56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (2 page)

C
LOUDS DRAPED OVER
Yankee Stadium that afternoon, swept up from the warm Gulf Coast waters to render the sky a pale gray mass as far as Joe DiMaggio could see. He sat alone in the home team dugout, gazing out past the centerfield fence, squeezing the handle of his bat, now and then taking a gentle half-swing. And how warm it was—getting up on 80°, he’d guess. The Bronx air felt too heavy for the middle of spring.
Maybe it’ll rain,
DiMaggio thought,
maybe we’ll get a washout
. But rain was still a day away. It was May 15, 1941, and the Yankees and Joe DiMaggio were in a slump.

Four straight games the team had lost. What were the Yanks now, 5½ back of Cleveland? Fourth place? Twenty-eight games into the season and they’d lost just as many times as they’d won. A day earlier the team had gone down quietly to the Indians and DiMaggio had been hitless, again. He was down to .306, hadn’t hit a lick since the first few games of the year. Up in Boston his brother Dom was outhitting him by 74 points; the Red Sox player-manager, old Joe Cronin from back home in San Francisco, was batting better than .400. It wouldn’t do.

The year before, the Yankees had fallen behind in the standings like this and never caught up, failing to win the American League pennant for the first time since 1935, for the first time since DiMaggio had arrived in ’36. Maybe things had come a little too easy for him those first few seasons in the majors. He’d knocked in 125 runs as a rookie, smashed 46 homers in ’37, hit .381 and won the American League’s Most Valuable Player award in ’39. Maybe he was due to slide some, maybe he couldn’t expect to hit like that in the big leagues forever.

No. Things would turn around again. He’d start hitting. He always did.
Just get things rolling
, DiMaggio told himself.
Keep swinging and stay on the ball
. A hit here, a hit there. He’d be on his way.

The fans were not so sure. A little more than 9,000 had come out on this Thursday, game time 3 o’clock, and DiMaggio knew they weren’t all sold on him. He was hardly the only struggling Yankee—rightfielder Tommy Henrich, stuck in the low .200s, had even been benched—but DiMaggio wasn’t just another ballplayer. He was the franchise, the man who was meant to carry the Yankees, as Babe Ruth had done, and Lou Gehrig. Those guys didn’t have bad years, not when they were young and healthy anyway. DiMaggio was the latest great one. And he sure was being paid that way. In the stands, the men took to their seats, adjusted their fedoras, rolled their necks.
What’s he makin’ again? Thirty-seven five? At 26 years old? And he wants more?

Yes, DiMaggio liked his money. He had delayed even coming to the Yankees from his home in San Francisco in 1936, declining their mailed offer of $5,000 for the season, then nixing letter after letter that came in from New York with proposed raises until finally the Yankees general manager Ed Barrow wrote, “This is all!” and Joe accepted $8,500.

Fans had heard about that wrangling and they also knew that DiMaggio had missed the start of the 1938 season, demanding—just two years into his career!—a $40,000 salary. The team only wanted to pay him $25,000, and by late April, DiMaggio surrendered. Yankees owner Col. Jacob Ruppert had called him an “ungrateful young man,” and many baseball fans, working for dimes to DiMaggio’s dollars, were inclined to agree.

These weren’t easy times, New Deal or not. The worst of the Depression still stung, too many hardworking lives were still in tatters, unemployment was still up near 10%. Those factory jobs, lost by the thousands in the early 1930s, hadn’t come back in New York. The stock market sagged. And now, reverberating across the Atlantic, the war in Europe.
Isn’t DiMaggio makin’ enough? And he gets paid for those cigarette advertisements too. The guy was on a Wheaties box! What’s he gonna do with all that dough?
Just a few years before, Babe Ruth himself had been taking pay cuts after every season. Hit 46 home runs one year, still agreed to lop 25% off his wage.
And that was the Babe!

Now Ruth was retired, and the ailing Gehrig too. The Yankees just didn’t seem the same anymore, seemed vulnerable like the rest of the world.

Booooo
, shouted some among the Stadium crowd as DiMaggio loped out to centerfield to start the game that afternoon.
Booooooo
.

Joe McCarthy wasn’t happy either. Not on a four-game losing streak. The manager would sometimes seethe even after the Yankees
won
a game if they looked sloppy doing it. You played the game the right way for McCarthy. You hustled. You threw the ball to the right base. You were smart. And you won. Nobody won more regularly as a manager than McCarthy did. He’d had winners in the minor leagues, and then in the National League with the Cubs, a pennant in 1929, and he’d really won with the Yankees, five world championships in 10 years. McCarthy’s big league teams had won more than 60% of the games they were in. Missing the pennant in ’40 was a sour blow and now there was this lackluster start in ’41. If it kept up, his ballplayers knew, the Henrich benching would only be the first.

Before the game DiMaggio had seen that dark, dyspeptic look on McCarthy’s face, watched him for a while as the manager stood surveying the field, shifting his weight on the dugout steps, working his chaw against his lower gum. The White Sox were in town and the Yankees were honoring Jimmy Dykes.
Of all people
, thought McCarthy, though he’d never complain out loud.

The media all loved Dykes, Chicago’s ebullient, loose-tongued player-manager who enlivened every game he was part of. At 44 he was officially retiring as a player so as to clear space for a younger player on his roster. Dykes had been in the league for 22 years. He was 5′ 9″ and scrappy as junk metal, a sometimes .300 hitter who would grab his glove and play wherever you put him. Usually, that was third base and now on the field the photographers were staging a picture: Dykes pretended to cling to the third base bag, as if refusing to go gently from his playing career, while a few of the White Sox players tried theatrically to tear him away.

McCarthy didn’t go for that kind of horsing around—not by a manager, certainly. And he didn’t go for Dykes, a man who would play cards in the clubhouse right up until game time, then later crack to the reporters that he’d come out late because he didn’t want to have to look at “those bums, the umpires” for any longer than he had to. Dykes was always saying stuff, and the year before he’d gone too far, come right out and mocked McCarthy, declaring that anyone could manage the Yankees with the lineup they had, that all McCarthy had to do was “push buttons and watch his murderers’ row win games for him.”

What a thing to say. Petty. Bush. McCarthy would never diminish a man like that, not a peer, not in public. More irksome now was that this year manager Dykes had his undertalented White Sox ahead of the Yankees, and even challenging the Indians for first place. Everyone said Dykes was working miracles. During the last series between these teams, in Chicago about two weeks before, the White Sox had whupped the Yankees 8–1.

Dykes
, thought McCarthy. His face darkened and he rubbed his mouth. He sent a thin brown line of saliva out of the dugout.
Damn Dykes
.

At home plate Dan Daniel, the dean of the New York baseball writers, was presenting Dykes with some kind of honorary scroll and talking into a microphone to the crowd. The Chicago manager took the scroll and then, his wit and loquaciousness blunted by the moment, by the real and present weight of his own retirement, could only lean into the microphone and say simply, “Thanks.” Some of the Yankees players had gone out to join the White Sox, and stand along the foul line. Yanks pitcher Lefty Gomez even needled Dykes, lamenting that the one guy he could get out was hanging ’em up.

McCarthy wasn’t out on the field for any of it, and neither was DiMaggio. They were in no mood.
This must be eating McCarthy alive
, DiMaggio thought on the bench, looking over at the only big league manager he’d ever had. And at that thought DiMaggio, in spite of himself, couldn’t help but smile.

Then the ceremony broke up and the players stood as the national anthem played, and DiMaggio ran out to his place in centerfield, hearing the boos that came down from the stands. And then the game began and the day got worse. The White Sox took a lead in the top of the first, going up 2–0, scoring their first run after DiMaggio’s beeline throw to third base clipped the elbow of Chicago’s Billy Knickerbocker, who’d headed there from first after a single. The ball bounded into the stands, Knickerbocker jogged home and the Yankees were trailing just two batters into the game. Listless, they would never even rally to tie the score.

At the end of the day it was Chicago 13, New York 1. And for those who missed it, the New York newspapers the next morning were unyielding: “The Yankees never looked worse,” wrote Arthur Daley in The
New York Times
, “and derisive shouts greeted the final out of each inning.” A wire report that went to newspapers across the country called it “one of the most humiliating defeats the Yanks have suffered in years. They did everything wrong.”

So forgive the fans at Yankee Stadium if they did not, as they filed out of the park that early evening, look back fondly on, or even expressly recall, the fact that at shortly before 3:15 p.m., with two outs in the bottom of the first inning and the rookie Phil Rizzuto leading off second base, Joe DiMaggio drew a bead on a fastball from the White Sox’s blond, 5′ 10″ 174-pound lefthander Edgar Smith and lined a hard, low single into left centerfield for his only base hit of the game.

“I
’M IN THE
worst slump I’ve ever experienced in all my years in the game,” DiMaggio had told reporters a week into May, and even now, 10 days later, his struggles showed little sign of letting up. “My timing is off,” he said. “You come up saying to yourself, ‘Here’s one that’s going out of the park.’ The pitch comes in and it looks like a fat one and then instead of smashing it the way you want to, you only get a piece of it.”

There had been other, lesser slumps, of course. Just the season before, in August 1940, DiMaggio had endured a nuisance of a spell when, swing as he might, he could not seem to drive the ball; he felt something strangely amiss. He hadn’t been scuffling for long, though, when one evening at dinner Dorothy glanced at him from across the table and said’shyly, hesitantly’that she thought she could help. DiMaggio smirked, cocked his head, put down his fork and leaned back in his chair.

He looked back at his wife, and his eyes narrowed slightly. A faint, unbidden annoyance came over him. With his long fingers DiMaggio gathered up the napkin off his lap and wiped the corners of his mouth. There was a tightness now in the room.
She thinks she can help
. He silently weighed the notion.

Dorothy attended just about every game at Yankee Stadium, always sat in the same seat behind home plate, a little over to the third base side, a few rows up. “I noticed something at the ballpark today,” she said in her quiet voice.

When he’d met her, in 1937 on the set of a movie they both were in, she was a 19-year-old showgirl. Beautiful, blonde and smart, eyes wide and shining. She didn’t even know who Joe DiMaggio was then, didn’t care a whit for baseball. Three years later it was still a new game to Dorothy. Hitting, or anything else that went on at the place where Joe took care of business, was barely something she would ask him about, let alone offer advice on. But she was doing it now. DiMaggio looked over the table at Dorothy’s broad, pretty face, saw the tentative way she held her hands, her nervousness. Steam rose up from the plates of ravioli that Dorothy had made. Their wedding had been nine months before, in San Francisco.

DiMaggio’s smirk softened into a smile and the hardness faded from his eyes and he let the air out of his chest. “What did you notice?” he asked.

“Your hitting,” she began. “The number five on your shirt is in a different position. I don’t see it the same way anymore. You’re not swinging the way you used to.”

In an instant DiMaggio knew that Dorothy was right, that she was onto something about his form that he could fix. The next morning at Yankee Stadium DiMaggio worked on his stance, realized that he was striding just slightly too much, an involuntary, inchlong lunge that upset his balance. His body wasn’t turning with its usual force, his follow-through was not quite complete, and the misstep had put an unwanted wrinkle in his smooth swing. DiMaggio shortened his step to the way it had been, the way he liked it, and after swinging for a while, after a good, long session of batting practice before the game, he felt natural again, comfortable. That afternoon he went 3 for 4. And he kept on hitting from there. With that’simply if improbably’that slump was over.

This one, though, he could not shake. For nearly four weeks he’d been hitting under .200. Only 14 hits in his last 73 at bats, one of the numbers guys around the clubhouse had informed him.
You’re pressing, just relax
, he had taken to telling himself before coming to the plate, reminding himself again and again to
keep on swinging, that’s how you’ll come out of it
. And yet every at bat felt like a wholly new start to DiMaggio, and every out a different kind of failure. Whenever he’d get things right for an at bat or two—his swing in sync, the barrel of his bat passing through the air just where it was meant to be—the next time up he’d again hit one off the handle or stub one off the end of the bat.

The day after that awful 13–1 loss to the White Sox, DiMaggio had smashed a home run deep over the Yankee bullpen and into the leftfield bleachers, a distant place where only two men alive, he and the Tigers’ Hank Greenberg, had ever hit a baseball. Later, in the ninth inning of that game, DiMaggio tripled to the wall and the Yankees pulled out a 6–5 win.