56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports

by Kennedy, Kostya

  So Rigney, and guys like Buddy Lewis in Washington, and several other players who were looking to defer, heard it from the fans in the stands, and sometimes loudly. Hey Rigney, Greenberg went in. What makes you so special? In the game against the Yankees, Rigney had been getting by all right until he gave up five runs in the sixth.

  Draft talk was all over the ballparks then—the latest had it that Bobby Feller would get called up in August—and some people around the majors feared that as the war thickened, baseball might get shut down altogether. Everyone knew how Roosevelt loved the game, honored its place, respected its might. The President and Eleanor had sent a wreath to the Gehrig home when they’d heard about Lou. Yet just the other day there was National League president Ford Frick fanning the fears, announcing loudly his dread that a “government official might try to do away with baseball . . . during this time of stress and turmoil.” The way things were leaning then—lately Mussolini had taken to taunting the U.S., baiting them to officially get into the fight, labeling Roosevelt a dictator—could set Frick or anybody else on edge.

  Seventh inning, one out, nobody on, the Yankees up five-zip. Rigney was ready to throw. This could be my last time up, DiMaggio thought stepping in. One more chance at it. He didn’t have any kind of book on pitchers but he knew something about Rigney: if he got you out once with a pitch, he’d like to throw it again the next time around. Fastball, usually. You could look for it. Rigney reared and pitched. DiMaggio swung.

  Damn, it’s coming right at me! Even though Lodigiani was playing DiMaggio deep and tight against the third-base line—just the way he used to play him on the scuffed macadam at North Beach playground—the low whistling drive arrived so fast that he had scarcely moved his hands when the ball kicked off the dirt and into his chest. Six inches higher on the hop and there’d have been teeth scattered on the infield. Lodigiani, though, was going to stay with this one; make Joe earn his way on. Lodi snatched up the ball and heaved it hard and accurately to first. But he was too late, by barely a blink it seemed. base hit, read the scoreboard, and of course it was—not even Keltner could have come up clean on a ball hit like that. At first base, DiMaggio took his lead and glanced toward second. The thought, that’s 25 in a row, had already been through his mind and gone. DiMaggio would come around to score. The Yanks would win 8–3

  A cool rain fell the next afternoon, game canceled, but on the third day in Chicago the Yankees and White Sox played at Comiskey Park beneath the lights, some 37,000 on hand. The Yankees’ 3–2 win was secured in the 10th inning on DiMaggio’s two-out home run (he had also singled in the fourth) and the satisfaction that McCarthy felt came not just from the team’s now five-game winning streak, nor that the Yankees had moved into second place. The sweep and the beating back of the upstart White Sox came amid all the more ballyhoo for Dykes, a front-page story in The Sporting News marveling at how he was turning other teams’ castoffs into Chicago stars. As if Dykes’s hot brand of bristle and bounce made up some kind of magic fairy dust. I know what I think, McCarthy said to himself. I think if any team is going to run away with the pennant, it’s gonna be the Yankees.

  The minor miracle of the visit to Chicago was that Dykes had been around to see every out of the two Yankee wins, even with umpire George Pipgras calling things from behind the plate for the first game, manning first base in the next. No one loved to run a guy more than Pipgras did—legend was that he’d once tossed 17 players from a single game—and no one could rankle an umpire quite as expertly as Dykes.

  In the ninth inning of that 3–2 win, the Yankees had been down 2–1 to Chicago’s sharp lefthander Thornton Lee when Red Ruffing, in as a pinch hitter, knocked a two-out double to bring in Gordon from first. Dykes came hurtling out of the dugout, arguing that a fan had interfered with the play by getting in the way of Chicago leftfielder Myril Hoag as he tried to catch the ball. At the very least Dykes wanted Gordon put back on third. He appealed to the second base umpire. He appealed to the third base umpire. Nothing doing. Then Dykes went to home plate and told that night’s head ump, Steve Basil, that he was playing the damn game under protest. Dykes steamed off, never bothering to confront Pipgras, avoiding an altercation. From inside the Yankees dugout McCarthy had quietly reveled in Dykes’s futile stomparound.

  An inning later, when a long fly ball landed in the upper deck in leftfield, it wasn’t the first time that DiMaggio had changed the game that night. In the third inning he had twice made excellent running catches, once to steal a hit from Lodigiani. In the fifth, when Lodi tried to score from second base on a single, DiMaggio let go a wire from deep centerfield to catch him dead at home. There would be no question, the next time that DiMaggio and Lodi’s eyes met, about who had gotten the better of whom.

  The Yankees’ train left Chicago around midnight, an eastbound charter that would deliver the team to New York City well into the morning light. It was close to 1 o’clock by the time the players got their dinners in the Pullman dining car. They ate with care as the train rumbled along, hoping not to splatter their good clothes—jacket and tie wherever you went as a Yankee, another McCarthy rule. Joe was looking forward to getting home, to seeing Dorothy and to touching her skin, to the solitude of his study, to smokes on the terrace, to getting back to a routine. He supposed, sighing softly, that Dorothy would want to spend some time talking about the funeral and Eleanor and Lou.

  Maybe he would take her to Toots Shor’s for dinner that week. Or maybe he’d go alone. He’d wait and see. But it was time to get back there, into the New York night. He would pick his way through the bustle under the awning out in front of Toots’s place, then whisk through the revolving front door, a path suddenly clearing through the crowd inside, and come up near to that spectacular round bar in the center of the room that always seemed layered thick with athletes and politicians and writers, as well as just about every guy in midtown who’d gotten off work and wanted a belt. Showgirls came around, and the crime guys in their hats. This was the center of everything. DiMaggio had a table in the back.

  A month earlier, when he wasn’t hitting and the Yankees weren’t winning, DiMaggio hadn’t wanted to go to the saloon at all. Sometimes he would call and arrange to meet Toots outside on 51st Street and the two of them would take a long walk through the city, DiMaggio quiet and brooding. They would exchange a few words about Toots’s kids or whether J. Edgar Hoover had come by the place lately and just get away from things for a while. But that was it. Then Joe would go back home. DiMaggio couldn’t stand the way that he felt in Toots’s place when things were going badly on the field. Then, in every friendly greeting and salute, every “Hey Joe, how ya doin’?” he would hear an admonition. As if maybe he wasn’t doing enough. Why wasn’t he hitting? Why had the team lost the game that day? When was he going to turn it around? In the tough times, DiMaggio was certain that these were the thoughts people had when they said hello to him through the smoke and conviviality of Toots Shor’s. These were the thoughts he could not push from his mind, even when Toots came up, grinning through his rubbery cheeks, and wrapped DiMaggio in an ursine hug—boy, only Toots could do that—and blurted out his “Hiya crumb bum!” After the Yankees had lost a couple of games, DiMaggio did not want to talk with anyone who might say something about baseball. He did not want to answer any question about anything at all.

  But now things were going just fine, and the greetings at Toots’s—those same “How ya doin’ Joes?”—would feel joyous and celebratory. DiMaggio had gotten a hit in 26 games running, after all, and was returning as the hero of the Yankees’ winning trip out West. Toots could lead Joe and Dorothy back to DiMaggio’s table to eat dinner in relative quiet, and for something close to free. He would let come around only the people that Joe and Dorothy wanted to come around. DiMaggio could feel the people’s eyes upon them (and Dorothy adored this, he knew) and not worry that someone would barge over and ask for an autograph the moment he sliced into his steak.

  Toots controlled things, just t
he way that he did for Jack Dempsey or Babe Ruth or Jackie Gleason or any of the other saloon regulars that everyone wanted to touch. Toots knew just how to do it. He would let a few of the autograph seekers come to Joe of course, would bring over a football player or an actor or someone else to say hello. Toots understood the way Joe was. DiMaggio had two fears when he went out in public. One was that everybody would pay attention to him. The other was that nobody would.

  The Yankees would be home for nearly two weeks now. Maybe Joe would give Jerry Spats a call and see about having dinner with him and Rose and Dorothy at the Castle. Maybe, and this was a good idea, he would take Dorothy to the movies one hot evening. In the Navy was out now, the new Abbott and Costello, their first since that hilarious war movie they’d done, Buck Privates. Joe and Dorothy had gone to the set of that one in Hollywood the winter before, had a meal there, watched Bud and Lou carry on. Abbott: Suppose you had five dollars in this pants pocket and 10 dollars in this pants pocket, what would you have? Costello: The captain’s pants on.

  Those boys were real movie stars now. DiMaggio had met them years back through Dorothy and had hit it off, especially with Lou. He’d even brought Lou out to Newark to visit the crippled children’s hospital as a favor to Spatola. A few minutes inside and Lou would be breaking everybody up.

  So he and Dorothy could go to the movies one evening, have Jimmy drive them down to a theater on Broadway and get them in the back way. They’d sit in the air-conditioned cool, have some laughs. He’d get out at night with Lefty here and there too. The Joe Louis-Billy Conn fight was at the Polo Grounds next week. On Thursday, Dorothy would make him spaghetti and meatballs, more than even he could eat.

  A gibbous moon glowed above the Yankees’ Pullman as it rolled along: Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York. For DiMaggio it felt good to be going home.

  Chapter 10

  Seeing Rapid Robert

  “ONE MORE AND he ties his own record, longest streak he’s had in the big leagues.” Squeaks had gotten it from somewhere, from one of the newspapers the others hadn’t seen or from one of “his guys” he was always talking to about DiMaggio. Joe’s previous 27-game run wasn’t really official, Squeaks explained, because 19 were spring training games. “But this one counts fellas. And if he gets a few more in a row he’ll have the longest ever for a Yankee.”

  Following the Yankees, and Joe, was a rite for all of the Hornets. News and opinion were currency—you had to be up to speed. But no one, even among all the boys in Jackson Heights who imitated Joe’s batting stance, his haircut, the deepness of his voice and the plainness of his speech, no one had it for DiMaggio quite so much as Squeaks Tito. DiMaggio was everything. Once when the Hornets had picked out their latest uniforms, Squeaks made off gleefully with number 9. “What are you so hot about getting Charlie Keller’s number for?” Commie asked. “You’re a third baseman.”

  “Keller? Nah, nine’s the number Joe D wore when he came up in ’36,” Squeaks had sniffed. Now it was a Friday night and he was talking about DiMaggio and this new streak. “You know if I ever saw DiMaggio walking down the street and he didn’t say ‘Hi’ to me I think I might go over and punch him in the nose,” Squeaks said to Commie.

  “Why?” Commie was laughing now, along with his big brother Sal. “You think that because you spend so much time thinking about him, he should somehow know you?”

  “Yes!” said Squeaks and his voice, tinnier and tighter than any other that any of the Hornets had ever heard, pinched higher still. “That’s exactly how I see it.”

  Sometimes Commie and Sal called Squeaks the mystery man. No one seemed to know just where he lived or what his parents did. He wouldn’t answer questions. He’d simply appear for games, or to hang out. He was always around until he wasn’t. Squeaks had quick hands—he was becoming a Golden Gloves boxer—and a barrel chest that he willingly used to knock down the hot ones at third, and he had a good arm for someone his size. He went with a girl that everyone knew as The Moose.

  Some of the guys had bought loosies from the news dealer and they were standing in front smoking them: Camels. The El train rattled and creaked into its stop above Roosevelt Avenue and the latest herd of commuters clattered down the steel steps to the street. A cool, light rain fell and on the sidewalk among the pack of green Hornets jackets mingled a few blue-and-white ones too; some of the Dukes were hanging around. There was talk about a dance that night over at the Knights of Columbus. The Bettes were going: Eileen, the two Marys, maybe Janette. “Let’s meet at Bickford’s in an hour,” Joe Party Time said. And Gigilo announced he was going home first to get dressed. About a week left of school before summer break was all, and a weekend of ball in front of them if the rain held off, under the lights on Saturday night, then a couple of games at Hornets Field on Sunday. “I hear Panza’s going to see the Yankees tomorrow,” Commie said. “If he can get off work.” Panza was a few years older, Janette’s big brother. They all called him Iceman because he and his father delivered blocks of ice.

  “That’ll be Feller pitching for Cleveland, right?” Sal said.

  “Yep.”

  “He’d better get off work,” Squeaks said. “For a game like that. . . .”

  Everyone wanted to see the Yankees, and Joe, meet up against Bobby Feller. There wasn’t a pitcher anywhere that stirred the fans like Feller did—still just 22 years old, but already in his sixth major league season. At 17 he’d come off the Iowa plains, from a homespun ballyard on his daddy’s dusty farm—hogs, corn, a few cows—and struck out Cardinal after Cardinal after Cardinal, eight of them in three innings of an exhibition game. That was July of 1936. In early September, Feller struck out 17 Philadelphia A’s. In October he went back for his senior year at Van Meter High. At the same time DiMaggio was making his first mark in the majors, and like DiMaggio, Feller hadn’t let up since. Every year he struck out more batters than anyone. He’d gone 24–9 in ’39, 27–11 in ’40, and now, two months into the ’41 season Feller already had 13 wins, the most in the majors and more than a third of the games the Indians had won in all. Cleveland was holding on to first place, four games up on New York, and when Feller was on the mound, every fourth day as steady as the milkman, they were the best team in baseball. During one stretch already this season he had pitched 30 consecutive innings without allowing a run.

  He was dubbed Rapid Robert and you knew about his famous fastball, the heir to Walter Johnson’s. Brother, the way that fastball juddered and juked as it sped in. It was the pitch that people turned out to see. Or maybe just to hear as it thudded into the catcher’s mitt loud enough, in some ballparks, to make an echo. Feller had a curveball that killed too; it came in hard and still broke two feet, a pitch that many hitters dreaded even more than the heat. Feller would throw the curve anytime—behind in the count, runners on, didn’t matter. Some overthinking scientists were suggesting that the curveball, anyone’s curveball, was merely an optical illusion. None of them had ever come to bat against Bob Feller. The Yanks’ Charlie Keller said Feller’s curve “behaved like an epileptic snake.”

  Feller was the big draw in baseball, a reason to come see the game even when the Indians weren’t in a pennant race. With Feller, you never knew what you might see. He was like Babe Ruth in that way, ever given to the spectacular. Like on the last day of the 1938 season, when the Tigers came into Cleveland along with Hank Greenberg and his 58 home runs. Thirty thousand fans turned out to see if Greenberg could get up to Ruth’s home run record, 60 in a season, or whether Feller could keep him down. (Five hundred miles away most Yankee fans were Feller fans for the day: Protect our Babe.) The crowd did see a record in Municipal Stadium that afternoon, they saw Rapid Robert Feller strike out 18 men—including Greenberg twice—surpassing himself for the most ever in an American League game.

  Then there was Opening Day of 1940, gray and bitter and barely 40° in Chicago, when Feller looked around him in the ninth inning and realized he had not allowed a base hit. His parents and his sister had come in
from Iowa for the game. Three outs later Feller was striding off the field at Comiskey Park a 1–0 winner, the no-hit feat complete, his Indians teammates backslapping and cheering while every Chicago player returned to the clubhouse with exactly the same batting average—.000—that he had when the game began. White Sox manager Dykes, because of the chill in the air or because of the outcome of the game, or both, applied a hot water bottle to the side of his head.

  When the Yankees and DiMaggio faced Feller, though, the crowd learned it might see something else. Sure Feller could beat New York—he’d done it twice already in ’41—but Joe gave him trouble. People still talked about the game in Cleveland in 1937 when DiMaggio tripled against Feller (who was just 18 years old at the time) and then later doubled against him and then, with the Yankees and Indians tied at 1–1 in the ninth and DiMaggio down 0 and 2 in the count and the bases loaded, how Feller had come with the curveball, just a little too high and DiMaggio had driven it into the leftfield stands. The grand slam silenced the big crowd and made winners of the Yanks. DiMaggio had hit Feller pretty well ever since.

  The Yankees didn’t need to have the nation’s ace visiting in order to lure a crowd to the Stadium on a Saturday in June, not with the team and DiMaggio streaking. Still, Feller made for something special, something rich. It was the third inning now and more than 44,000 looked on. The Yankees had a 1–0 lead after another home run by Henrich—that made seven homers in two weeks for Tommy; DiMaggio’s old bat was serving Henrich well. Two on, two out and up came DiMaggio for the second time. He’d walked in the first. Now he was digging in, like always, his back foot clawing a rugged patch into the dirt, making the batter’s box his own. A lot of righthand hitters wouldn’t stand in so firmly against Feller, on account of the fact, they said only half-joking, that they didn’t want to get maimed. In addition to everything else, Feller could be plenty wild, more than wild enough to keep most hitters in a state of unease, literally on their toes. Joe was not that way. And though he would never admit to it, his teammates believed that DiMaggio eyed the mound with a little extra purpose when Bob Feller was standing upon it. So, let’s see who’s the best. Keller said that he could see the veins in DiMaggio’s neck bulge out as he waited for Feller’s pitch.