After some more questions, the large room suddenly went dark after fuses blew under the strain of all the cables and wires powering the newsreel and radio feeds. When the lights came back on after several minutes, Joe was gone.
The heir to Ruth and Gehrig, DiMaggio had personified a certain graceful nobility as well as the Yankees aura of success and invincibility during his relatively short career, which spanned 1936 to 1951, with three years out for World War II. In Joe’s thirteen seasons of supple but sparkling defensive play and prodigious clutch hitting, the Yankees won an astonishing ten pennants and nine World Series, a record that served only to put a sheen on his skills and reputation and define him as a winner. DiMaggio came to transcend baseball as a cultural icon: the Hemingway hero, the Joltin’ Joe celebrated in Simon and Garfunkel lyrics, the megawatt star who married his equal in Marilyn Monroe. In his latter days, he assumed less dignified roles as the omnipresent Mr. Coffee TV pitchman and, finally and less visibly, the rapacious memorabilia hawker obsessed with making money.
DiMaggio’s acknowledgment of Williams at his farewell press conference was fitting, since the two were by far the dominant players of their era—baseball’s golden age—and came to be joined at the hip in fan discourse. During their careers and into their retirements, there were endless debates about who the better player was and who was most valuable to his team, and both men remained rivals for the rest of their lives. For Ted, the rivalry was friendly. For Joe, it was fierce.
The two were opposites in many respects.
DiMaggio was shy, backward, and hardly spoke at all. Traveling in a car across the country in 1936 to his first spring training as a Yankee with fellow San Franciscans Tony Lazzeri and Frankie Crosetti, Joe never uttered a word until he was asked if he would like to share the driving, whereupon he said he didn’t drive.
Williams, on the other hand, was a chatterbox, with a boisterous, voluble personality and a curious mind. Joe, whose teammates called him the Sphinx, was stolid. Where Ted was explosive and colorful, Joe made it a point to conceal his emotions.
Ted came from a troubled home; Joe a strong one.
Joe always dressed immaculately, usually in a tailored suit and sporting a fresh manicure. As Roy Blount Jr. once wrote, when they saw Joe in the flesh, people would always say to him, “You look good, Joe.” And when the Clipper was out of earshot, the people would say to themselves, “Don’t he look good?”2
But the Kid was a rumpled, unmade bed who almost always wore a casual, open-collared shirt.
“DiMaggio was regal,” wrote Tom Boswell of the Washington Post. “But Williams was real. Joe D met the world like an icy myth of a starched man and liked it that way. Ted wore his rough edges and his opinions on his sleeve.”3
When Joe returned to Yankee Stadium after he retired, he would demand an appearance fee and insisted on being introduced last, after Mantle and other stars.4 Williams never made any such demands, and he stayed involved in the game far more than DiMaggio did. Joe didn’t have any modern-day favorites, the way Ted did in Tony Gwynn and Nomar Garciaparra—or any baseball causes, such as trying to get Dom DiMaggio and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson into the Hall of Fame.
Ted often argued with the fans, whereas Joe did what he could to cultivate their goodwill. Joe knew how to tip his hat deftly, just enough to acknowledge the crowd but not enough to annoy the other team. Ted, of course, did not tip his hat at all.
Both were proud. When photographers wanted a joint picture, they’d have to get both of them to meet in neutral ground, behind the backstop. Neither would go to the other’s dugout.
Ted enjoyed being Ted more than Joe enjoyed being Joe, and Williams had a more satisfying post-baseball life.
Ted never demanded sycophants and had a healthy distrust of people who sucked up to him. Joe could cut you off if you didn’t call him Clipper and insisted that everything be done for him. He was surrounded by coat holders and fixers; he expected freebies or others to pay his tab. Ted always insisted on picking up his own check and paying for others.
Joe smoked incessantly—even in the dugout. Ted never smoked. Joe loved nightclubs, Ted loved the outdoors.
Ted had a significantly longer career—seventeen full years and two partial seasons, which were interrupted by the Korean War. Since Williams aspired to be the world’s greatest hitter and was largely an indifferent fielder, DiMaggio, who was perhaps peerless in the outfield, certainly must be considered the better all-around player. But Williams was clearly the superior batter, statistically.
Ted was better in average, homers, and RBIs as well as on-base percentage and slugging percentage. Ted won six batting titles to Joe’s two, four home-run titles to Joe’s two, four RBI titles to Joe’s two, and six runs-scored titles to Joe’s one. Ted won two Triple Crowns, Joe none. Interestingly, though DiMaggio is generally thought to have been faster than Williams and a better base runner, Joe only had thirty career stolen bases compared to twenty-four for Ted, whose six runs-scored titles suggest he was at least not a liability on the base paths. DiMaggio was harder to strike out. He had only 369 strikeouts in 6,821 career at bats compared to Ted’s 709 in 7,706: Joe struck out just 5 percent of the time compared to Ted’s 9 percent.
Ted hit from the left, Joe from the right. Joe was still at the plate. Ted was jittery and moved his hips from side to side.
Ever the disciplined hitter, Ted took far more walks than Joe, who was willing to swing at bad pitches to drive in a runner. That was a key difference in their hitting philosophies, and even some of Ted’s teammates gave the edge to DiMaggio on this issue.
Eddie Pellagrini, a Red Sox utility infielder in 1946 and 1947, recalled that when he was stationed in Hawaii during World War II, playing ball with other major leaguers, the Williams-DiMaggio debate was a hot topic among Red Sox and Yankees players: “All the Red Sox guys would say, ‘Aw, shit, Williams is the better hitter.’ I’d say, ‘Williams might be a better hitter for average, but let me ask you a question. Who would you rather have up there with the winning run on third, Williams or DiMaggio?’ This was in forty-five or so. Ted had hit his .406. I said, ‘Joe would hit that ball when it was way outside. Williams would take the walk.’ I met DiMaggio at some Old-Timers’ Game years later.… I said, ‘With runners on base, you’d hit a ball that far outside.’ You know what he said? ‘Farther than that.’ He wanted to hit the winning run in. Even on a bad ball.”5 But Johnny Pesky, Ted’s longtime friend and teammate, dissented, saying simply that Williams was the better hitter and DiMaggio the better all-around player. “That’s the way we always settled it. I’ve been calling Ted the greatest hitter that ever lived for the last fifty years.”6
New York writers were given to fawning, over-the-top depictions of Joe. “He’s an artist in the exact sense of the word, a Cezanne with a finger mitt, a Van Gogh with a Louisville slugger,” gushed Joe Williams of the New York World-Telegram in 1948.7 And while Joe was protected by the press to conserve his standing as a hero, Williams was not. “The New York writers both respected [Joe] and feared that he would cut them off,” wrote David Halberstam in Summer of ’49. “They generously described his aloofness, born of uncertainty and suspicion, as elegance.… No such protection was offered Williams.”8 It was thanks in part to his good press and strong relationships with the writers that Joe won three MVPs to Ted’s two. Despite Ted’s .406, the 1941 vote in favor of DiMaggio was defensible because of Joe’s streak and because the Yankees won the pennant, but the narrow 1947 tally for DiMaggio, in the face of Williams’s overwhelmingly superior numbers, was not.
“The New York temperament rallied around Joe,” John Updike, the writer and longtime Williams admirer told author Peter Golenbock. “You cannot say that about the Boston fans and Ted. But the run of us certainly were for Williams, and admired him all the more because he seemed to be carrying all these handicaps, broken bones, angry Herald columnists, all these loud fans, double war service, divorce problems.… He never had a smooth season where he jus
t played ball and everything just fell into place.”9
As Ted made his mark in the Pacific Coast League he’d been touted by Lefty O’Doul, Joe’s manager with the San Francisco Seals, as the best prospect to come out of the PCL since… DiMaggio. Ted demurred: “I’ve never even seen DiMaggio play but from all I have read about him, I know I’m not in his class yet,” he said in 1938.10
The two first laid eyes on each other in Yankee Stadium on opening day of 1939, Ted’s first big-league game. Williams was a bit starstruck and made sure to play the Clipper deep. Over the years, they would play in nine All-Star Games together, but never became particularly friendly. There was that famous picture of the two sluggers in the clubhouse after Ted’s winning home run in the 1941 game, both beaming, Joe’s right arm around Ted, his left fist pumping Williams in celebration. But Joe would generally keep to himself at those affairs, not talking much to anybody.
“It was either Ted or it was me,” DiMaggio would say years later about the rivalry between him and Williams. “In a sense it was flattering. What people were saying was that, at the time, we were the two best.”11
Williams had been aware of DiMaggio since 1933, when Joe began starring with the San Francisco Seals. In 1936, the year Ted graduated from high school and joined the San Diego Padres, DiMaggio had his magnificent rookie season with the Yankees, batting .323 with 29 home runs and 125 runs batted in. That fall, Joe—the fisherman’s son who couldn’t stand the smell of fish and had spurned the entreaties made by his father, Giuseppe, to join him at sea—returned home to San Francisco and a hero’s welcome. Giuseppe’s fishermen friends hoisted him on their shoulders and carried him along the wharf in triumph.12
In his public comments about DiMaggio, Williams was unfailingly generous. “It took the big guy to beat me,” Ted said after Joe beat him out as the 1941 MVP. Of the streak, he said: “I believe there isn’t a record in the books that will be harder to break than Joe’s fifty-six games. It may be the greatest batting achievement of all.” And assessing Joe’s career, Williams wrote in one of his books on hitting: “I can’t say enough about DiMaggio. Of all the great major leaguers I played with or against in my 19 year career, he was my idol. I idolized Joe DiMaggio!”13
Joe’s public comments about Ted, on the other hand, ranged from gracious (“There’s no question in my mind—I’ve always said he was the greatest hitter in the game”14) to damning with faint praise (“Best left-handed hitter I’ve ever seen”15) to sharply critical (“He is a crybaby. You can write that for me”16*).
And, privately, when speaking to his friends or sympathetic writers, DiMaggio was contemptuous of Williams. “He throws like a broad and runs like a ruptured duck,” Joe would say. According to Joe’s agent and lawyer, Morris Engelberg, who in 2003 wrote a book entitled DiMaggio: Setting the Record Straight, the Clipper considered Gehrig, Ruth, Hornsby, and Cobb better hitters than Williams and was dismissive of Ted for never having won a championship. “ ‘Tell him to hold up his hands. Where are the rings?’ ” Engelberg wrote, quoting Joe.17 “He thought Williams was a selfish player because he concentrated on one thing, his hitting, and neglected to improve his base running and fielding.” Joe was also critical of Ted for taking too many walks. He even undercut Ted’s .406 achievement, telling pals that he could have achieved the milestone himself in 1939 but for his manager, Joe McCarthy. He’d been over .400 late in the season when he came down with an infection in his left eye. He couldn’t see the ball properly, but McCarthy insisted on playing him, and his final average dipped to .381. After the season, Joe said McCarthy told him he’d left him in the lineup because he did not want DiMaggio to be a “cheese champion.”
Williams would read about Joe’s private comments, or friends would tell him about them, but Ted would turn the other cheek—or even be sympathetic to Joe. “Ted would put a positive light to it, like, ‘Well, we were competitors; what do you want the guy to say?’ ” recalled Al Cassidy, Ted’s friend and the executor of his estate. “Or he’d sit there and say, ‘You know, I didn’t throw the ball very well.’ He justified why Joe would say it. I never knew Ted to be condescending to anybody, even in conversations like that, whether we said it or someone would say it to him.”18
When both men attended events, Ted would be solicitous of Joe and sometimes defer to him. Dan Wheeler, a friend of Williams, recalled the interplay between the two men at a New York fund-raising event for Major League Baseball in the ’90s: “We were in the green room. Joe Garagiola was the emcee. Sandy Koufax and Whitey Ford were in the room, and then Joe D came in, and Ted and Joe talked. Garagiola came over to Ted, and said, ‘Ted, we’re gonna introduce you last,’ and Ted said, ‘No, second to last.’ He pointed to Joe and said, ‘Introduce him last, this is his town.’ ”19
Jonathan Gallen, a memorabilia dealer turned investment banker who had business dealings with both Ted and Joe, confirmed the differences between what each man said about the other privately: “Joe D could never hand out a solid compliment. It would be like, ‘Yeah, he could hit, but he couldn’t field.’ The general tone of it all was negative. Ted loved people. He never ran them down. He saw the best in people. He loved baseball. He had a giant appetite for life. There was no one whose public perception was more different than the reality than Joe DiMaggio. The reverse was true of Ted. Joe was cheap as hell. Ted could not say no. Ted would give you everything, and Joe would give you nothing. Ted would want you to do well. But Joe—if you were making more than he thought you should off a deal, Joe wouldn’t do the deal. Joe was stingy and unhappy.”20*
As he got older, DiMaggio became fixated on making money from the memorabilia market. Williams dabbled in it, mostly as a way of reconnecting with his son, John-Henry, to whom he would entrust most of his business dealings.
The man who coordinated most deals for both men over a span of about fifteen years was one of the nation’s leading memorabilia brokers, Jerry Romolt of Arizona.
“I had Joe and Ted both, but I never promoted shows for them together,” Romolt said. “They were friendly when they crossed paths, in social activity, but they were not particularly close. Ted loved Joe, and Joe respected Ted. Joe was not a giving, gregarious person like Ted was; he was not as open as Ted was to him. Joe had a very competitive streak, and I know he was envious of Ted. Williams was my favorite of all time. He was rough on the exterior. But on a personal level there wasn’t a better human being. He was eminently reachable. There was an exposure to his soul that Joe could never bear.”21
Sometimes, DiMaggio would agree to do a promotional deal for a certain price, then insist on getting paid more when the event was actually being held.
Once, the Bowery Savings Bank in New York had hired DiMaggio to help it persuade Italian customers not to take their money elsewhere. “They called in Joe to reassure people, and to endorse the bank,” recalled former John Hancock Financial Services CEO David D’Alessandro, who at the time worked as an executive for an advertising firm retained by the bank. “He agreed to ten thousand dollars a day for two days. Then, after being told they had a full house and were turning people away, he said: ‘You guys are getting too good a deal,’ and raised his fee to twenty thousand dollars a day.”22
In his dealings with Bowery Savings, DiMaggio was always looking for ways to get extra money or merchandise, D’Alessandro said. For one advertising campaign, the bank wanted the Clipper photographed in his old Yankees uniform with assorted vintage equipment, so D’Alessandro arranged to borrow the precious gear from the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. “After the photo shoot, the son of a bitch started packing the stuff up and was going to walk away with it!” D’Alessandro said. “I said, ‘Mr. DiMaggio, we borrowed this from Cooperstown. We have to return it all.’
“Joe said, ‘What are you talking about? I played with these things.’ Only after I told him that I would lose my job if I didn’t return the stuff did he give it back. The problem with Joe—he was always nickel-and-diming. You had to send him two first-
class air tickets to bring him in from San Francisco. He would use one and cash the other.”23
According to Dr. Rock Positano, a leading podiatrist who began treating DiMaggio for his aching heels in the early 1990s and then became a Clipper intimate, Joe always stayed competitive with Williams and remained keenly aware of what Ted was doing.
“There was always this immense rivalry, even fifty years after they played ball,” Positano said. “Joe wouldn’t make a move without Ted doing it first—like going to the White House. Joe did not want Ted to get any of the publicity.” In 1991, President George H. W. Bush wanted to honor Joe and Ted on the fiftieth anniversary of the streak and Williams’s .406 milestone, and then fly them to the All-Star Game in Toronto aboard Air Force One. “Joe had a trepidation about it. He said, ‘Doc, Williams is doing it, so I’ve got to do it.’ ”
When DiMaggio introduced Rock to Ted at the Marriott Marquis hotel in New York, Positano was enamored with Williams and thought he was “larger than life.” But Joe didn’t want him to get too friendly with Ted. “He said, ‘Listen, Doc, he’s a little different than I am. He’s not as friendly as I am.’
“Joe really did not like Ted, that’s the bottom line. He respected him as a hitter. Joe thought Ted was a one-dimensional player. Just a hitter. He always judged his contemporaries on how many championships they won. But he did think Williams was the best natural hitter in baseball. And he had great respect for someone who served in the military.
“Ted was a lot easier on Joe than Joe was on Ted. I told Joe once, ‘Look, you have to be easier on this guy. He didn’t have an easy life. He was a war hero.’ Joe would say, ‘Listen, Doc, you have to understand, I’m still a competitor. Just because we stopped playing ball doesn’t mean we don’t have a competitive drive. I respect him as a hitter, but when it comes down to it, he should respect me more.’ ”24
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 43
