56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (10 page)

Not once but twice in the second game did DiMaggio, throwing home to try to get a base runner, heave the baseball over Yankees catcher Buddy Rosar and into the stands, a performance which, combined with a misplay of a ball hit by Williams, gave him four errors on the day. The Yankees were on their way to a 13–0 loss and Joe’s pop-fly double in the fifth inning did nothing to stop the fans from chanting “Meatball Joe” when he came to bat, or from shouting out “Dommy’s better” when Joe took the field. (A day later, after Gomez let slip to the writers about Joe’s injured neck, DiMaggio wouldn’t lean on it to explain his errors. “I just had a bad day,” he snapped.)

The shutout was the first of the season inflicted upon the Yankees. Dominic had three hits in the two games. Williams went 3 for 5 (naturally, he also walked a few times); he was now hitting .429.

The Red Sox and Yankees headed west on the same chartered Pullman late that afternoon, the Sox bound for Detroit, the Yankees to Cleveland for three games. And though Dominic and Joe were but a few hundred feet apart, though they might have met and chatted in one of the dining cars as some of the other Red Sox and Yankees players did, the brothers did not meet. Anyway, after a 13–0 game there was not a lot to say.

T
HE INDIANS WERE
now the favorites in the American League, all the experts said. They had Bobby Feller, the most dominant and thrilling pitcher in baseball, and they had other starting pitchers who could shut a team down too. Cleveland had a powerful first baseman in Hal Trosky and a good-hitting outfielder in Jeff Heath. The infield, with Ken Keltner at third base, Lou Boudreau at shortstop and Ray Mack at second, included some of the finest defensive players in the game. Keltner, who often batted third and was a home run threat, stole a hit per game with his glove, it seemed. Boudreau, so quick afield despite his sluggardly pace on the bases, and Mack, brilliant on the pivot, went by the nickname Murder Inc. for the many double plays, the 6-4-3 rally killers, that they turned. Cleveland won 11 straight games in late April and early May, and four weeks later the team was still in front of Jimmy Dykes’s overachieving White Sox. The Yankees had come into Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium at the start of June in third place, four games behind. When they departed, they were a game closer in the standings.

Those few days in Cleveland now seemed a blur to DiMaggio, though the Yankees had just left the city that afternoon. At the beginning of the series, heavy rains had given the teams a day off, allowing DiMaggio to rest at the Hotel Cleveland, helping his neck to heal. The Yankees doubleheader sweep the next day in front of more than 50,000 fans was achieved on the strength of fine pitching by Red Ruffing in the first game and by Gomez in the second. DiMaggio’s single against the lefthander Al Milnar helped make the difference in the opener. In game two he scratched a ground ball hit off the tough breaking-ball pitcher Mel Harder. And though Cleveland, with Feller on the mound, had responded with a 7–5 win in the third game, the Yankees were pleased to have won twice in the series, and pleased that even in their final-game loss they’d hit well against the Indians’ ace.

DiMaggio had knocked a single and a double against Feller, his first multihit game since the opener against the Senators. He usually handled Feller. At the plate, DiMaggio would prepare himself for Feller’s fastball—really, you had to do that or you’d have no chance to hit it when it came—and though the ball would zip in at near to 100 miles per hour, DiMaggio had the bat speed to meet it. If Feller threw his curve, DiMaggio would wait stock still until the last instant and then lash at the pitch.

It’s as if he waits and waits so that he can watch my curveball break and only then swings
, Feller thought.
Is it possible he can do that and still hit it? Not even Williams can do that
.

On the train trip from Cleveland to Detroit, Joe Gordon had sung gaily in the aisle, entertaining the team. Henrich had talked about the two home runs he’d hit off Feller. Rizzuto was teased for the stiff new suit he’d just bought; in response he stood and sang along with Gordon. The Yankees players made jokes and were happy, and McCarthy did not seem to mind.

But now, just a few hours later, that train ride was forgotten, irrelevant. DiMaggio stood silently in the splendid lobby of the Book-Cadillac Hotel in Detroit. He shifted his weight and then smoothed his tie. It was 10:30 at night. The glinting marble walls and the gilded latticework of the hotel seemed out of place, unreal. There was a tremulous hush all through the big lobby. Gomez stared somberly, seeing nothing. Selkirk tore a piece of paper once and then again and kept tearing it until the paper was in tiny strips. McCarthy sat on one of the pinkish upholstered couches, alone and away from everyone else. Some players clustered by the room clerk’s desk and collected a piece of mail or the key to their room. Other players stood with their hands in their pants pockets quietly murmuring to one another. Nothing that anyone did seemed to matter.

Catcher Bill Dickey, Lou Gehrig’s old roommate, came in through the front door. He had been out for a malted. One of the bellmen told him the news. “My God!” said Dickey. “I only spoke to Lou a few days before we left New York. He told me he felt fine.”

The Yankees had been expecting this, of course. They had seen the hard, awful signs over the past years. The end result was inevitable. Even so, the news landed like a blow from behind: sudden and harsh. For DiMaggio, in the first moments of knowing, it almost seemed impossible. Lou Gehrig was dead.

They had met for the first time in the Yankees clubhouse in St. Petersburg, spring training 1936. DiMaggio was the young Italian rookie with the big reputation. He wasn’t sure how people would take to him. He remembered feeling Gehrig’s strong hand against his back and then hearing Gehrig say, “Nice to have you with us, Joe.”

DiMaggio had never been as struck by a ballplayer as he was by Gehrig. His strength—the bands of muscles that ran across and up and down his broad back—was extraordinary. At bat Gehrig gave an impression of power greater than any DiMaggio had ever seen. Gehrig hit the ball with a straightforward authority, like a skilled carpenter addressing a nail. Over DiMaggio’s first two seasons Gehrig batted .353 and drove in 311 runs and the older players kept assuring Joe that Gehrig had been even better a few years back.

They lockered directly beside one another at Yankee Stadium, in the corner by the window, and though their conversations tended to be brief they exchanged words often. “Gee, that was a bad ball I hit at,” DiMaggio might say quietly, and Gehrig would tell him not to worry, he’d have another chance the next day. That simple optimism was reassuring to the young player.

DiMaggio was moved by the courtesy and graciousness with which Gehrig spoke to the writers who covered the team. Gehrig had been the second star to Babe Ruth for most of his career; now DiMaggio, from the other side of the country and wrapped in intrigue, had arrived and begun socking the ball, and the attention on Gehrig was diluted again. That did not seem to matter to him. Gehrig remained cheerful and patient and uncomplaining. He rarely spoke about other ballplayers to the press but he did speak to them about DiMaggio. “He has a marvelous disposition for a ballplayer,” Gehrig said once, early in DiMaggio’s career. “His expression never changes. You mark my words. He is going to be the greatest righthand hitter in baseball.”

At another time, in DiMaggio’s second season, Gehrig said: “Joe is the best defensive outfielder in the game. Once he is told where to shift for a certain batsman, he never has to be reminded.”

Such superlatives were uncommon from Gehrig, the writers and DiMaggio knew, and so they carried all the more weight.

Sometimes, when both of these quiet players were in the right mood and the Yankees were winning, they would horse around before a game, point their bats like rifles maybe, and, for the cameras, DiMaggio would reach out and muss the top of Gehrig’s hair. They would laugh together.

They laughed too on the morning after Gehrig made his gaffe on the radio. He’d gone on an interview program, hired to speak a few words in praise of the breakfast cereal Huskies. But at the crucial moment when the radio host asked him to name his cereal of choice Gehrig had said, in a slip-up, “Wheaties.” The flub made some news and the next day a reporter came by the lockers at the Stadium and asked Gehrig “What did you eat for breakfast?” And Lou, not yet catching on, had said frankly and in innocence, “Two eggs, a little toast.” Then DiMaggio, playing along with the writer, began to grin and said, “What about the things you put in a bowl, with sugar on top? Dandelions! Don’t you eat those?” DiMaggio was not often silly in this way, but around Gehrig it felt okay.

Now Gehrig’s locker was empty, had been for many months, day after day after day, and no one would ever use it or wear Gehrig’s number 4 for the Yankees again.

It had been right here in the Hotel Book-Cadillac, two years and one month earlier, that Gehrig had taken himself out of the lineup 2,130 consecutive games after he’d first stepped in. He had visited McCarthy in his room and said that he could no longer play well enough to stay in there, that his coming out of the lineup was for the good of the team. In the moments that followed McCarthy said to him kindly and with love in his voice, “Lou, fellows like you come along once in a hundred years.”

The manager had called the baseball writers into his room then to tell them the news that would be the next day’s headlines. “I’m sorry to see it happen,” said McCarthy, adding, in a notion that Gehrig would echo when he spoke to the writers himself: “Maybe the warm weather will bring him around.”

No one, not McCarthy nor Gehrig nor the men who followed the team, believed that.

Gehrig had been failing for some time. He had seemed empty in that spring training of ’39—
Something is wrong
, DiMaggio remembered thinking from the moment he saw him—and still emptier after the season began. His power had dramatically and inexplicably vanished. Even when Gehrig would strike the ball squarely on the sweet round flesh of the bat, it would not go anywhere. By early May, he was batting .143. Gehrig ran as if he had weights tied to his ankles. He was not yet 36 years old. Nobody had ever seen a player decline so shockingly fast.

Later Gehrig told DiMaggio why he had decided to quit when he did. In a game against the Senators, Gehrig had fielded a ground ball and thrown it over to the pitcher, Johnny Murphy, who stepped on first base. “Murph, Gordon and Dickey all gathered around me and patted me on the back,” Gehrig told DiMaggio. “ ‘Great stop,’ they all said together, and then I knew I was washed-up. They meant to be kind, but if I was getting wholesale congratulations for making an ordinary stop, I knew it was time to fold.”

All through the early part of the 1939 season the Yankees had been worried that Gehrig might get hurt on the field. Even after Gehrig’s trip to the Mayo Clinic soon afterward, after learning there that he had what the doctors diagnosed as a form of infantile paralysis, and even after his July 4, 1939, speech before the big crowd at Yankee Stadium, when Gehrig had called himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth” to have the kind of teammates he had and to have the love of the fans the way he did—and Babe Ruth standing there had put his arms around Gehrig and wept, genuinely forgetting, it seemed, the rift between them—even after that, Gehrig had stayed and traveled with the team all season.

DiMaggio could never bring himself to watch Gehrig getting dressed in his uniform. He would look away rather than see the great man fumble with his buttons and his belt, rather than see the look of confusion that time and again passed over Gehrig’s face. Gehrig played bridge and DiMaggio remembered the day when Lou for the first time could no longer shuffle the cards. Gehrig began trailing his left foot when he walked. The next season, 1940, he stopped coming regularly to the park. He would sometimes appear in the Yankee dugout before a game to watch batting and fielding practice but then when DiMaggio glanced over again, Gehrig, ghostlike, had disappeared.

Gehrig’s demise was still, for all the evidence, impossible to fully accept; in the recesses of many Yankee minds there lingered a small hope—“hope even against hope” as Ruth put it—that if anyone could overcome this insidious thing it would be Gehrig. No one else had his resolve or his resiliency. He had taken the field every single day for more than 13 seasons without respite. Long before his final at bat, back when he had played in “only” 1,800 of those 2,130 consecutive games, he had been commended by the league with a notice that lauded the qualities his teammates saw game after game and year after year: “Eighteen hundred games in spite of broken fingers, ribs, toes, sprained ankles, severe spike wounds, concussions of the skull as a result of being hit with a pitched ball, severe colds and bruises. No wonder the baseball world hails Lou Gehrig as the ‘Iron Man.’ ”

So now in the saddened lobby of the Book-Cadillac Hotel—as the Yankee players each took a few moments to organize a simple sincere message and went to the clerk’s desk to send telegrams to Eleanor, Lou’s wife—there remained a sense of disbelief. “I just can’t express my thoughts. I can’t realize Lou is gone,” said McCarthy. Dickey said that Gehrig was like a brother to him. Art Fletcher, the Yankees’ third base coach, said: “It is the most painful news that I have ever heard.”

The next morning DiMaggio and Dickey and Gomez were called over to Briggs Stadium to speak on a radio program that was honoring Lou and being aired across the country. When it was DiMaggio’s turn, he moved near the microphone and said: “I lost a very fine friend in Gehrig. Lou helped me more, just about as much as, anybody connected with baseball. I too, like Lefty, would like to join and offer my sympathy to his wife, mother and dad.”

DiMaggio listened to the others, like the Tigers’ president Walter Briggs and then the manager Del Baker, who talked about “what a grand hustler Lou Gehrig was. He should live as an inspiration to all ballplayers.” Then the radio show went to Cleveland where the Red Sox were playing the Indians, and Jimmie Foxx said, “I am deeply grieved. He was the greatest hitter I ever saw.” Feller spoke too. Then the show went to New York where the Giants’ Carl Hubbell said some words and so did Mel Ott. The Babe came on the radio, and so too did the president of the National League, Ford Frick, who talked of the “emptiness that you feel in your heart.” When the show signed off, the host, the former big leaguer Ty Tyson, said simply, “Lou Gehrig has left us a heritage. May we do it proud.”