56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (32 page)

At away games word of Joe’s getting a hit was sometimes announced between innings over the stadium loudspeaker. At home in Fenway Park Dominic received information more intimately, as he stood in centerfield. Ted Williams had asked the scoreboard operator inside Fenway’s big green monster of a leftfield wall to alert him whenever there was an update on Joe. Suddenly Dominic would hear Williams’s booming voice: “Dommy! Dommy! Joe got a hit. The streak’s alive.”

No one on the Red Sox kept a closer eye on what Joe DiMaggio was doing than Williams did. He would check on DiMaggio’s daily statistics in the box scores, and then he would talk about what he’d read.
You would guess that Ted was the brother
, thought the Red Sox second baseman Bobby Doerr. By this time Williams was batting .404, easily the best average in baseball and a full 55 points better than DiMaggio’s. For a stretch of nearly a month from mid-May to mid-June, Williams had hit .517. Hardly anyone noticed. Some writers lamented how Williams’s run at a historic season—nobody had hit better than .400 since Hornsby in ’24—was being “obscured” and “submerged” by DiMaggio’s streak. Yet obscured and submerged it remained. While the crowds swelled to see DiMaggio, Williams’s gaudy average appeared to have no effect on the turnstiles. When comparisons were drawn between the two players the argument that DiMaggio was the better fielder and the more intimidating base runner inevitably won out. When Williams was asked for his own evaluation, he spoke respectfully of DiMaggio. “Joe is stronger,” Williams said. At 22, Williams was remarkably thin. He earned about a third of DiMaggio’s salary.

Still, the fact that he could be hitting over .400 and with power too—his 15 home runs and 56 RBI barely trailed DiMaggio in those categories—and nonetheless be rendered an afterthought was not always easy for Williams to take. “I had a 23-game hit streak this season,” he pointed out during an interview just before Boston came to New York, and even as DiMaggio’s streak rose upward Williams spoke undaunted. “I’d like to break every hitting record in the book,” he declared.

Joe wasn’t spending much time thinking about Williams, or about any other rival player. He thought about his own play and about what he still needed to do. There had certainly been a sense of achievement after passing Sisler’s record, the beacon that for so long had shone brightly before him. The Yankees had celebrated DiMaggio as a conqueror when he reached 42—on the train ride up from D.C. he had bought every teammate a bottle of beer—and the public celebrated too. A story headlined,
DIMAGGIO SETS CONSECUTIVE HITTING MARK
, ran on the front page of
The Washington Post
.

Yet Keeler lurked in DiMaggio’s mind. Dominic’s surprise notwithstanding, newspapers had been mentioning Keeler’s streak for the better part of a week. While the Yankees were in Philadelphia, DiMaggio had gotten a call from a reporter friend in San Francisco confirming that Keeler’s record, set way back then, was indeed the official major league mark. Even in the exultant locker room shortly after he had eclipsed Sisler, DiMaggio had allowed that he was still looking ahead. “Now I’m going after that 44 game mark,” he said. Keeler was the new goal.
Imagine getting this close and then not breaking it
. To DiMaggio this was an unsettling thought.

THE FACT THAT
DiMaggio could tie Keeler with a hit in each game of the doubleheader against the Red Sox was something neither the Yankees nor the New York reporters were shy about advertising. The hitting streak sold: newspapers, tickets, score books. Rarely had a baseball plotline had legs like this. Thus Keeler, a .341 career hitter who had died too young of heart disease in 1923, was resurrected. Some old-timers argued that Wee Willie had it tougher than current hitters, given the way that in his day baseballs could be kept in play for entire games, becoming filthy with soil and tobacco juice, becoming too soft for a batter to really drive. The ball was “dead” in that era, they said, and players swung smaller bats. Keeler’s was 30½ inches long and 30½ ounces in weight, the smallest piece of lumber the folks at the Louisville Slugger factory had ever turned for a major leaguer. Even so, Keeler choked up six inches on the handle. When he first stepped into the batter’s box he looked like a sandlot novice, a kid. He stood less than 5′ 5″ and he weighed 140 pounds.

Keeler grew up (if you could call it that) in Brooklyn and baseball gripped him from the start. He would come to the Gates Avenue School carrying a bat in his hands, and with a weathered ball stuffed into each of his coat pockets. The hips of his trousers were worn from sliding, his palms were rough and callused. Sometimes Wee Willie had about him the faint smell of horses; his father drove a streetcar on the DeKalb Avenue line.

Wee Willie had a schoolteacher, Miss Emma Keeler. “I am very sorry to acknowledge that you are a namesake of mine,” she said to him, “but I am thankful that you are not of my kin.” Miss Keeler never appreciated the love that Willie felt for America’s young and growling game. As a baseball player Wee Willie was the best in the school. As a student he couldn’t tell fowl from fish or from anything else. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” Miss Keeler said as she returned a test paper to Willie. “You should be ashamed to say that the rhinoceros, an animal the hide of which cannot be pierced by a bullet, is noted for its fine feathers. A boy who pays no more attention to his studies than you do will never amount to much when he gets to be a man.” Then Miss Keeler paused: “I also wish to add that I shall no longer tolerate the bringing of baseball bats into this schoolroom.”

So Wee Willie wasn’t long for the schoolroom. He could box, tenacious in the ring despite his tiny stature, and when he wrestled he could toss a guy twice his size. But nothing else mattered if there was a ball game going on. Willie pitched, played the infield—who cared if he was lefthanded—and would even fill in at catcher, anything to earn money in the semipro leagues. Everyone in Brooklyn got to know Willie’s name but when he made it big, he made it big in Baltimore, as the rightfielder on a team with the formidable likes of Hughie Jennings and John J. McGraw. Those three led the Orioles to the championship of the National League in 1894, ’95 and ’96. In ’97 Keeler started the season by getting a hit in 44 straight games, and finished it with a batting average of .424.

Opponents stuck Willie with the nickname Little Boy, yet even as they cursed his pesky style, the little boy was transforming the game. He could place a base hit as accurately as another guy could throw a baseball. He’d bunt his way on base—daring and happy to do it even with a runner on third—and when the infielders came in close to try to take that bunt away, he would just chop the ball over their heads or slap it hard past their gloves. If Keeler saw a fielder moving to cover a base, he hit the ball right to the spot where the fielder had been. It was Wee Willie who brought the hit-and-run play to the major leagues.

They called him a “scientific hitter” and around the time that he was averaging better than .370 in each of six seasons in a row, people begged him for a treatise on the art. “Keep your eyes clear and hit ’em where they ain’t. That’s all,” he said. Over the years “hit ’em where they ain’t” had found purchase in the lexicon, attached to Keeler, and was a philosophical truth in dugouts across the land.

Some said that in those years of the late 1890s and the early aughts Wee Willie was the best player in baseball—better even than Nap Lajoie. Keeler ran the bases with great speed and he covered wide ground in the outfield. Some of that was the ground that sloped sharply down and out of sight in Baltimore’s old Union Park. It was there that crafty Willie would secretly stow baseballs in the grass. When a batter hit one out past the slope in rightfield Keeler would race back, vanish from view, and then, miraculously, come up throwing a moment later. In this way the Orioles often got startled runners out. Then came the day that both Keeler and the Baltimore centerfielder disappeared chasing a ball over the brow. A moment later not one but two baseballs came hurtling toward second base. From then on the umpires checked the grass.

Keeler returned to Brooklyn to play for the Superbas and twice helped that team win the National League. Folks called Keeler the pride of Williamsburg for the neighborhood where he was raised. Out in front of the Superbas’ Washington Park a boy would sometimes wave a score card before games, shouting “you can’t tell the players without one!” But the fans were interested in one player in particular. And when they looked out to see Wee Willie Keeler standing beside a teammate, perhaps the 6′ 1″ Duke Farrell, well, the fact was you could tell
that
player without any help from the score card at all.

Keeler went on to play for the Giants and for the Highlanders too, retiring finally in 1910 at the age of 38 with 2,932 hits, two batting titles, and an unmatched eight seasons of 200 base hits or more. “Records don’t mean much to me,” he said, but of one even Wee Willie was proud. In a span of more than a full season in the 1890s Keeler had come to bat 700 times without striking out.

He would have been great in any era—everyone chewing it over at Yankee Stadium that day agreed. But could you really compare Wee Willie’s time to 1941? Foul balls did not even count as strikes then. Poking with his little club, Keeler would knock foul after foul, wearing a pitcher down in body and in mind until he threw just the pitch that Keeler wanted.
What about that?
went the argument in the Stadium bleachers.
A good hitter could be up forever! No wonder they got wise and changed the rule. That deck was stacked
.

It was the first of July, a Tuesday afternoon, and nearly 53,000 fans had jammed into Yankee Stadium for the doubleheader with the Red Sox. The size of the crowd was astonishing, the largest of the year. Not even the Yankees had expected this many fans to show up, not in the middle of the week and certainly not with the heat being what it was. There had been no letup. Temperatures remained in the mid 90s and the air had become even heavier and more stifling. A 54-year-old man in Brooklyn died of prostration. A 39-year-old news reporter from the
Journal-American
became so overheated that his heart gave out. Many people throughout the area were hospitalized. The papers offered advice about what to do—put a cold compress on the neck; lie in cool bathwater in the middle of the day. Around the city the air-conditioned movie theaters were packed regardless of what they were showing on their screens. On a day like this you did not pay to sit in the open sun at Yankee Stadium, with the body heat of thousands around you, unless something special was going on.

They are here to see me
, DiMaggio thought as he jogged out to stand in centerfield. He could hear the people calling out his name.
They’re here to see me get a base hit in both games
.

In the bottom of the first inning of Game 1 against the second-year lefthander Mickey Harris, DiMaggio fell behind 0 and 2. Then he hit a foul pop-up that was caught by the Boston first baseman Lou Finney.

DiMaggio had still not recovered the stolen bat, a fact that Bina Spatola, sitting in the first row right behind the Yankees dugout and right in front of Jerry Spatola, her dad, was well aware of. She still couldn’t quite believe that she was here at the game, on this day in the heart of the streak. She and Geta were in Joe’s good seats, the same seats where actors like George Raft and Virginia Pine sometimes sat. Or Lou Costello and his wife. Bina had her hair pulled back and she was wearing a sundress. Geta had sunglasses on.

Jerry had been working to get Joe D his bat back. The word on the street had revealed some news, a few suspects. The bat was apparently in Newark somewhere—that much even Bina had heard. An usher had seen a guy leaving Griffith Stadium carrying the bat, but by now it had changed hands who knew how many times. Jerry Spats, with the help of the broad-knuckled Peanuts (and probably, though Bina would never have been able to say for sure, with the help of some of Richie’s guys), was making sure the bat got back to Joe where it belonged.
If Dad has to pay somebody for it that’s what he’ll do
, Bina thought.
He’ll get it back
. She liked to put her hands on the top of the warm dugout roof. Home plate was right there in front of her.

In truth losing the bat didn’t matter all that much to DiMaggio. Certainly he was sorry not to have it—he was sorry for anything that forced a change in his habit, and he had liked that bat fine. But DiMaggio was not finicky about bats. When he was first breaking in, tall tales were written of how Joe had grown up in San Francisco hitting with oar handles. Those stories may as well have been true. DiMaggio had been ordering from Louisville Slugger since 1933, and just in the past couple of years the company had sent him 36-inch bats that weighed 33, 34, 35, 36 and 37 ounces. When Fritz Bickel turned a bat for DiMaggio he was as assiduous as ever, working his calipers and gauges, bent intently over the lathe. But Bickel knew that he would never hear about it if he didn’t get the weight exactly right. It wasn’t like turning a bat for Williams. The Splinter demanded the best wood, with a long narrow grain. Eight grains per inch or he might send it back. And you had better not miss on the weight. It was said that Williams could pick through a batch of 10 bats and just by hefting each one know which was two-tenths of an ounce lighter than the rest. DiMaggio? Not quite. Once in a rare while if he thought a bat felt funny he’d take it to the butcher and have him put it on a hanging scale.