Joe DiMaggio

by Jerome Charyn

  Rickey realized that baseball was nothing but a mirror, with its own little distortions, of American society, a society shaken by the war. Blacks had been ostracized in the army and navy, often confined to segregated units, but they had fought and died alongside white soldiers, and little by little had begun to break through the military’s own labyrinth of racial barriers. Sooner or later, desegregation would have to come to baseball, in spite of the owners or the reticence and ambiguity of the players themselves. And so by the end of the war, the Mahatma had already dreamed up his Great Experiment—to crash through baseball’s glass ceiling and bring a black ballplayer to the majors. If he failed, if the ballplayer he chose was rejected by the Dodgers themselves, or by the other clubs in the National League, and by the fans, he would hurt the chance of future black ballplayers. And Rickey wasn’t about to lose.

  Even if Josh Gibson had been younger and in his prime, the Mahatma would probably not have chosen him. Josh was too volatile a player, too unsophisticated, and might have fought an entire dugout or turned morose at all the derision heaped upon his head. Rickey needed a much more subtle target, even if the target wasn’t the very best prospect in the Negro leagues. He settled upon Jackie Robinson, who was a little past his prime but hadn’t lived as segregated a life as Josh. Robinson had played baseball, basketball, and football against whites, was a star halfback at UCLA, with a fierce desire to win and “steely hard eyes that would flash angry in a heartbeat,” according to actor Woody Strode, Robinson’s teammate on the Bruins. He also served from 1942 to 1944 as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, where he was charged with insubordination for refusing to move to the back of a segregated military bus. He was a kind of daredevil who could deal with taunts and racial slurs.11

  “Luck is the residue of design,” Rickey loved to repeat, and it was as if he had willed Jackie Robinson into being, had welded him together with his very persona. Of course it wasn’t true. Robinson was much shrewder and tougher than most of the people around him, white or black, and believed in the wonder and magic of his own possibility in spite of all the bitterness he had to face. “I went to bed one night wearing pajamas and woke up wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform.” But he had been in training for that transformation all his life. He would soon become the most visible man in America after crooner Bing Crosby. But he’d already been famous at UCLA. And if a tiny cabal of his own teammates was against him, he rode right over them. When the leader of the cabal, outfielder Dixie Walker, presented manager Leo Durocher with a signed petition, Durocher scoffed and said, “Wipe your ass with it!”12

  How could the Mahatma have known that Robinson would develop into the premier second baseman of the National League? He just wanted Robinson to last the season without too many mishaps. Robinson did much more than that. He created havoc around him, confusing the opposition with his base running and his unorthodox batting style, where he seemed to chip away at the ball while he stood on his pigeon toes; Robinson seemed everywhere at once, and if he got a hit, he was capable of stealing one, two, or three bases at a time.

  There had been talk of an all-out war against Robinson, a sit-down strike, but nothing came of it. Bench jockeys ridiculed him without mercy, and he continued to hit and run. One of the first players to greet Robinson on the field, to shake his hand, was Hank Greenberg, who had just been traded to the Pirates. Greenberg had been taunted from the time he joined the Tigers in 1933. Outfielder Jo-Jo White, his own teammate, had once stared at him in amazement, believing that all Jews were supposed to wear horns. But Greenberg was a Jewish Goliath at six feet four and a half, and there weren’t many players who would dare tangle with him. Also, there wasn’t any Mahatma telling him not to fight back. Robinson may have become an All-Star, and certainly the most daring base runner of his time, but he paid a terrific price. He would develop high blood pressure and diabetes, and would be dead at fifty-three. Baseball had killed Jackie Robinson, even if more slowly than it killed Josh. But he was a hero in a way that Gibson could never be. Josh would remain obscure in spite of the myths that grew around him, while Robinson was the engine for one of the defining events in America in the twentieth century, played out on a baseball diamond in 1947.

  4.

  The season was much more mundane in the American League, which had no visionary moguls and took much, much longer to integrate, except for the Cleveland Indians, who snatched Larry Doby from the Newark Eagles—winners of the 1946 Negro World Series—eleven weeks after Robinson put on a Dodger uniform. Doby was subjected to much the same taunts and slurs but received little of Robinson’s attention in the media: the second black American in the majors was no longer a novelty. Bench jockeys from the Bombers probably rode him a little less than other teams did. They didn’t have to. The Indians sat in fourth place, while the Yankees were the real contenders. DiMaggio was batting over .300 again, had a couple of long streaks. Crippled or not, he was the “soul” of the team. “When I turned around and saw Joe in center field, looking tense and ready for the pitch, I knew we could win, even if we were losing by nine runs in the eighth inning,” said Phil Rizzuto.13

  It hadn’t been easy for the Jolter. He had two operations on his heel before the season started. He hopped around with a cane, his heel “stitched up like a bad shoemaker had fixed it.” He missed the first four days of the season, had to put on a padded slipper. Then, like some gaunt ghost, he appeared at the ballpark in Philadelphia, threw himself back into the lineup, and slapped a three-run homer to win the game. The Bombers never faltered after that, even though the Jolter had to sit out a few other series.14

  It wasn’t a fabulous season for him, not in terms of the record book. For the second year in a row he failed to knock in 100 runs. But the Yankees won the pennant by 12 games, and the Jolter received his third Most Valuable Player award (one vote ahead of Williams).

  The Red Sox were up in arms; they reviled the Yankees and every sports writer in America who had voted for DiMag. Their Kid had a stupendous season. For the second time he had won the Triple Crown, with 32 homers, 114 runs batted in, and a batting average of .343, and for the second time he was robbed, first by Joe Gordon in ’42 and now by the Jolter. But Ted Williams didn’t have the same fire to win. If the Thumper went 3 for 4, he would lament over his one lost hit, stuck as he was inside the world of his own statistics. But if DiMaggio had a bad day and the Bombers didn’t win, he would blame himself and couldn’t be consoled.

  “If the Yankees lost, Joe thought it was his fault,” recalled Toots Shor. “He’d come by on those days and would send the doorman in to get me. . . . He would stand outside and sort of hide, hoping nobody would see him. Then the doorman would come up to me and say, ‘Joe’s out there.’ I always knew what he wanted. I would go out and we would just walk. Up and down the street, up to Fifth Avenue to look in the windows, just walk. No talking, not a word said about the game or my family or anything.”15

  Around the clubhouse or at Tootsie’s he was called “the Daig,” short for Dago. That’s what Yankee veterans had called him when he first came up and that’s what he called himself: the Dago. He had his own fan club on the team, players who adored him and began to mimic his moves, to do everything the way the Dago did. One of these worshipers was “fireman” Joe Page, a relief pitcher with an incredible fastball that jumped all over the place. His pitching (as well as his life) was wild and erratic at the beginning of the season, and he was almost sent down to the minors several times. Only the Dago could keep him calm. Page would scour the clubhouse for DiMaggio. “Where’s Daig? Did anybody see the Dago come through here?” And when the fireman had the biggest win of his career, in the seventh game of the World Series (against the Brooklyn Dodgers), he said, “I knew I had to do it for Joe.”16

  That could have been the Yankee war cry in ’47, right through the climactic game with the Dodgers. It was the first Series ever televised, even if it could be seen only in the bars and hotels of several eastern cities. And DiMaggio would make th
e one indiscretion of his entire career in front of this audience. It was during the sixth game of the Series, and the Bums were leading 8–5 at Yankee Stadium. The Jolter came up to bat in the bottom of the sixth with two men on base. He hit a long fly toward the Dodger bullpen, 415 feet away, that looked like a sure home run. Joe was already at second base when journeyman outfielder Al Gionfriddo came out of nowhere, and “in an act of God,” stumbled, stuck out his glove, and caught the ball just as it was careening over the bullpen’s wire fence. And with seventy thousand fans at the Stadium and three million watching him on the tube, Joe DiMaggio kicked at the dirt near second with such power that he “smacked the base loose from its hinges,” according to Yankee pitcher Eddie Lopat. No one had ever glimpsed the Jolter’s feelings inside a ballpark before—the anger and the tension at a catch that was worthy of DiMaggio himself.17

  5.

  Critics generally agree that it was one of the fiercest and most evenly matched World Series ever played. It was the first time Jackie Robinson would face Joe DiMaggio on the field. The Jolter batted .231 in the Series, with two home runs; Robinson batted .259. Neither of them dominated, but it didn’t matter. They were there. And yet Josh Gibson’s words to Joe DiMaggio lay like a lament over the Series itself.

  “C’mon, Joe, talk to me, why don’t you talk to me?”

  The Yanks would be one of the last teams in baseball to bring up an African American. The feeling among their owners and management was that “a black player was not a Yankee type.” It was a white-bread world, full of prejudice and the fear that black players would somehow taint the Bombers, that they would suck in droves of black fans, “who would in turn scare away the good middle-class white fans.”18

  DiMaggio was a vivid part of that white-bread world, very much a Yankee of his time, entombed in the Bronx. There was never a word from Joltin’ Joe about Jackie Robinson. That blindness was far more hobbling than his heel. And this is what lends such poignancy to Josh Gibson’s remark. Joe’s self-absorption tarnishes our sense of him as a hero and ties him to a rough-and-tumble dynasty in the Bronx that had morphed into an elitist club of white champions. There’s no way in the world that Joe or any of the Yankees could ever have talked to Josh Gibson.

  And what a multitude of riches and talent the Yanks would lose. In 1949 they sent their scout Bill McCorry to have a look at a young ballplayer on the Birmingham Black Barons. McCorry wasn’t impressed. “I got no use for him or any of them. I wouldn’t want any of them on the club I was with. I wouldn’t arrange a berth on the train for any of them.”19

  That young ballplayer was Willie Mays!

  The Say Hey Kid might well have been better off across Harlem River at the Polo Grounds, where manager Leo Durocher built up his own little dynasty with the help of Willie and two other veterans of the Negro leagues, Monte Irvin and Hank Thompson. But whatever Willie’s fate, we’re still left with the ghost of Josh Gibson. And we no longer have to hop around the usual shibboleths over how good Gibson was, whether he could have hit against Carl Hubbell, or whether his mythic home runs could have measured up to Hank Greenberg’s or the Babe’s. Instead, we have to scrutinize a game so colorblind before 1947 that it condemned to oblivion some of its very best players. White baseball now seems like a narrow garden, an antique world of pretense that sang its own sunny songs and fooled itself into believing it was the best.

  FIVE

  The Wounded Warrior

  1.

  It was sort of his twilight, but not quite. He couldn’t hurl rockets any more from center field to home plate. Even in his fanciful autobiography, Lucky to Be a Yankee, first published in 1947 (and revised in ’49 and ’57), he wrote that his throwing arm troubled him all through 1946. “In 1947, it got steadily worse and I found that I was good for about one throw a game and not even that all the time.” It’s hard to believe that the rest of the league was naïve enough never to stumble onto the truth that the Jolter had a lame arm, and wouldn’t have tested that arm by having runners try to stretch a single into an extra-base hit.1

  I suspect that he still could throw a rocket when he had to, but that it hurt him with every throw (sometimes his arm was so sore after a game that Joe Page had to help him comb his hair). From 1948 on he seemed to play in constant pain, whether it was calcium chips in the elbow of his throwing arm or bone spurs in either heel. He had become the Yankees’ wounded warrior, whose presence on the field was essential to the team. The warrior had to be taped up before every game. “I feel like a mummy,” he said.2

  He’d become a chain smoker and a coffee hound, would have a cigarette and half a cup of coffee between innings. He was a notorious cheapskate and wouldn’t spend a dime unless he had to; whenever he visited a nightclub, somebody else picked up the tab. But he was generous with his teammates, and the few times he had dinner with them, it was always his treat. “You eat with the Dago, the Dago pays.” These were often the only words he spoke during the entire evening—he was always distant, in a dark mood.3

  Everybody seemed to want a piece of the Dago, whether it was his autograph or some sponsorship deal. “There were so many people after him, night and day, that the ball park seemed the only place he could really rest,” according to Yankee third baseman Bobby Brown. But even out there in his own alley in deep center he began to look like a haunted man, someone who was already too much of a myth to play like Joe DiMag, the Daig of flesh and blood. He was the Jolter, who always had to shake and rouse, to stir something in us that no one else could. And he did.4

  Hank Greenberg, in a documentary film about himself, swears that Babe Ruth was the only one who could mesmerize a stadium in the middle of batting practice. But he couldn’t have seen the Jolter in ’47 or ’48. We sat like pieces of wood and watched him through the smoky haze as he took his cuts at the plate. We weren’t the only ones. His teammates watched him, and so did the other players, silent in their dugout or along the foul lines, not wanting to disturb his swing. There was nothing, no game at all, not even the suspense of baseball, until the Jolter finished swinging. And the whole damn ballpark, from the smallest kid to the oldest lady, from a loudmouth car salesman to the left fielder on the St. Louis Browns, must have had a similar belief, that we were tied to DiMaggio by some taut, invisible string, that he belonged to no one in the world but us; and we had to be vigilant: should we shut our eyes for a second, the string might break, and DiMaggio would shatter into shards of glass.

  2.

  He would have his best season since ’41, would play as if there had never been a war, would bat .320 and lead the league in homers, 39, and runs batted in, 155. But the Yanks were caught in a three-way race with the Red Sox and the Indians; and Cleveland won the pennant in 1948 with some help from its two African American stars, Larry Doby and Satchel Paige, who claimed to be forty-one but might have been fifty. Rather than scare its white fans away, Cleveland broke all attendance records at 2,260,627 and it won the World Series against the all-white Boston Braves, 4 games to 2, with Doby batting .318.

  Babe Ruth had died during the season, after suffering from throat cancer. He’d had his own battle with fame; followed everywhere, he was still a forgotten man, “creating a stir whenever he appeared in public, but curiously neutered,” according to Creamer. He had wanted desperately to become a manager in the big leagues. Not a single club would hire him. The Babe believed there was a conspiracy, that he was being blackballed. He probably was. Owners were frightened of his boisterousness, of the attention he got.5

  He had created the modern Yankees, had built the club around his own sense of bravura, his brilliance with a baseball bat and his gift for publicity. The Bombers had little use for that bravura after he retired. Yet the same Yankee moguls would honor him the moment he died, feed off the power of his myth: the bad boy of baseball was suddenly “immortal.” He would lie in state at the Stadium while more than a hundred thousand fans paid their respects to the Bambino. Then his body was delivered to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, w
here six thousand mourners were waiting for him, with another eighty thousand outside in the rain. DiMaggio was “the only active player to take part in the services.”6

  What could DiMaggio have been thinking, he who had so little power to reflect? He was Ruth’s heir, the one who profited most from the Bambino’s mountainous celebrity, and from baseball’s need to find another such idol, different but still godlike, who could inherit some of Ruth’s great aura. He was “the Walloping Wop” until he went away to war, the juvenile who could hit, field, and run like no other, who obscured lumbering Lou Gehrig with his feats, had the popularity of a crooner or a film star rather than a center fielder in the lonely caverns of the Bronx. Songs and jingles would be written about Joltin’ Joe. And then he was shamed into joining the Army Air Corps. His wife dumped him for a stockbroker, lived in the Waldorf, and the nearest Joe ever got to battle was a heated pinochle game. He brooded, watched his career slip away, calculated the money he was losing while he was in uniform. And when the war was over, he was jolted back to baseball. He didn’t know what to expect.