The 1941 World Series had its glories and legendary moments, but it also picked up one piece of unfinished business from DiMaggio’s streak. Back at game 40 on June 28, Johnny Babich of the Philadelphia A’s had said he intended to give DiMaggio slim pickin’s to swing at that day. Dodger pitcher Whit Wyatt, when interviewed by reporters, thought Babich was overly charitable. He said that in the National League DiMaggio’s strike zone would start at his Adam’s apple. Apparently both DiMaggio and Wyatt remembered those gentle words in the second game of the series when Wyatt took the mound. DiMaggio flied out in the fifth inning after two rare strikeouts and two earlier pitches under his chin. As he passed the mound returning to the dugout, he shouted out, “This series isn’t over yet.” Wyatt responded, “If you can’t take it, why don’t you get out of the game?” DiMaggio’s version of Wyatt’s question had a racier second clause. Uncharacteristically, DiMaggio went after the Brooklyn pitcher, but no damage or even contact took place as both benches emptied, the players milled about, and the umpires settled things, which is what everyone seemed to want. Wyatt proved he was a man of his word, perverse as that word might have been, and DiMaggio proved he had read the local sports pages back in June.
In the series, the Yankees won the opener behind Red Ruffing, who defeated reliever Hugh Casey 3–2. Joe Gordon hit a two-run homer and a game-winning single. Whit Wyatt, while irritating DiMaggio, also stopped a 10-game Yankee consecutive win streak in the World Series by turning the previous day’s score around in favor of the Dodgers. When the teams moved to Ebbets Field for the third game, the Yankee left-hander Marius Russo, suffering a miserable cold, held off the Dodgers 2–1 as Charlie Keller, not expected to play because of a badly sprained ankle, drove in DiMaggio with the game-winning run. Earlier in the day DiMaggio got his first hit of the series, a single.
Game 4 was perhaps the most famous in World Series history. Kirby Higbe of the Dodgers started against Ately Donald. A two-run homer by Pete Reiser had given the Dodgers a 4–3 lead into the top of the fabled Yankee ninth inning. With Hugh Casey working in relief, Johnny Sturm died on a full-count ground-out. Red Rolfe then tapped to Casey for an easy out number two. It looked like a wrap. But Tommy Henrich forced the count to 3–2 before taking an awkward cut at a slithering—some witnesses might have guessed slobbering—Casey pitch heading for the inside corner. Henrich was completely fooled, and his bat made no contact with Casey’s savage and mysterious delivery. Mickey Owen’s catcher’s glove, to his utter dismay, made only slightly better contact with the pitch. Henrich flew to first base as the errant third strike rolled far behind the plate; half the Yankee team had to be summoned from an overly hasty retreat down the dugout runway toward the clubhouse. Poor Owen’s surprise was greater than anyone’s. The man was no slouch in back of the plate. From September 22, 1940, while with the Cards, to August 29, 1941, after his trade to the Dodgers, he had played flawlessly at catcher, amassing 508 putouts and assists without a single error. This play was a fluke, and the reputation earned by it was sadly unmerited.
Nevertheless, there stood a crestfallen Owen in foul territory, and there at first stood the ghost of Tommy Henrich’s strikeout. All Dodger history passed before the Brooklynites’ stunned eyes. DiMaggio followed with a line single to left. Keller, with the count 2–0, doubled high off the right field wall to drive in both Henrich and DiMaggio and put the Yankees a run ahead. Bill Dickey walked; Gordon doubled over Wasdell’s head against the left field wall, driving in two more runs; Rizzuto walked; and finally, Johnny Murphy, Yankee relief pitcher, put Hugh Casey and the Dodgers out of their misery with a roller back to the box. The score: 7–4. Three Dodgers zombied up and out in order in their half of the ninth.
This had been a tight, gritty series until Casey’s pitch and Owen’s play loosened the Dodgers at the joints. In the final game, the series clincher, Tiny Bonham of the Yankees hurled a four-hitter against Whit Wyatt as Gordon, Keller, and Henrich combined to wreak significant enough havoc to sink the now subdued Dodgers 3–1. DiMaggio’s series was mediocre at .263 and a mere one run driven in, but the series MVP, Joe Gordon, at .500 and Charlie Keller at .389, both with five runs knocked in, picked up the slack. Keller especially was remarkable. His ankle was so severely sprained shortly before the series that he sported a cast extending above his knee. I asked him recently how he had managed to ready himself for the series so quickly, and his answer was direct: “I ripped off the cast.” Ducky Medwick took the Dodger team honors at the plate with a meager .235 average, and Brooklyn saw its fate reflected in the sad numbers of Pete Reiser at .200 and Dolf Camilli at .167. The Yankees in those days of modest earnings carried home $5,943.31 as their winning share; the Dodgers got $4,829.40 each for the solace of losing.
After the season and the series, DiMaggio and his wife, Dorothy Arnold, awaited the birth of their first child. Joe DiMaggio, Jr.’s, arrival on October 23 provided the great Yankee with his biggest thrill of a year in which thrills were many. DiMaggio sounded like every father when he told reporters the day after his son’s birth: “You ought to see the little fellow, he has the most perfect nose. And I never saw such a pair of hands on a baby.” Joe, Jr., grew up with the decade, and at 10 he figured in that memorable and poignant photograph taken in 1951 at the end of DiMaggio’s career, with father and son walking into the gloom of the visitor’s clubhouse corridor at the Polo Grounds during the World Series, a familiar number 5 hunched on DiMaggio’s back and a tender arm drooped over his boy’s shoulders.
The year ran its course. A crop of movies that made 1941 one of the most brilliant in the history of American film reaped more of its harvest in later summer and fall: How Green Was My Valley, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Hitchcock’s Suspicion with Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine, even Disney’s Dumbo. In his madcap comedy 1941, director Steven Spielberg alluded to the currency of Disney’s animated film when he had Robert Stack, as a commanding general, cry like a baby over Dumbo in a Hollywood movie house during an imagined Japanese invasion of Los Angeles. A much younger Robert Stack, coincidentally, was one of the rising stars in 1941: his name had even appeared on the Sporting News’s list of potential candidates to play Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees.
After the World Series, the football season kicked into full swing with notables such as Frankie Albert, left-handed quarterback for Clark Shaughnessy’s radical T formation at Stanford, and Otto Graham, exceptional sophomore passer for Northwestern. Navy beat Army in mid-November 1941, 14–6, before nearly 100,000 at Philadelphia’s Municipal Stadium. The game was initiated as always by the on-field procession of midshipmen and cadets. On this November day the huge crowd cheered for minutes on end, seeming to sense that the pageant of American men in uniform would soon display itself less ceremoniously in a world perilously at war.
On the professional football circuit in 1941 George Halas’s Chicago Bears, with Sid Luckman doing the passing and Joe Maniaci, Norm Standlee, and Ray Nolting most of the running, won their division in a rugged end of the season game with Green Bay and then coasted to a championship victory over the New York Giants, 37–9. The championship game, played a week after Pearl Harbor, drew only 13,000 disconcerted fans. A few days earlier Bruce Smith, tailback for the undefeated Big Ten champions, the University of Minnesota, had given his Heisman Trophy award acceptance speech. He cut his remarks short because President Roosevelt planned a radio address to the nation at the same time that afternoon to rally the land after the shock of Pearl Harbor. Smith’s few words were in a language one now recognizes as prewar Americanese: “Those far eastern fellows may think American boys are soft, but I have had, and even now have, plenty of evidence in black and blue to show that they are making a big mistake.”
There was no doubt at the end of the year that America was a fighting nation. But even before Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war, the isolationist cause in America had begun to founder badly. This became more obvious as the months passed, and in an important editorial for Life Walter Lippmann
called isolationism a “stupendous failure.” By late summer and early fall Charles Lindbergh, whose appearances across the land had coincided with so many of the prominent days of DiMaggio’s streak, spoke more desperately and more bitterly. Many in his own organization, America First, had deserted the troubled aviator. Things reached their sorriest level in a particularly vicious September rally in Des Moines, where Lindbergh blamed the Jews of Europe for bringing problems down upon their own heads. After Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh was a man without a cause and almost without a country. He had already quit his Army reserve rank of colonel, and Roosevelt not only refused to recommission him but withheld security clearance so that he could not work for the aircraft industry. The President finally relented when Henry Ford offered Lindbergh a job as consultant on the manufacture of the B-24 Liberator bomber. Even then Lindbergh could barely stifle his admiration for things German; he called the Ford plant at Rouge the highest creation of Faustian man.
The amazing flight of Rudolf Hess that had so startled the world near the beginning of DiMaggio’s streak quieted as a story later in 1941, primarily because the British put a lid of absolute secrecy on the deputy führer’s confinement. Churchill wished to keep Hitler off guard, and he also knew how furious the entire incident made Stalin. Hess’s efforts to gain an English alliance against Russia rendered him a symbol of Nazi perfidy, and even if he were repentant—which he wasn’t—the Russians would keep him locked up in Berlin’s Spandau Castle until he died.
The military campaign along the huge Russian front in the latter half of 1941 remained the focus of the European war. Of the millions who fought, tens of thousands died; of the tens of millions who merely tried to live, hundreds of thousands were executed. Hitler’s 10-week projection for taking Russia had not counted on the endless supply of manpower and the capacity of the Russian nation to endure the bitterest savagery the world had ever known. Soon the Nazi armies would find themselves bogged down in the mud and snows of the Russian plains and forests, facing the doomed prospect of having to lay in for a long siege of the two cities they had planned to capture weeks before: Leningrad in the north and Stalingrad in the south. These struggles would change the course of the European war.
It is sad testimony to the vigilance of the western democracies that the most extreme measures of the Nazi program, the murder of civilian populations and the full-scale siphoning off of European Jewry into SS detention and labor camps, were relegated to the back pages of the news late in 1941. Editors were reluctant to give prominent space to what they fervently hoped was just rumor. Civilized nations did not dematerialize populations. What no one knew at this time, however, proved even more appalling. Hitler’s lieutenant, Reinhard Heydrich, had formed an addendum of sorts to the German plans for the invasion of Russia, plotting the elimination of so-called “racially inferior” populations of the captive nations. Göring put the second piece of the puzzle in place in regard to the final solution. He cabled Heydrich on July 31, 1941, “to carry out all the necessary preparations with regard to organizational and financial matters for bringing about a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe.”
The world would all too soon see the undeniable result of Heydrich and Göring’s newly conceived horror when 33,000 Ukrainian Jews were rounded up from the lovely city of Kiev and its environs and shot in an unspeakable series of mass executions at Babi Yar. Matters would get even worse through the bone-chilling Russian winter. By year’s end the casualties for the campaign, including civilians and soldiers, reached close to 6 million. “Never before” is the only accurate way to describe what took place along the eastern front of the European war, and the experience inured Germany for a pan-European holocaust in regard to which much of the modern world has long intoned “Never again.”
The emerging story of the war for America after DiMaggio’s streak and into the fall and winter of 1941 concerns Japan, the far east, and the Pacific theater. There had been hints throughout 1941 of more than a mere tropical storm on this horizon, but Roosevelt’s and the Defense Department’s hearts and minds were forever at sea in the Atlantic. A week after DiMaggio’s streak ended, Japan moved its armies into Indochina. In response, the United States froze Japanese assets, as we had done to the Germans and the Italians in June. Though months earlier the Japanese had worked out the full scenario for a sneak attack on the U.S. naval installation in Hawaii, diplomatically at least Japan wished to maintain contact with Washington. America offered a nonaggression pact in return for guarantees from the Japanese for a free China. A diplomatic stall set in, continuing to the very hour when the Japanese raided Pearl Harbor.
For its issue just after the attack on Pearl Harbor, as part of a story that had been prepared earlier, Life magazine hit the streets with a huge picture of a bucolic teenager, starlet Patricia Peardon, in the innocent Moss Hart Broadway musical Junior Miss. All was sweet innocence. The next week Life grew somber and tense. Its cover was an image of the American flag. The war raged with the United States fully in it when Hitler’s Germany joined its Japanese ally by declaring war on us before the formality of our doing so on them.
Little in a culture as various as America’s probably ever was as simple as many believed (and still do) before World War II, but that doesn’t lessen the feeling for the last year before our full immersion into an awful conflict, a year that both forges and closes the myth of an epoch to which Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak contributes its bounty of energy, endurance, and grace.
Afterword
When Streak first appeared in 1988, the Harvard polymath Stephen Jay Gould reviewed it in The New York Review of Books. What intrigued me was a statistical study Gould mentioned in which his colleague Ed Purcell, a Nobel laureate in physics, measured the comparative variables in baseball achievements. Purcell’s conclusion was that “frequency” models for every important record but one fell within reasonable statistical probabilities. Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak, from May 15 to July 17, 1941, stood alone as a kind of freak of baseball nature.
Purcell’s point is that the 56-game hitting streak was not only an extraordinary accomplishment for all the reasons usually adduced—DiMaggio’s unique talent, concentration, consistency, and endurance—but because the closest competitors miss by so far. Given the profile of other baseball records, Wee Willie Keeler, George Sisler, Tommy Holmes, or Pete Rose should be closer to DiMaggio’s 56-straight than they are. Therein lies the unique glory of DiMaggio’s great record. Purcell frames it this way to make his comparison clear: There is a greater chance that the major leagues will be able to boast of four future lifetime .400 hitters, each of whom will play in at least a thousand games, than that one player will equal DiMaggio’s hitting streak record.
Purcell drops down to .350 so that he might compare something that actually happened to DiMaggio’s achievement. How many players would have to average .350 lifetime with a thousand games under their belts to equal the comparative odds of breaking DiMaggio’s streak record? Fifty-two. How many have done so? Only three: Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, and Shoeless Joe Jackson. Good for them. But math is unforgiving. Where are the forty-nine others whose presence would provide a statistical equivalent for the streak? Nowhere to be found. Even Ted Williams misses the list, with his .344 lifetime average.
Fifteen years have passed since I began working on Streak, reconstructing and recapturing its wonderful moments game by game, at bat by at bat. The question most often asked me by readers, interviewers, and friends bears on the observations by Stephen Jay Gould and Ed Purcell. How long do I think the streak record will stand? All I can say is, a long time. I am not even thinking about intangibles, such as improved relief pitching, better fielding, night baseball, and jet lag. Nor for me is it simply the statistical unlikelihood that anyone will soon or ever break the record, though that element does enter in. It is rather the mounting pressure of the enterprise. Fans over the last several decades have seen what the pressure of a stre
ak does even to brilliant hitters like Pete Rose and Paul Molitor. Streaks are charted from their early games and become media frenzy by the time they reach the high 20s. DiMaggio had a run of only eight games when he said the pressure for him—beyond the normal desire to rip the ball as hard as he could on every at bat—was considerable. He claimed that his stomach began to knot up around game 38 when he was after George Sisler’s modern-day record of 41, set in 1922, and did not relax until after he had surpassed Wee Willie Keeler’s 1897 record of 44 straight.
The games after that were less intense, measured partly by DiMaggio’s sheer doggedness at the plate under any conditions and by the public relations Juggernauts loosed in every visiting city as the Yanks and Joe came to town. DiMaggio told reporters that he felt fairly relaxed after he set the record. He was loose for the last twelve games, and even got a healthy percentage of his hits in early-inning at bats. Extending a streak is nothing like chasing down another. The gut-wrenching days for DiMaggio occurred when he was hard on Sisler’s and then on Keeler’s heels. (An oddity of streak lore is that DiMaggio was told of Keeler’s record only when he was approaching Sisler’s.) As for the pressure a ballplayer would face today if nearing DiMaggio’s 56-game record, even Joe blanched at the thought when I asked him about it on the phone: “Oh, my!”
The last sentence in the preceding paragraph is blessed with a seemingly innocuous prepositional phrase: on the phone. Joe DiMaggio clearly did not like to talk to those writing books about him. I know. It took me six years to reach him, and I had to go through the good offices of A. Bartlett Giamatti, at that time president of the National League, to speak to DiMaggio at all. I knew Giamatti from my days at Yale University, and as a favor he convinced DiMaggio that I wasn’t one of those New York intellectuals intent on ferreting out the personal secrets of his life. DiMaggio had an almost preternatural distrust of writers because he feared they wished to pry into matters best consigned to silence: his life with Marilyn Monroe; his emotional disconnect from his troubled son, Joe Jr.; favors that may have been done for him by Italian compatriots with all-too-predictable connections to the underworld; his cold-comfort friendships with hangers-on who wished to extract from him more than he was willing to give.
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