56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports

by Kennedy, Kostya

  He used that same bat his second time up, in the third inning, and when Hudson dropped down to whip in a sidearm curve, DiMaggio was not fooled. His line drive reached the shortstop Cecil Travis before DiMaggio had gotten out of the batter’s box and Travis, without moving his feet, caught the ball at shoulder height. 0 for 2. The game wore on and the heat did not wane. DiMaggio sat by himself on the bench, and the Senators brought in Arnold Anderson to pitch. Anderson weighed 210 pounds and stood 6′ 3″, an Iowa farm boy with auburn hair and a freckled face. His best pitch was the heater. Everybody called him Red.

  In the fifth inning against DiMaggio, Red came inside with the fastball on the first pitch, then missed away with the curve. When he came back inside with the fastball one more time DiMaggio could only get the handle of his bat on the pitch and the ball never really had a chance, dying in Cramer’s glove in short centerfield. The fans in Griffith Stadium sat back down. The sun had fallen lower in the sky.

  The score was tied at 4–4 when the Yankees scored twice in the top of the sixth to take the lead, but if ever a game-turning rally seemed beside the point, it was this one. The fans and many of the players had one thought on their minds: DiMaggio was 0 for 3. Joe never did the things that some ballplayers do when they’re nervous on the bench. He did not scratch the side of his face, or finger his lower lip, or rub his hands together. DiMaggio only sat and looked in front of him. Unless something happened that called for his attention, he did not turn to the left or to the right. He stared straight ahead.

  No one in the Yankees dugout would speak to Joe at all. But when the seventh inning arrived and with it, perhaps, DiMaggio’s final turn at bat, Henrich came over. He suggested that DiMaggio try using the bat that Henrich was using—it too was DiMag’s bat after all, and the other one Joe had used today hadn’t had much luck in it. DiMaggio agreed and took the Henrich bat with him to the plate. Again Red Anderson started off high and close with his fastball, this time forcing DiMaggio to jerk back out of its way. Maybe Red, in his first full major league season, got cocky. Or maybe the fastball was the only pitch that he trusted. Whatever the reason, on 1 and 0 he threw it again—this time over the plate.

  You could have heard the crowd’s roar on Georgia Avenue, past the trolley tracks and way up the hill, when DiMaggio hit that ball, a hard, clean single into leftfield. At first base Earle Combs slapped DiMaggio on the back and first baseman Mickey Vernon shook his hand and DiMaggio gave Vernon a pat on the rump. There would be no enforcing of the league’s antifraternization rule today. When the first base umpire, Bill McGowan, strolled over he gave DiMaggio a tap on the behind himself. The joyful scenes repeated themselves in the Yankee dugout—caps tossed in the air, players dancing. And now DiMaggio did smile, broadly and without reservation. He looked around and hitched his pants. Suddenly children—“the urchins” as the Yankee players laughingly called them—ran onto the field and toward DiMaggio. In the crowd, the bedlam (and this was the word that the newspaper writers would use) did not quickly subside. Joe touched the bill of his cap, once and then a second time. Several minutes passed before the game could start again.

  And when Keller tripled, bringing DiMaggio home to score, the crowd stood and hollered anew as he arrived at the dugout, greeted before the first step by Johnny Sturm, and then by Lefty and Twink, and Dickey and Henrich and Rolfe and then by all of his teammates as he stepped down among them, all of them wanting to envelop their Joe. McCarthy grinned and Rizzuto hopped about and DiMaggio was filled with relief and happiness.

  The euphoric mood continued in the locker room after the game as the reporters came rushing in. DiMaggio sat naked on a trunk, laughing and unabashed. Players tossed towels at him and even tousled his sweating black locks. All of this was O.K. to do now. When McCarthy came over and shook DiMaggio’s hand the manager would not let go. His smile was unrestrained as he looked at Joe and an understanding passed between them. DiMaggio knew that McCarthy had compromised his game strategy more than once in deference to the streak. This was no small thing for a manager like McCarthy. The divide that had existed between the two men ever since McCarthy had toed the Yankee line over DiMaggio’s contract, now seemed forgotten and closed. “I don’t deserve the credit all alone,” DiMaggio told the writers first thing that day. “You have to give Mr. McCarthy some of it. He allowed me to hit that 3 and 0 pitch and it brought me many a good ball to swing at.”

  Before long a 10-word telegram arrived at the clubhouse from Sisler in St. Louis: “Congratulations,” it read. “I’m glad a real hitter broke it. Keep going.”

  DiMaggio spoke as expansively as he could to the writers. “Sure I’m tickled, who wouldn’t be,” he said. “It’s a great thing.” It was impossible for him to measure every word. There were many questions and they came fast. “When I got so close to Sisler’s mark I didn’t want to stop,” DiMaggio said. “I never felt so much on the spot before. . . . It is the most excitement I guess I’ve known since I came into the majors.”

  By then the news had traveled to all the ballparks in baseball. And in New York, New England and California, and across the middle states, some version of this news report burst through the radio broadcasts: “The Nazis, continuing their march, are now said to be just 225 miles from Moscow.” Then a pause. “And this has just come in from our nation’s capital: Joe DiMaggio has done it! The Yankee slugger has hit in 42 consecutive games, a new record.”

  In San Francisco customers ordered Scotch highballs at the Grotto and Giuseppe felt relieved and all aglow. And who said he couldn’t joke around in English? A reporter from the Chronicle spoke to Papa DiMaggio and transcribed his words this way: “Joe, he waited too long. He waits until da seexth inning before he ties da record of Seesler. Then he waits until da seventh inning before he breaks Seesler’s record in da second game. He makes his papa worry too long. Why cannot my son Joe do it in da first inning?”

  In Jackson Heights on the bench outside the White Castle on Northern Boulevard—the joint where big Eddie Einsidler once knocked back 35 of those little burgers in a sitting, putting the rest of the Dukes and Hornets to shame—Squeaks Tito was keening, his voice now at a pitch, as Commie and the rest of the guys joked, that only a dog could hear. The radio sung the words from Washington: His Joe DiMaggio had come through.

  Twenty-one-year-old Ray Robinson was a summer morning clerk at the Lake Stafford Hotel in Keene, N.H.—afternoons off, tennis, swimming, tanned young women up for a lark. Truly, Robinson wondered, could a guy have a better job? When he got the news, he hurried to spread it around.

  A shout went out in Bensonhurst where Maury Allen and the rest of the young stickballers stopped their game and ran to the first radio they could find.

  The main street buzzed in Ocean City, N.J., and little Gay Talese, his parents scarcely aware, felt thrilled, empowered even, by what DiMaggio had done.

  In South Jamaica, Queens, the radio hummed on the grocery store counter and Mario Cuomo sat on the milk box, fiddling with his pea shooter, and all ready to go. It was a hot Sunday night, and often on hot Sunday nights Mario and his parents and his brother and sister would all get into the wood-paneled station wagon and drive out to Rockaway Beach. They would park right on the sand and put the tailgate down and sit together in the back of the car listening to the water lapping in, and talking, perhaps, about the things that had happened in the ball games that day. The sun slipped to the horizon and you could hear the voices from the boardwalk. There was not the hubbub here of a place like Coney Island with its roller coasters and the Wonder Wheel, and the air-rifle shooting galleries where now, in a nod to the times, the tin ducks had been replaced as targets by little models of Nazi paratroopers. At Rockaway Beach the night was quieter; there was just noise enough. Mario could fall asleep under the blankets, the sea breeze upon him, full of sweet anticipatory giddiness, knowing that the next day his ballplaying hero Joe DiMaggio would be all over the newspapers. The hitting feat would be there for Mario to feast upon just as soon a
s dawn arrived and they awoke to the sounds of the seabirds and rubbed the salt from their eyes and drove back into South Jamaica to open up the store.

  Chapter 20

  Now, Wee Willie

  AT FIRST DOMINIC thought the newspaper story was a joke. Wee Willie Keeler? In 1897? Where did they come up with this stuff? For a couple of weeks now the news he’d been getting in Boston or on the road was about Joe’s trying to catch George Sisler at 41 straight. Now Joe had done that and, it seemed to Dominic, a longer record had suddenly materialized. Sisler, they were now saying, only held the “modern” record. Keeler had run off 44 consecutive games for the Baltimore Orioles more than four decades earlier, before the turn of century. Dominic hadn’t spoken to Joe in many weeks and was thinking about what he could say by way of congratulations when, soon after he and the Red Sox had arrived at the Hotel Commodore in New York for a doubleheader, with Joe’s streak at 42 games, Dom saw the headline: DIMAGGIO WILL AIM FOR ALL-TIME HITTING RECORD. So it’s true, Dom thought. Joe still has a few games to go. It isn’t a put-on.

  Dom paid attention to the streak, of course, as did Vince, with the Pirates. In fact Dom could not have avoided it if he’d tried: On the radio and in the bars and restaurants, the streak was on everybody’s lips. Even in the Red Sox dugout these days, when someone said “DiMaggio” they were often referring not to Dom but to Joe. When Dominic called home it was Joe’s streak that his father always got around to before long. Sometimes Dominic would be out somewhere, at a grocery shop or by a newsstand, and hear for the umpteenth time a lady ask some guy, “What did DiMaggio do today?” It was all Dom could do not to lean over and say, “Oh, I got 2 for 4 and thanks for asking.”

  At away games word of Joe’s getting a hit was sometimes announced between innings over the stadium loudspeaker. At home in Fenway Park Dominic received information more intimately, as he stood in centerfield. Ted Williams had asked the scoreboard operator inside Fenway’s big green monster of a leftfield wall to alert him whenever there was an update on Joe. Suddenly Dominic would hear Williams’s booming voice: “Dommy! Dommy! Joe got a hit. The streak’s alive.”

  No one on the Red Sox kept a closer eye on what Joe DiMaggio was doing than Williams did. He would check on DiMaggio’s daily statistics in the box scores, and then he would talk about what he’d read. You would guess that Ted was the brother, thought the Red Sox second baseman Bobby Doerr. By this time Williams was batting .404, easily the best average in baseball and a full 55 points better than DiMaggio’s. For a stretch of nearly a month from mid-May to mid-June, Williams had hit .517. Hardly anyone noticed. Some writers lamented how Williams’s run at a historic season—nobody had hit better than .400 since Hornsby in ’24—was being “obscured” and “submerged” by DiMaggio’s streak. Yet obscured and submerged it remained. While the crowds swelled to see DiMaggio, Williams’s gaudy average appeared to have no effect on the turnstiles. When comparisons were drawn between the two players the argument that DiMaggio was the better fielder and the more intimidating base runner inevitably won out. When Williams was asked for his own evaluation, he spoke respectfully of DiMaggio. “Joe is stronger,” Williams said. At 22, Williams was remarkably thin. He earned about a third of DiMaggio’s salary.

  Still, the fact that he could be hitting over .400 and with power too—his 15 home runs and 56 RBI barely trailed DiMaggio in those categories—and nonetheless be rendered an afterthought was not always easy for Williams to take. “I had a 23-game hit streak this season,” he pointed out during an interview just before Boston came to New York, and even as DiMaggio’s streak rose upward Williams spoke undaunted. “I’d like to break every hitting record in the book,” he declared.

  Joe wasn’t spending much time thinking about Williams, or about any other rival player. He thought about his own play and about what he still needed to do. There had certainly been a sense of achievement after passing Sisler’s record, the beacon that for so long had shone brightly before him. The Yankees had celebrated DiMaggio as a conqueror when he reached 42—on the train ride up from D.C. he had bought every teammate a bottle of beer—and the public celebrated too. A story headlined, DIMAGGIO SETS CONSECUTIVE HITTING MARK, ran on the front page of The Washington Post.

  Yet Keeler lurked in DiMaggio’s mind. Dominic’s surprise notwithstanding, newspapers had been mentioning Keeler’s streak for the better part of a week. While the Yankees were in Philadelphia, DiMaggio had gotten a call from a reporter friend in San Francisco confirming that Keeler’s record, set way back then, was indeed the official major league mark. Even in the exultant locker room shortly after he had eclipsed Sisler, DiMaggio had allowed that he was still looking ahead. “Now I’m going after that 44 game mark,” he said. Keeler was the new goal. Imagine getting this close and then not breaking it. To DiMaggio this was an unsettling thought.

  THE FACT THAT DiMaggio could tie Keeler with a hit in each game of the doubleheader against the Red Sox was something neither the Yankees nor the New York reporters were shy about advertising. The hitting streak sold: newspapers, tickets, score books. Rarely had a baseball plotline had legs like this. Thus Keeler, a .341 career hitter who had died too young of heart disease in 1923, was resurrected. Some old-timers argued that Wee Willie had it tougher than current hitters, given the way that in his day baseballs could be kept in play for entire games, becoming filthy with soil and tobacco juice, becoming too soft for a batter to really drive. The ball was “dead” in that era, they said, and players swung smaller bats. Keeler’s was 30½ inches long and 30½ ounces in weight, the smallest piece of lumber the folks at the Louisville Slugger factory had ever turned for a major leaguer. Even so, Keeler choked up six inches on the handle. When he first stepped into the batter’s box he looked like a sandlot novice, a kid. He stood less than 5′ 5″ and he weighed 140 pounds.

  Keeler grew up (if you could call it that) in Brooklyn and baseball gripped him from the start. He would come to the Gates Avenue School carrying a bat in his hands, and with a weathered ball stuffed into each of his coat pockets. The hips of his trousers were worn from sliding, his palms were rough and callused. Sometimes Wee Willie had about him the faint smell of horses; his father drove a streetcar on the DeKalb Avenue line.

  Wee Willie had a schoolteacher, Miss Emma Keeler. “I am very sorry to acknowledge that you are a namesake of mine,” she said to him, “but I am thankful that you are not of my kin.” Miss Keeler never appreciated the love that Willie felt for America’s young and growling game. As a baseball player Wee Willie was the best in the school. As a student he couldn’t tell fowl from fish or from anything else. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” Miss Keeler said as she returned a test paper to Willie. “You should be ashamed to say that the rhinoceros, an animal the hide of which cannot be pierced by a bullet, is noted for its fine feathers. A boy who pays no more attention to his studies than you do will never amount to much when he gets to be a man.” Then Miss Keeler paused: “I also wish to add that I shall no longer tolerate the bringing of baseball bats into this schoolroom.”

  So Wee Willie wasn’t long for the schoolroom. He could box, tenacious in the ring despite his tiny stature, and when he wrestled he could toss a guy twice his size. But nothing else mattered if there was a ball game going on. Willie pitched, played the infield—who cared if he was lefthanded—and would even fill in at catcher, anything to earn money in the semipro leagues. Everyone in Brooklyn got to know Willie’s name but when he made it big, he made it big in Baltimore, as the rightfielder on a team with the formidable likes of Hughie Jennings and John J. McGraw. Those three led the Orioles to the championship of the National League in 1894, ’95 and ’96. In ’97 Keeler started the season by getting a hit in 44 straight games, and finished it with a batting average of .424.

  Opponents stuck Willie with the nickname Little Boy, yet even as they cursed his pesky style, the little boy was transforming the game. He could place a base hit as accurately as another guy could throw a baseball. He�
��d bunt his way on base—daring and happy to do it even with a runner on third—and when the infielders came in close to try to take that bunt away, he would just chop the ball over their heads or slap it hard past their gloves. If Keeler saw a fielder moving to cover a base, he hit the ball right to the spot where the fielder had been. It was Wee Willie who brought the hit-and-run play to the major leagues.

  They called him a “scientific hitter” and around the time that he was averaging better than .370 in each of six seasons in a row, people begged him for a treatise on the art. “Keep your eyes clear and hit ’em where they ain’t. That’s all,” he said. Over the years “hit ’em where they ain’t” had found purchase in the lexicon, attached to Keeler, and was a philosophical truth in dugouts across the land.

  Some said that in those years of the late 1890s and the early aughts Wee Willie was the best player in baseball—better even than Nap Lajoie. Keeler ran the bases with great speed and he covered wide ground in the outfield. Some of that was the ground that sloped sharply down and out of sight in Baltimore’s old Union Park. It was there that crafty Willie would secretly stow baseballs in the grass. When a batter hit one out past the slope in rightfield Keeler would race back, vanish from view, and then, miraculously, come up throwing a moment later. In this way the Orioles often got startled runners out. Then came the day that both Keeler and the Baltimore centerfielder disappeared chasing a ball over the brow. A moment later not one but two baseballs came hurtling toward second base. From then on the umpires checked the grass.

  Keeler returned to Brooklyn to play for the Superbas and twice helped that team win the National League. Folks called Keeler the pride of Williamsburg for the neighborhood where he was raised. Out in front of the Superbas’ Washington Park a boy would sometimes wave a score card before games, shouting “you can’t tell the players without one!” But the fans were interested in one player in particular. And when they looked out to see Wee Willie Keeler standing beside a teammate, perhaps the 6′ 1″ Duke Farrell, well, the fact was you could tell that player without any help from the score card at all.