Now, what that was, what that meant, he had very little idea. Lazzeri and Crosetti knew more. They timed their trip to make St. Petersburg at night, after newspaper deadlines. At least the kid would get his feet on the ground before the writers were on him like flies.
Still, by the time Joe dressed the next morning, walked to Miller Huggins Field, and put on a uniform (Number 18), word had spread: the great hope had arrived. And a score of New York writers gathered, all starved for copy, all waiting for him.
“Hey, Joe!” yelled the first one who saw him, as he trotted onto the field. “Give us a quote, will ya? . . .”
“Don’t have any,” Joe murmured, as he loped by. He didn’t know what they meant. He thought, maybe “Quote” was some kind of soft drink.
No matter: they didn’t quote him; half of them spelled his name wrong (he was back to “De Maggio” again) . . . but they all knew the story. As the dean of New York baseball writers, Dan Daniel, wrote in the World-Telegram: “Here is the replacement for Babe Ruth.”
THAT WAS A lead that packed a ton of freight—undue pressure on the kid, of course. But business was business. And the business of those writers was to make heroes, to make Larger-Than-Life, to make the Great National Game a drama to hold readers in thrall.
Dan Daniel, who sometimes signed a piece “Daniel,” or sometimes “Daniel M. Daniel,” was really Daniel Margowitz, born to a family of doctors who were mystified and dismayed when their boy gave up on medicine, and started writing baseball, in 1909. But young Dan saw great things in the National Pastime, which label (and product) he promoted with zeal for fifty years. Under Daniel’s eye, and the spur of his stories, baseball transformed itself from a ragbag collection of unstable and vaguely disreputable clubs to America’s premier live entertainment—a crucial national industry, governed only by its own rules, but no less solid (and more popular, always) than the U.S. Treasury.
He wasn’t the game’s greatest literateur: that title had long since passed to Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, Grantland Rice, and then to those whippersnappers, Jimmy Cannon and Red Smith. Daniel preferred to write fast and badly. (His highest stylistic touch was to turn adjectives into verbs—viz., “ ‘I’m just in a slump,’ he morosed.”) At the Telegram, he owned the Yankee beat, and as the lead sports writer, covered other big baseball and boxing stories, too. To that he added a daily column, “Daniel’s Dope” (which title gave the rest of the writers unending jokes). And every week, he sent some five thousand words by telegraph to St. Louis, where Taylor Spink printed them in his nationwide Sporting News.
Withal, Daniel was a statesman of the baseball nation: chairman of the writers’ association, counselor and agent to both players and management, shepherd to The Game itself. He dressed for the role of Secretary of State: French-cuffed shirts under vest and suit coat. (August, a hundred and six degrees in the press box in Chicago, there’s Daniel in his vest and jacket.) He boasted of personally ending Babe Ruth’s holdout of 1930 (when he cowed the Bambino with a lecture on the Great Depression—an event that previously had escaped the Babe’s attention). Daniel chided the industry as a whole for missing its chance to promote attendance with radio and film. “I do believe that baseball lags behind the times,” he wrote. “It has snubbed most of the up-to-the-minute agencies for spreading the gospel of the game, creating a wider human interest in the players and the drama of the man in the field.”
Promotion, drama: these Daniel understood. And when he made DiMaggio the successor to Babe Ruth, Daniel also knew he was reaching for the trump card. (When he’d ended that holdout for Ruth in 1930, he intervened for one compelling reason: “Without the Babe there wasn’t an awful lot to write about.”)
But if DiMaggio flopped? Well, Daniel would have gone on. Consistency wasn’t at issue. One year, when the American League beat the Nationals 12–0 in the All-Star Game, Daniel wrote that the NL was fast becoming a minor league. Three months later, when the Cardinals beat the Red Sox in the World Series, Daniel wrote that the National League had shown anew its clear and dangerous superiority. When some whippersnapper pointed out the contradiction, Daniel shrugged: “I warned them both,” he said. “Now they’re on their own.” And Daniel was hardly alone as he grasped for this rookie’s coattails. After Joe’s first day of spring training, the gray and eminent Herald Tribune informed New York: “Rookie Outfielder Blasts Three Homers in Debut” . . . and only in the body of the story did one learn, that was at batting practice—scrimmage games hadn’t even begun.
IN A SENSE, the writers didn’t have any choice. Not if they wanted to keep their jobs. And that was the best job on any newspaper. Baseball writers had status, visibility, more freedom than any other reporter, more travel, more good times, and more money. They had opportunities to moonlight—ghostwriting for magazines or memoirs; one way or another, they dined out on friendships with the heroes of the age. They never had to sit in an office, they took winters off, had a month (with their families) in Florida for spring training . . . and every bit of it on the cuff. And the quickest way to lose it all was to run afoul of the fellows in the business—not the newspaper business, but the baseball business.
Everybody knew stories of writers who annoyed the club management, or players, and that was the last you ever saw of them—unless you happened to have business in the courthouse of Bayonne, New Jersey. Club owners thought nothing of complaining to the editors, and their complaints carried weight. It was the ball clubs, not the papers, that paid for the writers’ train fares, their hotel rooms, their food and drink. Why shouldn’t the teams have the sort of writers they wanted?
But it wasn’t really threat that kept the hero machine humming; the club was a traveling fraternity. The men at spring training—or on those three special railroad cars, heading north—were your buddies, your meal-mates, the first guys you talked with at breakfast about some story in the paper, and the last guys who said good night as you padded, with your toothbrush, in your skivvies, up the Pullman corridor to your bunk. Sure, you were there to cover the club, but when the club did well, you did well. Sure the players were celebrities—good for them! (Good for you!) That didn’t mean you could fire away at will. If a player got so stinko he couldn’t play the next day’s game—he was still puking while they played the anthem . . . well, “stomach flu” was close enough. (It covered the main point: he was out of the lineup.) If two or three writers were drinking in the anteroom of Babe Ruth’s suite, while the Sultan of Swat was disporting in the bedroom with a succession of female fans . . . well, of course their feature stories on the great Bambino were bound to mention his vast appetites. But it was always about his eating a dozen hot dogs (no, make that two dozen) before the game.
It was Ruth who set the standard for the press, as he did for so much of the modern game. He was not only the drawing card and brand name for his team and town, but the one-man focus of fan attention, and fount of copy, for the country as a whole. It wasn’t just his home runs—they changed the way baseball was played. But his blaring character, his individual, grandiose glory made a collection of local clubs, local attractions, into the National Game—an industry marketing its personalities. In New York, where the cult of Big Names was centered, the tabloid press sprouted and grew up feeding on the new appetite for personalities. In particular, the New York Daily News, with the largest circulation in the country, set its first roots in Ruthian soil. Marshall Hunt, the Daily News’s man with the Yankees, stayed professionally and personally close to the Bambino. In fact, the Yankees used to send Hunt with Ruth, down to Hot Springs, Arkansas, to boil some winter fat off the Babe in the baths.
“We played golf every morning,” Hunt told Jerry Holtzman, in No Cheering in the Press Box, “and then we’d get tired of the food in the hotel and I’d hire a car and we’d go out in the country looking for farmhouses that said ‘Chicken Dinners.’ What Babe really wanted was a good chicken dinner and the daughter combination, and it worked that way more often than you would think. After mayb
e about a month of that we would join the main team in Florida or New Orleans, wherever it was. We did this every year, all the time he was in New York.”
But when the editors of the Daily News needed information on a story about a paternity suit against Ruth . . . Hunt stalled, talked it over with the Babe, and finally told New York:
“Listen, we’ve got along fine with the Babe and he’s done a lot of things for us. You try to get somebody else to worm this thing out in New York, and not through the Babe, because we don’t want to go on this personal bend.”
In the end, they were all in the baseball business together. And so, when Daniel anointed this West Coast rookie as successor to Ruth, and the hero machine kicked into action, it didn’t merely send the call, “All Hands on Deck!” It also sent the message, “Handle with Care.”
FOR JOE DIMAGGIO, there was no choice at all. As the club’s chattel, he was at the disposal of management, writers, fans, like any wooden seat in the ballpark. He could be what they required, or go back to Fisherman’s Wharf. Anyway, Joe wouldn’t kick: as he wrote in Lucky to Be a Yankee, he thought all the writers “treated me swell.” It was up to him to be as good as they said.
And to their obvious astonishment, he was. In the Yankees’ first grapefruit game, against the Cardinals, DiMaggio hit third—the Babe’s old spot—and in his first at bat, smashed a line drive triple to left over Muscles Medwick’s head. For Joe, that was an omen: his first hit that won him his job with the Seals was a triple, too. So he relaxed, and lined out three more singles. For the writers, this was rapture. Dan Daniel was already elbow-deep into his grab bag of ethno-geographic metaphor: “The San Francisco Italian,” Daniel vehemed, “became a veritable Vesuvius of fire and action.”
By that time, Daniel couldn’t help himself. He was, to put it baldly, in love: “The Italian lad has big strong arms, with tremendous wrists. His back muscles ripple in their sheaths . . . .”
Another game against the Cardinals, and Joe got two more hits, the first another triple that rattled up against the wall in right center, where the numbers 420 had been painted. (“Soon Lou Gehrig walked and the pair put on a double steal in which the fleet Giuseppe scored . . . .”) His third game, against the Cincinnati Reds, Joe went four-for-six, and was cheered from the grandstand by a crowd three times larger than the Yankees usually enjoyed. “Never before . . .” announced the Secretary of State, “has a recruit fresh from the minors created the furore which Di Maggio has stirred up, or intrigued the fans so thoroughly with the magic of his bat and his possibilities in the American League.”
By the end of that story, Daniel was on to another burning question (and another errand for the Yankee management): Where would Joe play, and whom would he dislodge? Daniel’s eye fell (not by happenstance) upon center field, where the Yanks’ best outfielder, Ben Chapman, was established. Chapman (or in Danielese, “The Alabama Arrow”) was fast and able, a career Yankee, and career .300 hitter. But he was a holdout. The Yanks were trying to make him swallow a cut in salary (from twelve thousand dollars to ten), so Chapman was working out at home, in Birmingham. Daniel’s mention of center field was designed to pressure “Chappie” into the fold.
The Chapman story, almost lost in the “furore” over DiMaggio, was a window on the character of the Yankees and their writers. The real story with Chapman was he had a temper, and he showed it. To the Yankees that made him a “loudmouth.” The club and the writers had celebrated his talent when he came up; had passed congratulations all around when Chapman was moved from the infield to the outfield, and led the league in assists; they had sung of his speed and daring when he led the league in stolen bases. But he wouldn’t shut up and simply act glad to be living his life in pinstripes. When he held out in ’36, all at once the songs turned sour. “Chapman should be the best player in baseball,” the manager, Joe McCarthy, was quoted in the New York Post, “but his temperament is all wrong.” Within ten days, Chapman signed for the proffered ten thousand dollars (with a two-thousand-dollar bonus, if he kept his mouth shut and played hard all year), but the writing was on the wall. Two months later, he was dealt off to the Senators. And thus, the Yanks solved their “temperament problem.”
There was no evidence, then or now, to suggest that Joe took heed of Chapman’s troubles . . . or noted that his own pinstripes, uniform Number 18, belonged the year before to Johnny Allen—a splendid pitcher, another “temperament problem”—who’d been shuffled off to Cleveland. How could Joe read a warning for himself in the orgiastic praise around his name in the papers? Joe was never going to be a “loudmouth”—that was clear. But a holdout? . . . Well, if he did his job, if he did everything they could ask, if he was perfect, Joe was sure he’d be rewarded.
He was doing more than anyone could ask. In his fourth spring game, against the Boston Bees, he had another two hits. His batting average now stood at .600 . . . . But after one of those hits, he was forced at second base, and as he slid in, the Boston fielder, Joe Coscarart, stepped on DiMaggio’s left foot. The next day, Joe’s foot was swollen. And that was another harbinger of things to come. Joe turned himself over to the trainer . . . who promptly turned that bruised foot into a medical drama.
Earle V. “Doc” Painter, trainer to the Bronx Bombers, considered himself a scientist in a world too long beset by ignorance. Not for him the old-fashioned rubdowns and slatherings of liniment: these he regarded with contempt. The old-time trainer, he insisted, “slapped and pounded and rubbed the patient, until he took all the life out of the player’s muscles.” Doc Painter, in contrast, had a thoroughly modern regimen of treatments that included cups of sweet tea with lemon before dinners, “gobs and gobs of tepid salt water” as a cure for indigestion, laxatives for players who were “constipated through over-exercise” . . . and for players (especially old-timers) exhausted by “the nervous, physical, exciting life of baseball,” the stimulant of “an occasional highball.”
Joe would have been better off with a couple of stiff drinks. Instead, the Doc put Joe’s foot into a Diathermy Machine, which was a new-age wonder designed to bring heat to internal tissues. High-frequency electrical impulses were supposed to increase drainage, decrease swelling and pain. But Painter cooked Joe’s foot until it looked like a broiled red pepper. At that point, Joe had a real medical problem: first-degree burns, and a chance of infection or blood poisoning. Painter said a week to ten days of rest would make Joe as good as new. But DiMaggio wouldn’t play for more than a month. He would miss the rest of the spring exhibitions—and the first three weeks of the season, as well.
Members of the fraternity set to putting the best face on this debacle. Carefully, repeatedly, they absolved Doc Painter with a gush of pseudoscience: high blood sugar in the skin of Joe’s foot made him extrasensitive to heat . . . no way Painter could have known—he was blameless. And anyway, maybe this was good for the team, allowing the veterans some attention (and ink) now that the Walloping Wop would be absent for a week or two. Poor Lou Gehrig. He’d spent his career in the shadow of the Babe. And now, when he had a chance to top the marquee, along came this rookie, and once again stolid Lou got buried in the ballyhoo.
The strange thing was, the ballyhoo didn’t even pause for a day, just because Joe stopped playing. It was more grandiose, more imaginative, once the scribes didn’t have to write what the kid actually did in a game. Here came the stories about the boy who loved baseball; learning to hit with broken oars; taking his brother’s job. Right away, Joe started working on his “autobiography”—an eight-part series to run in the World-Telegram, under Joe’s byline—though the prose (and the story line) was purely Daniel’s Dope. “Just imagine how I feel about all this!” it began, with ingenuous exclamation. And there followed a winsome sketch of a boy who’d never been to the big city—wondering if big, tough New York could find a place in its big, tough heart for a scared kid like him.
“With this little introduction, let me start where I should have started—from the beginning. My full
name is Joseph Peter Di Maggio, Jr . . . .” (Thus Joe attained his first major league record: youngest player ever to get his own name wrong in his autobiography.)
In fact, Joe was already in New York and doing fine. The Yankees were scheduled to barnstorm north—games in a half-dozen Southern cities, on and off the trains . . . so they sent Young Joe ahead to consult with doctors and to rest his foot in the Hotel New Yorker. There he was visited by more big-league writers, for interviews that showed him to be nothing like a scared boy.
Frank Graham, the influential columnist for the New York Sun, came to ask Joe about his impressions of the big city. “Right now, it looks a lot like San Francisco,” Joe said. Graham tried another tack:
“How did he like Joe McCarthy and the rest of the Yankees?
“ ‘Fine.’
“What did Joe [McCarthy] say to him when he reported?
“ ‘Nothing much.’ ”
DiMaggio wasn’t frightened of New York, of Joe McCarthy or the Yankees—nor of shrugging off an interview with some big-cheese columnist. True, Joe was green, a rookie, just twenty-one; but he’d already seen how these press guys worked. He played, and they wrote about him. He sat out, and they wrote feverishly. He talked, and they wrote what he said. If he said less, they wrote even more.
Joe didn’t have much schooling—no education in media, of course. But there were some things he’d learned as a kid. And there was one thing he could spot a mile away—knew it as a birthright, saw it in North Beach every day . . . and saw it now. Whenever he held back, or walked away, he could see it: in the way these writers came after him, in their smiles, their eyes, in their columns of newsprint. Joe DiMaggio knew everything there was to know about guys on the make.
Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (Touchstone Book) Page 10
