56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (13 page)

Jeez, how Rizzuto wanted back in the lineup. But it was Crosetti’s job now and the old stalwart was playing okay, fielding better in fact than he had in years. Besides, McCarthy had his plan. The major league education of a young shortstop, he now felt, was best begun sitting by his side. As talented as Rizzuto was, there was no need, not yet, to make any change.

The ancient showerheads sputtered in the Sportsman’s Park locker room and an odorous, unidentifiable film covered the old floor and old walls. The Yankees got dressed in cramped aisles in front of their stalls, inevitably and sometimes awkwardly bumping into a teammate. That’s just how it was at Sportsman’s Park, and none of those nuisances could bother the Yankees much now. They had come to St. Louis and at the expense of the poor Browns had righted things again. The Yanks left town, bound for an exhibition game in Kansas City and then on to Chicago, tied with the Red Sox and the White Sox for second place. Keller was suddenly hot, and so was Henrich, still swinging that bat Joe had given him. DiMaggio’s batting average was up to .340, not exactly Williams territory but high enough to push his slumping brother Dom in the DiMag-O-Log back home. Joe’s hitting streak, so extravagantly extended, was now appreciably long enough that some of the other players—though this was not something that they would talk about directly with him—had begun to take notice.

SO JOE HAD
a hitting streak. Twenty-four games. Dario Lodigiani had been around one of these streaks before, back when Joe was playing in the PCL in San Francisco and Lodi and the others used to go out after their day at Galileo High to Seals Stadium to watch Joe, just 18 years old, and see if he could keep it alive another day. Now here they were, eight years later, Joe the magnificent Yankee, Lodi sticking as a third baseman for the White Sox. Would’ve been nice to talk to Joe a little bit on the field, catch up. But that was against the rules—no fraternizing!—and besides it wasn’t Joe’s way. All business. There was a coolness to the way Joe played, a ruthlessness. As if he saw everyone on the other team in the same impersonal way.

The game was in the seventh inning now and some of the spectators at Comiskey Park noticed that DiMaggio was without a hit in three times up. Lodigiani had thrown him out at first base in the sixth.
It’d be nice to get him again here
, Lodi thought, chuckling to himself. That would burn Joe just right, give Lodi something to tell the boys about next winter: how he’d stopped Joe’s streak.

Poor Johnny Rigney though. The White Sox starter sure was having a tough go on the mound all of a sudden. Falling apart. Worst start of the season, no doubt. Rigney wasn’t a half-bad righthander. He’d gone 15–8 in 1939 and so far in ’41 he’d been pitching like an ace, just into his usual hard luck. Two starts before Rigs had thrown a three-hitter and still took the loss. After that game Rigney’s luck went harder still: His draft board called and gave him a reporting date less than three weeks away. Tough blow to Rigney, and to the White Sox. He asked to defer for 60 days, so he could stay on the team long enough for his contract bonus to kick in—and wouldn’t you know, the draft board said okay!

That didn’t end the headaches though. Now Johnny heard the carping, the complaints about a ballplayer getting preferential treatment. The Illinois director of the selected service—apologetically, while professing to be a White Sox fan—had even filed an appeal straight to President Roosevelt to reverse Rigney’s deferment, to make an example out of the $12,000 a year pitcher and to set a standard. The director just didn’t think the deferment was right: What about the clerks, the accountants, the salesmen and proofreaders and waiters who were supporting their wives and children or their aging parents, or both? Hadn’t they had their deferments denied? There were hundreds of folks like that. It didn’t seem fair to give a pass to a big leaguer, and especially not this one. Rigney was engaged to marry Dorothy Comiskey—yes, of those Comiskeys, the family who owned the team, who had the ballpark named after them. Dorothy was the White Sox treasurer and an heir to the team. And Rigney needed the extra cash from his bonus?

So Rigney, and guys like Buddy Lewis in Washington, and several other players who were looking to defer, heard it from the fans in the stands, and sometimes loudly.
Hey Rigney, Greenberg went in. What makes you so special?
In the game against the Yankees, Rigney had been getting by all right until he gave up five runs in the sixth.

Draft talk was all over the ballparks then—the latest had it that Bobby Feller would get called up in August—and some people around the majors feared that as the war thickened, baseball might get shut down altogether. Everyone knew how Roosevelt loved the game, honored its place, respected its might. The President and Eleanor had sent a wreath to the Gehrig home when they’d heard about Lou. Yet just the other day there was National League president Ford Frick fanning the fears, announcing loudly his dread that a “government official might try to do away with baseball . . . during this time of stress and turmoil.” The way things were leaning then—lately Mussolini had taken to taunting the U.S., baiting them to officially get into the fight, labeling Roosevelt a dictator—could set Frick or anybody else on edge.

Seventh inning, one out, nobody on, the Yankees up five-zip. Rigney was ready to throw.
This could be my last time up
, DiMaggio thought stepping in.
One more chance at it
. He didn’t have any kind of book on pitchers but he knew something about Rigney: if he got you out once with a pitch, he’d like to throw it again the next time around. Fastball, usually. You could look for it. Rigney reared and pitched. DiMaggio swung.

Damn, it’s coming right at me!
Even though Lodigiani was playing DiMaggio deep and tight against the third-base line—just the way he used to play him on the scuffed macadam at North Beach playground—the low whistling drive arrived so fast that he had scarcely moved his hands when the ball kicked off the dirt and into his chest. Six inches higher on the hop and there’d have been teeth scattered on the infield. Lodigiani, though, was going to stay with this one; make Joe earn his way on. Lodi snatched up the ball and heaved it hard and accurately to first. But he was too late, by barely a blink it seemed. base hit, read the scoreboard, and of course it was—not even Keltner could have come up clean on a ball hit like that. At first base, DiMaggio took his lead and glanced toward second. The thought,
that’s 25 in a row
, had already been through his mind and gone. DiMaggio would come around to score. The Yanks would win 8–3

A cool rain fell the next afternoon, game canceled, but on the third day in Chicago the Yankees and White Sox played at Comiskey Park beneath the lights, some 37,000 on hand. The Yankees’ 3–2 win was secured in the 10th inning on DiMaggio’s two-out home run (he had also singled in the fourth) and the satisfaction that McCarthy felt came not just from the team’s now five-game winning streak, nor that the Yankees had moved into second place. The sweep and the beating back of the upstart White Sox came amid all the more ballyhoo for Dykes, a front-page story in
The Sporting News
marveling at how he was turning other teams’ castoffs into Chicago stars. As if Dykes’s hot brand of bristle and bounce made up some kind of magic fairy dust.
I know what
I
think
, McCarthy said to himself.
I think if any team is going to run away with the pennant, it’s gonna be the Yankees
.

The minor miracle of the visit to Chicago was that Dykes had been around to see every out of the two Yankee wins, even with umpire George Pipgras calling things from behind the plate for the first game, manning first base in the next. No one loved to run a guy more than Pipgras did—legend was that he’d once tossed 17 players from a single game—and no one could rankle an umpire quite as expertly as Dykes.

In the ninth inning of that 3–2 win, the Yankees had been down 2–1 to Chicago’s sharp lefthander Thornton Lee when Red Ruffing, in as a pinch hitter, knocked a two-out double to bring in Gordon from first. Dykes came hurtling out of the dugout, arguing that a fan had interfered with the play by getting in the way of Chicago leftfielder Myril Hoag as he tried to catch the ball. At the very least Dykes wanted Gordon put back on third. He appealed to the second base umpire. He appealed to the third base umpire. Nothing doing. Then Dykes went to home plate and told that night’s head ump, Steve Basil, that he was playing the damn game under protest. Dykes steamed off, never bothering to confront Pipgras, avoiding an altercation. From inside the Yankees dugout McCarthy had quietly reveled in Dykes’s futile stomparound.

An inning later, when a long fly ball landed in the upper deck in leftfield, it wasn’t the first time that DiMaggio had changed the game that night. In the third inning he had twice made excellent running catches, once to steal a hit from Lodigiani. In the fifth, when Lodi tried to score from second base on a single, DiMaggio let go a wire from deep centerfield to catch him dead at home. There would be no question, the next time that DiMaggio and Lodi’s eyes met, about who had gotten the better of whom.

The Yankees’ train left Chicago around midnight, an eastbound charter that would deliver the team to New York City well into the morning light. It was close to 1 o’clock by the time the players got their dinners in the Pullman dining car. They ate with care as the train rumbled along, hoping not to splatter their good clothes—jacket and tie wherever you went as a Yankee, another McCarthy rule. Joe was looking forward to getting home, to seeing Dorothy and to touching her skin, to the solitude of his study, to smokes on the terrace, to getting back to a routine. He supposed, sighing softly, that Dorothy would want to spend some time talking about the funeral and Eleanor and Lou.

Maybe he would take her to Toots Shor’s for dinner that week. Or maybe he’d go alone. He’d wait and see. But it was time to get back there, into the New York night. He would pick his way through the bustle under the awning out in front of Toots’s place, then whisk through the revolving front door, a path suddenly clearing through the crowd inside, and come up near to that spectacular round bar in the center of the room that always seemed layered thick with athletes and politicians and writers, as well as just about every guy in midtown who’d gotten off work and wanted a belt. Showgirls came around, and the crime guys in their hats. This was the center of everything. DiMaggio had a table in the back.

A month earlier, when he wasn’t hitting and the Yankees weren’t winning, DiMaggio hadn’t wanted to go to the saloon at all. Sometimes he would call and arrange to meet Toots outside on 51st Street and the two of them would take a long walk through the city, DiMaggio quiet and brooding. They would exchange a few words about Toots’s kids or whether J. Edgar Hoover had come by the place lately and just get away from things for a while. But that was it. Then Joe would go back home. DiMaggio couldn’t stand the way that he felt in Toots’s place when things were going badly on the field. Then, in every friendly greeting and salute, every “Hey Joe, how ya doin’?” he would hear an admonition. As if maybe he wasn’t doing enough. Why wasn’t he hitting? Why had the team lost the game that day? When was he going to turn it around? In the tough times, DiMaggio was certain that these were the thoughts people had when they said hello to him through the smoke and conviviality of Toots Shor’s. These were the thoughts he could not push from his mind, even when Toots came up, grinning through his rubbery cheeks, and wrapped DiMaggio in an ursine hug—boy, only Toots could do that—and blurted out his “Hiya crumb bum!” After the Yankees had lost a couple of games, DiMaggio did not want to talk with anyone who might say something about baseball. He did not want to answer any question about anything at all.

But now things were going just fine, and the greetings at Toots’s—those same “How ya doin’ Joes?”—would feel joyous and celebratory. DiMaggio had gotten a hit in 26 games running, after all, and was returning as the hero of the Yankees’ winning trip out West. Toots could lead Joe and Dorothy back to DiMaggio’s table to eat dinner in relative quiet, and for something close to free. He would let come around only the people that Joe and Dorothy wanted to come around. DiMaggio could feel the people’s eyes upon them (and Dorothy adored this, he knew) and not worry that someone would barge over and ask for an autograph the moment he sliced into his steak.

Toots controlled things, just the way that he did for Jack Dempsey or Babe Ruth or Jackie Gleason or any of the other saloon regulars that everyone wanted to touch. Toots knew just how to do it. He would let a few of the autograph seekers come to Joe of course, would bring over a football player or an actor or someone else to say hello. Toots understood the way Joe was. DiMaggio had two fears when he went out in public. One was that everybody would pay attention to him. The other was that nobody would.

The Yankees would be home for nearly two weeks now. Maybe Joe would give Jerry Spats a call and see about having dinner with him and Rose and Dorothy at the Castle. Maybe, and this was a good idea, he would take Dorothy to the movies one hot evening.
In the Navy
was out now, the new Abbott and Costello, their first since that hilarious war movie they’d done,
Buck Privates
. Joe and Dorothy had gone to the set of that one in Hollywood the winter before, had a meal there, watched Bud and Lou carry on. Abbott:
Suppose you had five dollars in this pants pocket and 10 dollars in this pants pocket, what would you have?
Costello:
The captain’s pants on
.