56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports

by Kennedy, Kostya

  “You just want your guys to be hitting, and hitting with the right form,” Baylor went on. “A big part of it is for guys to just hit the way they can, naturally, without thinking about what they’re doing when they’re in the box. A hitting streak makes you worry about things that you shouldn’t be worrying about.”

  Many of the players I spoke with agreed. Keith Hernandez, the former Cardinals and Mets first baseman and a perennial .300 hitter, said, “I never knew when I was in a hitting streak until I picked up the newspaper in the morning. I’d read a note that said: ‘Hernandez has hit in 13 straight games.’ Then that night I’d be sure to go 0 for 4.” (Hernandez’s career-high streak: 17 games in 1987.)

  Rockies second baseman Clint Barmes, a career .254 big league hitter who once hit safely in 30 consecutive games while playing at Indiana State, says he now starts noticing that he’s on a streak when he’s gotten a hit in “10 or 12 games in a row; for me that’s pretty good. But then you start thinking about it and you have to keep yourself from going outside your hitting zone to try to get a knock to keep it going. That’s exactly how you get yourself out. I expand my zone too much anyway, and if I have a hitting streak going I may really expand it. It’s not good.”

  Sports psychologists hear that kind of talk all the time. “We don’t want you out there thinking consciously, but rather operating unconsciously,” says Alan Goldberg, a former sports psychology consultant for the University of Connecticut athletics department who has worked with hundreds of athletes through his Massachusetts-based practice Competitive Advantage. Think of the brain as having three parts, Goldberg says, simplifying to help make his point: the forebrain, which processes information consciously and uses words and logic; the midbrain which is involved with emotional states; and the hindbrain which is more about knowing than about thinking. The hindbrain handles involuntary actions and works outside of conscious thought; you understand things in the hindbrain through your experience.

  “When you’re hitting a baseball you want to be operating as much as possible from the hindbrain,” says Goldberg. “The forebrain is analytical and slow and judgmental—it will tell you ‘you should really keep your elbow back, you know’ or ‘you can’t get a hit in yet another game, that’s crazy.’ The forebrain will have you thinking about the speed of the pitcher’s fastball and your own statistics and so on as if it’s putting together a 100-piece puzzle piece-by-piece. The hindbrain uses muscle memory and it’s instantaneous. It coordinates the whole so that you’re seeing the 100-piece puzzle at once, all put together. At the beginning of a hitting streak you can be working from the hindbrain but once you’ve become aware of the streak, the forebrain inevitably comes more and more into play.

  “The actual doing is in the hindbrain,” Goldberg added. “The potential outcome is fodder for the forebrain.”

  Or as Rockies All-Star Todd Helton—a potent slugger whose career longest hitting streak is just 17 games despite his .324 batting average—suggested: “When you know that you’re on a hitting streak, you might start to think about the result rather than the process, and that’s the wrong way around.”

  ATHLETES OFTEN DESCRIBE themselves as being “in the zone,” which is the same sensation that analysts in numerous disciplines call having “flow.” The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, now a professor at Claremont Graduate University in California, conceived the term and popularized it in his 1990 book, Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience. “Flow” describes a mental state marked by a diminishment of self-consciousness along with a heightened sense of involvement with an environment or task. You become extremely focused on doing something without realizing it.

  The subconscious and one’s learned, automatic responses are central to flow, as is the idea that gratuitous or “irrelevant” information is prevented from entering your mind. (The thought that you need a base hit to extend a consecutive-games hitting streak, for example, is irrelevant to the information you need to strike the baseball well.) In a state of flow, Csikszentmihalyi believed, experience is intensified and performance is maximized.

  “The idea of flow is applicable to hitting a baseball,” says Gordon Bower, a cognitive psychologist and professor emeritus at Stanford who also pitched for Case Western University and in semipro leagues during the early 1950s. “You want the hitting skill to be automated, so that you are responding to a particular cue, or to a small set of cues, without necessarily being aware of what you are responding to. You’re just subconsciously remembering what to do. If you start bringing in an extra cue, such as needing to perform the task in a particular way, that interrupts the response.

  “We see this on memory-retrieval tests. If you get subjects to think about something negative—‘Oh this test is so hard’ or ‘My parents will kill me if I mess up this test after what they’re paying for me to go here’—they’ll probably perform poorly on the test. The same thing holds true if you get them thinking about something good, such as ‘After this test, I’m going on a vacation with my fiancée’ or ‘My professor is about to give me the assistant teaching position I’ve been trying to get.’ They’re more likely to screw up the test under those circumstances too. The crucial point is that getting them to think about something else gets in the way of their normal performance, and that is clearly applicable to muscle memory and to hitting a baseball.”

  George Brett, one of the game’s great hitters, had a 30-game streak with the Royals in 1980, the same season he batted .390. He likens the feeling you get during a hitting streak to being at basketball practice and having the coach say to you as he heads to the locker room: “O.K., just hit 10 straight free throws and you can quit.”

  “You’ll drain the first four or five no problem,” says Brett, “but then you start thinking about it, thinking ‘I can’t miss.’ And that’s when shooting suddenly gets tricky. A hitting streak is like that because until you get your hit that day you’re thinking ‘I need to get one. I need to get one.’ ”

  To see how an automated, hindbrain process can be interfered with by the forebrain, try this: take a few moments and make yourself intentionally conscious of your breathing. Pay close attention to how you bring the air in, then let it out; invariably the breathing becomes less fluid, awkward even—a shallow breath here, a deeper one there. You breathe most naturally when you don’t think about breathing. Self-awareness has not simply influenced the process, it has weakened it.

  This is the same kind of thing that cuts to the heart of one of the oldest tricks on the links. The buddy you’re playing against for a case of Pabst is pulling away late in the round when you suddenly say, “Wow, man, you’re playing great today! Are you doing something new with your grip?” Or you point out cheerily, “You know if you can just keep it to two over par on the next three holes, you’ll beat my best score on this course.” Then watch him fade.

  In 1986 Roy Baumeister and Carolin Showers published a paper in the European Journal of Social Psychology titled, “A review of paradoxical performance effects: Choking under pressure in sports and mental tests.” The notion of choking has received a fair amount of attention among social psychologists, virtually all of whom agree with Baumeister’s and Showers’s suggestion that an athlete failing to perform in a pressurized environment (in this case that would mean going hitless for a game and thus killing the streak) “may result from distraction or from the interference of self-focused attention with the execution of automatic responses.” That’s the forebrain getting in the way of the hindbrain again.

  So, there’s that. In addition to the inherent difficulty of getting a hit off a major league pitcher, there is the simple but inescapable matter of being overly aware of what you are trying to do. That little piece, cited by ballplayers like Baylor and Brett, by behaviorists like Bower, and by psychologists like Goldberg, has been enough to derail the barely formed hitting streaks of many, many players, including some of the best hitters in the game.

  At 20 games, or thereabouts, news of Joe DiMa
ggio’s hitting streak had yet to make it back to San Francisco, was hardly a topic of talk in New York City, was barely noticed in the Yankee clubhouse, was little more than the stuff of sidenotes for the herd of daily writers. And yet it had already firmly attached itself to the man himself. DiMaggio knew that with a hitless day he’d be back at zero, starting over again. Or, looking at it the other way and perhaps more significantly, he knew that with another handful of successful games, maybe a good week or so, he could have something truly powerful in the works. A long hitting streak is the most captivating and dramatic of all baseball events—then, now and always—and DiMaggio, by dint of his own experience, knew that as well as just about anyone.

  “All the other stuff—the media being on top of you and people asking you about it and all the outside reminders—that all works against you when you’re in a hitting streak,” says Goldberg. “But to mess things up with too much conscious thinking? For that, all you really need is yourself.”

  Photos

  Joe and his father Giuseppe, San Francisco, 1937

  Photograph by Bettmann/Corbis

  Joe with older brother Vince (left) and younger brother Dominic

  Photograph by AP

  DiMaggio and Lou Gehrig, 1936

  Photograph by MLB Photos/Getty Images

  PART II

  Chapter 9

  Like A Bullet

  THE CROWD WAS sparse at Sportsman’s Park, as usual. Even on a comfortable Saturday afternoon in St. Louis; even now with the Browns on an improbable three-game winning streak (the best of the year for the ever-lousy club) and with their exuberant, newly installed manager Luke Sewell vowing better days ahead; even on this Ladies’ Day at the ballpark, and even with so many kids being allowed in for free (all you had to be was nine years old, breathing and enrolled in a school somewhere and you could get a pass that let you into any Browns game anytime); even now with a chance to come and watch the mighty Yankees, Lefty Gomez on the bump; even so, only 2,300 people had paid their way to see the game. The St. Louis Browns had won 16 and lost 29 on the season and they were 12 games out of first place. Sometimes it felt like the Cardinals played in a one-team town.

  DiMaggio didn’t mind the emptiness of the ballpark. Nor had he ever minded the unusual, jerry-rigged look to the old place, with its roofed, double-deck grandstand. He’d always hit well here. The dimensions were fair and the Browns’ pitching was generally unthreatening. Today too it felt good to be anywhere but in Detroit where, for three days, heavy clouds had sat dark and unmoving. In the second of the two games at Briggs Stadium, despite DiMaggio’s RBI triple in the sixth and then a dramatic Henrich homer in the ninth, the Tigers had won 5–4, in 10 innings, to complete a rain-shortened sweep.

  Now in St. Louis, out of the Book-Cadillac and into the Chase Hotel, Gehrig’s death had become more a hard fact and less an emotional shock. McCarthy and Dickey were back with the team and the Yankees were up against a tall, righthanded rookie named Bob Muncrief. The young pitcher, though, did not last long. Four relievers were needed to follow him in the Yankees’ eventual 11–7 win. Keller hit a grand slam, DiMaggio three singles. His hitting streak was now at 22 games; one more, he knew, and he’d equal the 23 straight he’d run off the season before. I could get past that in the doubleheader tomorrow. DiMaggio’s neck and shoulder no longer ached. He was leading the American League with 65 base hits. I’m beginning to feel it now. I’m beginning to feel like I can smash that ball to pieces.

  And the next day in the doubleheader, DiMaggio all but did that, belting three home runs, two in the 9–3 rout by the Yankees in the first game and another in the second game that clattered onto the roof of the hokey rightfield pavilion and closed the scoring in an 8–3 win cut short after seven innings by approaching darkness. DiMaggio had seven RBIs that afternoon and almost had a fourth home run; he drove a double in the second game that crashed into the screen above the rightfield wall. It was not only DiMaggio who carried the Yanks in their series in St. Louis; Keller, back from a pointed four-game McCarthy benching, homered twice; Red Rolfe had five base hits and scored five times in the three games. But it was DiMaggio that every Yankee moved to. “The boys are just waiting for Joe to show ’em how to do it,” McCarthy had told the writers a few days earlier. The 1941 Yankees were Joe DiMaggio’s to lift and to bear; McCarthy knew it, they all did. And so it was DiMaggio’s hits—seven of them in the three games—that sent the real electricity through the bench, that had his New York teammates nodding and squeezing their hands into happy fists, their emotions hot but reserved, as McCarthy demanded. The Big Dago’s stirring, boys, the Dago’s coming alive! They could feel it, they all could.

  The rookie Rizzuto, still tethered to the bench day after day, absorbed it all, his eyes following DiMaggio as he strode up to bat, as he swung, and then as he charged out of the batter’s box. He’s outdoing himself, Rizzuto thought. Everything he hits is like a bullet. If DiMaggio hit a home run, Rizzuto watched him as he rounded the bases, his gait slow and even but never without intensity, a firm and unchanging pace that delivered DiMaggio on stride to the plate. Rizzuto watched. He watched DiMaggio’s silence, for in DiMaggio silence could be seen. Often it was a literal silence: He would remain wordless for long stretches, and his body moved soundlessly. Then too there was an underlying silence to DiMaggio, even as he came down the dugout steps and accepted the congratulations of his teammates with a short deep laugh and a few words of thanks—even then there was something unspoken, unreckoned, silent. He would stand at the fountain and fill a Dixie cup with water and drink it there, not spilling a drop, and then he would sit down. Rizzuto watched. After games he would hang around late, just as DiMaggio did, and maybe get to leave the ballpark with him.

  Jeez, how Rizzuto wanted back in the lineup. But it was Crosetti’s job now and the old stalwart was playing okay, fielding better in fact than he had in years. Besides, McCarthy had his plan. The major league education of a young shortstop, he now felt, was best begun sitting by his side. As talented as Rizzuto was, there was no need, not yet, to make any change.

  The ancient showerheads sputtered in the Sportsman’s Park locker room and an odorous, unidentifiable film covered the old floor and old walls. The Yankees got dressed in cramped aisles in front of their stalls, inevitably and sometimes awkwardly bumping into a teammate. That’s just how it was at Sportsman’s Park, and none of those nuisances could bother the Yankees much now. They had come to St. Louis and at the expense of the poor Browns had righted things again. The Yanks left town, bound for an exhibition game in Kansas City and then on to Chicago, tied with the Red Sox and the White Sox for second place. Keller was suddenly hot, and so was Henrich, still swinging that bat Joe had given him. DiMaggio’s batting average was up to .340, not exactly Williams territory but high enough to push his slumping brother Dom in the DiMag-O-Log back home. Joe’s hitting streak, so extravagantly extended, was now appreciably long enough that some of the other players—though this was not something that they would talk about directly with him—had begun to take notice.

  SO JOE HAD a hitting streak. Twenty-four games. Dario Lodigiani had been around one of these streaks before, back when Joe was playing in the PCL in San Francisco and Lodi and the others used to go out after their day at Galileo High to Seals Stadium to watch Joe, just 18 years old, and see if he could keep it alive another day. Now here they were, eight years later, Joe the magnificent Yankee, Lodi sticking as a third baseman for the White Sox. Would’ve been nice to talk to Joe a little bit on the field, catch up. But that was against the rules—no fraternizing!—and besides it wasn’t Joe’s way. All business. There was a coolness to the way Joe played, a ruthlessness. As if he saw everyone on the other team in the same impersonal way.

  The game was in the seventh inning now and some of the spectators at Comiskey Park noticed that DiMaggio was without a hit in three times up. Lodigiani had thrown him out at first base in the sixth. It’d be nice to get him again here, Lodi thought, chuckling
to himself. That would burn Joe just right, give Lodi something to tell the boys about next winter: how he’d stopped Joe’s streak.

  Poor Johnny Rigney though. The White Sox starter sure was having a tough go on the mound all of a sudden. Falling apart. Worst start of the season, no doubt. Rigney wasn’t a half-bad righthander. He’d gone 15–8 in 1939 and so far in ’41 he’d been pitching like an ace, just into his usual hard luck. Two starts before Rigs had thrown a three-hitter and still took the loss. After that game Rigney’s luck went harder still: His draft board called and gave him a reporting date less than three weeks away. Tough blow to Rigney, and to the White Sox. He asked to defer for 60 days, so he could stay on the team long enough for his contract bonus to kick in—and wouldn’t you know, the draft board said okay!

  That didn’t end the headaches though. Now Johnny heard the carping, the complaints about a ballplayer getting preferential treatment. The Illinois director of the selected service—apologetically, while professing to be a White Sox fan—had even filed an appeal straight to President Roosevelt to reverse Rigney’s deferment, to make an example out of the $12,000 a year pitcher and to set a standard. The director just didn’t think the deferment was right: What about the clerks, the accountants, the salesmen and proofreaders and waiters who were supporting their wives and children or their aging parents, or both? Hadn’t they had their deferments denied? There were hundreds of folks like that. It didn’t seem fair to give a pass to a big leaguer, and especially not this one. Rigney was engaged to marry Dorothy Comiskey—yes, of those Comiskeys, the family who owned the team, who had the ballpark named after them. Dorothy was the White Sox treasurer and an heir to the team. And Rigney needed the extra cash from his bonus?