The DiMaggios

by Tom Clavin

  Disaster almost struck later in the month. Doing some restless sparring on a train, sophomore outfielder Sam Mele punched Ted, and the rib injury put him on the sidelines. He missed 13 games, but the Red Sox kept rolling. An 8–0 blanking of the Tigers in Detroit was the team’s thirteeth consecutive victory. They had leapfrogged over the Athletics (still skippered by 85-year-old Connie Mack), Yankees, and Indians into first place. However, an indication of how tightly bunched the top teams were was that a doubleheader loss to Clevelend on August 1 dropped Boston to fourth place.

  Boston fans took to singing altered lyrics to the “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio” tune Les Brown had written in 1941:

  Who hits the ball and makes it go?

  Dominic DiMaggio.

  Who runs the bases fast, not slow?

  Dominic DiMaggio.

  Who’s better than his brother Joe?

  Dominic DiMaggio.

  But when it comes to gettin’ dough,

  They give it all to brother Joe.

  Brother Joe and the Yankees spent the early summer chasing the Indians and Athletics for first place. Joe’s bat was hot again. On May 20, he duplicated a feat from 12 years earlier, when he had been just 21. The Yankees were in Chicago to face the 4-18 White Sox. In the first inning, Joe hit a three-run homer. In the third, he singled. In the fifth, he hit a solo shot. In the sixth, he tripled in three runs. And in the ninth he doubled, for the second (and last) cycle of his career. He would have gone 6-for-6, but in the eighth his long fly was grabbed against the fence. On June 20, in a doubleheader against the Browns, Joe hit three home runs, powering his team into second place, three and a half games behind the Indians.

  But the heel started bothering him again, and both knees. Joe DiMaggio was still shy of 34, but some days he felt 74. As the season progressed his body played him a symphony of aches and pains. There were days when he simply couldn’t stand the thought of suiting up to play, but he did: the Yankees were in a tight pennant race, and he hated the thought of not being the Big Guy.

  “There were occasions this year when DiMaggio must have felt he was through,” wrote Jimmy Cannon, who continued to be one of Joe’s buddies at Toots Shor’s. “He was sick with doubt and irritable. The heel was full of pain. On payday when he picked up his check he was ashamed of himself. Seldom does any athlete feel he is fleecing an employer when there is a contract to guarantee him a salary. The inactivity changed him. It made him a recluse. The telephone was shut off in his apartment. He ducked intimates. He sat home and played jazz records endlessly. At the Stadium, he gave me the impression he felt himself an intruder.”

  But he played, game after game. In midsummer, he had hits in 25 of 27 straight games and batted .493. With all his physical and mental agonies, the Big Guy still put the Yankees on his shoulders and carried them toward September.

  Vince couldn’t catch on with a PCL team for the 1948 season. For a time he resumed peddling sporting goods. It could not have been easy that his sales calls took him around to PCL clubhouses, including Oakland’s. Still, he just couldn’t quit baseball completely. He went down a notch in the minors to the California League, signing a contract with the Stockton Ports, who that year were affiliated with the Oaks.

  It was a pretty good contract. The owner of the team, Al Spreckens, had enlisted Vince to manage the team as well as patrol center field. Given his outgoing personality, managing and coaching could turn out to be the best way for Vince to stay in baseball. With an eye on the drawing power of the DiMaggio name, Spreckens declared that Vince’s salary “will be the highest ever paid to a California League manager.” It sure beat hawking bats and gloves.

  Vince had his hands full. Besides himself, only one player had been a major leaguer. The other players were on their way up to or down from the Pacific Coast League. For his own part, facing California League pitching rejuvenated Vince at the plate, and he could still play center field at a major league level. “It was great fun playing for the Ports, because Billy Herbert Field was so well kept and Vince DiMaggio had a lot of room to catch fly balls hit to center field,” remembered Lou Bronzan, a pitcher then spending his first of two years with the club. At the end of the season, Vince’s 30 homers led the league, and he was fifth in runs batted in.

  But Spreckens, facing financial difficulties, would decide not to renew Vince’s costly contract. Once again, Vince had to wonder if he was finished in baseball while his two younger brothers were making headlines every day.

  Joe continued to drag himself out onto the field game after game—he would miss only one the entire season. Despite the pains in his legs and a worsening pain in his throwing arm, he played magnificently, especially when he came to bat with runners in scoring position. The Yankees kept winning and kept chasing the Indians, Athletics, and now the Red Sox, who were surging. The way the three rivals were playing, Joe couldn’t afford to take his bat out of the lineup, even when his own manager suggested it.

  As in Joe’s magnificent season of 1941, when Lou Gehrig died, the franchise experienced a great loss in 1948. On August 16, Babe Ruth died. The cancer treatments had proven ineffective, and by the early summer it was common knowledge that the greatest baseball player ever was not going to make it. Weak and wan, he managed to attend the premiere of The Babe Ruth Story that June, with William Bendix rather uncomfortably playing the Sultan of Swat, but he was barely able to speak to fans and reporters. He was hospitalized soon after.

  He was only 53 when he died, another Yankee champion taken too soon. His funeral filled St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York (with 75,000 more mourners standing outside on Fifth Avenue in the rain). Before the season was over, the team would retire the Babe’s number 3. As a man who had declared himself “lucky to be a Yankee,” and who had often been mentioned in the same sentence with Ruth, Joe had to feel the loss to the club.

  The doubleheader on August 20 was an example of how relentless the Red Sox had become by late summer. They were down 4–1 to the Senators in the ninth inning. Then the hometown fans were thrilled when a three-run shot by Vern Stephens tied the score, and a walk-off homer by Stan Spence won it. In the second game, Dominic’s grand slam led the way to a 10–4 win. In a victory the following day, Stephens socked a grand slam. And on the twenty-fourth, the Sox scored three runs in the ninth to defeat the Indians 9–8 and reclaim first place.

  The finish to the 1948 season remains one of the finest in American League history. Three tough and talented veteran teams battled down to the last regular-season out and beyond before the pennant winner was left standing. No wonder the Yankees, Red Sox, and Indians established new attendance records—combined, the clubs drew 6.5 million spectators to their home parks.

  Even better, as David Halberstam points out in his book Summer of ’49, “The best player on each of the three teams was having a remarkable year.” Ted continued to hit almost every pitch on the nose. His average was the best since the 1941 season, over .400, and again he surpassed 100 runs batted in. Somehow, despite the pressure of being skipper of the Indians, Lou Boudreau was hitting almost as well as Ted. He would be voted the American League MVP. And even with the nagging injuries, Joe was having one of his best years, especially as an RBI machine.

  At times it was as if they were competing directly against each other, even though there were 16 other men on the field when two of the rivals played. In a late-season doubleheader, Indians catcher Jim Hegan made the mistake of teasing Ted about Boudreau’s having inched ahead of him in the batting race, saying that “the Frenchman’s got you beat this year.” Ted responded, “The hell he has,” and knocked out six hits in his next seven at-bats. When he stepped up to the plate for the eighth time that day, he said to Hegan, “This one’s for Lou.” The next pitch went over the right-field wall.

  Dominic was also having a fine year. No one was playing the outfield better. He covered an enormous amount of territory between Ted in left and Mele, Wa
lly Moses, or Stan Spence in right. In 1948 Dominic set an American League record for center fielders with 503 putouts, a record that would stand until Chet Lemon of the White Sox broke it 29 years later.

  “Dom was a fantastic fielder,” Buddy Lewis of the Washington Senators told Baseball Digest in 2006. “He would play in about 20 to 30 yards closer to the infield than other center fielders. You try to hit the ball over his head in Fenway Park and you couldn’t do it. It would just make you sit down and cry after you saw Dom race back and catch a ball you hit and thought was a sure double or triple.” (When Lewis died at 94 in 2011, he was the last player to have been present at Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech at Yankee Stadium in 1939.)

  “He was a terrific center fielder,” says Bobby Brown, who played for the Yankees as an infielder and outfielder from 1946 to 1954. “Dom was a very good hitter too, but he made that Boston outfield defense. Ted Williams was an average fielder, and Dom helped him greatly by covering some of left field as well as all of center.”

  Mele remembers that during “one game at Yankee Stadium, Joe hit a ball toward left-center. No way Williams was going to get to it, but Dominic streaks across and makes a tremendous backhanded catch. Inning over, rally snuffed out. Dom, Ted, and I are running in and Joe’s running out to center. ‘Nice catch,’ he said. Dom kept running. That is what he did, another day of doing his job. But I’m sure an ‘outburst’ like that from Joe meant a lot.”

  The fans in Boston began to hope that for the first time since 1915 the World Series would feature both of the city’s teams. The perennial punching bags the Braves, recovered from their days as the Bees, had grown into genuine contenders, led by Warren Spahn, Bob Elliott, and Eddie Stanky. They fought off the St. Louis Cardinals to nab the National League title, their first pennant since 1914. Now if the Red Sox could only gut it out. . . .

  Dominic was doing his part—getting on base, driving in a lot of runs for a leadoff batter, and playing center field brilliantly. He was getting banged up but refused to sit out a game. He also refused to be distracted by his impending wedding. All the DiMaggios were making plans to be at the ceremony in the Boston area. He was certain that Emily was the one. According to Halberstam in The Teammates, Emily’s “lack of interest in baseball did not bother Dominic at all. Nor was there any problem of ethnicity, as might have happened in an era when ethnic divisions were considered more important. Her grandmother, Carlotta, seemed to be rather proud of the fact that, although she was Italian, she was not Sicilian, and she had said something along that line one night at dinner, a snide zinger aimed at Sicilians, and Dominic had said, quite gently, ‘Carlotta, I’m Sicilian,’ and Carlotta, not one to back down, and not quite ready for political correctness either, looked at him and said, ‘Well, that’s your problem.’ ”

  The Red Sox clung gamely to first place during the first, then second, then third week of September—including a thrilling 10–6 comeback win over the Yankees on September 9 in which Dominic went 3-for-3 and made what the New York Times described as a “breathtaking catch” in center. The Yankees and Indians howled at their heels.

  During the 1948 season, Joe went from the Great DiMaggio to something like an immortal who awed even his teammates. Richard Ben Cramer offered a description of his daily entrance:

  “When Joe walked into the locker room, it was like the lights came on, as if a voice on the PA had announced: the team is here. Of course, he was impeccable: not just in a suit and tie, but the best suit and tie in America. He had a pal from Seventh Avenue who’d make the suits—whatever Joe wanted—and his tailor, of course, to put the finishing touches. And no hat: might obscure the face.

  “He’d stride in, across the new carpeted clubhouse, with the paper under his arm. If there were fellows already getting dressed, Joe wouldn’t stop. ‘Good morning.’ ‘Good morning, Tom,’ he’d say as he passed—like an executive greeting secretaries on the way to his office. By the time he had his coat hung perfectly, Pete Sheehy would be running with the ‘half-a-cuppa-coffee.’ Joe didn’t have to ask anymore.

  “DiMaggio would sit in his undershirt with his half-a-cup and a smoke, one leg thrown over the other. He’d open up the paper. The other players would sneak glances, to see if Dago was gonna say anything. They’d never talk to him first. . . . The Big Guy could sit in stillness till he was ready to visit the trainer, get himself taped. After that, it was BP. Joe hit first. When Joe stepped into the cage, that’s when BP started.”

  For Vince and Dominic, it would be unthinkable to act in such a way. But they had remained mere mortals, while their brother had ascended to Mount Olympus. This would be a facet of their relationship for the rest by their lives. “Normal” for Joe would always be the veneration of others—and the isolation. Tommy Henrich shared the outfield with him every year from 1939 to 1950 except during the war. No one on the team knew Joe better or admired him more, yet during all those years the two men never once went out to dinner.

  Remarkably, the Indians, Red Sox, and Yankees had identical 91-56 records with one week left. Four games later, as the tireless Bob Feller won again, the Indians had a two-game lead with only three games left to the season, all against the Detroit Tigers, who had sunk to fifth place. When Cleveland lost the first game in the series, a window opened for the other two contenders.

  In the past, this would have been the moment for Joe to lead the Yankees through that window. But he had been younger then, and the injuries didn’t linger as long or hurt as much. As the season progressed he had tried walking on his toes to take pressure off his heel, which was inflamed again. But that strained his leg muscles, so that before every game he had to be wrapped tightly in ever more bandages. Jimmy Cannon lived in the same building as Joe. One day in late September, Cannon caught a grimacing Joe coming down a flight of stairs, putting both feet on one step before he could lower a foot to the next. When Joe noticed Cannon staring at him, he begged him not to write about how much pain he was in. This wasn’t about him, Joe explained, it was about not letting opponents know how gimpy he was.

  In the last week of the season, a Time reporter visited the bruised and battered hero. “The center-fielder of the New York Yankees had the worst charley horse he could remember. He wore a thick bandage over his left thigh (to support the strained muscles) and a second bandage around his middle to hold up his first one. On any ordinary day such aches & pains would have put Center-fielder DiMaggio out of the line-up. But no day last week was an ordinary one in the American League. The Yankees were fighting for survival in the hottest pennant race in history, and they needed DiMag.” The article also reported that Joe was up to a pack of Chesterfields a day, probably an underestimation. The article dismissed “bespectacled Dom” as the “family pet.”

  Showing a surprising lack of faith in his team’s chances, Dom and Emily had set the date of the wedding for October 7. “I’ll see that Dom is free to get married on the seventh,” Joe told Rosalie over the phone.

  The last games of the season were on October 2 and 3, with the Yankees in Boston against the Sox. The Yankees had to win the first one for a shot at the pennant; failing that, they could at least force the Sox into a playoff by winning the second. Saturday morning before the first game, Boston fans were in the streets to jeer the Yankee players as they left the nearby Kenmore Hotel to go to the ballpark.

  In the game, before a packed crowd, Ted socked his 25th home run in the first inning, which helped propel the Red Sox to a 5–1 win, with Jack Kramer pitching a complete game. For only the third time in nine seasons, Joe would not be in the World Series.

  Dom and Joe drove straight from the game to Wellesley, where the DiMaggio family was meeting for dinner near the church where the wedding would take place. For most of the ride, Joe was too disappointed to speak. Dominic didn’t know what he could say to console his brother. Finally, Joe told him, “We’ll get back at you tomorrow, we’ll knock you out. I’ll take care of it personall
y.” Dominic recovered with some bravado of his own: “I may have something to do with that. I’ll be there too.”

  “Joe and Dom absolutely had a good relationship, and they were also very proud men,” says Babe Martin, a backup catcher on the 1948–49 Boston teams who became one of Dominic’s close friends. “They wanted to show everybody that they would go ahead and play hard against each other. They didn’t want people to think that they would favor each other under any circumstances. They would not do that. They would play hard against each other and show everybody the competitiveness they had.”

  “They were DiMaggios, and that name was golden in baseball,” says Bobby Doerr. “They had to do their best because they were the best baseball-playing brothers in the game.”

  Harris tried to talk Joe out of playing in a game that was really meaningless to the Yankees. The Big Fella deserved a rest. But Joe told his manager, “My brother’s with the Red Sox, and nobody in Cleveland or anyplace else is going to say I rolled over and played dead so Dom’s team would have a better chance. I can’t do that.”

  On Sunday, the Tigers trounced the Indians 7–1. The door was left open for Boston.

  “They had come to see Yankee blood,” Joe said about the 31,304 fans at Fenway Park that day. He was in a strange position—even his own family was not pulling for him. In the stands were Giuseppe and Rosalie and their seven other children and various in-laws. They weren’t exactly rooting against Joe, but they wanted Dominic to have another shot at a world championship. “Are you rooting for either of your sons, Mr. DiMaggio?” a reporter asked. After one of his daughters translated the question, Giuseppe replied, “I hope Dominic win this time. Giuseppe, he win all the time.”

  In the first inning, Joe doubled in a run. The Yankees were still in front in the third inning when the Sox scored five runs. In the fifth, Phil Rizzuto singled and Bobby Brown doubled. Joe stepped to the plate and doubled off the Green Monster. It was 5–4 Sox in the sixth when Dominic and Stephens took over and produced four runs with homers. The score was 10–5 in the ninth and Joe stood in the batter’s box. Both he and his brother were 3-for-4. Joe sent another ball off the left-field wall, but it was only a single—he could barely make it to first base. Harris sent Steve Souchok in to run for him. As Joe limped toward the Yankee dugout, the Red Sox crowd cheered him in a way that rivaled anything he had experienced at Yankee Stadium. Anyone who glanced into center field saw that Dominic had doffed his cap as a salute to his brave brother.