by Tom Clavin
In his autobiography Lucky to Be a Yankee, Joe skips over 1942 entirely.
In Boston, the youthful Sox played well enough to grab the pennant in any league that didn’t include the Yankees. Dominic and Pesky formed an excellent tandem with the hit-and-run. They developed a play that was successful for much of the year. With Dominic on first, Pesky in the batter’s box would touch his right ear as a signal. He then bunted the ball toward the third baseman, who charged in. Invariably, Pesky would beat the throw at first. Meanwhile, without breaking stride, Dominic rounded second and dashed to third before the third baseman returned to the bag to receive the first baseman’s throw. It worked until a game with the Yankees late in the season, when the Yankees’ grizzled veteran catcher Bill Dickey got wise. When Pesky bunted, Dickey ran for third base. When Dominic arrived, Dickey already had the ball. “Got ya!” he said, grinning, as he applied the tag.
Ted Williams more than fulfilled his potential this season. He batted .356, hit 36 home runs, and drove in 137 runs, adding up to one of the rarest feats in baseball, the Triple Crown for batting. Incredibly, he still wouldn’t get elected the MVP of the American League. That honor again went to a Yankee, this time second baseman Joe Gordon. The Flash had lower stats—.322, 18, and 103—but as Ted would point out for public consumption, “The Yankees won the pennant again. And we were second again. The voting tends to go to the team that wins, which is right.” Privately, however, he seethed.
The final game of the ’42 season was at Fenway Park. Among the crowd were 4,293 boys and girls admitted free for carting in 29,000 pounds of scrap metal for the war effort. The Red Sox downed the Yankees 7–6. Even with the war intensifying in Europe and in the Pacific, few at Fenway could have imagined that this game was the last time they would see Ted Williams, Pesky, and Dominic play there until 1946. In November, Ted and Pesky were assigned to be Aviation Naval Cadets at the training school at Amherst College in Massachusetts. For Ted, the stay at the snow-covered campus was short-lived—while doing exercises one day, he suffered a hernia. He would spend the next two months in the Chelsea Naval Hospital.
The Pittsburgh Pirates did not play well. There had been hopes that a young, aggressive team—catcher Al Lopez was the only player over 30 in the starting lineup—would build on the foundation of the previous year. But there was no one hitting .300 or more on the entire roster. And the pitching was bad. By season’s end, Rip Sewell, at 17-15, would be the only pitcher with a winning record.
At least Vince was entrenched in the lineup and still recognized as the best center fielder in the National League. Struggling to keep his batting average over .250, he represented the only power and speed on the Pirates. In late August, he had six RBI in a doubleheader against the Dodgers—and Brooklyn won both games anyway. In several ways, the season couldn’t end fast enough for him. Hurlers were pitching around him because there was not much offense in the rest of the lineup, and when he did put runs on the board, Pittsburgh’s pitching and defense let the opposing teams back in the game. No wonder, then, that he began to develop ulcers. All he had to do was pick up the papers every day and see that his brothers were on clubs playing winning ball consistently, while he was turning 30 on a club that was sinking back into the depths of the National League. The Pirates were 66-81 in 1942, a woeful 36.5 games out of first. They finished in fifth place only because the Chicago Cubs, Boston Braves, and Philadelphia Phillies were considerably worse.
After the loss in the Series, Joe, Dorothy, and Joe Jr. took a train to San Francisco. They’d no sooner gotten back to the West Coast than Dorothy left for Reno with Joe Jr., establishing residency there. Joe followed her. Her price for a reconciliation was that he had to enlist in the Army. He waffled for weeks. He complained to friends that her idea of saving the marriage was for him to go away for a couple of years, maybe even get killed.
Barrow mailed him his 1943 contract, which he and Tom ignored. There were conflicting press reports through January that Joe would or would not join his younger brother in military service. Finally, back in San Francisco on February 17, he joined the Army. A photo of the ceremony distributed nationally shows him at the front of a group of men, right hand raised, with his expression showing something like terror.
THIRTEEN
During World War II, Joe and Dominic would be away from their aging parents and their brothers and sisters for far longer than they ever had before. For the two youngest brothers, there would be no holiday visits to the house on Beach Street, where Giuseppe presided and served his homemade wine while Rosalie cooked up enough food to satisfy everyone.
“My grandmother was a very good cook,” remembers Joanne DiMaggio Webber. “My grandparents spoke Italian at the table—pretty much all the time too. At the dinner table we had salad first, then soup, then pasta, then the main course. With nine children, I guess it had been important to prepare several courses.”
Vince and his family could still see his parents and most of his siblings, but he wasn’t particularly pleased about it: he tried several times to join the military but was rejected because of his ulcers. For the first time since 1936, only one of the DiMaggio brothers would be heading to spring training.
For much of his military career, Joe would tell bunkmates how much he didn’t like being in the service and complain about how much money he was losing by earning only $50 a month from the Army. He was a lowly private, but that didn’t mean he would be anywhere near the front lines dodging bullets. Only two months later, the Associated Press sent out a story headlined “DiMaggio Stars in Game,” about a contest hosted by the Hollywood Stars of the Pacific Coast League. The victorious visitors were a team made up of Army and Navy all-stars, which included Yankees teammate Red Ruffing. Joe might or might not survive his marriage, but there was no doubt he would survive the war.
Joe played baseball so regularly that newspapers kept track of his batting average that spring, which was .333 after a game against the University of Southern California. One account wryly noted, “Private Joe DiMaggio’s Spring training has been somewhat different this year.” When the major league season began, Joe was roaming the outfield at the Santa Ana Army Air Base. He was one of the best players in a military uniform, but in one game he met his match. His Santa Ana team was playing the Army Air Transport Command squad from nearby Long Beach. Joe managed only to pop up twice and strike out. The opposing pitcher was Ruffing, who at 38 could still bring it. That fall, he would defeat the Camp Pendleton team 4–1 for the Southern California Service Championship.
Dorothy moved to Los Angeles so that she and Joe Jr. could see Joe when he was on leave. It didn’t help their relationship. In October 1943, she filed for divorce, charging mental cruelty, and asked for $650 a month in alimony and child support.
Even before the war, Joe had complained of trouble with his stomach. After the divorce filing and the headlines that followed it, his stomach felt worse. By the time the divorce was final in May 1944, the ulcerlike symptoms were chronic. Joe didn’t want the divorce, but he didn’t contest it, refusing to open up his private life to the press and the court. The terms of the interlocutory decree were a cash payment of $14,000 to Dorothy and $150 a month in child support.
In the early part of 1944, Joe was with the Seventh Army Air Force. Finally, he was to be deployed: he would head a team of former major league stars who would tour the Central Pacific. One of the team members was Dario Lodigiani from the DiMaggios’ North Beach neighborhood, who had completed three years with the White Sox. Soon after Joe arrived in Hawaii, he was promoted to staff sergeant.
It was more of the same—play baseball and spend downtime with other players. In August, though, Joe landed in a Honolulu hospital. He was leading the Hawaii League at the time with a .411 average and had recently hit a homer measured at 475 feet. The press reported an unspecified “stomach disorder,” but quashed rumors that he was going to apply for a medical discharge and return to the Yankees.
Whatever was wrong with Joe’s stomach (he insisted the diagnosis was an ulcer, one of the very few times he compared himself to Vince), it was enough to get him a new posting—back to the New York area. He was shipped to the Army Rehabilitation Center in Atlantic City. This trip included a three-week furlough, and it wasn’t long before Joe was back sitting at his usual table at Toots Shor’s. He also served as a guest referee with heavyweight champion Joe Louis at a series of bouts in Brooklyn.
Joe’s little brother had a much more positive attitude toward military service. Dominic enjoyed the Navy. “I wanted to be on the water. I love the water. I guess that comes from being raised in San Francisco.” He wouldn’t have turned down any branch of the service, though, because “I just didn’t want to be at home playing baseball while all my fellow countrymen were out fighting and serving their country. I wouldn’t have felt right about that.”
Like thousands of others, Dominic found himself at the Norfolk Naval Training Station. It had its own baseball team that competed against teams representing other bases and agencies, even the FBI. The Norfolk squad had dominated in 1942 with a 92-8 record thanks to the pitching of Fred Hutchinson and Bob Feller, who had 19 wins before shipping out to join the crew of the USS Alabama. The 1943 edition had Dominic patrolling center field. The team compiled a 75-25 record. The commander of the Norfolk Naval Training Station, Capt. Harry McClure, was also the manager of the ball club. In one game, Dominic chased after a fly ball and crashed into the fence. As he lay there stunned, McClure wanted to check on his center fielder, but it wouldn’t do for a captain to go running out to see a lowly sailor. So McClure called for his jeep and was driven out to help Dominic stand up.
The Red Sox sorely missed Dominic and their other young stars that year. The lineup included only two regular starters, Bobby Doerr at second base and Jim Tabor at third. Like most major league clubs, the Red Sox had to rely on retreads and players who might have otherwise retired to fill out their roster. Al Simmons, at 41, could bat only .203 to end what was otherwise a Hall of Fame career. Manager Joe Cronin, who would turn 37 later in the year, was still plugging away at the plate and in fact would establish a still-unbroken American League record of five pinch-hit home runs. The home opener against the Yankees attracted fewer than 7,000 fans. Only 714 people attended the final game at Fenway on September 27. The Red Sox compiled a dismal record of 68-84 and finished 29 games out of first place.
The 1944 season was better, with Boston winding up at 77-77 and 12 games out. But the war was still grinding on, and more good players exchanged Red Sox uniforms for military ones. Doerr had 95 RBI and a .325 average in September, then went into the Army. Tabor and catcher Hal Wagner also went into the service before the season ended. One of the year’s few highlights was a 25-game hitting streak by Dominic’s replacement in center field, Catfish Metkovich.
Dominic, by then off in the Pacific (stationed in Australia), didn’t have time to follow the misfortunes of the Red Sox. “We were part of a team,” he said about his Navy service. “You just joined another team—that was all that happened in World War II.” Sounding very much the Little Professor, he added, “I do believe that anyone who goes into the service, for even a short period of time, picks up a lot more for their future as far as living and understanding things a great deal better, a maturity, so to speak. It teaches you. It’s another avenue of learning.”
Ted Williams had fun learning how to fly. “Flying came easy for me,” he reported. But not for a teammate who was stationed with him at the Amherst training facility. “Poor Pesky,” Ted reported. “He was a great little athlete. A boxer, wrestler, basketball player, he could run like hell and he was a tiger on the obstacle courses. But he couldn’t swim a stroke, he’d go right down, and he flew an airplane like he had stone arms.”
After Amherst, Ted was sent for further training at a base in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. That July, he and Dominic were together again, not in a military location but back in Fenway Park. Maurice J. Tobin, the mayor of Boston, had arranged an exhibition game to raise money for the city’s poor. The Boston Braves would take on an all-star team managed by Babe Ruth. Tobin had enough influence that Dominic could leave the Norfolk base and Ted could visit from North Carolina. Ted met the Babe for the first time and bested him in a home run hitting contest, 3–0. In the game itself, Ted hit a homer that turned out to be the winning run in the 9–8 victory, after Dominic had tripled in two runs.
Ted went for further training in Kokomo, Indiana, and then on to Pensacola, Florida. (Pesky, who just couldn’t get the hang of flying, was sent to an operations school in Atlanta, where he could earn an officer’s commission while staying on the ground.) Ben Chapman was one of the major leaguers Ted encountered in Florida, where some baseball was being played, “but I didn’t have my heart in it at all and I played lousy. By this time I was more interested in flying, and I was also enjoying the pleasures of Florida’s fishing for the first time.”
Ted was made an instructor at the Pensacola base. In May 1944, when he was promoted to second lieutenant, Ted and Doris Soule, the girl he had met in Minnesota, were married. He would turn out to be about as adept at marriage as Joe DiMaggio was. Ted was eager to see combat, but it was not to be. When the war against Japan ended in August 1945, he was in San Francisco, awaiting transportation to Hawaii. Shipped there anyway, he was reunited with Pesky and a few other major leaguers. Until orders to return to the United States were sorted out, they played baseball under the auspices of the 14th Naval District League. The commissioner was Bill Dickey.
Even during a world war, baseball was still a business. With Joe gone, the Yankees felt free to cut Lefty Gomez loose, even though clubs were keeping many older and damaged players. Gomez had gone 6-4 in the 1942 campaign, but it was clear that his arm strength was declining. He was traded to the purgatory of the National League, the Boston Braves. He didn’t last as long as spring training with that club and was sent packing to the Washington Senators. He retired after pitching only four and two-thirds innings for them. His eccentric explanation for his short stint was, “I couldn’t speak enough Spanish to make myself understood on that club.” The future Hall of Famer had a career record of 189-102, but at least as important to the Yankees was that Gomez had six World Series wins without a defeat (and he hadn’t pitched in the 1941 and ’42 Fall Classics).
Even with Joe, Phil Rizzuto, Tommy Henrich, and others gone to war, the Yankees won the 1943 pennant by 13.5 games over the Senators. To cap off the season, the Bronx Bombers became world champions again by taking the Series in five games from the club that had taken away their championship the year before, the St. Louis Cardinals. But New York had a dismal ’44 season, finishing third behind the usually hapless St. Louis Browns. That year the estate of Jacob Ruppert sold the team to Dan Topping and Del Webb. They brought Larry MacPhail over from the Brooklyn Dodgers as a minority owner and replacement for Ed Barrow as general manager.
The Red Sox had an unhappy ’45 campaign. On April 16, the club offered a sham tryout to three black players, Marvin Williams, Sam Jethroe, and Jackie Robinson. The fortunes of the Red Sox might have been dramatically different in the next decade had they signed Robinson, as Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers would do six months later. But Boston was not a welcoming place for players of color. The Boston Globe reported that near the end of the one-hour tryout someone shouted, “Get those niggers off the field!” It would not be until 1959 that a black player wearing a Red Sox uniform appeared in a regular-season game.
In the opening day game at Fenway Park, the Yankees beat them 8–4, and it didn’t get much better—the Red Sox lost their first eight games. In one of them, Metkovich made three errors in one inning—more center-field miscues than Dominic would have committed in half a season. The one highlight of the season was rookie Dave “Boo” Ferriss. As a left-handed outfielder at Mississippi State University, his arm had gone bad, but being ambidextrous, he switched to right
-handed pitching. After Boston’s eighth straight loss that April, a frustrated Cronin turned to the 23-year-old, who two months earlier had been discharged from the Army Air Corps because of asthma. Ferriss began his first game on April 29 by throwing ten straight balls, then recovered to toss a five-hit shutout. On June 6, he pitched his eighth consecutive complete-game victory. He ended the ’45 season with 21 wins. The rookie was feted with a “Boo Ferris Day” on September 23 and presented with a Lincoln Zephyr.
“When I got out of the Army, the Red Sox sent me to their minor league club in Louisville, Kentucky, and I expected to spend the year there learning how to pitch at the professional level,” he recalled 66 years later. “No one was more surprised than me when I got called up and told to get out there. Nothing for me to do but give it my best.”
For the first time since 1936, Vince was the only DiMaggio playing in the major leagues. Early in the 1943 season, he wrote Dominic, “You fellows left me holding the bag. Now it’s up to me to do something about carrying on in the proper DiMaggio style.”
He did the best he could. With the wartime depletion, Vince was one of the best ballplayers left in the National League. His third home run of the season, on May 27, was the first one hit at Forbes Field in the ’43 campaign, an indication of how poor the rest of the Pittsburgh squad was in the power department. He clouted two homers and had five RBI in a 17–4 rout of the Dodgers on June 3. The next day he raced to the wall to take a homer away from Arky Vaughan.
When Vince was in New York, the reporters were finally able to get past the “wrong DiMaggio” bias. “Likable and affable, Vince has a far warmer personality than either of his brothers,” wrote Arthur Daley in the New York Times. “Where a brief ‘uh-huh’ was a full-flowered conversation for the reticent Joe and where Dom was much too shy and retiring, Vince is expansive.”
