56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (28 page)

Some of the men now climbing the steps to the train on Roosevelt Avenue wore military issue, the Army and Navy having dispatched thousands of deskmen to New York as the U.S. defense corps swelled. The men in uniform, greeting one another with salutes, were a regular reminder of the war. Some of the older guys the Hornets knew—Ponzo, Danny the Greek—had already been drafted. Billy’d gone into the Marines. Another round of draft registration was just a few days away, for anyone who had turned 21 since October. “Yeh, Charlie’s a 1-A,” Itsy would say, “He’s going in.” Or, “Maybe Rizos will get a 4-F with that limp he’s got.” They would talk standing outside the candy store in the late afternoon sun, or sitting on the stoop nursing their icy Pepsis and waiting for a little more of the day’s high heat to fall off.

They played three-on-three stickball on 94th Street, maybe put a quarter each on the game. Some of the guys would take their position in the outfield, two sewers back from home plate, with a cigarette dangling from their mouths. Squeaks had learned that DiMaggio sometimes smoked while he was out shagging balls on an off day. Car fenders marked first and third base, a sewer cover was second base and they would chalk in a box for home plate. You stood with the broom handle held high and tried to hit the pink rubber ball on one bounce. The game’s progress was peppered with discussion about whether or not a batted ball had gone foul, or what to do when the ball got caught up in a fire escape, or whether to demand a do-over when some passer-by unknowingly walked onto the “field” and disrupted a play. After a while Mrs. McCarthy, Jack’s mom, would call out from her first floor window and then there would be fresh cookies for the taking on her sill, warm and with the fresh-baked smell. Just one was never enough. Neither, really, were the two that they each got.

They would play for hours, switching around the teams here and there; their parents, or other adults, coming home from work carrying bags of groceries or just out on a walk, would stop and watch, pleased to see the boys and to see how much the games mattered to them and how happy they were in these moments. For the parents the stickball games played against the backdrop of darker things. They understood that there was more than just this week’s draft registration ahead of them, that there would certainly be other drafts and that the war, by the looks of it, would be long and that some or most or even all of these boys might have their numbers called one day too.
Where will the war lead us? What will it cost?
Watching the teenagers chasing after a bouncing pink ball in the bronze evening light, gay and unburdened, the adults would feel a sudden bolt of sadness and loss. It was, in the way one might feel upon seeing a row of red tulips in their plumpest April bloom, a realization of just how fleeting the sweet scene before them was. They were grateful for the boys’ stickball games, and for their weekend baseball league, and grateful too for the Yankees and the Dodgers and for the boxing matches and all the diversions. And of course for DiMaggio, a simple hero engaged in a simple if daunting feat that in this summer seemed to them so extraordinary and so important. Knowing rationally that what DiMaggio did or didn’t do in a baseball game was, in the deeper sense, inconsequential—would another hit matter, really, to any of their lives?—did nothing to dull the opposite sensation: that the hitting streak did matter and that there was something tangible and far-reaching at stake when DiMaggio came to bat. Everyone, it seemed, put some small measure of hope upon DiMaggio each day and then later scurried to find out if he had fulfilled it.

The boys would look for him in the newsreels before the main feature at the movies. (And to the boys, if not to the Bettes, these newsreels were a lot more interesting than seeing Clark Gable and Rosalind Russell in a clinch.) A chronicling of Joe D’s hits might unfold among accounts of the latest Army buildup or of the old submarine, the O–9, that had gone down during a test in the waters off New Hampshire and had not come back up. There were images of soldiers firing guns on a practice range somewhere and then moments later of DiMaggio swinging his bat. For the Hornets and the Dukes it was all a sea of energy and experience, excitement, power, uncertainty and hope. For them, “Did he get one?” seemed as important as any question that anyone could ask.

A
TERRACED IRON HOME RUN
wall towered 34 feet above rightfield in Philadelphia’s Shibe Park, running from the foul line to centerfield. It was now more than six seasons old. The Athletics’ owners had built it to block the view of fans who for decades had gathered by the hundreds to watch ballgames from the flat rooftops and second-story bay windows of the row houses along North 20th Street. Some homeowners had constructed bleachers upon those roofs and on game days charged admission and sold hot dogs and Coca-Cola, angering the Athletics who saw this only as a skimming of their profits. The homeowners chafed bitterly against the building of the fence and the moment it went up—a forbidding expanse of unpainted corrugated metal that stung the neighborhood like a slap with the back of a hand—everyone in Philadelphia, and around the major leagues, called it the Spite Wall.

The Spite Wall was a strange, ugly and, for outfielders, unpredictable thing. Fly balls that struck off those ribbed terraces might fall straight down or might bounce 100 feet back toward second base. When a ball was driven high and far over his head in rightfield Henrich would turn his back to home plate and face the wall, tense with uncertainty. Sometimes the ball hit the fence and bounded right to Henrich. Sometimes it ricocheted out near DiMaggio in centerfield. Sometimes Gordon or Rizzuto ended up with the baseball near the infield. A fly ball that soared toward the Spite Wall, some 330 feet from home plate at the rightfield edge, close to 450 feet away in center, caused all of the Yankee fielders to prepare for any crazy bounce.

Shibe Park had other peculiarities as well. The tiny visitors’ locker room was dim and spartan, and one of the two showerheads invariably sputtered. There were just 20 steel lockers, not enough to accommodate a full team. Some of the newest Yankees, like Jerry Priddy and the pitcher Charley Stanceu, had to hang their clothes on nails driven crudely into a wall. The deep concrete dugouts flooded badly in heavy rains and pools of water collected inside the players’ tunnel that ran beneath the stands. But the field itself was always immaculately groomed, the grass a vibrant and unvarying green. The infield and the outfield produced the truest hops in the league. Perhaps because of that high wall, the sharp
pock
of a fastball arriving into a catcher’s mitt echoed uniquely in Shibe Park and could be heard even on the radio broadcasts that originated from a small balcony extending off the bottom of the upper deck.

By now the Tall Tactician, Connie Mack, was nearing 80 years old—
80!
—and in his 41st season as the Athletics manager. He still wore his long thin neckties and his white, high-collared shirts and throughout each game he clutched the lineup sheet in his narrow hands. Much like Shibe Park itself, built of steel and concrete to great fanfare and excitement in 1909, Mack seemed a treasure from another era, a relic to be revered. Despite the stadium’s mild nuisances and cramped quarters and despite the ungodly heckling of the Philadelphia fans, Shibe Park was not, DiMaggio felt, a bad place to play. Its idiosyncrasies created a distinct atmosphere, a personality almost, that was more than just tolerable, it was interesting—at least for 11 games each year. The home run fences were well within reach (the concrete wall in leftfield stood a more standard 12 feet high), and the Athletics were often quite easily beaten. Once in 1939, over the course of a doubleheader in which DiMaggio hit three home runs, the Yankees outscored Philadelphia 33–2.

Whatever the charms at Shibe Park—its façade looked more like a temple built during the French Renaissance than the entrance to a ballfield—facing the Athletics’ righthanded pitcher Johnny Babich was not among them. He had defeated the Yankees five times in six games during the 1940 season, almost single-handedly preventing them from reaching the World Series. On the final Friday of the season in Philadelphia, Babich and the last-place A’s had stopped the Yankees 6–2, at once ending their pennant hopes and forcing them to settle for third-place money. Less than a year before, Babich had himself been property of the Yankees, winning 17 games and losing just six for their minor league team in Kansas City in 1939. But instead of bringing him up and into the big league fold, Ed Barrow had let him go to Philadelphia.

Babich maintained that he “didn’t bear down any harder against the Yanks than against any other club,” but DiMaggio didn’t believe it. He knew about Babich from back home. Johnny had grown up in Albion, 150 miles north of San Francisco, and had played with Vince on a team in Tucson for a while and then played for the Seals just before Joe arrived. After the Seals had let Babich go, he hooked on with the crosstown Missions and then set about beating his old team time and again. Since breaking into the majors with the Dodgers in 1934, Babich had been traded three times and had spent three full seasons (’37, ’38, ’39) in the minor leagues after having surgery on his pitching elbow. With such a fragile arm, who knew how long his career would last. When Babich got a chance to pitch in a big game—in 1940 he’d acquitted himself splendidly in matchups against Feller—he seized the chance with conviction.

DiMaggio was familiar with Babich’s long-legged windup and with the muscular width of chest that Babich turned toward the plate as he brought his long right arm straight down to release the ball. He made his living with a pitch they called “the slideball” or “the sailer,” an ornery offering that all at once dropped and veered to the right. To righthanded batters he would work the pitch off the outside corner. It could be deadly.

Babich was 28 years old and lived with his wife, Francine, and a white-haired fox terrier they called Stinky, and he bore a chip on his shoulder. He would rather be playing for a World Series contender than for the Philadelphia A’s. He
deserved
to play for a contender. In that pennant-determining 1940 game against the Yankees (the team that had given up on him and that he’d already defeated four times), Babich had allowed just five base hits. Now, facing the Yankees for the first time since that game, Babich had let it be known to his teammates—and in turn word had come to the Yankees and to DiMaggio—that he intended to stop Joe’s hitting streak right where it was at 39 straight games. He had a simple plan to do it too. If he could get DiMaggio out once, then he would walk him the rest of the game. In this way the Yankee-slayer would make his most dramatic kill.

More than 13,600 fans were in the stands this Saturday, better than twice the A’s typical weekend-game crowd. It was an extremely hot afternoon and in the city people sought relief in places like Gimbels department store, which boasted of being “the largest air-cooled area in Philadelphia.” The Athletics were a sixth-place club; it was not their sluggers—the outfielders Sam Chapman and Bob Johnson and the second baseman Benny McCoy could all drive the ball—that the people sweating in the Shibe Park seats had come to see. The day before, the newspaper headline
JOE DIMAGGIO AND HIT STREAK HERE TO FACE A’S
had run across the top of a page. The teams themselves, readying for a two-game set, were an afterthought.

DiMaggio had been grateful in the first of the two games, the previous afternoon, when he singled off the A’s Chubby Dean on the first pitch of his first at bat to run the streak to 39 games, easing his mind at once. (Later he smacked a home run more than 450 feet.) This was the first time since the streak had really taken hold of everyone’s attention that DiMaggio was playing on the road. Although he was always closely watched as a player, he had never felt such particular and elevated attention in the major leagues. He had come under focus as a rookie, of course, and again after his contract disputes when he would be regularly booed. In those times DiMaggio would wake in the middle of the night, the boos still sounding in his mind, and leave his bed and smoke cigarettes, pacing the floor until the light of day. Now there was a similar feeling. He realized that he was again being judged on a standard beyond whether the Yankees won or lost; this was something else: Get a hit and succeed. Don’t, and fail. The streak was now completely defining him. And with that, DiMaggio knew, came a chance to leave an imprint that could last even after he was gone. Like Ruth’s home runs and Cobb’s batting average and Gehrig’s impossible string of games played. With the streak, DiMaggio was after something larger than the day’s final score; larger, even, than the Yankees run to the pennant. Larger, maybe, than the game itself.

In the evening at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel in Philadelphia he listened to the radio, first the quiz show and then the news in which he played a principal part. “Tomorrow, Joe DiMaggio will try to hit in his 40th straight game and get one step closer to George Sisler’s record,” the radio man said. Then followed more dispatches about the Nazis’ advance and the British dropping bombs in France, about the Philadelphia racketeers who were shorting folks on coal deliveries across the city and about a local teenager with a flourishing turkey farm. Mrs. Roosevelt, in other news, had advanced the notion of implementing a national service program for girls.