56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports

by Kennedy, Kostya

  Gomez picked at his spikes. He was getting ready to pitch that day. The Yankees lead on Cleveland was now at 2½ games and the locker room was in the pregame quiet that DiMaggio preferred. Doc Painter appeared with the salt pills again and McCarthy said it would be okay for the team to skip infield. The players walked around bare-chested, their faces, necks and arms well-browned, their torsos pale as the belly of a fish.

  In place of Grove, the Red Sox sent out Heber Newsome, a rookie at 31. Boston loved Newsome, and with his assortment of pitches he was the team’s biggest winner. The first time Newsome faced DiMaggio on this afternoon he got ahead with a curveball just above the knees. If the crowd was far smaller than it had been the day before, its principals were hardly more contained. These were the people who, heat-be-damned, wouldn’t have missed this game for anything. Newsome could not win: Throw a strike and the crowd shouted out, annoyed at anything that went against DiMaggio. Throw a ball and they booed him for playing the coward.

  Now there were three photographers kneeling along the first base line to shoot DiMaggio, and two more behind him. One of them kept his lens trained on the Yankees dugout, ready to catch the players in their lively leaps should DiMaggio make his hit. On a 1–1 pitch DiMaggio drove an outside curveball deep into right centerfield, a double for sure. The players jumped up in the dugout, the fans rose from their seats. But the Boston rightfielder, Stan Spence, closed hard on the ball and at the last instant jumped and made a one-handed catch.

  Before the game DiMaggio had agreed to a few photographs with Williams. The two of them were posed holding a bat, handle-up, between them and going hand over hand as if choosing up sides for a game in the yard. Joe had not talked with Dom though, not about the streak nor about Dom’s having been excused from the draft. The two DiMaggios had not talked together about anything during Boston’s stay in New York. Joe’s caught up in the hitting streak, that’s why, Dom thought. And maybe not talking is just as well right now, both of us preparing for the games and all.

  In the third inning DiMaggio again swung at a curveball on 1 and 1. This time he pulled it down the third-base line, where Tabor, who’d looked so clumsy the day before, snagged the ball backhanded behind the bag, straightened and threw out DiMaggio with a stride to spare.

  It must have been 100 degrees on the field that day. In the dugout, when he wasn’t hitting or about to hit, DiMaggio sat by himself with his eyes half-closed, silent and still. Gomez had a shutout through five.

  Photographers worked in the stands too and there they were especially attendant to Dorothy, sitting gamely in her unshaded box seat, in her pretty patterned dress and her hat, and her handbag held against her pregnant belly. Her mother and father sat beside her. Each time Joe came to bat a photographer waited with Dorothy in his sights, hoping to capture that first reactive smile if her man came through.

  When Newsome missed twice to fall behind DiMaggio in the fifth inning the booing that arose seemed to the writers on hand to be far louder than a crowd this size should rightfully produce. People hissed angrily. Pitch to him, ya bum! Pitch to him! Then DiMaggio hit a long foul ball into the leftfield stands and it was 2 and 1. Now Newsome threw again, and DiMaggio swung. And now the ball was in the air above the outfield, very high and very deep. The leftfielder Williams could only turn and watch it go. Home run.

  People said they saw DiMaggio smiling as he trotted briskly around the bases. He kept no recollection of this himself. Dorothy was standing, her round face radiant and her hands held high as she clapped. Her parents stood and cheered along with her. Elsewhere the cameras caught fans in the bleachers who moments before the 2-and-1 pitch had sat tensely, score cards gripped, but who now were jubilant and waving their arms. At home plate Red Rolfe shook DiMaggio’s hand and then Timmy Sullivan did and then, again, he was back among the rest of his teammates. DiMaggio felt as if he were in a trance. Everything felt wonderful. He had done it. No other major leaguer, not even back in the dusty days of the last century, had ever hit in 45 straight games. DiMaggio’s name stood alone above the rest. “You have got to do the best that you can while you last in this game” he had said to the magazine writer before the game.

  In the dugout his mind wandered. His home run had been part of a six-run rally that would yet again make a winner of Gomez. At one point, perhaps because he’d seen Dorothy and June in the stands, or perhaps because of something reminiscent in the sunlight on the grass, or perhaps for some other reason he really couldn’t say, DiMaggio asked Gomez when the four of them could go on a trip to Bear Mountain again. It was an odd time to ask, but DiMaggio adored those trips. Lefty would drive them up along route 9W, more than 90 minutes into the countryside, and at the park they would find a spot in the sun and unpack the food. Gomez and DiMaggio would horse around by the water’s edge. Once on such a trip, in a moment of uncharacteristic unrestrained glee, Joe had beat with his palms a little rhythm on Gomez’s bare back. They’d go in the water and then come out and lie next to the girls and snack on something while their swimming trunks dried in the sun. They would recall for their wives funny times with the team, like when Lefty had once asked Joe to carry a suitcase for him back to the hotel. The suitcase had been so heavy and Joe’s shoulder had so ached that back at the room he couldn’t wait to open the bag and see what weighed it down. Inside was a thick, solid wooden log, there only for the purpose of Gomez’s prank. The two men had laughed then at the hotel, and now they laughed again in the retelling. Joe loved Lefty.

  The final innings passed dreamily and the game ended, another easy Yankees win. Again Joe was besieged by oncoming fans as he ran off the field and he could not stop a boy from snatching his cap and racing off with it toward the centerfield exit. DiMaggio, floating, would have just let it go. But the Red Sox’ Mike Ryba, coming out of the bullpen, saw the boy and knocked him down and then the ushers came and got Joe’s cap.

  In the Yankees clubhouse there was great excitement and commotion. McCarthy spoke about the strain that the streak had put not just on DiMaggio but on all the team, about how nervous they all had often been and how pleased they all now were. “I don’t believe anyone but a ballplayer is in a position to appreciate what it is to hit in 45 straight games,” McCarthy said. He said that he did not think DiMaggio’s record would be beaten. DiMaggio again thanked McCarthy for letting him swing at those 3 and 0s. Henrich and the pitcher Tiny Bonham hoisted DiMaggio onto their shoulders and he grinned and held on. The chalkboard was back, this time inscribed: 45 CRACKS RECORD. No one wanted to go home, neither the players nor the fans; when Joe finally did leave he would need a police escort to get through the throng that was waiting for him outside the stadium.

  In the meantime he smoked in the clubhouse and sifted through the latest stack of fan mail. He said to the reporters, “I don’t know how far I can go but I’m not going to worry about it now.” Then it was Gomez, ever japing, who gave the writers their line for the next day. In clubbing that record-breaking home run Big Joe had used Wee Willie’s own formula, Gomez reasoned. “Fact is,” he said, “Joe hit ’em where they ain’t.”

  The View From Here

  The Challenger, Pete Rose

  Peter Edward Rose is sitting at a small, cordoned-off table near the front entrance of the Field of Dreams sports memorabilia store at the Caesars Forum shopping mall in Las Vegas. It is a Thursday in April. Rose, nearly 70, is wearing a long-sleeved gray cotton T-shirt, tight designer blue jeans and a pair of heeled, narrow-toed pale leather boots. Cowboy chic. He has a square head and short, unfortunately dyed red hair, roughly the color of a rooster’s wattle. He is affable, at ease and often ebullient.

  Shoppers who’ve come here to get with Rose have a few options. They may purchase a baseball, a bat, a photograph or one of numerous other items (a bobblehead doll of Rose sliding headfirst; a rooster-red second-baseman’s mitt that’s a replica of the one he wore in Cincinnati; a copy of his 2004 book, My Prison Without Bars) and take it to Rose to sign. Prices range from $79
for a 6-inch-by-9-inch photo of Rose in his playing days to $400 for a suite of items including an authentic number 14 Reds, Phillies or Expos jersey. For their fee, buyers also get a few minutes with Rose. They are allowed behind the red velvet ropes to sit beside him as he signs, to make small talk and to have their picture taken while shaking his hand. In addition to his signature, Rose adorns items with inscriptions such as HIT KING and CHARLIE HUSTLE or sometimes NL CHAMPS 1980 if he’s signing a Philadelphia jersey. He’ll also write just about anything else a customer asks him to write, working from a quiver of Sharpie pens of various colors and widths. He uses a thick blue pen to sign jerseys; a pencil-thin black one for autographing a baseball card. One customer came forward with Rose’s 1963 Topps rookie card, a coveted collectible worth more than $1,000, and had Rose write on it MOVE OVER TY! an allusion to Ty Cobb, whom Rose eclipsed in 1985 as baseball’s alltime hits leader. Rose always signs neatly and deliberately.

  During the signing session Rose is a terrific banterer and raconteur. He likes to ask people where they’re from and then make some geographic inquiry (“Isn’t that the town from where you can really smell Cleveland?”) or offer up pronouncements of sports trivia. “You’re from Pittsburgh?” Rose asks a guy in a Steelers cap. “Do you know that your quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, won more games in his first five years in the NFL than anyone ever?” When a couple of middle-aged men from Chicago settle in to have a bat autographed, Rose launches into a brief but well-reasoned polemic about the omission of Ron Santo, the beloved Cubs third baseman from 1960 through ’73, from the Hall of Fame. “He has more home runs and a higher batting average than [former Orioles third baseman] Brooks Robinson, and Robinson’s in!” Rose declares. The Chicagoans are delighted. “Amen, Pete!” says one. “You’re the best.”

  Rose will crack short, prefab jokes as he signs (“You want this to read ‘to Bob’? O.K., but do you mind if I spell Bob backward?”) and he’ll tell stories about old colleagues such as Willie Mays. “One time, and this is a true story,” Rose begins, addressing a clutch of rapt, thirtysomething Minnesotans. “I’m out to dinner with Willie. We’re in town for an All-Star Game. Willie was always a sharp dresser and he’s wearing this dark, sharkskin suit. Well, he goes to the bathroom and when he comes back he has water all over the outside of his leg. I said, ‘What happened?’ And he says,” (now Rose begins to mimic Mays’s comically falsetto voice) “ ‘Pete, I was standing there taking a pee and suddenly the guy next to me just turns himself toward me,’—Rose is up out of his seat now, standing and swiveling his entire body to illustrate the approaching mishap—‘and he says to me, ‘Hey aren’t you Willie Mays?’. . . ‘He pissed on me!’ ” The crowd around the table, those signing, those waiting their turn, customers and store employees just pausing to listen in, all burst into laughter. “So,” Rose finishes off, “there’s someone out there who pissed on Willie Mays. And it wasn’t me.”

  Rose is generous with his time and patient with his visitors. When he finishes with the autograph session, Rose himself packs up the signed items for the customers, sliding a photo carefully into a plastic sheath or folding a newly signed jersey just so and covering it with a clear wrap. Then he encourages an extra free photograph or two—“Don’t you want to get your son in here with us for one?”—and, as the shoppers finally start to inch away, Rose invariably adds a parting zinger. “You know, the whole time your wife was sitting next to me, she had her hand on my ass. . . . ”

  The customers love it, of course. And in a few hours of work Rose has sold nearly $10,000 worth of merchandise. On a weekday. On weekend afternoons that number can double. In 2007, his third year working about 15 days a month at the Field of Dreams store, Rose sold, among other items, 5,000 jerseys and 17,000 baseballs. Rose says that a representative from Rawlings, the ball maker, told him he was the company’s 31st biggest customer that year, trailing only Major League Baseball’s 30 franchises.

  “Pete, you are the greatest,” says a woman named Harriet who isn’t buying anything but has just stopped to say hello, “In our house you are already in the Hall of Fame.”1

  Rose nods at this. “Thank you, sweetheart,” he says. Rose doesn’t quite look his age; his body, fleshier, naturally, than it was during the playing career from which he is now a quarter century removed, nonetheless remains similar in character: chesty, compact. He has substantial shoulders, thick wrists and small, wide hands. No neck. Legs that are slightly bowed. He is 5′ 11″ or so, and has a pot belly that’s hidden on this day beneath the loosely fitting shirt. Rose’s eyes flicker with an eager restlessness and—in the firmness of his handshake, in the way he might turn his head sharply to attention or absently roll his shoulders—he recalls that same intractable energy, that superball quality he possessed more than three decades ago, in the summer of 1978 when, at age 37, he hit in 44 consecutive games and became the only player since Joe DiMaggio to have a streak of even 40 in a row.

  That 44-game run is another thing that customers like to talk to him about. “I was there in New York when you tied the National League hitting streak record, Pete!” someone will say. Some fans even bring Rose faded game programs from one of the games late in his streak, just to show him.

  “That was the hardest thing I ever did in baseball,” says Rose of the feat that would win him, among numerous other benefits and accolades, an extended audience with President Jimmy Carter at the White House. “That really was the only time in my career that I felt pressure. When I was going after Ty Cobb’s hit record [in 1985] I had all of September to pass him. I did it on September 11th, but if I hadn’t I would have done it on September 12th. In a streak when it is June 23rd, you’ve got to get a hit. When it’s June 24th, you’ve got to get another fucking hit. No rest. That’s what made it hard, and that’s what made it fun. As much as that streak was the most challenging thing for me as a player, it was also the most fun, just great. I felt like I was helping baseball, like it was good for the game.

  “I tried to stay focused by just setting close-term goals for myself when it was going on—beat the Reds team record, beat the National League record, get to 40 in a row,” Rose goes on. “But sure, I thought about getting to Joe DiMaggio. Once I reached 40, somewhere in the back of my mind I thought that maybe I could do it, break that record. Even though I knew that I was still really a long way off.”

  THE THIRD CHILD and first son of Harry and LaVerne Rose was born on April 14, 1941—“The year of DiMaggio’s streak,” Pete tells people today—the same afternoon that President Franklin Roosevelt tossed out the baseball season’s ceremonial first pitch in Washington, D.C. It’s fitting. “Pete plays every day like it’s Opening Day,” Reds teammate Joe Morgan would say more than 35 years later.

  Raised in Anderson Ferry, a bare-knuckled, blue-collar section of Cincinnati, hard by the Ohio River, Pete, like his father before him, was an undersized and enormously driven athlete. Harry played semipro football, and was known as both a hard man to bring down and as a ferocious defender; one time, as Pete tells it, Harry suffered a broken hip on a play, but still got up to tackle the ball-carrier.

  Pete also played football, and also relentlessly. But even before he made the varsity team at Western Hills High he realized that this was a game, in the long run, better left to larger men. In baseball, where size hardly mattered, he could improve his performance and get ahead of the others through sheer repetition in practice. Rose likes to say that he played baseball for the opportunity to succeed the way his father, “the only man who ever truly influenced me,” never had. At age nine, at Harry’s bidding, Pete, a natural righthanded batter, became a switch hitter. From that day forward, Pete says, “I never went two days of my life without swinging a bat. Really. Most days, whenever I could, I would hit for hours.”

  That dedication, and the fact that Rose was a hometown boy, attracted the Reds far more than did his natural ability. Rose was smart and intense on the field and he had a knack for making contact with the ball. In 1961
, during Rose’s first pro assignment, to the Florida State League, another Cincinnati prospect named Chico Ruiz said after watching Rose, “That guy has a base-hit bat.”

  He won the National League Rookie of the Year award at age 22 in 1963 and the old-timers said that they’d never seen a ballplayer quite like him. Rose played every moment as if it were his first, and last, on the ball field, hurtling headfirst through the air to slide into third or even into home, crashing into railings to catch pop-ups and famously bolting to first base after drawing a walk. His joy was unceasingly apparent, the way he would fairly yelp and clap his hands after getting a hit, making the turn at first base and then hungrily eyeing second. To Rose, playing baseball was a privilege and opponents calling him “hot dog” or “Hollywood” didn’t diminish his zeal. When veterans chided him for racing to first base after ball four (“It’s called a walk for a reason, bush-leaguer,” they’d call out), Rose just kept right on doing it. He wanted to get to first as fast as possible, he told reporters, flashing his gap-toothed grin, “Because I’m afraid the ump might change his mind.”

  He batted leadoff, came to the plate 700 times a season and was good for more than 200 hits. “The only thing I don’t like about baseball,” Rose said during those early years, “is that they don’t play enough games.”

  Watching Rose play was certainly nothing like watching Joe DiMaggio. Rose, forever churning, never looked graceful on the field. Where DiMaggio’s effort was fluid and concealed, Rose’s was ever obvious. DiMaggio, long and angular, always knew just how hard to run—to glide, really—to get to where he needed to go and always, it seemed, got there safely. Rose, burly and broad, played like a bull just let into the ring, his romps around the basepaths ending, inevitably, in a spray of dust.