56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports

by Kennedy, Kostya

  By now the Tall Tactician, Connie Mack, was nearing 80 years old—80!—and in his 41st season as the Athletics manager. He still wore his long thin neckties and his white, high-collared shirts and throughout each game he clutched the lineup sheet in his narrow hands. Much like Shibe Park itself, built of steel and concrete to great fanfare and excitement in 1909, Mack seemed a treasure from another era, a relic to be revered. Despite the stadium’s mild nuisances and cramped quarters and despite the ungodly heckling of the Philadelphia fans, Shibe Park was not, DiMaggio felt, a bad place to play. Its idiosyncrasies created a distinct atmosphere, a personality almost, that was more than just tolerable, it was interesting—at least for 11 games each year. The home run fences were well within reach (the concrete wall in leftfield stood a more standard 12 feet high), and the Athletics were often quite easily beaten. Once in 1939, over the course of a doubleheader in which DiMaggio hit three home runs, the Yankees outscored Philadelphia 33–2.

  Whatever the charms at Shibe Park—its façade looked more like a temple built during the French Renaissance than the entrance to a ballfield—facing the Athletics’ righthanded pitcher Johnny Babich was not among them. He had defeated the Yankees five times in six games during the 1940 season, almost single-handedly preventing them from reaching the World Series. On the final Friday of the season in Philadelphia, Babich and the last-place A’s had stopped the Yankees 6–2, at once ending their pennant hopes and forcing them to settle for third-place money. Less than a year before, Babich had himself been property of the Yankees, winning 17 games and losing just six for their minor league team in Kansas City in 1939. But instead of bringing him up and into the big league fold, Ed Barrow had let him go to Philadelphia.

  Babich maintained that he “didn’t bear down any harder against the Yanks than against any other club,” but DiMaggio didn’t believe it. He knew about Babich from back home. Johnny had grown up in Albion, 150 miles north of San Francisco, and had played with Vince on a team in Tucson for a while and then played for the Seals just before Joe arrived. After the Seals had let Babich go, he hooked on with the crosstown Missions and then set about beating his old team time and again. Since breaking into the majors with the Dodgers in 1934, Babich had been traded three times and had spent three full seasons (’37, ’38, ’39) in the minor leagues after having surgery on his pitching elbow. With such a fragile arm, who knew how long his career would last. When Babich got a chance to pitch in a big game—in 1940 he’d acquitted himself splendidly in matchups against Feller—he seized the chance with conviction.

  DiMaggio was familiar with Babich’s long-legged windup and with the muscular width of chest that Babich turned toward the plate as he brought his long right arm straight down to release the ball. He made his living with a pitch they called “the slideball” or “the sailer,” an ornery offering that all at once dropped and veered to the right. To righthanded batters he would work the pitch off the outside corner. It could be deadly.

  Babich was 28 years old and lived with his wife, Francine, and a white-haired fox terrier they called Stinky, and he bore a chip on his shoulder. He would rather be playing for a World Series contender than for the Philadelphia A’s. He deserved to play for a contender. In that pennant-determining 1940 game against the Yankees (the team that had given up on him and that he’d already defeated four times), Babich had allowed just five base hits. Now, facing the Yankees for the first time since that game, Babich had let it be known to his teammates—and in turn word had come to the Yankees and to DiMaggio—that he intended to stop Joe’s hitting streak right where it was at 39 straight games. He had a simple plan to do it too. If he could get DiMaggio out once, then he would walk him the rest of the game. In this way the Yankee-slayer would make his most dramatic kill.

  More than 13,600 fans were in the stands this Saturday, better than twice the A’s typical weekend-game crowd. It was an extremely hot afternoon and in the city people sought relief in places like Gimbels department store, which boasted of being “the largest air-cooled area in Philadelphia.” The Athletics were a sixth-place club; it was not their sluggers—the outfielders Sam Chapman and Bob Johnson and the second baseman Benny McCoy could all drive the ball—that the people sweating in the Shibe Park seats had come to see. The day before, the newspaper headline JOE DIMAGGIO AND HIT STREAK HERE TO FACE A’S had run across the top of a page. The teams themselves, readying for a two-game set, were an afterthought.

  DiMaggio had been grateful in the first of the two games, the previous afternoon, when he singled off the A’s Chubby Dean on the first pitch of his first at bat to run the streak to 39 games, easing his mind at once. (Later he smacked a home run more than 450 feet.) This was the first time since the streak had really taken hold of everyone’s attention that DiMaggio was playing on the road. Although he was always closely watched as a player, he had never felt such particular and elevated attention in the major leagues. He had come under focus as a rookie, of course, and again after his contract disputes when he would be regularly booed. In those times DiMaggio would wake in the middle of the night, the boos still sounding in his mind, and leave his bed and smoke cigarettes, pacing the floor until the light of day. Now there was a similar feeling. He realized that he was again being judged on a standard beyond whether the Yankees won or lost; this was something else: Get a hit and succeed. Don’t, and fail. The streak was now completely defining him. And with that, DiMaggio knew, came a chance to leave an imprint that could last even after he was gone. Like Ruth’s home runs and Cobb’s batting average and Gehrig’s impossible string of games played. With the streak, DiMaggio was after something larger than the day’s final score; larger, even, than the Yankees run to the pennant. Larger, maybe, than the game itself.

  In the evening at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel in Philadelphia he listened to the radio, first the quiz show and then the news in which he played a principal part. “Tomorrow, Joe DiMaggio will try to hit in his 40th straight game and get one step closer to George Sisler’s record,” the radio man said. Then followed more dispatches about the Nazis’ advance and the British dropping bombs in France, about the Philadelphia racketeers who were shorting folks on coal deliveries across the city and about a local teenager with a flourishing turkey farm. Mrs. Roosevelt, in other news, had advanced the notion of implementing a national service program for girls.

  DIMAGGIO DID NOT care for Johnny Babich, nor for the bases-on-balls plan that Babich had devised. In the first inning against Babich, DiMaggio pulled the ball hard down the leftfield line where it landed a few inches on the wrong side of the foul line, a few inches from a streak-extending double. On his next swing Joe lifted a high pop fly that the shortstop Al Brancato settled under and caught. Babich had his out.

  Now, as DiMaggio came up to lead off the third inning, Brancato moved a couple of strides to his right, toward third base, playing him to pull. This was Connie Mack’s instruction, communicated from the dugout with a casual wave.

  At second base Benny McCoy held his usual position. In truth you could never predict where DiMaggio would drive a pitch. McCoy deeply admired DiMaggio although he didn’t know him much, certainly not in the way that he’d already gotten so friendly with Dominic just in passing around the league. Benny liked to banter but Joe was never open to him in that way. Still, McCoy felt an affinity with Joe. A few months before the 1940 season McCoy and some other players in the Detroit Tigers’ system had been declared “free agents” by commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis; the Tigers, Landis ruled, had willfully mishandled the players’ contracts and blocked their financial progress. In the bidding war that followed, McCoy, with only half a season of big league baseball behind him, drew a guarantee of $65,000 over two years to sign with the A’s. That was superstar money. And so when Benny had a bad game, which he often had that first season, the crowd heckled and booed. There goes the $65,000 beauty. Oh cripes. You know, I could strike out like that for half the dough he’s getting paid! McCoy had heard of, and then heard f
or himself, the booing that DiMaggio sometimes got because of the money he made. Players who bargained for big contracts did not fare well in the public’s mind. Why, I’m the Joe DiMaggio of the Philadelphia A’s, McCoy sometimes thought to himself with a smile.

  McCoy was playing better this season, fielding well and driving in runs. But lately he was in another pickle. His draft number had been called that spring and his repeated requests for deferment on the grounds that he had parents and siblings to support—most recently he’d been granted a respite until late July—did not sit easily with every fan. Again McCoy heard some heckling from the stands. He had talked about the draft situation with Dom DiMaggio when the Athletics were up in Boston, and so the news that arrived just that day, with the Yankees in town, that Dom had been spared military induction on account of his poor eyesight was encouraging to McCoy. So was the fact that the White Sox’s Johnny Rigney had been spared conscription at the 11th hour by what the Army doctors were calling a perforated ear drum. Maybe if it came down to it the draft board would find a way to exempt McCoy, too. Maybe I’ll get to play out this whole season after all, he thought.

  McCoy looked in from second base. The sun was hot upon the infield. He was not pleased with Babich’s plan either. McCoy wanted to beat the Yankees, of course, and who better than Johnny to do that, but he couldn’t help but root for DiMaggio to get his hit. The streak was exciting; they all felt it. At the very least Joe should get his fair cracks and not be walked. In the first inning many in the crowd had actually risen to watch as DiMaggio’s pop-up fell into Brancato’s glove. DiMaggio was now standing in the batter’s box again.

  Babich’s first pitch came in well outside and the second one did too, and perhaps that was the pitch that truly sounded the tocsin in DiMaggio’s mind. Babich really could do this. He could just walk me. Ball three arrived, once again well off the plate.

  DiMaggio stepped out and looked down to Art Fletcher at third base to see if he would be asked to take a pitch on the 3–0 count. From the dugout McCarthy gave Fletcher the sign to let Joe swing away and then DiMaggio turned back toward the plate to take his stance again. Through the shadows McCarthy could see Joe’s features harden and contract and a darkness encroach upon his eyes. It was a look of hot resentment, fierce but controlled. Seething. It was not a look that McCarthy recalled ever seeing on a ballplayer’s face.

  The fourth pitch from Babich came in, high and again decidedly off the plate, but this time not quite far enough. I can reach it, DiMaggio thought. His bat was suddenly in motion and the baseball violently struck, on a line, a blistering missile right back through the box and into centerfield. Babich, nearly hit by the whistling ball, toppled off balance and the blood drained from his face. “He was as white as a sheet,” DiMaggio would later recall. The ball skipped deeper onto the outfield grass and centerfielder Bob Johnson gathered it before it rolled into the gap. DiMaggio never slowed as he ran down the line and with coach Earle Combs urging him on, he took the turn at first base on a hard angle and hurtled to second, sliding in safely, a single having become a double by DiMaggio’s determination that it be so. Though DiMaggio would later call this blow off the insolent Babich “the most satisfying hit of the streak,” he did not let that satisfaction show as he stood on second base. He simply watched Babich get the ball back and he prepared to take his lead. McCoy wanted to greet DiMaggio, even just a quick hello, but shyness would not let him. He has other things on his mind than saying hello to me, McCoy thought. The streak was now at 40 games.

  The Yankees won the game 7–4. Charlie Keller’s home run extended the team’s streak to 23 straight with a homer, and fans spilled onto the field after the final out in the ninth, hoping as ever to get near Joe. Later in the victorious locker room—the odors of sweat and breath mixing with soap and cigarettes—as the team prepared to catch its chartered bus for the train station, DiMaggio received a telegram from Jefferson Hospital downtown requesting that he come there right away. A flagging and incurably ill 10-year-old boy wanted to meet DiMaggio; perhaps the baseball star would bring joy in the final hours. Lefty went with Joe of course. Now he was always at DiMaggio’s side, there to deflect the increasing attention, to steer people away, to handle the inquiring press. “You nervous about the streak?” a reporter would call out and it would be Lefty who would turn and reply, “Joe? Nah, he’s fine. Me? I threw up my breakfast.”

  A spleen disease afflicted the boy, Tony, and in the hospital room Joe sat and talked with him for awhile. Tony was terribly thin but DiMaggio found him bright and cheerful. Because the boy had listened to the radio and knew all about the streak, and because this was the sort of thing a baseball hero was supposed to do, DiMaggio assured Tony that the next day he would have him in mind when he played a doubleheader against the Senators. DiMaggio said that he would break the hitting streak record and that doing so would be his way of communicating his thoughts and well wishes to Tony. Then Joe and Lefty went from the hospital and took a cab to the 30th Street Station and got on board the evening train to Washington, D.C.

  Chapter 19

  Bedlam

  DIMAGGIO SAT READING Superman and smoking in his room at the Shoreham Hotel. Joe adored the Superman comics, although he did not want many people to know this. If the newspapers picked up on it, and he felt they surely would, who knew what people might think? What if they made fun of him for the Superman thing? Lefty had the assignment of discreetly buying the weekly comic book for Joe; whenever DiMaggio himself carried a copy he tucked it away and out of sight. He read the daily Superman strips in the newspaper too.

  Superman was a story of simple and unambiguous heroism in which the seemingly impossible was routinely achieved. Something important was always at stake. Everybody loved Superman and unfailingly he saved the day. There was also in the story the everpresent element of secrecy, of Clark Kent’s disguising a completely other identity that no one, not even Lois Lane, could ever know.

  “Why, Joe, you’re just like him,” Lefty would kid. “He puts on his uniform and all of a sudden no one can stop him! He’s everyone’s hero.” Sometimes when buying the comic—and DiMaggio always had Lefty get it on the very day it came out—Gomez would goof around and call out loudly to DiMaggio, hovering off to the side: “You mean this comic book, Joe? Or this one, the Superman?” DiMaggio would scowl and turn his back and walk off a few paces. Only Lefty could get away with tweaking him like this.

  Tonight, with the doubleheader and Sisler’s record waiting in the balance at Griffith Stadium the next day, Joe and Lefty would stay in the room. As DiMaggio had realized, over the last days in New York and then again staying at the Ben Franklin in Philadelphia, being out in public now meant being subject to an almost relentless pestering.

  Even in ordinary times when DiMaggio went out someone invariably wanted a piece of him—and wanted his autograph. Fans interrupted his meals at restaurants and surrounded him when he left Yankee Stadium. At the movies DiMaggio found it best to sit near the back, to limit the number of people who might see him and come over to greet him even as the picture rolled. The fawning and the people’s eagerness to approach him had become far greater now; it seemed that each day his celebrity grew.

  Now, even a simple stroll or an attempt to sit quietly in the hotel lobby was a sure invitation to be bothered. That was too bad. DiMaggio liked the hotel lobbies, saw them as a comfortable place to relax. He liked to sit in the plush armchairs beneath the fancy chandeliers and, with one or two of the guys in the chairs beside him, watch the hotel guests come and go. They’d sit without speaking. A few years back in St. Louis a reporter had seen DiMaggio, Frankie Crosetti and Tony Lazzeri together in the lobby of the Chase Hotel. The teammates sat for nearly an hour and a half without exchanging a single word. Then DiMaggio cleared his throat. “What did you say?” Crosetti asked. And Lazzeri said, “Shut up. He didn’t say anything.” And then the three men fell back into silence. They sat and watched and were left to do so in peace.

  T
hat would not be possible in this time of the hitting streak and so DiMaggio would stay in the room, and he and Lefty would put the radio on and order up steak. Even on a night like this some enterprising fans would come and knock on the door claiming to be a bellhop or a maid. Gomez would tell them to bug off, and that DiMaggio wasn’t even there. At times, though, a pretty woman would arrive to the room, and if Joe had invited her or if he wanted her to stay (he had a fondness then for redheads), Gomez would let the woman inside and then leave the two of them alone for a while. Rarely did Joe ever see any of these women again. He expected nothing of them and he made it clear that they should expect nothing of him. DiMaggio did not offer to take any of the women out for a meal, nor did he suggest that they spend any additional time together. To none of the women did he play the cavalier. The dalliances may have briefly pleased DiMaggio but they did not satisfy him, and they did not lessen the loneliness he felt for Dorothy when he was away. When he was apart from Dorothy she seemed in every aspect ideal. His annoyances with her seemed small and unimportant and were far from his thoughts; she became in his mind the missing ingredient he needed to feel at ease. No other woman changed that. DiMaggio still, or even more so, looked forward to returning home to Dorothy’s arms and to their first moments together; he still wanted her to be at the ballpark for every game and to be on his arm when the photographers came. Out in the nightlife, DiMaggio’s moments of gallantry were reserved only for his wife. There may have been other women sometimes, but really there were none. Joe was always true to Dorothy, in his fashion.