DiMaggio had never been as struck by a ballplayer as he was by Gehrig. His strength—the bands of muscles that ran across and up and down his broad back—was extraordinary. At bat Gehrig gave an impression of power greater than any DiMaggio had ever seen. Gehrig hit the ball with a straightforward authority, like a skilled carpenter addressing a nail. Over DiMaggio’s first two seasons Gehrig batted .353 and drove in 311 runs and the older players kept assuring Joe that Gehrig had been even better a few years back.
They lockered directly beside one another at Yankee Stadium, in the corner by the window, and though their conversations tended to be brief they exchanged words often. “Gee, that was a bad ball I hit at,” DiMaggio might say quietly, and Gehrig would tell him not to worry, he’d have another chance the next day. That simple optimism was reassuring to the young player.
DiMaggio was moved by the courtesy and graciousness with which Gehrig spoke to the writers who covered the team. Gehrig had been the second star to Babe Ruth for most of his career; now DiMaggio, from the other side of the country and wrapped in intrigue, had arrived and begun socking the ball, and the attention on Gehrig was diluted again. That did not seem to matter to him. Gehrig remained cheerful and patient and uncomplaining. He rarely spoke about other ballplayers to the press but he did speak to them about DiMaggio. “He has a marvelous disposition for a ballplayer,” Gehrig said once, early in DiMaggio’s career. “His expression never changes. You mark my words. He is going to be the greatest righthand hitter in baseball.”
At another time, in DiMaggio’s second season, Gehrig said: “Joe is the best defensive outfielder in the game. Once he is told where to shift for a certain batsman, he never has to be reminded.”
Such superlatives were uncommon from Gehrig, the writers and DiMaggio knew, and so they carried all the more weight.
Sometimes, when both of these quiet players were in the right mood and the Yankees were winning, they would horse around before a game, point their bats like rifles maybe, and, for the cameras, DiMaggio would reach out and muss the top of Gehrig’s hair. They would laugh together.
They laughed too on the morning after Gehrig made his gaffe on the radio. He’d gone on an interview program, hired to speak a few words in praise of the breakfast cereal Huskies. But at the crucial moment when the radio host asked him to name his cereal of choice Gehrig had said, in a slip-up, “Wheaties.” The flub made some news and the next day a reporter came by the lockers at the Stadium and asked Gehrig “What did you eat for breakfast?” And Lou, not yet catching on, had said frankly and in innocence, “Two eggs, a little toast.” Then DiMaggio, playing along with the writer, began to grin and said, “What about the things you put in a bowl, with sugar on top? Dandelions! Don’t you eat those?” DiMaggio was not often silly in this way, but around Gehrig it felt okay.
Now Gehrig’s locker was empty, had been for many months, day after day after day, and no one would ever use it or wear Gehrig’s number 4 for the Yankees again.
It had been right here in the Hotel Book-Cadillac, two years and one month earlier, that Gehrig had taken himself out of the lineup 2,130 consecutive games after he’d first stepped in. He had visited McCarthy in his room and said that he could no longer play well enough to stay in there, that his coming out of the lineup was for the good of the team. In the moments that followed McCarthy said to him kindly and with love in his voice, “Lou, fellows like you come along once in a hundred years.”
The manager had called the baseball writers into his room then to tell them the news that would be the next day’s headlines. “I’m sorry to see it happen,” said McCarthy, adding, in a notion that Gehrig would echo when he spoke to the writers himself: “Maybe the warm weather will bring him around.”
No one, not McCarthy nor Gehrig nor the men who followed the team, believed that.
Gehrig had been failing for some time. He had seemed empty in that spring training of ’39—Something is wrong, DiMaggio remembered thinking from the moment he saw him—and still emptier after the season began. His power had dramatically and inexplicably vanished. Even when Gehrig would strike the ball squarely on the sweet round flesh of the bat, it would not go anywhere. By early May, he was batting .143. Gehrig ran as if he had weights tied to his ankles. He was not yet 36 years old. Nobody had ever seen a player decline so shockingly fast.
Later Gehrig told DiMaggio why he had decided to quit when he did. In a game against the Senators, Gehrig had fielded a ground ball and thrown it over to the pitcher, Johnny Murphy, who stepped on first base. “Murph, Gordon and Dickey all gathered around me and patted me on the back,” Gehrig told DiMaggio. “ ‘Great stop,’ they all said together, and then I knew I was washed-up. They meant to be kind, but if I was getting wholesale congratulations for making an ordinary stop, I knew it was time to fold.”
All through the early part of the 1939 season the Yankees had been worried that Gehrig might get hurt on the field. Even after Gehrig’s trip to the Mayo Clinic soon afterward, after learning there that he had what the doctors diagnosed as a form of infantile paralysis, and even after his July 4, 1939, speech before the big crowd at Yankee Stadium, when Gehrig had called himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth” to have the kind of teammates he had and to have the love of the fans the way he did—and Babe Ruth standing there had put his arms around Gehrig and wept, genuinely forgetting, it seemed, the rift between them—even after that, Gehrig had stayed and traveled with the team all season.
DiMaggio could never bring himself to watch Gehrig getting dressed in his uniform. He would look away rather than see the great man fumble with his buttons and his belt, rather than see the look of confusion that time and again passed over Gehrig’s face. Gehrig played bridge and DiMaggio remembered the day when Lou for the first time could no longer shuffle the cards. Gehrig began trailing his left foot when he walked. The next season, 1940, he stopped coming regularly to the park. He would sometimes appear in the Yankee dugout before a game to watch batting and fielding practice but then when DiMaggio glanced over again, Gehrig, ghostlike, had disappeared.
Gehrig’s demise was still, for all the evidence, impossible to fully accept; in the recesses of many Yankee minds there lingered a small hope—“hope even against hope” as Ruth put it—that if anyone could overcome this insidious thing it would be Gehrig. No one else had his resolve or his resiliency. He had taken the field every single day for more than 13 seasons without respite. Long before his final at bat, back when he had played in “only” 1,800 of those 2,130 consecutive games, he had been commended by the league with a notice that lauded the qualities his teammates saw game after game and year after year: “Eighteen hundred games in spite of broken fingers, ribs, toes, sprained ankles, severe spike wounds, concussions of the skull as a result of being hit with a pitched ball, severe colds and bruises. No wonder the baseball world hails Lou Gehrig as the ‘Iron Man.’ ”
So now in the saddened lobby of the Book-Cadillac Hotel—as the Yankee players each took a few moments to organize a simple sincere message and went to the clerk’s desk to send telegrams to Eleanor, Lou’s wife—there remained a sense of disbelief. “I just can’t express my thoughts. I can’t realize Lou is gone,” said McCarthy. Dickey said that Gehrig was like a brother to him. Art Fletcher, the Yankees’ third base coach, said: “It is the most painful news that I have ever heard.”
The next morning DiMaggio and Dickey and Gomez were called over to Briggs Stadium to speak on a radio program that was honoring Lou and being aired across the country. When it was DiMaggio’s turn, he moved near the microphone and said: “I lost a very fine friend in Gehrig. Lou helped me more, just about as much as, anybody connected with baseball. I too, like Lefty, would like to join and offer my sympathy to his wife, mother and dad.”
DiMaggio listened to the others, like the Tigers’ president Walter Briggs and then the manager Del Baker, who talked about “what a grand hustler Lou Gehrig was. He should live as an inspiration to all ballplayers.
” Then the radio show went to Cleveland where the Red Sox were playing the Indians, and Jimmie Foxx said, “I am deeply grieved. He was the greatest hitter I ever saw.” Feller spoke too. Then the show went to New York where the Giants’ Carl Hubbell said some words and so did Mel Ott. The Babe came on the radio, and so too did the president of the National League, Ford Frick, who talked of the “emptiness that you feel in your heart.” When the show signed off, the host, the former big leaguer Ty Tyson, said simply, “Lou Gehrig has left us a heritage. May we do it proud.”
It was decided that McCarthy and Dickey would leave the team to attend the funeral, McCarthy right away, and Dickey after that afternoon’s game—a dreary one at which the flags flapped at half-staff and the outcome, a 4–2 Yankee loss despite DiMaggio’s fourth-inning home run, scarcely had meaning. There was none of the usual bench jockeying that day. When the Yankees players passed through the Detroit dugout on the way to their own, the Tigers just nodded solemnly and said “Tough about Lou” or “What a man Lou was, really.” Rudy York, the Tigers’ slugging first baseman whom Lou had taken time to mentor here and there, felt especially low.
The sky was a blackish gray and some rain had fallen, and the crowd of barely 3,500 was smaller than any for a Yankee game at Briggs Stadium in five years. Before Dizzy Trout’s first pitch of the game both teams and all those hardy fans stood in silence, hands or caps over their hearts, for a full minute. The flags hung at half-staff in every ballpark in the major leagues.
Gehrig had died in the Bronx, at home and in his bed, with Eleanor and his parents and his mother-in-law and a doctor beside him. Ed Barrow had been the last Yankee to visit him, three days before. They had sat together by the window and watched the Hudson River rippling by. As the Yankees president prepared to leave the house that afternoon, he kissed Gehrig on the head in farewell and Lou looked up at him the best he could and said in the voice that had gotten thick and raspy in the last few months: “I’ll beat it, Boss. Keep those Yankees up.”
The night before the funeral more than 5,000 people stood on the streets outside the tiny Christ Episcopal Church, just two blocks from Gehrig’s home, waiting to see his body as it lay in state. Children and oil-stained truck drivers and men in business suits and women in long dresses all filed heavily past the bier. Gehrig lay in a mahogany coffin with roses all around.
In the morning, Dorothy attended the funeral with Lefty’s wife, June. The women were good friends, both of them actresses of some stature before they’d married into baseball. On this day they shared a single umbrella. They wore dark clothes and simple hats, and before Dorothy and June even got to the Christ Church on that soggy morning to join the group of friends—a small, intimate group as the Gehrig family wished—Dorothy had wept. She knew what Joe thought of Lou, the respect that Gehrig had earned from everybody. Dorothy had heard that when the telegrams arrived at Gehrig’s house from the Yankee players, each man having sent his own, the stack of them as thick as a drugstore novel, Eleanor had finally collapsed. She had lived for two years knowing that Lou would die. Now Eleanor sat bereft and stoic, her topcoat still on, holding her handbag tightly to her side.
Oh, poor Eleanor, Dorothy thought. To go through that and now the loneliness. Poor Eleanor. Dorothy stayed near June all day. She was four and a half months pregnant now.
Among the honorary pallbearers were McCarthy and Dickey and members of the New York Parole Commission—where Gehrig had worked, appointed by Mayor La Guardia, for the last years of his life—and Bill (Bojangles) Robinson. Timmy Sullivan, the Yankees’ bat boy who played first base at practice, sat in a pew. “We need no eulogy because you all knew him,” said Reverend Gerald V. Barry, and soon the service was over and a phalanx of 20 cars drove out to a crematory in Queens beneath a steady, pelting rain. It had rained all morning on the vine-cloaked church, just as it had rained steadily in Detroit, washing out the Yankees-Tigers game. The Yankee players sat joyless in the big hotel and remarked at how fitting the downpour and the cancellation were. “They’re burying Lou along about now,” someone said. And it was hard, even if you didn’t go much for sentiment, not to look outside into the grayness and imagine that the sky was weeping too.
So it was in early June of 1941. Lou Gehrig was dead, and the United States stood on the precipice of war. A few days before, many millions of people had turned out for Memorial Day parades across the country, more than 500,000 in the heart of Manhattan alone, a showing unlike any since the first World War. President Roosevelt had just announced a call for a second mandatory draft registration, for those men who had turned 21 since the first registration, eight months before. That call-up had enlisted nearly 17 million potential soldiers. Now another 750,000 or more would soon be signing up.
On the day of Gehrig’s funeral, in Washington D.C., a congressman from New York City’s East Side, M. Michael Edelstein, stood up in the House and rebutted, passionately and angrily, the argument by the Mississippi congressman John Rankin that a “group of our international Jewish brethren are attempting to harass the President and Congress into plunging into the European war.” Edelstein responded swiftly and to the point, dismissing Rankin’s charge, chastising him for his ignorance and for using Jews as a scapegoat just as Hitler would do, and closing tersely with a reminder to that gentleman from Mississippi that “all men are created equal regardless of race, creed or color.” Then, even as the applause for his response still echoed through the House, M. Michael Edelstein walked out of the chamber and into the corridor and fell straight down, dead from a heart attack at age 53. Some 15,000 New Yorkers would come out for his funeral two days later. The reverend at Gramercy Park Memorial Chapel called Edelstein a “martyr at the altar of democracy and true Americanism.”
That was all part of the biting strangeness that hung over New York in those late spring days. A strangeness hung over the third-place Yankees too, an unquestionable void. And an uncertain feeling was settling upon all of America, upon Ocean City, N.J., where volunteers with binoculars patrolled the boardwalk looking out for suspicious boats; upon the smacks in San Francisco Bay, where state police had now begun to guard the waterfront, and upon so many other places in between.
Buffeted by the portentous Saturday newsreels (“In California, U.S. soldiers test the world’s largest war plane. . .”) and the sober newspaper headlines (ARE WE READY FOR WAR?) and the radio bulletins from home and abroad, the country still sought to maintain the rhythms of life. Millions of people listened on Sunday nights to Jack Benny and his whimsical comedy skits. They tuned in to Martin Block’s Make Believe Ballroom and danced along. Teenagers, the Hornets and Dukes and Best Bettes of Jackson Heights among them, hummed the radio hit, I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair on their way to school. Grown-ups packed into the movie theaters to see Citizen Kane, gripping and ingenious—a masterpiece, the critics agreed. In the daily comic strips, from Los Angeles to St. Louis to Cleveland and New York, people followed Popeye and Blondie, Flash Gordon and the Lone Ranger.
Some people followed the horse races and the great thoroughbred Whirlaway, who was galloping out to win the Triple Crown. Many followed boxing and the much anticipated Joe Louis-Billy Conn heavyweight title fight that was now just a couple of weeks off. Many, many people followed baseball, attendance having ticked upward again after the worst of the Depression years and more radio stations than ever were broadcasting the sport.
It was good to have all of those things, Benny’s wisecracks, Block’s frisky tunes, ballplayers like Feller and Williams and Joe DiMaggio and the suddenly surprisingly competent Brooklyn Dodgers; it was good to think about those things when you didn’t want to think more about the heavier matters at hand.
Many newspaper readers, on the same morning they had read about Gehrig’s death and learned about a bomber boat that had crashed, killing four in a test outside San Diego Bay, also read about the Yankees and their 7–5 loss in Cleveland. In The New York Times, coverage of that game appeared in a narrow single-column
article by James P. Dawson. The story was succeeded by a series of brief and random notes about the team, including, at the very end of the piece, just above the box score, a blurb that many readers surely missed or scarcely registered, which read in its entirety: “DiMaggio, incidentally, has hit safely in nineteen straight games.”
The View From Here
Thinking Can Be Dangerous
In its earliest stages, a hitting streak—Joe DiMaggio’s or anyone else’s—is not really a hitting streak at all. A batter has simply hit safely for a handful of games in a row. Only after a streak has reached a certain length (in DiMaggio’s case about 20 games) does the hitter really start to think about it—and that, as those in the game can tell you, will almost certainly work against him.
“If a player didn’t know that he had a hitting streak going on, he’d be able keep it up longer, no doubt,” Colorado Rockies hitting instructor Don Baylor said when I visited with him during a Rockies series against the Diamondbacks. Baylor was sitting in full uniform at a desk in the coaches’ office. He leaned back in his swivel chair, crossed his cleated feet and smiled slowly, in thought. At 61, he is an avid student of the game. “The problem comes when you start thinking about it too much.”
Baylor, a powerful righthanded hitter who was the Most Valuable Player in the American League in 1979, has worked as a major league coach and manager since he retired as a player after the ’88 season. He is relaxed and insightful in discussion and his teaching method draws in part on the styles and techniques of successful hitters throughout baseball history. After Baylor and I spent some time together, I agreed to swap him some footage I had of DiMaggio hitting in exchange for one of his Ted Williams’ discs. He planned to show the DiMaggio clips to his righty batters; he likes Joe’s follow-through and the consistency of his swing. Baylor told me that DiMaggio’s currency in the minds of today’s young hitters comes in large part from his hitting streak, “a record that has stood out there so far in front for so long it’s almost holy,” he said. Baylor himself never had a streak longer than 14 games.
56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports Page 8
