56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (30 page)

“We couldn’t draw flies before this,” the Senators manager Bucky Harris said to reporters, peering up into the sea of hats. “The capacity crowd we have here is due to Joe and to nobody and nothing else.”

Nor were these fans reserved in their affection. As DiMaggio made his way to home plate for batting practice, groups of boys and young men spilled from the aisles and pushed past the ushers onto the field and came right up against Joe, tugging on his uniform, pulling on his arm, begging for his autograph.
Over here, Joe!
A kid held a baseball and a pen.
Joe, over here!
Another had a program in his hands. At this outpouring DiMaggio did not quite know what to do. He smiled and quickly signed his name on a couple of things as he walked, and then demurred and went to take his batting practice swings. Soon afterward DiMaggio moved to get away from the boys and to go back into the dugout and up into the shaded tunnel for a few moments of respite. A last half-cup of coffee. A Camel. Christ it was hot. DiMaggio just wanted the game to begin.

So did McCarthy. Aside from the DiMaggio hoopla there was still a game to be won—two games actually—and a chance for the Yankees to break away from the persistent Indians and move firmly into first place. The Senators, even at well under .500, were scrappy, with good speed and a couple of All-Star hitters. Their two best pitchers, the knuckleballer Dutch Leonard and the young righthander Sid Hudson, would be starting in the doubleheader.

Washington had won nine of its last 13 games and Bucky Harris, McCarthy knew, was always up to something. Whenever the Yanks played in Griffith Stadium, McCarthy had to keep an eye on their bat bags or else the bags would wind up stashed in the shower room. (Innocently enough, the clubhouse boy would say.) The Senators believed that the moisture from the showers might make the Yankee bats a little heavier, sap a little of their zing. The Senators did not win much anymore—“Washington: first in war, first in peace, last in the American League” as the vaudeville routine went—but under Harris they did not lie down.

Sisler had played here in 1928, acquired from the Browns for a forgettable, six-week stint near the end of his career. After appearing in just 20 games as a Senator, he’d been traded again, to the Boston Braves, but it was not those days the old-timers remembered when they thought about Gentleman George. With the Browns in St. Louis he had been the best first baseman in baseball for years, bar none; the predecessor to Lou Gehrig. As a rookie in 1915, fresh off the diamonds at the University of Michigan where Browns manager Branch Rickey had found him, the lefthanded Sisler had pitched too; in his first major league start he had gotten the better of Walter Johnson, the Big Train himself. As a hitter Sisler was most often compared to Ty Cobb.

Sisler batted .407 in 1920, hit .371 a year later, and then came 1922. It was said that no ballplayer—not Cobb, not the Babe—ever had a better all-around season than Sisler had that year. He batted .420 and hit in 41 consecutive games. He led the American League with 246 hits, 51 stolen bases and 18 triples. He dominated on defense too, fielding his position with a range and agility unlike any first baseman before or since. Sisler could deflate a rally all by himself. Once, on an opponents’ squeeze play, he had raced in, scooped the bunt into his glove, tagged out the batter and dived to the far side of home plate to tag out the runner trying to score from third. A 3-3-3 double play you could say.

At 5′ 11″ and 170 pounds Sisler swung an oversized 42-ounce bat, and he swung it wisely. Branch Rickey called Sisler “the smartest hitter I’ve ever seen,” and added that he wasn’t surprised given that Sisler had graduated from Michigan in four years with a degree in mechanical engineering. For Gentleman George—he did not smoke, drink or cuss—baseball came naturally. “I always could hit even against bigger boys,” he explained, almost sheepishly. “And I always could field. I never had to learn. I just seemed to do everything right instinctively.”

And then, just after that brilliant 1922 season, something terrible happened. Sisler was 29 and entering his peak when, that off-season, he contracted a strange sinus infection. Before long the infection started to put pressure on his optic nerve, blurring his sight. Sisler was out driving one day when he thought he saw two cars approaching him, though really there was only one. The doctors had him sit out all of the 1923 season. He would appear sometimes in the St. Louis stands wearing dark glasses to protect against the sun. Slowly his eyes began to heal, though never completely. When Sisler made his comeback with the Browns in 1924 he batted just .305. He became a symbol of an athlete dying young. One newspaper columnist wrote that watching Sisler with his diminished sight was like it would be to watch the great thoroughbred Man o’ War trying to race without his forelegs.

Even so Sisler played six more seasons and four times he batted better than .325, impressive figures for many players, though for Sisler so much lower than his heights. He wound up with 2,812 hits and a .340 lifetime batting average and who knows what records he would have set if not for the trouble with his eyes. In 1939, Sisler was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was regarded throughout the game as one of the greats.

The attention on DiMaggio at this doubleheader in D.C. was not limited to the sweltering mass at Griffith Stadium—nor to the room in St. Louis where Sisler, now a sporting goods salesman, tuned in. Radios played on the stoops in Jackson Heights and on the fire escapes of East Harlem where Italian was still commonly the language of the street; in another Italian enclave, upstate, a radio was rigged to an outdoor loudspeaker. Guests at a lakeside resort in New Hampshire asked to receive updates on DiMaggio throughout the afternoon. The streak was being followed in Kansas City by Rugger Ardizoia and Bud Metheny and the rest of the would-be Yankees playing for the minor league Blues. Radios were on in Newark, of course—big Sunday crowd at the Vittorio Castle—and in small Connecticut towns. The play-by-play broadcast by the Senators’ guy, Arch McDonald, would carry on the powerful airwaves of WMAL through Washington, D.C., and out the many miles east to the coasts of Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey—the seaside hamlets that lay an entire country’s width from Joe DiMaggio’s Grotto on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco.

Business was thriving at the Grotto, income having spiked terrifically as compared with the summer before, and the explanation for this was clear. Tom estimated that in the days since the streak had caught fire the restaurant’s daily take had doubled. Tourists wanted to be around Joe’s name, to see the newspaper clippings of him on the wall and his trophies in the back, to chat a bit with his brothers and to imagine the hit-streaking DiMaggio returning to this place when his season was done. “Any wonder that I’m trying to keep this streak going?” DiMaggio, grinning, had told reporters after getting Tom’s report on the Grotto. “It’s cash in the register, boy.”

All week long DiMaggio’s father, Giuseppe, had paced the front rooms of the house on Beach Street waiting each day for news of Joe’s fate. The old man understood that Joe had something special at stake. Tom couldn’t remember ever having seen their father so preoccupied, had never known Giuseppe to be so concerned with any of his sons’ baseball accomplishments. The radio that Joe had bought his parents played throughout the afternoons and evenings—you never knew when you would hear some talk of the streak—and sometimes Giuseppe would ask his granddaughter Betty to call the newspapers to see if anything new had come in. Such fussing, though, was not Rosalie’s way. Each night she quietly lit a candle for Joe and changed the flowers in the icon, hoping to help bring good fortune to her son.

Now at the busy, bustling Grotto, Tom hustled about stroking his mustache and tidying things and making sure that the customers were comfortable and pleased. Soon, Mike came in off the docks. Wine was being poured in the middle of the day. People ordered cioppino—
it’s authentic at DiMag’s place
, they reasoned. The radio had been turned on and set atop the bar, where it had been stationed throughout the week. No one knew just when the bulletins would come. Several times, Tom had to scold the waiters and the bus boys to keep their minds on their work.

They were listening too over in the Mission District, at the Double Play lounge and in the smokeshop outside Seals Stadium. And they were listening, as ever, in North Beach, on the church square and at the taverns and in the kitchens of their homes. Still all afternoon Alessandro and his buddies wore out the line phoning the
Call-Bulletin
and the
Chronicle
, hoping that a ticker tape had just delivered some news and that they would have it even a moment or two before others in the city. Getting the news first mattered to them. This was their Joe,
their
hometown hero, even if he had now captured the nation’s gaze. The boys who came from the playgrounds of North Beach clung to Joe’s roots and to the memories they had of him as a teenager and as a younger man. They would remind anyone in San Francisco then, just as they would go on reminding people all over for many, many years, that Joe was their Joe first.

PHOTOGRAPHERS KNELT ALONG
both foul lines at Griffith Stadium as if it were a World Series game and saved their film for when DiMaggio came to bat. Motion picture cameras were also trained upon Joe, there to capture him and his historic at bats for the newsreels. DiMaggio remembered to give a casual smile into the lens, a short wave, a friendly salute. When he prepared to hit, swinging two bats before tossing one aside upon his approach the plate, DiMaggio moved easily and with a seeming nonchalance. His face revealed nothing. Inside, though, he churned. It had been like that for some days now, as Sisler’s record had come nearer, and at times this stress affected DiMaggio’s behavior. A couple of games back he’d done something he could not remember ever having done before. A pitch came in that he believed was off the plate for a ball and when the umpire disagreed, barking out “strike!” DiMaggio turned back sharply to look at him. Every strike mattered; every hitless at bat could hasten the end of the streak. Yet even in the moment that he turned his head, DiMaggio regretted doing so. Looking at an umpire this way was a sign of disrespect. More than that, it was an act of self-insubordination, a self-inflicted blemish upon his polished image. DiMaggio simply did not question umpires nor ever betray disapproval of a call. He played the game as well and as intently as he could; the rest, he felt, was not his business. So uncharacteristic was DiMaggio’s backward look that the umpire was himself taken aback. “Honest to god, Joe, it was right down the middle,” he said through his mask. DiMaggio, chiding himself, wondering what had gotten into him, just swiveled back to face the pitcher and did not say a word.

Washington’s first-game starter, Dutch Leonard, was a coal miner’s son from Illinois. At 32 he had the look of a man well into middle age, flabby with a moon-face and a hairline in full retreat. The guys called him “butcher boy” and “big blubber” when they razzed him from the dugout. Leonard threw a knuckleball, an extravagantly slow curve and a fastball that on its own was nothing to remark on. But it was no accident that he had won 20 games in 1939 and was having another strong season. His big, jerky windup could throw a hitter off, and sometimes that sandlot fastball, when it came just after one of Leonard’s butterfly balls had danced by, seemed the size of a pea. For this reason, DiMaggio had recently described Leonard as having one of the trickiest fastballs in the league.

As DiMaggio dug in his first time up, the temperature had climbed to 98 degrees. The cameras clicked as he took his stance, and when he swung hard at the very first pitch—as if to say,
Let’s go, let’s get this done with
—and drove the ball into the outfield the people rose in the stands, only to see the able Doc Cramer glide over from centerfield, reach up and squeeze the ball into his glove.

In the fourth inning Leonard nibbled around the plate, coming in too high with his first pitch, missing off the outside corner on his second, putting a knuckleball too far inside on his third. With the count 3 and 0, DiMaggio again looked to Fletcher for the sign. Again McCarthy was allowing DiMaggio to swing away—even now with one out and a runner on first base and no score in the game; even though with Keller, the team’s leading RBI man, on deck, a walk might have done the Yankees good. In came a pitch that DiMaggio should have taken, but he swung at it nonetheless and as his pop fly landed in the glove of the third baseman George Archie, groans of disappointment came from the crowd.

Leonard was still in the game, trying to keep the Yankees’ lead to 3–0 and fighting the mid-afternoon heat, when DiMaggio stepped up for the third time, in the sixth. Again Joe swung at the first pitch and this time he missed. An errant curveball set the count at 1 and 1. Leonard looked in.
If I can get a fastball past him I bet I could finish him off with the knuckler
, he thought. And so it was the fastball that Leonard threw, knee high and on the outer half of the plate. The barrel of DiMaggio’s bat caught the baseball flush and in a moment it was bounding on the outfield grass toward the 422-foot sign in left centerfield.
Forty-one!
There was suddenly reason for the fans—now cheering and slapping backs—to weather the heat and stay around for the second game. They watched DiMaggio turn hard around first base and bear down toward second, his cleats kicking up the dun earth, slowing as he reached the bag with a stand-up double. The cheering continued in the stands and the Yankees dugout throbbed with excitement. Though DiMaggio did not clap, or clench his fist or raise his arms, he felt inside him a release and a momentary ease.