veered off, alone, toward a local Cleveland watering hole to buy himself a drink, the streak’s tribute and its epitaph. DiMaggio did not ask the rookie to keep him company, and the rookie never asked for his twenty back.
The Cleveland clubhouse was a tough place for an interview after the game as reporters crowded around the night’s losers to ask about their combined efforts against DiMaggio. “I hate to lose,” Keltner said. Right after the game, the visiting Yankee clubhouse was also strangely silent. The players were delighted with the tense, close win, but no one said a word until DiMaggio mumbled, “Well, I’m glad it’s over. Keltner was a little rough on me tonight.” Then the cheers and celebration began, partly for the win but mostly in honor of a great streak record now over and a great player whose performance made an impression on his teammates that they still marvel at half a century later. They remember the game that at once froze the legend preceding it and bore first witness to the excitement the legend has generated ever since.
DiMaggio spoke very carefully after the game. He said he was relieved the pressure was off, though he made it clear he would have liked to continue in pursuit of his own minor league record of 61. Relieved was not the same as happy. There was a way in which the major and minor league streaks shared something that made up for their five-game difference in duration. Ed Walsh, Jr., whose father’s spitballs in the early decades of the century got him into the Hall of Fame, ended DiMaggio’s 1933 streak; Jim Bagby, Jr., whose father pitched for Cleveland in the 1920s, ended the 1941 streak. Generations of experience were dispensed against DiMaggio, which makes for a fine baseball trivia question: Which son of a major league pitcher stopped DiMaggio’s record hitting streak? The answer: It depends.
Joe DiMaggio could hardly be expected to exit these days of his streak without Charles Lindbergh in some way or another entering them. True to form, Lindbergh’s saga, forging itself through all of DiMaggio’s streak, reached a climax on this July 17. Terribly upset at trying to put together the ruins after an encounter with Roosevelt’s hit man, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, Lindbergh wrote an open public letter to the President, releasing it to newspapers all over the country. He demanded that the President instruct his secretary to apologize for his vicious remarks about Lindbergh’s general fondness for fascist causes and objects, especially the slander surrounding the infamous medal awarded him by Göring in 1938. Lindbergh was weary of being called the Knight of the German Eagle. He wanted it to stop. The President ignored Lindbergh’s letter, and Harold Ickes immediately rattled the aviator again by refining most of the charges he had just leveled against him. No, he hadn’t called the beleaguered Lindbergh a fascist, merely an appeaser of fascists. The secretary then challenged Lindbergh to quit preaching doom and give the notorious Knight of the German Eagle medal back to Hitler. That evening, while the Yankees played in Cleveland, Wendell Willkie tried to calm the crowd at a Manhattan “Beat Hitler” rally when it began booing and hissing at the mention of Lindbergh’s name. Willkie said, “Let’s not boo any American citizen. Let’s save our boos for Hitler.” DiMaggio’s record topped out, and Lindbergh’s stock bottomed out.
Epilogue
The brilliance of DiMaggio’s record streak in 1941 is attested to by the intensity of interest and the sheer thrill attending any serious pursuit of it. Players approaching the streak, like Pete Rose in 1978 or Paul Molitor in 1987, with the concentration, the nerves, and the stamina to take the measure of its excellence, are nonetheless haunted by the fabled number 56 hovering somewhere in the middle distance. DiMaggio’s great streak is not only a hitting marvel but a formidable obstacle, a record that by its very achievement adds pressure to those mounting a challenge to it.
Famous numbers are part of baseball’s mythology, and they seem to stand guard at the larger statistical treasure trove so essential to those who follow and love the sport. Statistics are at once the stuff of baseball’s memorial infrastructure and the provenance of the idiot savant; they mark the connections from at bat to at bat, game to game, season to season, decade to decade, and at the same time soothe the baseball insomniac. Here are some stats. From May 15, 1941, to July 17, 1941, DiMaggio fared as follows against the rest of the American League.
G AB R H 2B 3B HR AVG
Philadelphia Athletics 5 21 6 11 2 1 2 .524
St. Louis Browns 12 48 14 22 5 0 5 .458
Chicago White Sox 12 45 11 19 1 1 3 .422
Cleveland Indians 7 26 7 10 4 0 1 .385
Washington Senators 5 21 7 8 1 1 1 .381
Detroit Tigers 7 32 6 12 2 1 2 .375
Boston Red Sox 8 30 5 9 1 0 1 .300
Totals 56 223 56 91 16 4 15 .408
These are the nuts and bolts. For good measure, DiMaggio scored as many runs, 56, as he had streak games, just as he scored as many runs, 41, as he had streak games at the time he tied Sisler’s modern-day record. He struck out only five times during the whole of the streak, walked 21 times, and was hit by two pitched balls. The pitching staffs of the Philadelphia A’s and St. Louis Browns provided the most wholesome food for DiMaggio’s feasts. Only head to head against the Boston Red Sox and Ted Williams did DiMaggio falter slightly, hitting .300 to Williams’s robust .520 in those eight games. Williams outhit DiMaggio .412 to .408 for the games included in the streak, though DiMaggio had 36 more official at bats (he rarely walked and Williams rarely didn’t), 14 more hits, 3 more home runs, 1 more double, 4 more triples, 5 more runs batted in, and a better sluggi
ng percentage, .717 to .684.
Chicago White Sox lefties Thornton Lee and Edgar Smith tossed DiMaggio the most balls that began as pitches and ended up as hits, six apiece. During the course of the streak DiMaggio faced three pitchers named Harris (Mickey for the Red Sox, Lum for the A’s, and Bob for the Browns) who allowed him what seemed like a modest seven hits combined. But poor right-hander Bob Harris of St. Louis gave up five of those hits. He faced DiMaggio six times during the streak, and DiMaggio hit .833 off him, making Harris the sweepstakes winner for the 56 games. He would get his revenge later in the season. As for DiMaggio’s performance against the best pitcher in the league, he faced Bobby Feller in two games and stroked three hits off him in six at bats for an even .500 average.
For the entire 1941 season DiMaggio hit in 114 of the 139 games in which he played, impressive but not as impressive as the major league record held by Al Simmons while playing for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1925. Simmons hit in 133 of his 153 games that year, amassing 253 hits and a .384 average. The city of Philadelphia has a lock on this sort of consistency. Chuck Klein of the Phillies holds the National League record by hitting in 135 of his 156 games in 1930, with 250 hits and a .386 average.
During DiMaggio’s streak the Yankee record was 41–13, but aside from DiMaggio only three Yankees averaged above .300 from May 15 to July 17: Phil Rizzuto at .368 (aided by his own 16-game hitting streak), Red Ruffing (including his phenomenal pinch hitting) at .351, and Red Rolfe at .305. Ted Williams still led the American League when DiMaggio’s streak ended, hitting .395, though DiMaggio had snuck in behind him at .371, with Travis following at .370, Heath at .369, and Cullenbine at .362. Yankee pitching was superb all streak long, with the two staff veterans, Hall of Famers Lefty Gomez and Red Ruffing, winning six and seven games, respectively, while losing none. Johnny Sturm said that DiMaggio put out a little extra for the vets on the Yankee staff; it seemed as though they too put out a little extra for him during the days of his streak.
Hard upon losing his streak on July 17, DiMaggio gained a second wind. He hit in 16 straight games, beginning July 18 in Cleveland with a single and a double against Bobby Feller, who beat the Yankees 2–1 for his nineteenth win of the season en route to 25 for the year. On July 23, the next time DiMaggio faced Al Smith of Cleveland, he smashed a home run, just a reminder that though Smith might have gotten him twice on July 17, he hadn’t put him in his hip pocket. On this same July 23, the rookie phenom who had received so much publicity during DiMaggio’s streak, Dick Wakefield, fanned three times in his first game for the Winston-Salem Twins of the Piedmont League.
DiMaggio continued his new streak until an August 3 doubleheader against St. Louis. He came to the plate four times in each game without a hit. John Niggeling collared him in the opener, and Bob Harris, whom DiMaggio had slapped around unmercifully during the streak, hung him out in the nightcap. From August 3 on DiMaggio never hit in more than 7 straight games. On August 29, with DiMaggio out of the lineup recovering from a sprained ankle, the Yankee team planned an evening at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington in his honor. Lefty Gomez told DiMaggio that they were going to dinner that night where he, Gomez, wanted and then to a movie. Lefty was tired of all the glad-handed DiMaggio hangers-on at the usual American League watering holes. DiMaggio said fine but told Gomez to hurry; he was famished. Then he paced in annoyance as Gomez went through a complicated dressing ritual until Selkirk phoned him that all was ready. “Shake a leg, I’m hungry,” said DiMaggio. Gomez complied, but on the way down the hallway he veered off toward Selkirk’s room, and DiMaggio followed, rolling his eyes at yet another delay.
The door opened to the entire Yankee team. Pitcher Johnny Murphy and his wife had coaxed a craftsman at Tiffany’s in New York to hurry a hand-tooled, elegant silver cigarette humidor with a detailed image on its lid of DiMaggio swinging a bat. Beneath a simple “56” the inscription ran “Presented to Joe DiMaggio by his fellow players on the New York Yankees to express their admiration for his consecutive-game hitting streak, 1941.” Everything about this gesture pleased DiMaggio. The streak was in its way as handcrafted as the gift honoring it; the Yankees were eager even before the season ended to give DiMaggio a token of the excitement he had given them. DiMaggio could not say enough in thanks at the time or say it exactly right since, but he was deeply gratified.
After DiMaggio’s streak ended in July, Newsweek magazine ran back-to-back profiles, the first honoring the Yankee center fielder and the second bemoaning the fact that the national attention paid to the progress of the hitting streak had all but obscured another legend in embryo, Ted Williams’s mission to crack the .400 barrier for the season. With the streak now over, Williams made the last months of the season his own. He returned to the Red Sox lineup on a regular basis on July 22, after being consigned by a recurring foot injury to pinch-hitting service from July 11. His slightly sagging average rose to exactly .400 against Cleveland on July 25; more important, Williams’s bat helped Lefty Grove win his 300th major league game that afternoon. The score was a rather free 10–6, but Ted hit a two-run homer and Jimmie Foxx a two-run triple to break a late inning tie for Grove’s long-awaited milestone victory.
Williams turned on what gas was left in his tank in early August (from August 7 through August 21 he hit .466), and that gave him the points he needed when he flagged toward the end of the year and precious decimals began dropping from his average. Before a final-day doubleheader against the Philadelphia A’s, Williams was at .39955 (officially rounded off to .400), but he insisted on taking his cuts. He remembers umpire Bill McGowan dusting off home plate on his first at bat and telling him that a player has to be loose to hit .400. Loose he was. In the first game he chalked up four hits, including a single and a home run off Dick Fowler and singles off Porter Vaughan and Tex Shirley. Connie Mack, who usually stuck it out with his pitchers, gave Williams enough variety to spice up his life and average to .404. In the second game Mack gave Williams a gift of Fred Caliguiri, a rookie whose major league career was sensibly brief. Williams singled and slammed a gigantic shot off the speaker horn in right field for a double.
His six hits on this remarkable day buoyed Williams’s average to .406 for the year. In addition, he had cranked up for 11 home runs in the last month of the season to take the major league lead that year at 37. No one but Williams in the American League ever hit over .400 and over 20 home runs in the same season, though Rogers Hornsby for the Cardinals in the National League took the home run crown with 42 during his .401 year of 1922. Hornsby’s performance that year and the years surrounding it remains extraordinary. From 1921 through 1925 his five composite years averaged out to .402, and his home runs totaled 140. Even Ty Cobb paled before this feat.
While Williams slugged his way to the last .400 season by a major league ballplayer, the Yankees were making a travesty of the American League pennant race. On September 4 they clinched the pennant 20 games up over the then second place White Sox. This was the earliest ever in the majors, surpassing the 1904 Giants in the National League and the 1910 Philadelphia A’s in the American, both of whom had clinched after 137 games, with the Giants playing a total of 153 games and the A’s 150. The previous 154-game record was held by the 1936 Yankees, who clinched on September 9 after 137 games. At season’s end the 1941 Yankees had won a total of 101 games, played .656 ball for the year, and held a 17-game lead over the Red Sox, who had sneaked past the White Sox for second. Chicago ended up in third, with Cleveland, having faded badly since the crucial July series with the Yankees, dropping to fourth.
The pennant race in the National League was an entirely different story, with the Dodgers scrapping and clawing to clinch a couple of days before the end of the season after a sequence of nail-biting extra-inning ball games that had the whole borough of Brooklyn in a cold sweat. In their own last-ditch efforts, the Cards brought up a minor leaguer on the roster expansion date, September 17. The young slugger, Stan Musial, had already moved to Rochester from Springf
ield late in July. He played in the first few Cardinal games after his elevation and hit .545 (12 for 22) until he cooled down later in September to a mere .426.
DiMaggio finished the year hitting .357, behind the league-leading .406 of Williams and the runner-up .359 of Cecil Travis, but he led the majors in runs batted in at 125 and registered 30 home runs. Later he won over Williams as American League MVP and as Associated Press Athlete of the Year for 1941. In the National League, Pete Reiser, at the age of 22, led the circuit in hitting with a .343 average, displacing Arky Vaughan as the youngest ever to do so. Vaughan had been 23 when he won the National League crown in 1935, hitting .385. Reiser was a superb ballplayer, and though he was hotter for most of the year than the proverbial pistol that gave him his nickname, he would just lose out to his teammate Dolf Camilli for the National League MVP in 1941. He won rookie of the year honors hands down, both hands in that he could hit from either side of the plate and throw with either arm; in the majors he threw with his right arm and hit from the left side. In center, he could catch anything that didn’t have a rocket attached to it.
Reiser and Camilli, plus a tough pitching staff headed by Kirby Higbe and Whit Wyatt, led Brooklyn into their first World Series ever against the Yankees. The Dodgers had won only two previous pennants, in 1916 and 1920, and had lost to the Red Sox and the Indians on those occasions. This year they had been bankrolled for another shot. Late in September the Saturday Evening Post ran a fascinating story about the tactics of Larry MacPhail during his time running the club, “Yes, You Can Buy a Pennant.” The article pointed out what a crafty executive could do with $833,110, starting with as little as the $100 he shelled out for the near rookie, Pete Reiser. MacPhail’s major deals included, among others, $80,000 in 1938 to the Phillies for Dolf Camilli; $25,000 for Whit Wyatt from Cleveland in 1939; $132,000 spent for Joe Medwick from the Cards in 1940; $42,500 for the minor leaguer Pee Wee Reese in 1940; $25,000 for Roy Cullenbine, whom he got from Detroit in 1940 and unloaded the same year to the St. Louis Browns; $100,000 for Kirby Higbe from the Phillies in 1941; and $50,000 to the Cards for Mickey Owen in 1941.
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