Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (27 page)

In 1949, he struck out 117 men in only 77 innings in Louisville. He had been sure he was going to the big club and had told reporters, “Last year I wasn’t ready. I was so nervous that I couldn’t find the plate. I realized I needed time in the minors. I’m ready now. I’ve quit trying to throw too hard. Control is the thing, and I think I have it.” Not everyone agreed, particularly those who batted against him. In Louisville, for the first time, he seemed to master his wildness. In one game he struck out twenty men. When he came up from the minors he was only twenty years old and probably had more natural talent than any pitcher on the staff, including Parnell.

In June, with Boston playing its worst baseball of the year, McDermott became a member of the regular rotation. He was all ears and elbows; years later he would look at his photo in
Life
magazine and say, “There, there it is, see for yourself, no wonder I could never get laid.” He drove McCarthy crazy. “Maurice,” the old man had told him in spring training, “all you have to do is aim for the middle of the plate and they’ll all jump in the barrel for you.” But he took no advice. “Maurice, can I tell you a few things?” Mel Parnell once said to him that year. “Not a few things, just one thing,” McDermott answered. “Maurice,” Parnell said, “I don’t think the world is ready for you yet.” McDermott
wanted to throw the ball past anyone he faced, in his own words, “Hard, harder, hardest.”

He did not try to be a flake. He
was
a flake. The Boston sportswriters were calling him Mickey, and he announced that he wanted to be called Lefty because he thought and felt like a Lefty. He sang at local nightclubs and told writers he would rather be a singer than a pitcher. Having been poor all his life, he loved to throw money around now that he was making a big-league salary, albeit a very small one. Everywhere he went he bought new suits and new shoes. “I led the league,” he once said of that rookie year, “in stolen hotel towels and buying suits.” He bought shirts and wore them only once. He often left clothes behind in hotels. “Mickey,” said his roommate Mel Parnell, “half the bellhops in the hotels in the American League are going around wearing your clothes.” “That’s just fine, Mel,” he answered, “let’s go out and buy a new suit.” He also seemed on his way to setting records in food consumption. He would go into the dining car on the train, eat one dinner, then order another. One day Tom Dowd, the road secretary, caught him doing it. “All right, McDermott, that meal’s on you,” Dowd said. “Why, because Tom Yawkey can’t afford it?” McDermott said. “No, kid, because you just had the biggest dinner of anyone on the team an hour ago,” Dowd replied.

His first few starts were impressive. Early in the season he had talked with the great Hal Newhouser. “Harold,” he had asked, “when am I going to learn?” “Someday you’re going to walk out on that mound and it’s going to feel like you own it,” Newhouser had answered. That seemed to be happening now. Suddenly a team that had been surviving with two pitchers had a third starter, one that batters feared. He dominated almost every game he was in. His control was better than expected. On July 5, at the lowest point in the season for the Red Sox, now twelve games out, McDermott started for Boston. He allowed the Yankees only
four hits, struck out seven, and won 4-2. It was his third victory in four decisions (the defeat being the game in which DiMaggio had beaten him in Boston), and his power seemed to promise more for the future. On the last day of July, he shut out Cleveland 3-0. It was his fifth victory in seven starts. The Boston writers were ecstatic,
BEST BOSTON ROOKIE SINCE DAVE FERRISS,
said one headline. There were comparisons with other great pitchers of the past and how they had fared at a comparable moment in their careers (Lefty Gomez at nineteen had been 2-5, Hal Newhouser at nineteen had been 9-9, Bob Feller at seventeen, 5-4). But even with McDermott’s victory, the Boston players left New York with a feeling that any vestige of luck had deserted them.

Dominic DiMaggio thought that, given the way the Yankees were playing, it would take 98 games to win the pennant. That meant that the Red Sox for the rest of the season would have to be 63-20, a record of over .750, as close to perfection as one could imagine for baseball. Actually, The Little Professor, as DiMaggio was called by sportswriters because he wore glasses, was slightly off—it would not require 98 games to win the pennant; it required only 97.

In those darkest days Ted Williams kept saying they were a hot-weather team and he was right: Boston was a team of good hitters, and by the middle of the summer the other teams’ pitchers had worn down. In the vernacular, they lost a yard or two on their fastballs. That helped the hitters, but it was a condition to which the Boston pitchers were not immune. Catching the Yankees appeared at that moment an impossible task.

It was Dominic DiMaggio, as much as anyone, who started the Red Sox comeback. He was probably the most underrated baseball player of his day, in part because of his size—he was smaller than most outfielders, and he hit with less power—in part because he wore glasses, and mostly because he played in the shadow of his brother Joe, and also that of
Ted Williams. But he became one of the premier center fielders of his day. He was chosen in eight All-Star Games and played in seven (missing one because of injuries). In the American League only his brother Joe was as good a defensive outfielder, for Dominic DiMaggio played center field like an infielder. He charged balls fearlessly, holding runners back from extra bases. He had speed and range and the special DiMaggio knack of anticipating the play, to get an exceptional jump on a ball. He was a good hitter, perhaps not a great one, but he studied pitchers almost as closely as Williams did. He knew that his job was to get on base, and he was probably the best lead-off hitter in the American League. He was an unusually intelligent man who could easily have run a baseball team, and he went on to become a remarkable financial success after his playing days were over. He did this not, as often happens, by cashing in on his name, but rather by starting a second career as the owner of a plastics manufacturing company in New England.

There was about Dominic a sense that he was different, more serious than other players. It was not just the glasses, which made him look different, almost scholarly, it was his demeanor, his language, his comportment. Once he was called out on strikes on what he clearly thought was a bad pitch. He turned to the umpire in rage, stared at him, walked angrily back to the bench, and then, poised on the top step, yelled, “I have never witnessed such incompetence in all my life.”

The Yankees were aware of Dominic’s value to the Red Sox. They believed they had to keep him off the bases. Not only was he a good contact hitter and a good base runner, but Johnny Pesky hit right behind him in the number-two slot. Pesky was a much better hitter with men on base, and was one of the best hit-and-run men in the league. If Dominic got on, the Yankee pitchers believed, it guaranteed that Ted Williams would come up with men in scoring position. Then they would face the choice of having to walk him and
risk an even bigger inning, or pitching to him and risking several runs.

Even while the Red Sox were losing in June, Dominic DiMaggio had already hit in 8 straight games. He was to hit in 26 more games, for a total of 34, before his streak ended on August 9. That remains a Red Sox record. More important, it helped turn a sagging team around. He would get on base, Pesky would move him around, and Williams, Junior Stephens, and Doerr would bring them home.

Dominic was the youngest and smallest of the DiMaggios. By the time he passed adolescence, it had become acceptable within the DiMaggio family to be a professional baseball player. Both Joe and Vince were playing professional ball, and Giuseppe DiMaggio had not only changed his mind about a career in baseball, he positively basked in Joe’s fame. “And when are you going to play baseball?” Giuseppe asked Dominic when he was still in high school. The old world had finally accepted the mores of the new one.

The boys’ mother, Rosalie DiMaggio, her youngest son was sure, was the real engine in the family’s drive for success and a better life. Giuseppe DiMaggio was a good man, a hard worker, but he would have been content with his life in the Old World. He was a man who accepted what was around him. She did not. She was the one who pushed her husband, first to move to the small fishing village of Martinez in the Bay area, and then to San Francisco; once in San Francisco, she pushed to find better houses in better neighborhoods with access to better schools. Schools were important, for she had been a schoolteacher in the old country. It was understood that the DiMaggio men of the next generation were to be more than fishermen. That was what all the sacrifice was for.

However, the fame that came to engulf her children somewhat perplexed Rosalie DiMaggio. She was pleased that they did well, but it was more important to her that they
were respected as men, not just as players. She was, thought Dominic DiMaggio, a wonderful old-fashioned woman of immense strength, yet she never raised her voice. She was guided by an unshakable religious faith. She told her children stories from the Bible, all with a proverb, all with a purpose. She constantly set standards of behavior that they were to live up to.

When Dominic was a newsboy, he once found a roll of crisp new bills worth thirty-five dollars. There was no wallet, and no way to return it. Dominic brought it home, somewhat pleased with himself. But his mother did not share in his pleasure. “Dominic, I feel badly about this,” she said. Dominic asked why. “I feel badly for the man who lost it—it is surely his week’s pay.” The lesson was clear: There was nothing else they could do, no way to return the money to the rightful owner, but there was to be no pleasure in this small windfall.

Dominic was the runt of the family. He was always eager to prove that he was as strong as his older brothers. He worked hard on the fishing boat, claiming that he liked it in order to show that his size was not a problem. Joe, by contrast, hated the boat, hated even the smell of fish, and he made no secret about it. At Galileo High School, Dominic did not play until his last year, and he batted ninth. He hit .400, but had not even played enough to get his full varsity black “G”; instead, he got the lesser “G” in a scroll, which he did not choose to wear. He was still small—five feet seven and 135 pounds—and a professional career seemed unlikely. But he liked the game and there were the footsteps of his two brothers in which to follow. So after graduation he kept playing, for the Presidio-Monterey Army team. He played shortstop and qualified for his availability by working as a lifeguard for the army.

He began to grow bigger and stronger and took a job with the Simmons Bed Company as a laborer. There he clamped springs onto mattresses. He was paid 40 cents an
hour—which meant he was drawing a check of $19.20 for 48 hours of work. He also played for the Simmons semipro team on Sunday. He often thought about a professional-baseball career, and decided that what he wanted was just one season in the major leagues. That would be enough to prove he could do whatever he wanted. In those days the Cincinnati Reds and the San Francisco Seals, an independently owned unaffiliated Pacific Coast team, held an annual joint tryout for local boys. They alternated which team got first pick each year, and in 1937, when Dominic was just twenty, he decided to go to the camp. Being a dutiful son, he talked it over with both parents, and he went to his boss and explained about the tryout: The camp would last about two weeks. His boss said that his job would be waiting if he did not get a contract.

There were 143 kids at the tryout, but Dom DiMaggio was the best player there. The Seals decided to sign him. Dom thought of himself as an infielder, but Charlie Graham, who was the principal owner of the Seals, took one look at him and said, “With those glasses we better get him in the outfield.” Graham’s fear, Dominic realized, was that a sharp infield hit might take a bad bounce and break his glasses.

Because neither of his parents spoke English, his older brother Tom negotiated the contract. Tom DiMaggio wanted to protect his younger brother, and was very tough with the Seals. Above all he did not want him playing in Tucson in the terrible Arizona heat, as Vince had done. “You can’t send him out to Tucson,” Tom said. “He’s so small and it’s so hot there, you’ll have to wipe him up with a blotter.”

The real burden was not so much Dom’s size, but the fact that he wore glasses. In that pre-contact lens era, wearing glasses was unthinkable. Hitters had to see, and they had to have great vision; if a player wore glasses, it was a sign that something more than just eyesight was missing. “Four-eyes” the schoolyard taunt went. It was about manhood
as well; perhaps he was not really tough enough to play in a man’s game. Occasionally a pitcher—pitchers did not hit—was allowed to wear glasses. Dominic DiMaggio could not, however, remember any other regular ballplayer who wore glasses at the time he broke in.

But Dominic had great confidence in himself; he knew he could see the ball and make contact. He was fortunate in his first season because Lefty O’Doul, who had managed his brother, was still managing the Seals. He was the best hitting instructor that Dominic ever saw. O’Doul recognized both the talent and the flaws in this young player. He saw power in the chest and arms, and he worked hard in spring training to improve Dominic’s swing, above all to keep him from lunging at the ball. DiMaggio, self-conscious about his lack of size, lunged because it seemed to promise greater power. O’Doul showed him that power was dissipated that way. He was to wait for the pitch and then swing, turning his hips into the ball, not lunge with his body. O’Doul was a patient teacher with a good eye. He would stand for hours behind the tiny batting cage they used in those days, armed with only a fungo stick, which was an unusually long bat. When DiMaggio moved his body, O’Doul would jab the fungo stick in his butt as sharply as he could.

One day Joe DiMaggio, who was already a star with the Yankees, dropped by the Seals camp and took some batting practice. Someone had an early movie camera and photographed both Joe and Dominic at bat. It was, thought Dominic years later, quite possibly the first use of the camera as a teaching vehicle in baseball, and it was an unusually dramatic one. When Joe was at bat, there was everything O’Doul had been preaching: The bat was cocked, and his entire body was still, as if frozen. The ball arrived, and Joe swung at it. His head did not move more than an inch, and the rest of his body did not move at all—except for his hips as they went into the ball. Thus his whole body was channeled into the swing.