56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports

by Kennedy, Kostya

  2 Two people who spoke to Daniel about the play years later told me that his ruling was influenced in part by the Times’ John Drebinger whose immediate conviction was that the ball was a hit.

  Chapter 13

  Something Inside

  EVEN NOW THE sight of Joe in the newspaper quickened Marie and gave her a fleeting feeling of surprise. That’s our Joe! When she thought of him—and, too, when she thought of Vince or of Dommy—Joe was still a little brother, hardly older than her own darling Betty was now. She could remember playing games of catch with Joe when he was not yet six years old and how effortlessly, even then, he caught the ball in his little hands. Later he had lengthened, his teenaged legs and arms extending like slender stems. The boys at the playground called him gambi.

  Joe was the gangliest of the DiMaggio sons but there had never been any awkwardness when he moved. Once, when Marie had been downtown, near the corner of Sansome and Market Street, she had come upon Joe and Dommy after they’d just finished selling their newspapers for the afternoon. They were throwing the wadded-up wrapper from one of their bundles of papers back and forth across the wide street, 30 feet maybe. The makeshift ball was the size of a small melon—although it was buoyant in the air—and the boys darted about the busy sidewalks making improbable catches. It was almost like a dance. Some people stopped to watch. Who would have thought that now, years later, both Joe and Dom would be playing centerfield in the major leagues, and that the newspapers being sold on that corner would carry articles about them.

  The afternoon light came in through the big bay windows of her parents’ house on Beach Street, rays of orange sun slanting in above the rooftops across the way. The palm trees outside stood still. Marie was the fourth eldest of the DiMaggio children, the third girl. She had long, black hair and plenty of forehead and her face was round like their ma’s. She was eight years older than Joe.

  Marie took out the scissors and the paste and opened her scrapbook on the table. There were years of clippings of all the ballplaying brothers in the book, of Vince and of Dom, but of course now mostly of Joe. Even after all that had happened for him, with the Seals and then the Yankees, all the many articles—and that family portrait in Life magazine, Marie standing right behind Joe, little Betty wedged in upon his lap—and the World Series victories and Joe’s massive wedding and the hero’s welcome that he got when he came back home from a triumphant season in New York, Marie had never entirely gotten used to it all.

  Finding a sketched cartoon of Joe in the San Francisco Call-Bulletin seemed to Marie almost surreal. Her Joe. She remembered the shock of the first time she had seen him as a kid with a cigarette in his mouth. She remembered the way Joe would move silently and seriously around at the North Beach playground, or through the Taylor Street apartment, almost unapproachable, a distance imposed between him and all others that Marie somehow understood. It was something different than shyness. At times she thought of him and Dom as like sons to her. When Joe first left San Francisco to join the Yankees, Marie gave him a signet ring.

  The Call-Bulletin caricature showed Joe with overlarge teeth and his mouth stretched into an exaggerated smile. He was in a pole vaulter’s milieu, using a bat to leverage himself over a bar labeled “32.” Above that, nine notches on the wooden frame, hung a tag that read: “George Sisler’s 1922 Major League Record—41.” The sketch was labeled, JOE DIMAGGIO’S RACE FOR THE CONSECUTIVE GAME HITTING RECORD and the headline at the top of the page inquired: Will Di Mag Make It?

  People in the neighborhood often asked about Joe, asking not only Marie, of course, but all the family, including Giuseppe when he went down to the wharf to help Mike mend nets or to watch him scrub down the bow of the boat, or just to kill a little time. Giuseppe would look out into the bay, his old fingers still nimble as he tied the becket knots, and would talk to Mike or to one of the men standing on the dock. He would feel at once wistful and grateful that now all those predawn mornings and the long days and the unceasing roll of the tide, and the coarseness of the crabs and fish in his calloused hands, that all of that was over. One of the other fishermen, Maniscalco maybe or one of the younger guys, would ask in Italian “How are the boys? How’s Joe?” And Giuseppe would tell them something about what Joe had said when he’d called that week. Then somebody would remark again for the thousandth time how Joe had never taken to the boats, how much he hated to fish. Mike laughed easily. He had a handsome smile and thick hair and he was broader across the chest than any of the other DiMaggio boys.

  Sometimes a guy from one of the papers would come around and ask about Joe too, in English. Giuseppe would stiffen and respond as if the question were naive and the answer obvious, “Joe justa good. He’s like alla my boys.”

  That wasn’t quite true though. Joe wasn’t like the rest. Joe’s success was the reason why Giuseppe and Rosalie had the house up in the Marina District on Beach Street. And if they still weren’t quite at home there, even a couple years after moving in, that was O.K. Maybe Giuseppe would never feel as comfortable on those whitewashed sidewalks as he had felt in their shack across the bay in Martinez or then in the flat on Taylor Street, but that was no matter. The Marina was one of the finest neighborhoods in San Francisco. The house had four bedrooms and two bathrooms and a big garage with more than enough room to make the wine. It was a white house with rococo designs beneath the eaves. Rosalie cleaned every day, sweeping the steps that led up to the front door and rubbing down the satinwood furniture inside.

  The DiMaggio household was smaller now, with the younger boys away and the older girls married. Still the home was often bustling with Giuseppe and Rosalie’s children and their children’s children. Marie and Betty were around, and Tom in the mornings and Mike at mealtimes. Rosalie always seemed to be ironing something.

  From the front door Giuseppe and Rosalie had to walk little more than a block to get to the Presidio with the fountain there in the pretty little lake, and the wide green flower-specked lawns and the benches to sit on. The park wasn’t full of old country Italians the way Washington Square in North Beach was, but Giuseppe did not go in much for small talk anyway. Living on Beach Street was a better and more respected place to be, and really that was what Giuseppe’s dream was all about. He had made the journey here alone at age 26 from their Sicilian home on the Isola delle Femmine, and he had lived the four frugal years missing Rosalie and their little one, Nell, and then all the hours and hours and days and days and years and years on the boat, all of the time thinking about making a better and more prosperous life.

  Now he had that life by way of the sons he and Rosalie had raised. Giuseppe had imagined each of his boys becoming fishermen just as he had followed his father and his grandfather in Sicily, but only Mike had done so. Giuseppe accepted now that Vince and Joe and Dom had created far richer careers on the baseball diamond. Joe’s money had altered all of their lives and taken the worry out of Giuseppe’s nights. Sometimes a reporter would ask Giuseppe (as if, in fact, there were some doubt) who was the best baseball player among his sons. The brothers all said Tom—what an arm he had before he got hurt!—but for Giuseppe the answer was simpler. “Joe. He makes-a the most money. So he is the best.”

  When he grew tired of standing out at the docks, Giuseppe went across Jefferson Street and climbed the stairs to the restaurant for a glass of dark red wine. He leaned into the kitchen and asked Ugo to put him up a bowl of spaghetti. Giuseppe still couldn’t read in Italian or in English but years ago when Joe had had his hitting streak in the Coast League, Giuseppe had taught himself to understand the box scores and the standings well enough to follow along. Now the sports pages, lately carrying the DiMag-O-Log, were a source of pride. He sat at a table near the Grotto bar and drank his inky wine and twirled the spaghetti onto his fork and looked at the different newspapers and the scores, and stopped to linger for a while when he came to a sketch or a photo of Joe. Tom would appear and go behind the bar to put on the radio and they would listen to the news and wai
t for the baseball scores.

  There were only a few customers around now in the late afternoon but soon the tourists would start to come in and sit by the windows overlooking the boats and eat seafood and then at some point get up and walk to the bar against the back wall to look at the trophies there—Joe’s various MVP and player of the year awards and even a small trophy that Dominic got while with the Seals. Always some dimwit would ask if Joe himself was around, and Tom would say politely, “No, he’s in New York, with the Yankees.” Later the band would play and people would dance on the dark inlaid floor. Tom looked slightly worried when he was on the job; he treated the responsibility of managing the staff and operations of Joe DiMaggio’s Grotto (the swankest place on the wharf, no question) with the seriousness that it deserved. It was Tom, too, who handled Joe’s contract negotiations with the Yanks.

  Giuseppe would listen to the radio at home as well, the heavy wood-encased machine another gift from Joe. This was a way to follow all three of their sons in the major leagues. Rosalie also listened to the sports reports. And so did fans all over San Francisco, many of them with an ear cocked for the DiMaggio name, especially Joe’s and especially now as his hitting streak stretched into the 30s and moved nearer to the alltime record. In North Beach, Joe was the native son and the teenage boys could not get enough news about him. “Did he get a hit today?” they’d ask one another at the playground, though that information alone wasn’t nearly enough. What kind of hit? More than one? What else had he done?

  Alessandro Baccari Jr. was 16 years old and he had been an altar boy at Joe’s wedding. Less than a week before that big day Joe had taken Al and the Salesian Panthers baseball team to the Athens Creamery for milkshakes. (Though after Joe ordered his two scoops of pistachio ice cream many of the boys canceled their shakes and ordered pistachio scoops instead.) Alessandro loved Joe. Loved him. The way he played ball, the way he carried himself. Like a king. Al had been 10 when he’d first met DiMaggio. Joe and the Seals manager Lefty O’Doul had come by the Baccari’s house one evening after a game—Lefty and Al’s dad were good friends—and helped shell the peas for the pasta they would all eat together. Alessandro saw that his mother Edith felt happy to have Joe and Lefty in the house; she sang softly in Italian and the bottom of her skirt bounced as she moved about tending to the table or the stove.

  Al and his friends were now big-dreaming local league ballplayers themselves and they were deeply into DiMaggio’s hitting streak. They would call the newspapers, the Chronicle, the Call-Bulletin, the News. “We want more information about Joe DiMaggio,” they would say. “Do more stories on Joe.” The boys got to know all the sports editors and the guys on the AP desk. They’d call anyone to plead. “Let’s try Prescott Sullivan,” Al said one afternoon as the hitting streak swelled. He phoned the Examiner and got Sullivan’s line. “Hello Mr. Sullivan, Alessandro Baccari Jr. here. We want some news about Joe DiMaggio. What’s the very latest on Joe?”

  And Sullivan said: “Huh? I’m a columnist.”

  “Yes, Mr. Sullivan, the very best there is. Now what’s going on with our Joe?”

  Before long, the San Francisco papers were indeed running more stories about DiMaggio and featuring those stories ever more prominently, and Al and his friends joked to one another that it was really their persistent pestering—not Joe’s ascent toward the major league’s longest hitting streak—that had made the difference.

  THERE WAS NO way to ignore this thing now that all the writers were hot upon it. On the day that DiMaggio extended his streak to 32 straight games, he hit two singles, drew a walk and lined a home run into the lower leftfield stands. In the fourth inning he was on first base when Buddy Rosar singled to left. DiMaggio, sensing he might catch White Sox leftfielder Myril Hoag a step slow, cut a sharp angle as he rounded second base and kept going to third, sliding in powerfully ahead of the ball. An inning later, DiMaggio’s single into left-center sent Red Rolfe from first to third, drawing a throw, and DiMaggio, never pausing as he trailed the play, hustled safely into second. If there’s an extra base to take, Big Dago takes it, thought Tommy Henrich in the dugout. In the Yankees’ 7–2 win Charlie Keller homered again, a grand slam in the fourth, to make it 15 straight games that the Yanks had hit a long ball.

  “Would you ever bunt to keep your streak going Joe?” one of the reporters asked DiMaggio after the game. “The third basemen sure play you deep.”

  DiMaggio was quiet for a while. He looked over at Lefty. Then he turned slowly back to the reporter and after a moment he said: “It just would not do for me to go up there and lay one down deliberately for a bunt to keep a streak going. . . . Sure I like to keep the streak going but to drive in runs is my first and only thought when I step up to the plate.”

  It was after that 32nd game, too, that a poem appeared in the New York World-Telegram, written by the columnist Tim Cohane:

  Our Joe Di Maggio has hit

  in thirty-two straight games.

  A batting streak that calls for cheers

  from Yankee guys and dames.

  If there’s a mental strain in this

  our Joseph doesn’t show it.

  He merely takes his batting stance

  and dares the bums to throw it.

  The writers—and the sports cartoonists—weren’t alone in taking notice. DiMaggio now was on the verge of Rogers Hornsby’s 33-game streak, the record for a righty batter.1 That streak had stood for 19 years, just as long as Sisler’s, and everyone in the game regarded Hornsby as the greatest righthanded hitter who’d ever lived. He’d batted over .400 three times, including an astonishing .424 one year, and he’d done it without choking up on the bat handle the way other high-average guys like Ty Cobb or Wee Willie Keeler or Nap Lajoie had done it in the early days. Hornsby gripped his bat right down at the knob, stood far from the plate and swung hard; he hit more than 300 home runs in his career. He once said that he couldn’t care less if he faced a righthanded or a lefthanded pitcher, that the guy could “throw with his foot as long as the ball came in the strike zone.”

  Hornsby could be a cuss. Yankees’ third base coach Art Fletcher told of how, when he was managing the Phillies in 1925 and Hornsby was player-manager of the Cardinals, they’d gotten into an argument at home plate and Hornsby had hauled off and slugged him in the face. Just like that. Gomez’s memory was of getting beaten by Hornsby, then 37 years old and winding down his playing career as a St. Louis Brown, with a game-winning three-run homer with two outs in the ninth inning and Hornsby rounding the bases and calling out to any Yankee who could hear him that he was “still good enough to beat you sons-a-bitches.” And yet Hornsby was beautiful to watch. When he stepped in to take batting practice, some older players recalled, everyone on the field stopped to watch his silky swing. Nobody but Cobb had ever finished with a higher career batting average than Hornsby’s .358. DiMaggio knew all about him.

  The White Sox were gone and the Tigers were in New York now and they were sending out their ace, the hefty righthander Bobo Newsom. Bobo—they’d called him Buck in the minors back on the West Coast—threw about as hard as anyone south of Feller. He’d gone 21–5 in 1940 and won two more games in the Series. Newsom was 6′ 3″, 220 pounds and sometimes it looked like he had a couple of chins. He earned a star’s salary, $35,000, and Ol’ Bobo Newsom from Hartsville, S.C., was this kind of pitcher: During the third inning of a game in 1935, a line drive off the bat of the Indians’ Earl Averill broke his knee cap. Newsom finished the game, winning it, then wound up in a cast for five weeks. Another time, in 1936, he was on the mound for Washington when a throw to first by the third baseman caught Newsom in the face and broke his jaw. He pitched six more innings and finished that game too.

  Ol’ Bobo, as he liked to call himself, would sure be pleased to put an end to DiMaggio’s streak before Joe could get his name next to Hornsby’s. No doubt about that. Back in 1933 in the PCL, before pitching against a streaking DiMaggio (Joe was 30 some odd games into that streak too
), Newsom had proclaimed. “I’m gonna stop him tomorrow.” He hadn’t, though. Nor had he stopped Joe when he faced him again during that same streak two weeks later. Nor had Newsom lived up to his boasts during DiMaggio’s first season with the Yankees when Newsom vowed that he would cool off the rookie. “I know Joe’s weakness,” the pitcher said. Against Ol’ Bobo that day Joe had a weakness for doubles; he hit three of them.

  Today it was Newsom, tomorrow somebody else would want to be the guy to try to stop the streak and get his name in the headlines. It was June 20, and the Bronx sky was thick with white-gray clouds. DiMaggio tested the firmness of the ground in centerfield, gauging how ground balls might play. He was shagging flies, maybe an hour before the game. Over in rightfield Henrich was climbing the wall again. Every so often Henrich had Earle Combs hit him fly balls just to that spot, so that he had to climb up the short rightfield fence and stand on top of it for an instant, to catch the ball and take away a woulda-been home run. When rookies first saw Henrich at it they thought he was just goofing around. But he wasn’t. “I need to practice this,” Henrich said. “One of these days I’m going to have to go up and catch a ball like that in a game.”