He worked exhaustively at the plate, never taking a day off, adjusting his stroke. Rose was choking up more now, the slightest concession to age. Before games he would wipe his bat clean with rubbing alcohol so that later he could see what marks had been left, see exactly how he had hit the ball, and learn something from it—the bat barrel a palimpsest of horsehide smudge. Even on off days when most Reds were taking a rest from it all, Rose was at the ballpark. He’d bring eight-year-old Petey with him sometimes, and they would pitch to each other and shag fly balls, just the two of them along with a Reds coach or two that Rose had enlisted to throw BP. And after a few buckets of baseballs had been hit, sprayed all over the field, Pete and Petey would each take an empty bucket in their hands and bustle into the outfield, where together they would gather baseballs off the grass.
Dom DiMaggio had sent Rose a telegram after Rose passed Dom’s mark of hitting in 34 straight games, at the time the ninth longest streak in history. Joe DiMaggio’s record, though, was still too far off to warrant any note from the record holder himself. (After Rose had reached 36 straight, against the Expos, Montreal’s Tony Perez had called out cheerily that Rose had “only 20 more games to go” to reach Joe DiMaggio. The comment broke everybody up; it was the “only” that got them.) When Rose reached 42 games a reporter from the Associated Press got in touch with Joe DiMaggio and asked him whether he was rooting for Rose to break his streak. DiMaggio did not feint. “Does a fish like to be out of water?” he said. The answer, 37 years after the defining act, was no.
ON THE NIGHT of July 31, the Braves drew 45,007 fans to their home game against the Reds, nearly quadruple Atlanta’s average crowd. In the sixth inning Rose, hitless in two at bats, grounded a single into rightfield off knuckleballer Phil Niekro, tying Wee Willie Keeler at 44 games.2 This was the mark that mattered to Rose even more than Holmes’s had. Fireworks went off. Rose was presented with an arrangement of roses in the shape of the number 44. (The Braves, appreciative of the excitement that brightened an otherwise dull, losing year, and also hoping against hope to sign Rose when he became a free agent after the 1978 season, would later engage a horticulturist to make a new strain of flower called the “Pete” rose.)
The next night yielded Rose a challenge far different from the one he’d just faced in the veteran and future Hall of Famer Niekro, against whom Rose had batted scores of times. Atlanta sent out Larry McWilliams, a tall rookie lefthander with an irregular, almost spasmodic motion. McWilliams had a record of 2–0 and before the game, Rose watched him closely as he warmed up, determining that McWilliams had three pitches—fastball, curveball, forkball. Rose was ready to go to work.
“I was more nervous in that game that I ever had been or ever would be pitching in the major leagues,” McWilliams remembers. “That was just the fourth start of my career and ever since I’d seen Pete get that ball through against Niekro the night before I knew that I’d be pitching against him with the streak intact. The atmosphere at the park was just amazing, electric, the crowd was so alive. This was the kind of game, you know, that if I hadn’t been on the team, I would have wanted to buy a ticket to see it.
“I really did not want to walk Pete—the people hadn’t come out to see that,” McWilliams continues. “But his first time up he ran the count to 3 and 2. I threw a fastball and he hit a rocket just foul by the bullpen down the rightfield line. I mean he hit that ball really hard. So then I got shy and threw a curveball and walked him. I was a little disgusted by that. The next time Pete came up I wanted to get ahead of him in the count so I threw a fastball on the first pitch and he hit a line shot right back at me that I just reached behind and was able to catch. It was a reaction-type play; I didn’t think about it before I caught it. That ball was a base hit most nights. And if I remember right Pete applauded the catch, literally clapped a few times and nodded his head, before he went back to the dugout.
“I faced Pete once more and he hit a pretty routine ground ball to shortstop. Jerry Royster was playing there and he threw him out. We had a big lead by then and after the fifth inning the manager, Bobby Cox, took me out of the game and told me to go shower up.”
Rose’s fourth at bat came in the seventh inning against the sidearming righthander Gene Garber and for the third time Rose hit the baseball on the nose, lining it chest high and into the glove of third baseman Bob Horner. The ball got there so fast that Horner threw across the diamond and doubled off the runner, Dave Collins, at first base.
By the time Rose came to the plate in the ninth inning, with two outs and nobody on, Atlanta led 16–4. But none of the more than 31,000 fans had left Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, nor was there any doubt about what they wanted to see. The crowd booed loudly when Garber, who had petitioned Cox to stay in the game so that he could face Rose again, fell behind 2 and 0. Still Garber wouldn’t give in, throwing a changeup off the plate that Rose fouled back. Garber got another strike, and then, on 2–2, went back to the changeup—his out pitch. The ball came in four inches outside, but Rose, fearing a walk, swung. And missed. The game was over. The streak was over. Forty-four. And now Garber leapt into the air, his arms outstretched, and catcher Joe Nolan rushed out to embrace him. Rose shot Garber a look, blew a bubble with his gum and went inside.
The scoreboard urged the crowd to chant “Ge-no, Ge-no,” to celebrate the victorious reliever, but the Atlanta fans weren’t having it. “Pete, Pete, Pete,” they called, until Rose, now stripped down to a red T-shirt adorned with the words HUSTLE MADE IT HAPPEN, came out and waved.
“I was in the clubhouse in my regular clothes by then,” says McWilliams, “And someone told me to go into the pressroom. So I did and I was just sitting there at the end of a table. The room was crammed with media but no one asked me a thing. After a few minutes Pete came in and asked me to scoot over, and he sat down beside me. He was kind of ticked off that Garber had thrown him a changeup. He said Garber had been pitching that at bat like it was Game 7 of the World Series.
“Then Pete was just rolling along with the reporters, ripping off one-liners, cracking people up, it was neat to see,” says McWilliams.3 “He said some complimentary things about my pitching, which was really nice. I was just sitting there quietly in a sport jacket. I had bushy hair that you wouldn’t have seen on the field under my cap and after a while one of the people in the media picked up on the fact that Pete had no idea who I was. He said, ‘Hey, Pete, would you know Larry McWilliams if he were sitting right next to you?’ Well, there was a pause and you could just see the wheels start to turn in Pete’s head real fast. Then he turned to me and said, ‘Oh, is that you?’ ”
McWilliams, who would end up pitching 13 seasons and winning 78 games, recalls that as a “pinnacle moment for me, this was the night I had the most impact on the game of baseball.” Garber, now running a chicken farm in Lancaster, Pa., gets calls from reporters every August, around the anniversary of the day he stopped the streak. “People don’t let me forget it,” Garber says, and adds that he has no regrets about the changeup that he chose to throw, nor the location where he chose to throw it. Rose doesn’t complain about that anymore either.
Though DiMaggio’s record had been so visible, shimmering in the distance and dropped into nearly every mention of Rose as the streak of 1978 wore on, the record had not really been threatened. When Rose passed the 40-game mark, the president of Dartmouth College, the renowned philosopher and mathematician John G. Kemeny, did some computing and proclaimed that DiMaggio’s streak was safe for “at least another 500 years.”
Even Rose, who in the aftermath of the 45th game finally admitted to having “been under strain” and to feeling the daily pressure mount along with the size of the streak, never regarded DiMaggio’s achievement as quite in his sights. On the night he hit in his 43rd straight, Rose declared that after catching Keeler he would turn his attention to Sidney Stonestreet. “He played for the Rhode Island Reds in the Chickenbleep League,” Rose explained. “He hit in 48 straight games way back when. Y
ou probably never heard of him. I just invented him.” Staring out at DiMaggio’s record, two weeks of ball games away, was too much even for Rose. He had needed to create another goal for himself, something more plausible that could push him and sustain him along the way.
________
1 Dozens of people say things like this to Rose every day. His banishment from baseball in 1989 for having bet on the sport while managing the Reds rendered him, according to Hall of Fame bylaw, ineligible for induction. For millions of fans, Rose’s continued exclusion from Cooperstown is keenly felt as an injustice.
2 Subsequent research has given Keeler a 45-game, two-season streak, crediting him with one game at the end of the 1896 season to go with 44 straight at the start of 1897.
3 When Rose was asked by The Washington Post that night whether all the interviews and media obligations he’d handled in recent weeks had made him lose sleep, he replied, “Those aren’t interviews, they’re conversations. [And] reporters don’t make me lose sleep. I’m not sleepin’ with any of them.”
Photos
DiMaggio during Game 41 of the streak, after tying Sisler’s mark
Photograph by Corbis
DiMaggio with pal Lefty Gomez (left) and manager Joe McCarthy
Photograph by San Antonio Light/Texas Institute of Culture/National Baseball Hall of Fame Library
The bride Dorothy, with Rosalie DiMaggio (far right) looking on
Photograph by Bettmann/Corbis
DiMaggio and the rookie Phil Rizzuto
Photograph by Bettmann/Corbis
Dorothy and Joe on the terrace of the West Side apartment
Photograph by Bettmann/Corbis
DiMaggio reaches the Wee Willie Keeler milestone
Photograph by Corbis
PART III
Chapter 22
American Beauty
HOW LIGHT AND easy DiMaggio felt after breaking Keeler’s record! That night after the game a photographer from the Associated Press came to the penthouse to shoot Joe and Dorothy sitting close together on the living room couch, he holding up a baseball with “45” printed in black ink between the wide stitches. DiMaggio’s eyes were warmly set on Dorothy and hers warmly upon him. She wore her hair brushed back, fresh lipstick and hoop earrings. Something about Joe, though, was different. A rare casualness. Although he looked sharp as ever—hair slick and neat, suspenders over a crisp white shirt—he had not shaved for the photo nor had he put on a tie. He smiled gently, his eyebrows raised.
A flood of calls came in for Joe, from his friends in and around New York—Toots and George Solotaire—and from Lefty O’Doul in San Francisco. He spoke with Giuseppe and Rosalie, of course, and when Tom called, Joe could hear the buzz of the Grotto customers in the background. Other calls came in from people DiMaggio hadn’t talked with in some time. Again and again he described to the different callers the game, and the home run that he had hit and the reaction of the fans. The phone calls were short and breezy and DiMaggio did not tire of them. He would pour himself something to drink and move around the apartment in a happy and untroubled way.
For Dorothy, everything was relaxed. The things she said and did that at other times might have bothered Joe, he now brooked and kept his easy mood. Dorothy’s parents and her sister were made to feel at home. They talked about the baby and about how the pregnancy had straightened Dorothy’s hair. There would be no autumn trip to Minnesota or San Francisco this year, with the little one due.
The baby’s name was chosen, Joseph Paul, and DiMaggio thought the timing of the birth was fortuitous. “He’ll always be able to say he was born the year I set the record,” Joe said. “That’ll make it easier for folks to remember his birthday.”
“Suppose it’s a girl,” Dorothy said.
“Then,” said Joe, smiling, “that’ll make it easier for folks to remember the birthday of Josephine Pauline DiMaggio.”
To the Olsons every moment spent in the lofty apartment felt luxurious. DiMaggio worked his train set for Dorothy’s little nephew Orin. The boy must have been no more than two, playful and engaged, and when at some point during his stay Orin rolled the “45” ball off the edge of the terrace so that it hurtled down nearly 200 feet to West End Avenue below, even that caused no trouble. A doorman saw the ball land and went after it. A baseball falling from the sky, especially one with 45 written on it, could have come from only one place, he reasoned, and he carried it in the elevator up to the DiMaggios’ floor. No one had been hurt and the ball was still in good shape. Everything now seemed charmed.
The Yankees were off the next afternoon and rain canceled the game on the afternoon after that—July 4. For Joe it was like he was frozen in place, frozen as a newly crowned king. The newspapers included many drawings of DiMaggio; one artist drew DiMaggio’s hitting streak as the eye of a storm around which many other events swirled. A writer suggested that given all the money that the Yankees were making off the streak, DiMaggio deserved a generous bonus. A top-of-the-page headline read: NATION HAILS DIMAGGIO’S FEAT.
Joe and Dorothy and her parents could recall how just six months earlier, during the visit to Duluth, he had walked unbothered through the town and into a flower shop where he had bought a bouquet of American Beauty roses for the Olsons’ home. It seemed impossible that he would be able to run an errand so unmolested now, anywhere.
Fan mail arrived from all over the country, scores of letters each day both to his home and to the Stadium. Many of the envelopes came with a lucky thingamabob inside—a bracelet or a small stone or a few lines of bad, original poetry or something soft to rub. People everywhere wanted in, wanted to feel in some small way a contributor to the streak. With the volume of mail being far too much for him or Dorothy to handle, DiMaggio turned the letters over to the Yankees’ front office to be opened.
Though the Yankees were washed out on Independence Day, baseball was played in Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Detroit. Each of those games paused in the middle or late innings so that those in the stadium could listen to some words from Roosevelt. He gave a short and pointed speech that denounced isolationism—men like the aviator Charles Lindbergh had been preaching exactly that, or, worse, an alliance with Germany—and the President urged people to overcome their fears as he appealed again for national unity. Americans needed to rally together with a common purpose, the voice said. “We must pledge our work, our will and if necessary our lives.”
Listeners had gathered in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and around the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia and at theaters and public squares across the land, and when Roosevelt had finished speaking the newly appointed Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone led the nation in reciting the pledge of allegiance. The fans in the baseball stadiums rose at their seats and the ballplayers stood on the top steps of their dugouts, caps held over their hearts. Three days earlier, the U.S. had registered more than 750,000 21-year-olds for the service draft; the Japanese had just drafted a million of their own. On the Boston Herald editorial page, a piece titled DIMAGGIO DOES IT weighed Joe’s feat against Keeler’s. Next to that appeared an editorial on Russia’s defense strategy; just above the DiMaggio story ran an analysis of a British general who had faltered in the field and thus been dismissed.
THE BAT CAME back, just in time for the July 5th game. Peanuts, wearing a tailored white suit, appeared with it at the Yankees clubhouse. He and Spatola had tracked it down to some guy a few miles north of Newark in Lyndhurst. Just how they had tracked it down Peanuts didn’t say.
The good fellows of Newark were fully attuned to the hitting streak and they too wanted to put a mark upon it. One of the police guys that DiMaggio knew from around the Vittorio Castle, a detective who had once been willing (when it became necessary due to an unfortunate misunderstanding) to testify in court on behalf of Richie the Boot’s honorable intentions, had given Joe a Winchester 21 shotgun engraved with DiMaggio’s name and the date June 30, 1941, the day after he’d passed Sisler’s mark. What Joe would
do with a duck-hunting gun wasn’t immediately clear, but still he appreciated the gift.
In the July 5th game against the Athletics, before a crowd of some 20,000, in his first at bat on the first pitch he saw, DiMaggio hit a home run into the Yankees bullpen, caught there on the fly by the coach John Schulte. Now the streak was at 46 consecutive games. Afterward, wearing a double-breasted suit with a kerchief in his pocket, DiMaggio autographed the barrel of the bat he had used to hit the home run that broke Keeler’s record. The bat would be flown to San Francisco via United Airlines; United had a stewardess, Polly Ann Carpenter, on hand to witness the autograph and then carry the bat across the country to be raffled off at the Seals doubleheader the next day, to benefit the USO. Before the first game at Seals Stadium a telegram arrived from FDR himself commending the USO’s “essential and patriotic duty” and adding, “I am deeply impressed by the invincible Joe DiMaggio surrendering his favored and record-breaking bat to the USO cause.”
DiMaggio sent a telegram as well and wired money to buy 100 of the 25-cent tickets. “If I win it, raffle it over again,” the telegram read, and DiMaggio added: “Tell all my friends I am appreciative of the hundreds of telegrams and air mail letters sent to me in the past several days.” Between games at the same stadium where eight years earlier Joe had begun his professional career, Giuseppe and Rosalie DiMaggio presented the bat to the winner of the drawing, a young San Franciscan named Jim Osborne. The bat raffle had raised $1,678.
56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports Page 27
