56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports

by Kennedy, Kostya

  But trying to estimate hitting streaks doesn’t follow. First of all, even an extraordinary streak of 40 or 50 games is a very small sample size and thus very likely to have departed from any underlying probability. More relevant: The conditions of a streak are far less knowable or predictable than the conditions in “regular games.” There is no such thing as an “ordinary” at bat when a hitting streak is on the line. These are highly charged and highly unusual events. The batter himself, the pitcher, the runners on base, the fielders, the managers and the fans are all to some larger or smaller degree impacted by the fact that a streak is in progress. There is simply no way to gauge this impact or its consequences.

  Consider another result of Arbesman and Strogatz’s simulation. It revealed the players who most often had the longest hitting streak during those 10,000 baseball histories. The list—headed by 19th century ballplayers such as Hugh Duffy and Wee Willie Keeler—is much like one that Michael Freiman produced in his paper six years earlier and also similar to one published by LSU finance professor Don M. Chance in the October 2009 issue of Chance. (Now what are the Chances of that combination?) Chance ranked the top 100 hitters of all time in terms of who was most likely to have had a long hitting streak. In short, he figured the list by determining his own version of streak average4 and also factoring in the length of a player’s career. Obviously, the longer the career went on, the greater was the opportunity for a streak to occur.

  Chance’s list in some regards feels spot on. Ty Cobb, Keeler and George Sisler were each ranked among the top five most likely to have a long hitting streak and each does in fact have one of the five longest hitting streaks of alltime. But of the other top 20 most-likely on Chance’s list, 15 have never had a streak of even 30 games, and none but the three mentioned have hit in more than 31 straight. DiMaggio was 28th on his list; Pete Rose was 53rd. These inconsistencies hardly render the list wrong or without relevance—no one would expect real life results to exactly mimic probabilistic estimates—but it does seem far enough off from actual events to at least give pause. Maybe guys who go on hitting streaks have something about them that guys who don’t don’t.

  Other recent work more pointedly addresses the disparity between probability guesses and actual player performance. Jim Albert, a math professor at Bowling Green, concluded in a 2008 study that while his probability model “explains most of the streaky hitting in baseball,” it also made clear that “there are some players that appear to exhibit more streakiness than one would predict.” Then there’s the 2008 paper by Trent McCotter, then a student at North Carolina, titled Hitting Streaks Don’t Obey Your Rules. McCotter took every batter’s game log from 1957 through 2006 and randomly shuffled these game logs 10,000 times to see what hitting streaks would materialize. His results revealed that there were more actual hitting streaks than were predicted by chance. (More or less is not really the issue here. The main point, for our purposes, is that reality did not match up with probability theory.) McCotter’s study, as he summarized, “seems to provide some strong evidence that players’ games are not independent, identically distributed trials, as statisticians have assumed all these years and may even provide evidence that things like hot hands are a part of baseball streaks.” So, might some hitters be more streak prone than others who produce hits at a similar rate?

  “From a statistical standpoint you’d like to say that it’s simply a reasonable fluke that of all the .325 hitters DiMaggio was the one to put together the longest streak, but there is a very serious stumbling block to that thinking,” says Bill James. “And that is the 61-game hitting streak that DiMaggio had in the Pacific Coast League. How do you account for for the fact that there was one player having two streaks of that length? You can’t. It makes you think that other things must be in play.”

  WAS THERE SOMETHING about Joe DiMaggio that suited him to hitting streaks? If so, was it tied to his unwavering style of play, an approach and commitment to every game that made him, according to peers, the most consistent player they were ever around? Was there something relevant to DiMaggio’s unflagging hustle, a trait shared by Pete Rose, history’s other great hit-streaker? And what to make of DiMaggio’s extraordinary combination of power and a propensity to make contact—an ability that appears to have some usefulness in maintaining hitting streaks. Home runs cannot be fielded after all, while strikeouts have no chance of worming their way to a fluke hit.5 Maybe DiMaggio’s acute self-consciousness helped him. Behavioral research has suggested that people who are generally self-conscious, as DiMaggio clearly seemed to be, are more easily able to thrive in situations that cause a high level of self-consciousness (such as a hitting streak) because those people are more accustomed to being in that frame of mind. Undoubtedly DiMaggio had a keen understanding of the need to seize important moments on the baseball field and also had the ability to seize them.

  One factor that leads many players, as well as most math professors, to say that the streak will not be broken is the extent to which it lords above all others. This is baseball’s ultimate statistical outlier. No one has gotten to within even 80% of the record. Having the single-season streak record at 56 and the next highest streak at 44 is analogous to Roger Maris’s single-season home run record of 61 being followed by a runner-up at 48. In fact there have been 28 player seasons of between 48 and 61 homers.6 Hank Aaron’s career home run record of 755 would be followed not by Babe Ruth’s 714 and Willie Mays’s 660, but by some player’s 593. Hack Wilson’s single-season standard of 191 RBIs would be seconded by 149, while in fact the RBI totals of 45 player seasons have fallen between those numbers. All other major records—Orel Hershiser’s stretch of scoreless innings (49), Pete Rose’s career hits (4,256) etc.—have a next-best that, relative to DiMaggio’s lead, is breathing down their necks.

  “DiMaggio’s is a number that just doesn’t seem like it can be explained,” says Hall of Famer and career .338 hitter Tony Gwynn. Ed Purcell, the late, great physicist whose work engendered much of the hitting streak analysis and debate, agreed. In Purcell’s evaluation, DiMaggio’s streak was the only event in baseball history that defied probabilistic explanation.

  In the end, The DiMaggio Enigma persists. The scads of probability studies are intriguing and useful in providing a framework for thought. They confirm the intuitive understanding that the likelihood of anyone at any time having reeled off a streak of 56 games is much higher than the likelihood of Joe DiMaggio in particular having done so. And they confirm in a general sense that some players—by statistics alone—are more likely than others to go on a hitting streak. But ultimately we get few solid answers.

  If there is life on Earth but none yet observed on any of the other planets in our solar system, can we make a guess as to the probability that alien life is thriving somewhere out there in the cosmos? Who could possibly say? We only know that there is life on Earth. And when it comes to baseball and to hitting streaks, there is at least one thing that we can say for sure: Through the end of the 2010 season 17,290 players were known to have appeared in the major leagues. Only one of them had ever hit in 56 straight games.

  ________

  1 DiMaggio, hobbled by an ankle injury in late August and September, played in just 139 games that year.

  2 Based on our assumption of DiMaggio getting 4.54 at bats per game, McGill used an 81.61% per-game hit probability to derive these figures. Also, seeking to more closely replicate reality, he ran the same numbers a second time but instead of 4.54 at bats, which is an impossible number for a batter to have in a game, he applied a formula in which he assumed four at bats in half of the games and five at bats in the other half. In this latter model the probabilities for a hitting streak of the various lengths were all very slightly smaller than those listed above.

  3 There are some nicely laid out examples of Bayesian analysis, named for its progenitor, the 18th century mathematician and Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes, as well as many other intriguing thoughts on randomness and chance in Leona
rd Mlodinow’s 2008 book, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. Mlodinow examines some sports occurrences in the book and very briefly touches on DiMaggio’s streak.

  4 Chance didn’t exactly use total plate appearances to derive this average. He argued that appearances that result in intentional walks or sacrifice bunts should be left out and not held against the hitter in computing his streak average (again, my term) because these aren’t true opportunities to get a hit. That, in my mind, is a mistake on his part. A sacrifice bunt might sneak through two fielders or die on a swatch of wet grass and go as an infield single; a batter could reach out over the plate during an intentional walk and smack the ball for a hit—as Kelly Leak did for the Bad News Bears in 1976 and as Miguel Cabrera did for the Florida Marlins in 2006. Any time that a batter steps into the box he has an opportunity to get a hit.

  5 Not only is DiMaggio’s career rate of 1.02 strikeouts per home run by far the lowest of any player with 350 or more home runs, during his streak in 1941 he struck out only five times while hitting 15 homers. Nobody hits like that.

  6 I am excluding from all home run discussion the dubious achievements of the Steroid Era, 1996 through 2004. In that time there were an additional 23 player seasons that eclipsed 48 home runs, including six that surpassed 61, polluting the record book.

  Photos

  At Yankee Stadium, DiMaggio leaving the field after Game 48

  Photograph by Daily News Archive/Getty Images

  DiMaggio with Les Brown as he plays “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio”

  Photograph by Bettmann/Corbis

  DiMaggio scoring in Game 56

  Photograph by Bettmann/Corbis

  Acknowledgments

  MANY PEOPLE ALLOWED themselves to be peppered with my questions and inquiries over the course of writing this book and I’m grateful to all of them for what they shared: their memories, their insights and, most precious of all, their time. My gratitude begins with the ballplayers from 1941, those who helped bring me onto the field and into the game. A great tip of the cap to the late Dominic DiMaggio, who was patient and gracious at a time in his life when he had every excuse not to be. And to Dom’s daughter Emily for her own thoughts. And to Dom’s son Dominic Paul. I owe thanks to Bobby Doerr, Benny McCoy, the late Herman Franks and the late Rapid Robert, Bob Feller; to Al Brancato and Marty Marion and Yogi Berra (by way of the exceedingly helpful Art Berke). I enjoyed and was inspired by few conversations more than the several that I had talking baseball with Rugger Ardizoia and Charlie Silvera. I’m also indebted to some important offspring, particularly Charles Keller and Robert Cleveland Muncrief III.

  My reporting in San Francisco and North Beach was enriched by numerous longtime residents of the city including Dante Santora and Dick Boyd; Art Peterson of the Telegraph Hill Society; the seemingly indefatigable Alessandro Baccari Jr.; Father Paul Maniscalco and Father Armand Oliveri at the church of Saints Peter and Paul; Gil Hodges III and Trevor Noonan at Liverpool Lil’s; David Wright and David Wees at Café Divine; Ida Debrunner and Suzanne Debrunner (and their wonderful photo album) on Taylor Street; Joe Toboni Jr.; Joseph Alioto Jr.; Betty at Galileo High. Telephone conversations with Patti Barsocchini were also very helpful, as were those far-reaching ones with Sam Spear.

  Visiting San Francisco would have been far less enlightening, as well as less enjoyable, without the company and guidance of the late Ron Fimrite. I wish I could thank Ron for that again, in person, and also for bringing me to his beloved Washington Square Bar & Grill and introducing me to Michael McCourt, a splendid bartender and also a source for this book.

  Several writers helped fill in the landscape, not only with their work, but, more pointedly, in our conversations. Among them: Robert Creamer, Ray Robinson, Dave Anderson, Roger Kahn and the late Maury Allen. They were also among those who escorted me back to 1941, as did Mario Cuomo and Gay Talese.

  To Tom Villante: Thank you for your clarity and your precision, again and again.

  In New Jersey, special gratitude goes to Bina Spatola and to Larry Chiaravallo, and a nod to Dr. Richard Boiardo. In East Harlem, thanks to Albert Luongo and to Jimmy and Joey.

  Among the many others who provided salient wisdom or detail, or both: Bert Sugar, Ed Moose, Orin Dahl, Al Kaufman, Kristi Jacobson, Rich Lindbergh, Andrew Crichton, Nick Peters, Norman Goldberger, George Bailin, Richard Goldstein, Stan Moroknek, Sam Goldman, Paolo Corvino, Sheila King in Chicago and Tucker Anderson.

  Many active, or just retired, major leaguers lent me an ear and gave me their voices on any number of relevant subjects, including (but not limited to): Clint Barmes, Luis Castillo, Ryan Church, Adam Dunn,

  Ken Griffey Jr., Todd Helton, Derek Jeter, Nick Johnson, Dan Murphy, Jimmy Rollins, Aaron Rowand, Ichiro Suzuki, Gary Sheffield, Matt Stairs, Nick Swisher, Robin Ventura, David Wright and Ryan Zimmerman.

  Other players, from the 1970s and ’80s, were helpful too, especially: Don Baylor, Wade Boggs, George Brett, Ken Griffey Sr., Tony Gwynn, Keith Hernandez, Carney Lansford, Larry McWilliams, Ron Reed and Pat Zachry.

  Pete Rose gets a big thank you just for being himself.

  For helping me parse through matters of mind and probability, many thanks to: Robert Remez, Steven Strogatz, Alan Goldberg, Bill James, Jim Lackritz, Benjamin McGill, Gordon Bower and Stanley Lieberson.

  For other important illuminations, thanks to Steve Hirdt, Walt Hriniak, Marty Brennaman, Rick Cerrone, Marty Appel, David Robbeson, Don Chance, Richard Hartman and two careful arbiters, Michael Duca and Ivy McLemore.

  This book would not have gotten done had I not received help in facilitating access, interviews and materials. For such help I am grateful to Phyllis Merhige, Eric Mann, Jay Horwitz, Corey Kilgannon, Joe Posnanski, Bob Richardson, Betsy Gotbaum, Ethan Wilson, Greg Casterioto, Padraic Boyle, Shirley in Cleveland, Andrew Krueger, David W. Smith, Patricia O’Toole, David Ouse, Jack O’Connell and Jim Nagourney.

  At the Yankees, thanks to Randy Levine, as well as to Tony Morante.

  At the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, special thanks to the indispensable Bill Francis. Also to Benjamin Harry, Freddie Berowski and Brad Horn. Thank you as well to my guides at the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory, especially to bat-turner Garrik Napier and to then curator Dan Cohen.

  A quiet thanks as well to those of you who gave me your time and thoughts or otherwise assisted on the book but asked not to be mentioned by name.

  A list of materials that I used follows in a bibliography, but I would like to cite two descriptions in particular: Tommy Henrich’s account of the moment Joe DiMaggio realized his bat had been stolen, and Phil Rizzuto’s account of the night the hitting streak ended, both from HBO’s Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? Also, a special citation to Joyce Hadley’s book, Dorothy Arnold: Joe DiMaggio’s First Wife.

  Now, a little closer to home:

  This book wouldn’t be here without the encouragement and guidance of Andrew Blauner, my agent, adviser and all-around savior. I’m grateful for Andrew’s intelligence and clear thinking, and perhaps most of all his abiding sense of decency.

  The book was greatly improved by the sharp, thoughtful and careful attention of David Bauer. Sense and sensibility in one. I feel lucky to have had David as an editor.

  I’m grateful to Kevin Kerr, a consummately professional and, in my experience, peerless copy editor. And to Sarah Kwak for her hard, thorough and creative work in making sure that we got things right. Many thanks as well to designer Stephen Skalocky and to photo editor Cristina Scalet.

  I was helped by Christy Hammond, who kindly excavated materials in Detroit, and by Matthew Parker, who did fine research in New York.

  Thank you in a big way to Terry McDonell for believing in the book from the start and then for supporting it. And a big thank you to Richard Fraiman for the same.

  Thanks to everyone at Sports Illustrated and Time Home Entertainment Inc. who kept things afloat: to the terrific, multitalented Stefanie Kaufman and the wonderfully diligen
t Allison Parker; to Joy Butts, Tom Mifsud, Helen Wilson, Scott Novak, Emily Christopher, Malena Jones and Lee Sosin.

  To Amy, for your fine eye and your counsel at every step of this process (and for your excellent work in Newark) and for your support and companionship and generosity, and for far more than I can here put into words, I embrace you and thank you and thank you again.

  In Kathrin Perutz, my eternal guide to defying gravitas, and in Michael Studdert-Kennedy, who sees to the heart of things, I had the two best teachers alive. They were, and are, my inspiration. Thank you for all of it. Thank you for having me.

  Kostya Kennedy

  New York

  2011

  Selected Bibliography

  BOOKS

  Alexander, Charles C. Rogers Hornsby: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1995

  Allen, Maury. Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? New York: Dutton, 1975

  Auker, Elden and Keegan, Tom. Sleeper Cars and Flannel Uniforms. Chicago: Triumph Books, 2001

  Barber, Red and Creamer, Robert. Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1968.

  Barolini, Helen et al. Images: A Pictorial History of Italian Americans. Staten Island, New York: Center for Migration Studies (Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli), 1981

  Blount, Roy, Jr. (co-author) Williams and DiMaggio, The Stuff of Dreams. Winnetka, Illinois: Rare Air Media, 1999

  Cataneo, David. I Remember Joe DiMaggio. Nashville, Tennessee: Cumberland House, 2001

  Considine, Bob. Toots. New York: Meredith Press, 1969

  Cramer, Richard Ben. Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life. New York. Simon & Schuster, 2000