Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (6 page)

One day near the end of spring, Joe Trimble, a sportswriter for the
Daily News,
came up to Coleman and asked him to autograph a baseball. It was the ball signed by all the regular players who had made the big club. “Are you sure you want me to sign this, Mr. Trimble?” he asked. “Hey kid,” Trimble answered, “relax, you’re going to make the club.” That was the way Coleman found out he was a Yankee. He would be paid $7,500 a year instead of $5,000 if he was still with the Yankees on June 1, which was the big day. His promotion ended one phase of terror and began another, the haunting fear that at some critical moment in some crucial game he would fail and cost the Yankees the game and possibly the pennant.

The most serious problem for the Yankees in 1949 was that its famous stars were clearly aging. The team had been known to fans and writers in the late thirties and forties by the names of its three great outfielders—Keller, Henrich, and, of course, the greatest of them all, DiMaggio. The three had constituted one of the best and most versatile outfields of modern baseball, and the names were given as one might give the batting order: Henrich-Keller-DiMaggio. But now Henrich was thirty-six, Keller would turn thirty-three during the season, and DiMaggio would turn thirty-five at the end of it. Keller’s body was already giving out on him; he had ruptured a disk in his back during the 1947 season, and had not received proper medical care because of management’s desire to keep him in the pennant race. His lower body had been allowed to atrophy: in 1949 he was experiencing constant back problems and could play only part-time.

Even more upsetting were DiMaggio’s injuries. It was clear
that his body was wearing down. He was thirty-four, and had wartime not interrupted his career, this would have been his fourteenth year as a major leaguer. He had played hard, punishing his body more than most bigger men do, particularly in the way he slid into the bases. Now his body was rebelling. His left heel was operated on in January 1947, and a three-inch bone spur was taken out. He arrived at camp that year weak and underweight, with his leg muscles atrophying. Then, in 1948, he started to feel acute pain in his right heel in the second week of the season. An X ray of it showed a bone spur about an eighth of an inch long. Bone spurs are not unusual for people who are on their feet a great deal, nor are they necessarily dangerous. But for someone who could not rest his feet, and who instead aggravated the problem with hard running, stopping, and sliding, they were a source of almost unbearable pain. DiMaggio should have gone to the hospital immediately.

But the Yankees were the defending champions, and DiMaggio was their most important player. So he played. The problems with his feet forced him into compensatory injuries and his knees and thighs ached by the end of the season. In November 1948, the season finally over, he underwent an operation to remove the spurs. He stayed on crutches for six weeks in order to rest his foot. When he finally tried to walk without the crutches, he felt better. But in February 1949 the pain started to return. As spring training was about to begin, it was obvious that either he was recovering more slowly than in the past, or the operation had not been a complete success.
Times
reporter John Drebinger was already speculating in print, whether DiMaggio would ever play again. “It is,” he wrote, “a pretty solid conviction that DiMaggio will never again be the DiMaggio of old.”

Upon arrival at the Yankee camp in Florida, DiMaggio was in severe pain. He was flown immediately to Baltimore. There his doctor said the pain came from a normal thickening
of the heel and would eventually disappear. Casey Stengel, worried for the first time, told DiMaggio to work out according to his own schedule. He played only forty-three innings that spring, and never hit a ball hard. Every day the pain got worse and limited his activities even further. He could not dig in when he came to bat. Because of his inability to put pressure on his heel, his leg muscles were atrophying once again. DiMaggio’s doctor and one of the trainers made adjustments on his shoes, and he tried to work out a new schedule, one that would allow him to hit while minimizing the amount of running.

DiMaggio had become a desperate man, yet he kept his desperation to himself, as was his manner. His career hung in the balance. He tried everything: whirlpool baths, heat treatments, sponge rubber heels as special cushions, and, finally, the removal of the spikes from his right shoe. By early April he could not run at all, and on April 13 there was the most ominous headline imaginable in
The New York Times:
JOE DIMAGGIO TO MISS YANKEE OPENER.

As the pain grew worse, mere walking became painful, and the measures to protect him became more elaborate. The Yankee trainers concocted a complicated new device for his street shoes—a leather arch support, nailed between the ball of the foot and the heel on the
outside
of the shoe. As the team swung through Texas prior to going north for the start of the season, it became less a matter of whether he could play, and more a matter of whether he could walk. At a game in Beaumont, Texas, he limped off the field after a few innings, his face contorted by the pain.

DiMaggio was then subjected to four hours of tests. He emerged from the prolonged session with the doctor, in the journalistic vernacular of that day, “solemn and grim visaged.” The condition of DiMaggio’s heel was “hot,” that is, it was hot to the touch. There was much conjecture in the daily newspapers about whether the Yankees, a notoriously cheap organization, would pay DiMaggio’s salary for
the year. Del Webb, one of the Yankees owners, a man then in his seventies, had flown to Texas for the exhibition games there, and he accompanied DiMaggio to his meeting with the doctor. During the session the doctor took X rays of the backs of both Webb and DiMaggio. Later he showed both photos to Webb. “This,” he said, holding up the two photos, “is the X ray of the body of a young man, and this is one of the body of an older man.” Webb said that was perfectly understandable. “Unfortunately,” the doctor continued, “the X ray of the body of the young man is yours, and the one of the older man is your young player’s.”

DiMaggio flew immediately to Johns Hopkins, thinking he might undergo another operation. Because of his status as the nation’s number-one athletic hero, there was a horde of writers and photographers waiting for him at the airport. He had traveled to Baltimore on a fatiguing series of flights in old-fashioned prop planes; on one leg of the journey he had flown through a terrible series of storms. Almost everyone on the plane, including DiMaggio, had thrown up. When the plane finally landed he looked at himself in a mirror in the airplane washroom. He was shocked by the white-gray color of his face and the hollow look to his eyes. He was in no mood to face either reporters or photographers. The questions were all the same anyway: Joe, how’s the heel? Joe, what are the chances of recovery? And the worst question of all: Joe, do you think this is it? Do you think it’s all over? Again and again he heard that last question. It was, he believed, like asking a man who had just suffered a heart attack, “When do you expect to die?”

At the hospital they quickly prepared him for emergency surgery, strapping him to a table. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a man in street clothes coming at him. Suddenly there was a camera. Then the pop of a flashbulb. DiMaggio finally exploded. “Look,” he yelled, “I’ve always played ball with you. Why did you have to do that right now? What’s my family going to think if they see a picture of me like
this?” That was a rare outburst for a man who prided himself on being in control.

Joe DiMaggio was the most famous athlete in America. In fact, he seemed to stand above
all
other celebrities. Soon after he retired as a player, he returned with a group of friends to the Stadium to watch a prize fight. He was with Edward Bennett Williams, the famed trial lawyer, Toots Shor, the saloon-keeper, Averell Harriman, the politician-diplomat, and Ernest and Mary Hemingway. Suddenly an immense mob gathered. Hundreds of kids, a giant crowd within a crowd, descended on DiMaggio demanding autographs. One kid took a look at Hemingway, whose distinctive face had graced countless magazine covers. “Hey,” the kid said, “you’re somebody too, right?” Hemingway said without pause, “Yeah, I’m his doctor.” For even Hemingway, then at the height of his fame, could not compete with DiMaggio. Endless magazines sought DiMaggio’s cooperation to place his picture on their covers. Already two hit songs celebrated his deeds and fame: a light ditty about “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio,” commemorating his 1941 hitting streak (“Who started baseball’s famous streak/That’s got us all aglow?/He’s just a man and not a freak/Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio ...”); and “Bloody Mary” from the 1949 hit musical
South Pacific
(“Her skin is tender as DiMaggio’s glove ...”). Still to come was a generous mention in Hemingway’s
The Old Man and the Sea:
Manolin fears the Indians of Cleveland, but Santiago, the older man, reassures him: “Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.”

His deeds remain like a beacon to those who saw him play. More than thirty years after DiMaggio retired, Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard, one of the most distinguished anthropologists in the United States, was still fascinated by him. He had first seen him play in 1949, when Gould was seven. Opening Day, he wrote in an essay for
The New York Times,
is not merely a day of annual renewal, “it evokes the bittersweet passage of our own lives—as I take my son to the game and remember when I held my father’s hand and wondered whether DiMag would hit .350 that year.”

Gould discovered that another Harvard professor, Edward Mills Purcell, a Nobel physicist, was also fascinated by DiMaggio. Purcell had run most of the great baseball records through his computer looking for any statistical truths they might produce. The computer responded that all but one were within the range of mathematical probability: that someone (Babe Ruth) would hit 714 home runs, that someone (Roger Maris) would one day come along and hit 61 home runs in one season, and that even in modern times a player (Ted Williams) might on occasion bat .406. But the one record that defied all of Purcell’s and his computer’s expectations was DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1941. A .400 hitter, after all, could have a bad day and compensate the day after. But to hit in 56 straight games challenged probability, Purcell noted, because of the difficulty of hitting a small round ball traveling at a great speed with a wooden cylinder—“and where if you are off one eighth of an inch a hit becomes a pop-up!”

Purcell’s description of the difficulty of batting was strikingly similar to one that DiMaggio himself gave after a game in St. Louis. “You know,” he told Red Patterson, the traveling secretary, as they rode to the train station, “they always talk about this being a game of fractions of an inch. Today proved it. I should have had three home runs today. I knew I was going to get fastballs and I got them and I was ready each time. But I didn’t get up on the ball—I hit it
down
by that much [he held his thumb and index finger about an eighth of an inch apart and then touched them just above the center of the ball]. If I got under them that much [he lowered his fingers just slightly
below
the middle of the ball], I get three home runs.”

DiMaggio had size, power, and speed. McCarthy, his
longtime manager, liked to say that DiMaggio might have stolen 60 bases a season if he had given him the green light. Stengel, his new manager, was equally impressed, and when DiMaggio was on base he would point to him as an example of the perfect base runner. “Look at him,” Stengel would say as DiMaggio ran out a base hit, “he’s always watching the ball. He isn’t watching second base. He isn’t watching third base. He knows they haven’t been moved. He isn’t watching the ground, because he knows they haven’t built a canal or a swimming pool since he was last there. He’s watching the ball and the outfielder, which is the one thing that is different on every play.”

Center field was his territory—right center and left center too—for most of his career. The other outfielders moved into his domain with caution. At the tail end of the 1948 season Hank Bauer was brought up from the minors and he chased, called for, and caught a ball in deep-right center field. Between innings in the dugout, Bauer noticed DiMaggio eyeing him curiously. “Joe, did I do something wrong?” the nervous rookie asked. “No, you didn’t do anything wrong, but you’re the first son of a bitch who ever invaded my territory,” DiMaggio said. It was not a rebuke, but Bauer deeded over more of right center in the future.

DiMaggio complemented his natural athletic ability with astonishing physical grace. He played the outfield, he ran the bases, and he batted not just effectively but with rare style. He would glide rather than run, it seemed, always smooth, always ending up where he wanted to be just when he wanted to be there. If he appeared to play effortlessly, his teammates knew otherwise. In his first season as a Yankee, Gene Woodling, who played left field, was struck by the sound of DiMaggio chasing a fly ball. He sounded like a giant truck horse on the loose, Woodling thought, his feet thudding down hard on the grass. The great, clear noises in the open space enabled Woodling to measure the distance between them without looking.

He was the perfect Hemingway hero, for Hemingway in his novels romanticized the man who exhibited grace under pressure, who withheld any emotion lest it soil the purer statement of his deeds. DiMaggio was that kind of hero; his grace and skill were always on display, his emotions always concealed. This stoic grace was not achieved without a terrible price: DiMaggio was a man wound tight. He suffered from insomnia and ulcers. When he sat and watched the game he chain-smoked and drank endless cups of coffee. He was ever conscious of his obligation to play well. Late in his career, when his legs were bothering him and the Yankees had a comfortable lead in a pennant race, a friend of his, columnist Jimmy Cannon, asked him why he played so hard—the games, after all, no longer meant so much. “Because there might be somebody out there who’s never seen me play before,” he answered.