56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports

by Kennedy, Kostya

  Chapter 2

  One Day In May

  “I’M IN THE worst slump I’ve ever experienced in all my years in the game,” DiMaggio had told reporters a week into May, and even now, 10 days later, his struggles showed little sign of letting up. “My timing is off,” he said. “You come up saying to yourself, ‘Here’s one that’s going out of the park.’ The pitch comes in and it looks like a fat one and then instead of smashing it the way you want to, you only get a piece of it.”

  There had been other, lesser slumps, of course. Just the season before, in August 1940, DiMaggio had endured a nuisance of a spell when, swing as he might, he could not seem to drive the ball; he felt something strangely amiss. He hadn’t been scuffling for long, though, when one evening at dinner Dorothy glanced at him from across the table and said’shyly, hesitantly’that she thought she could help. DiMaggio smirked, cocked his head, put down his fork and leaned back in his chair.

  He looked back at his wife, and his eyes narrowed slightly. A faint, unbidden annoyance came over him. With his long fingers DiMaggio gathered up the napkin off his lap and wiped the corners of his mouth. There was a tightness now in the room. She thinks she can help. He silently weighed the notion.

  Dorothy attended just about every game at Yankee Stadium, always sat in the same seat behind home plate, a little over to the third base side, a few rows up. “I noticed something at the ballpark today,” she said in her quiet voice.

  When he’d met her, in 1937 on the set of a movie they both were in, she was a 19-year-old showgirl. Beautiful, blonde and smart, eyes wide and shining. She didn’t even know who Joe DiMaggio was then, didn’t care a whit for baseball. Three years later it was still a new game to Dorothy. Hitting, or anything else that went on at the place where Joe took care of business, was barely something she would ask him about, let alone offer advice on. But she was doing it now. DiMaggio looked over the table at Dorothy’s broad, pretty face, saw the tentative way she held her hands, her nervousness. Steam rose up from the plates of ravioli that Dorothy had made. Their wedding had been nine months before, in San Francisco.

  DiMaggio’s smirk softened into a smile and the hardness faded from his eyes and he let the air out of his chest. “What did you notice?” he asked.

  “Your hitting,” she began. “The number five on your shirt is in a different position. I don’t see it the same way anymore. You’re not swinging the way you used to.”

  In an instant DiMaggio knew that Dorothy was right, that she was onto something about his form that he could fix. The next morning at Yankee Stadium DiMaggio worked on his stance, realized that he was striding just slightly too much, an involuntary, inchlong lunge that upset his balance. His body wasn’t turning with its usual force, his follow-through was not quite complete, and the misstep had put an unwanted wrinkle in his smooth swing. DiMaggio shortened his step to the way it had been, the way he liked it, and after swinging for a while, after a good, long session of batting practice before the game, he felt natural again, comfortable. That afternoon he went 3 for 4. And he kept on hitting from there. With that’simply if improbably’that slump was over.

  This one, though, he could not shake. For nearly four weeks he’d been hitting under .200. Only 14 hits in his last 73 at bats, one of the numbers guys around the clubhouse had informed him. You’re pressing, just relax, he had taken to telling himself before coming to the plate, reminding himself again and again to keep on swinging, that’s how you’ll come out of it. And yet every at bat felt like a wholly new start to DiMaggio, and every out a different kind of failure. Whenever he’d get things right for an at bat or two—his swing in sync, the barrel of his bat passing through the air just where it was meant to be—the next time up he’d again hit one off the handle or stub one off the end of the bat.

  The day after that awful 13–1 loss to the White Sox, DiMaggio had smashed a home run deep over the Yankee bullpen and into the leftfield bleachers, a distant place where only two men alive, he and the Tigers’ Hank Greenberg, had ever hit a baseball. Later, in the ninth inning of that game, DiMaggio tripled to the wall and the Yankees pulled out a 6–5 win.

  But the next afternoon, against Chicago’s tall, fastballing righthander Johnny Rigney, DiMaggio only singled harmlessly in the second inning, one hit in four times to the plate. It had rained earlier in the day, canceling batting practice and delaying the start of the game by more than 10 minutes. The weather kept the Saturday crowd to an undersized 10,272, among them New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia sitting up front and rooting from his usual box. Twice in the closely contested game DiMaggio left two men on base, grounding out in the middle innings and then, in the eighth, popping a ball high into the dull gray sky to end a Yankee threat. When the 3–2 loss was complete, DiMaggio, the Yankees and even the mayor were happy just to have the White Sox leave town.

  Now the St. Louis Browns were in for the first of three, and as the players did their fielding drills before the game and DiMaggio shagged his fly balls in the outfield he noticed that a stiff wind blew, snapping straight the U.S. flag above the monument to Miller Huggins in left centerfield. It was a Sunday, the 18th of May, and a pregame program was scheduled at Yankee Stadium to honor what the President had proclaimed as I Am An American Day across the nation. A few miles south in Central Park, a massive crowd of more than 750,000 had assembled on the Mall. On this day it didn’t matter if you believed the United States should get more deeply involved in the war that was now thundering through Europe or if you felt it was better to just stay out of it. All that mattered was to be patriotic. It was a day of simple, essential affirmation that after all the country had been through—those dark years when former bankers and businessmen sold apples on the streets, or found ditches to dig; when the long, cold sweep of joblessness and fear left no strata of society unharmed—and with all that the country now faced, the American people had something they could hold on to: each other.

  A few days before, 2,000 children had shown up at City Hall, given Mayor La Guardia a petition upon which citizens had pledged their allegiance to America. The staggering volume of the signatures, some four and a half million collected in a matter of days, moved the mayor’s voice to crack as he stood on the steps thumbing through a sheaf of pages, and wishing, he said, that “the entire country” could see what these children had done.

  The mayor was among those on the Mall now as the mass of New Yorkers literally pledged allegiance, rhythmically and in determined unison, saying the words, “… one nation, indivisible…” Speakers and entertainers followed—comedian Eddie Cantor who said, looking out from the rise at the rows upon rows upon rows of faces, that the crowd was so large it reminded him of his wife Ida’s relatives coming for dinner; and the beloved tap dancer Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, who between his frisky shuffles went to the microphone and vowed that if Hitler ever dared to come to Harlem that he, Bojangles Bill himself, would personally make sure that the Führer never got past Yankee Stadium.

  Cheers kept going up all afternoon. There were songs and there were serious speeches. La Guardia said some words as did President Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, who wasn’t shy about his view on the war. “We must give the British everything we have,” he said. “Everything needed to beat the life out of the common enemy.” Ickes added: “We must know our will.”

  Scenes like this played out all across the country. In Chicago 125,000 came together at Soldier Field to hear speeches and to see the great actress Helen Hayes read some patriotic passages; in Boston 100,000 flooded onto the Common. Tens of thousands more assembled in Los Angeles, Detroit, Milwaukee. Church sermons in hamlets from coast to coast took as their theme the importance and righteousness of American values, preaching, most assuredly, to the choir.

  In Washington D.C., there was a ball game to be played, the Senators hosting the White Sox, and soldiers came out in uniform to Griffith Stadium. The Senators afforded old Jimmy Dykes an honor there too, allowing him to be the one
to walk out into the outfield before the game and raise the U.S. flag. Then everyone, the people in the stands, and the two teams of ballplayers and the long rows of soldiers side-by-side on the field, quieted for the singing of God Bless America.

  At Yankee Stadium a brass band played as Phil Rizzuto fielded the last of his pregame ground balls at shortstop then jogged in and clicked down the steps into the dugout. He was now part of the second-string practice unit that included another rookie, Jerry Priddy, at second base, Buddy Rosar catching and the Yankee bat boy, Timmy Sullivan, helping out at first. None of them left their gloves on the field, as the starting players would. The beginning of the game was maybe half an hour away. A Bronx politician, with a few men in suits around him, stepped out and prepared to address the crowd, to talk about the “advantages of the American way.”

  Rizzuto, a shy wisp of a kid, ambled over to take his new spot in the dugout beside McCarthy. DiMaggio felt for the rookie, now relegated to the bench. McCarthy had indeed not stopped at the Henrich benching. Rizzuto, whose batting average was down to .246, and Priddy, overmatched from the beginning of the season and hitting just .204, had both been relieved of the starting jobs they’d won in the spring. “We’ll let the kids look around, sit and observe things,” McCarthy said, explaining his decision. “They’re better than they have been so far, but the heaviest type of pressure has been on them.” So veteran Frankie Crosetti was back in at shortstop, and Joe Gordon back at second base after a trial at first.

  Priddy’s benching DiMaggio could understand. His poor hitting seemed to be affecting him in the field too, and at 21, loud and cocky, he had some learning to do about the Yankee way. In late March, Priddy had boasted that he was already better than Gordon, who’d been a 100-RBI man and an All-Star two years running. Priddy’s résumé—40 homers and a .319 batting average over two years in the farms with Kansas City, smooth on the double-play turn’had inspired the Yankees to move Gordon to first base at the start of the season to make room for the heady kid. A month later that decision seemed rash. Priddy just wasn’t working out.

  Rizzuto, though, he was special, had something the older players liked. Scrawny and determined, he’d been the MVP of the American Association the year before, hit .347, stole 35 bases, wound up on the cover of The Sporting News. But for all the stories that were written to praise him, all the hullabaloo when he arrived in New York, Rizzuto never flaunted the hype, never called attention to himself’until you saw him play. He gathered ground balls as gently as if scooping up a baby into his skinny arms. He battled at the plate, fouling off the nastiest pitches and, until his recent struggles, finding some way to get on base. In the minors Rizzuto had been nicknamed Scooter for the way he glided about on the ballfield. He ran the bases with an alertness and an edge that DiMaggio—who covered the basepaths more determinedly and efficiently than anyone, anywhere’approved of. Rizzuto honored the veterans, and sought their counsel, respectfully probing Crosetti for bits of game-day wisdom.

  He took everything in stride that first March day in the locker room in Florida, when, before practice, Lefty Gomez seized upon Rizzuto’s diminutive stature, his baby face and, loud enough for everyone to hear, told Rizzuto to “grab your scooter and let’s go!” He took the ribbing naturally and at barely 5′ 6″ he was used to jokes about his size. Rizzuto was not much surprised when Gomez, at it again on a different day, rushed in carrying a footstool while Rizzuto was showering in the clubhouse. Gomez was concerned, he told Rizzuto, that the “water doesn’t get ice cold by the time it reaches you.”

  During the early days around the batting cage Rizzuto scarcely got the chance to hit. The veterans, guys like George Selkirk, Charlie Keller, squeezed him out, running through the batting order again and again and indifferently skipping Rizzuto who stood away from the pack, timid and helpless and bat in hand until DiMaggio, having had enough, said quietly between batters that he wondered how well the rookie could hit. And that was it. The sea of pinstripes parted. Rizzuto came up next.

  He adored DiMaggio, followed him shyly around, stared at him doing the simplest things, the cool way he would pull out his locker-room stool, and sit down on it, legs crossed at the ankles, take a cigarette from the clubhouse guy and smoke. DiMaggio wasn’t only the best ballplayer Rizzuto had ever played with, DiMaggio had class, he could see that. There was an elusiveness about him, a kind of majesty in all that he did. Rizzuto even liked to watch DiMaggio shave.

  Rizzuto cried when McCarthy benched him, the sharp news, after his sudden rise, simply too much to bear. When he stood at his locker that day, working and reworking the belt around his waist, keeping himself busy and trying to look down, his pain seemed true and sincere and his teammates let him alone, held back on the teasing. Other Yankees had been subject to McCarthy’s rookie benchings in seasons past. Nine years earlier, Crosetti had cried too.

  On the bench, Rizzuto would spend the games beside the manager listening as McCarthy dinned into him the nuances of the game, pointing out the poise that Crosetti showed whatever the situation, and just as importantly in McCarthy’s mind, showing Rizzuto that even big league opposition wasn’t without flaws, thus assuring the rookie that he belonged. “I’ve learned a lot already,” Rizzuto said a couple of days into his ordered rest. He added hopefully: “They’ve told me to keep my ears and eyes open and my chin up.” Rizzuto did as he was told and at night, when sleep wouldn’t come, he thought about just how he would go about things in the games when he got back in there.

  The pregame pageantry marched on and clusters of clouds passed through the sky, but the rain of recent days had not returned. A fine spring sunshine bathed the murmuring crowd, listening now, along with the Yankees and Browns, to the patriotic songs. What a voice Lucy Monroe had! High-pitched and clear and layered with the sense of deeply felt emotion, so that you just wanted to shush your neighbor and close your eyes to try to listen more intently, to climb deeper inside the voice and the words.

  She had already sung for the masses at Central Park, then come up to the Stadium and now, standing behind home plate, gripping gently the microphone in its stand, Monroe had both of the teams, and the more than 30,000 who had come out for the game, in her thrall. “Keep the Home Fires Burning” she sang, the old, heart-wrenching number from the first World War, and it was impossible then for the fans and the players not to think about the current war, and what might become of any or all of them.

  The Tigers’ Greenberg had already gone into the service, and Rizzuto had been among the big leaguers summoned to a local draft board. No wife, no children, good health. Only because he was supporting his aging parents did Rizzuto get a deferment, a ruling of 3-A. He would last the summer, it seemed, but Rizzuto was acutely aware that when the armed forces came calling in earnest, it would not be long before they were calling him. Hundreds of thousands of young men had been brought in and rated and hundreds of thousands had been conscripted; U.S. soldiers weren’t yet dispatched anywhere en masse, though there was a sense that, inevitably, they would be.

  “Keep the home fires burning/While your hearts are yearning/Though your lads are far away/They dream of home.” The song, especially as Monroe sang it, demanded optimism—“there’s a silver lining … turn the dark cloud inside-out”—and coming as it did on this particular afternoon, the music sent goose bumps fluttering across the necks and shoulders in the crowd, so that when Monroe finished, the stadium burst into wild applause and cheers that didn’t wane until she tossed her brown hair back behind her shoulders and again took hold of the microphone to begin the song that everyone wanted to hear. “On the street, in the home/In a crowd, or a-lone … Shout! Wherever you may be/I am an American, I am from the heart of me.”

  And nearly everyone knew the words, and nearly everyone did shout upon the lyrics’ command, so that the stadium seemed to sway and a feeling of togetherness and purpose touched the crowd. Lucy Monroe delivered the final chorus, lingering—“I am an American/I am … every part of me”’the
n she bowed and waved to all sides and walked off as a boy ran out and carried away the microphone. Gomez threw his last warmup pitches to Bill Dickey, and the Browns shortstop, Johnny Lucadello, took his stance.

  The Yankees had their way in this game—St. Louis was again a bad team this season, outclassed. DiMaggio had three base hits in the 12–2 thrashing, though in truth they were softly gained. On one slow-moving ground ball, third baseman Harlond Clift might have done a cleaner job of fielding and thrown DiMaggio out; another hit was more a pop fly than the hard-hit double it would look like in the newspaper box score, a ball that the Browns’ rightfielder really could have had. DiMaggio got on base on a catcher’s interference too. The batting average ticked upward, but the slump was hardly over.

  In the field DiMaggio’s attention to the wind was rewarded. Twice he took off and caught balls on the dead run, erasing certain extra-base hits by Don Heffner in the second inning and Chet Laabs in the fifth, and each time bringing the crowd to its feet. The men clapped or punched a fist into their opposite palm. Whoa, how does he get to balls like that? Every time! DiMaggio and the other outfielders could run without caution again now that the grass was no longer wet from the rain. Even the sometimes-muddy edges of the ball field, the stretches of dirt by the stands in foul grounds, were all but dry, the afternoon sun having baked away the mire.

  Chapter 3

  Perfect, Imperfect

  THE TIGERS WERE pitching to him. That was a surprise. Winning run on second—Henrich—no outs in the bottom of the ninth and the righthanded reliever Al Benton looking in for the sign. Usually in this spot they’d be walking DiMaggio intentionally. It’ll be the slider, I’ll bet, DiMaggio thought. Benton, 6′ 4″ and 215 pounds, threw hard, and lately he’d honed his slider into one of the league’s toughest pitches; even good hitters couldn’t help but drive it into the ground. Benton’s slider was all the more reason to put DiMaggio on and set up the next guy, Charlie Keller, for a double play. But no. Tigers’ manager Del Baker wanted DiMaggio, thought Benton could get him out with the game on the line. The Stadium crowd was alive—two Yankee runs had already come across in the inning, tying the game at 4–4.