The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (9 page)

“I don’t know how to drive a car,” said twenty-one-year-old Joe DiMaggio.

After watching DiMaggio take batting practice on March 2, 1936 — just batting practice, no 95-mile-an-hour fastballs, no shooting, hissing, snapping curves — Dan M. Daniel wrote in the New York
World-Telegram:
“Here is the replacement for Babe Ruth.” That was the first fusillade in the DiMaggio publicity barrage that continues into the present.

The three New York ballclubs underwrote New York baseball journalism years ago, and promotional copy — that is what Daniel actually wrote — was the return. The teams paid expenses for baseball writers on the road: hotel, Pullman berths, a weekly meal allowance. “Loans” were common. The teams served (and still serve) free meals and drinks to sportswriters before and after every home game. Favored journalists, who wrote with scarlet passion, drew special rewards, say a free trip to Florida for the wife and children during spring training. In this climate, most New York baseball writers were not in fact reporters. They were hairy-legged cheerleaders sans pom-poms.*

Stanley Woodward, whose integrity eventually cost him his job at the
Herald Tribune
, visited the Yankee camp on DiMaggio’s first day and reported that during a half dozen turns at batting practice DiMaggio hit three balls over the left field fence. “But the question still exists,” Woodward wrote, “whether he can power the offerings of the American League brothers after they start cutting loose, whether he can go and get them in the outfield and whether he can throw as well as his enraptured ex manager, Lefty O’Doul, says he can.”

Daniel dined out into the 1970s on his extravagant rhapsodic sentence from 1936. “I could tell at once,” he liked to say in a raspy, not unpleasant voice, “DiMaggio was the apotheosis of poetry in motion. I knew he was a great one right away.”

But Stanley Woodward, clearly, didn’t know. Good sports-writers come with a healthy skepticism. They know the story of the rookie who hits hard across several weeks of batting practice. A few weeks later, the rookie dispatches a collect telegram:

Dear Ma:
Be home soon.
They’re starting to throw curves.

DiMaggio never had to send that wire. In the seasons before he enlisted in the air force, decent Scotch sold for $2.50 a fifth, and a new Plymouth, with safety steel body and hydraulic brakes, cost $510, sales tax extra in those few states that imposed sales taxes. DiMaggio’s accomplishments in New York and a certain stubborn contentiousness brought him a salary of $43,750 by 1942. He was such a formidable businessman that the commissioner of baseball, hatchet-jawed, white-haired Kene-saw Mountain Landis, investigated a charge that Joe Gould, a tough little boxing manager, was DiMaggio’s business agent.

“He’s just a friend, Judge,” DiMaggio told Landis. “He gives me advice on endorsements.”

“We have no objection to that,” Landis said, “but is Gould getting a percentage of your Yankee salary?”

“No, sir.”

“Because if he is, DiMaggio, I’ll suspend you. My job is to protect baseball. We can’t have agents dirtying up the game. Suspend you. Maybe banish you for life.”

In a sense, DiMaggio called Landis’s bluff, as no other player ever did. He reported his chilling meeting to Bob Considine, a popular columnist for the Hearst newspapers.

“Why this heavy righteousness in Landis’ office?” Considine wrote the next day. “If Gould dug up easy endorsement dough for DiMaggio, it’s none of Landis’ business.

“The lackadaying is a front. The big league bosses are afraid that the ball players will smarten up enough to hire tough agents to speak for them.

“And if that ever comes to pass, the ball clubs would have to pay the blokes what they’re actually worth.”*

DiMaggio, a strong, rangy slugger who rarely struck out, clearly was worth a great deal. Center field at Yankee Stadium was only slightly smaller than the state of Nebraska and DiMaggio roamed the Bronx prairie with great skill. When Hank Greenberg walloped a 460-foot drive in August of 1939, DiMaggio ran back and caught that formidable wallop. DiMaggio could throw and catch the ball and hit, and with remarkable quickness he learned to play the New York press as well as he played the outfield.

Toots Shor’s restaurant in the West Fifties had a special appeal to athletes and celebrities. It was against house rules to bother anyone for an autograph; ballplayers in Shor’s were safe from tourists and fans.

The place was a clubby kind of barn; a lady I took there once said it had all the chic warmth of her boarding school gymnasium. Shor pampered the columnists and the ballplayers and they reveled in hard-drinking, nonstop talking camaraderie. At table one in Shor’s, DiMaggio came to know Considine and Jimmy Cannon and Bill Corum and Red Smith, and if any of them ever wrote a critical sentence about him, it has escaped my research. DiMaggio took the sports columnists into his confidence. Leaving his shyness far behind, he learned to swap stories until each important New York sports columnist regarded Joe DiMaggio as a personal buddy. Although this obviously was distinct from playing ball, it stands as a remarkable accomplishment on its own. In time someone remarked of Cannon that he “romanced DiMaggio as if Joe were some broad.” DiMaggio has a poker player’s feel for people, their strengths and vulnerability. He treated Cannon like a friend and the writer rewarded him with love poems in the shape of columns. As sports editor, Woodward felt he had to reprimand Red Smith only once.

“Walter,” Woodward said, using Smith’s baptismal name for emphasis. “You are
not
writing about deities. Stop godding up the athletes.”

The reference was to DiMaggio.

If you had any doubts about the batting skills of Ted Williams, you could get them cleared up by Williams himself, often in a memorable way. Once, trying to understand the sudden stardom of one of Williams’s teammates, the journeyman infielder Billy Klaus, I asked if Williams could explain a man having a very good year after experiencing a relatively bad one.

“Who ya askin’?” Williams said in a congenial bellow.

“You.”

“Mister,” Williams said, “I can see you don’t know very much about baseball, if you’re asking me about a bad year. See them bastards there.” He indicated a semicircle of New England sports reporters auditing from a distance. “Every one of them would give their left nut to see me have a bad year. But, mister, it ain’t gonna happen because ol’ T.S.W. [Theodore Samuel Williams], he don’t have bad years.” Lest I miss the point, Williams bounced a bat off the grass with great force, caught it one-handed on the rebound, and walked away.*

Such extravagant behavior was alien to DiMaggio. Indeed, he took pride in keeping his emotions under rigid control. When questions annoyed him, DiMaggio glared through the questioner. He didn’t boast. He was a more subtle artist than Williams and is perhaps more difficult to appreciate.

Fast as he was in his youth, DiMaggio never stole more than six bases in any major league season. As a rookie, stationed in left field, he threw out 22 base runners. By 1940, established in center, he threw out only 5. DiMaggio was an outstanding base runner on a team that did not steal, but there is no statistic for that. Rival base runners stopped taking chances when Joe DiMaggio was throwing from the outfield, and no statistic covers frozen base runners either. He twice led the league in home runs, batting average, and runs batted in, but he never led in all three columns during the same year. The vaunted “triple crown” eluded him.

Williams is most famous for hitting .406 in 1941. “You know,” DiMaggio remarked as we sat with Hank Greenberg at a little table on an Old Timers’ Day at Shea Stadium, “I wanted to hit .400 myself. One year, I really had a chance. That was 1939. On September 8, I think it was, I was hitting .408.

“Then something went wrong with my left eye. Really wrong. It got sore as hell, all bloodshot and inflamed. I could hardly see out of it. Allergy? I don’t know.

“But Joe McCarthy didn’t believe in cheese champions [a boxing term, for champions of small worth]. He kept playing me every day. He had to know the agony I was going through, swinging at that tough pitching with a blurry eye. I’ll never understand why he didn’t give me a couple of days off. But he didn’t. You played in those days with anything short of a broken leg.” His vision reduced, DiMaggio finished the 1939 season with a batting average of .381.*

DiMaggio’s most soaring accomplishment is generally said to be his great batting streak. In 1941, he hit safely in 56 games, swinging hard, not bunting, even when the streak was on the line. No one has come within a dozen games of matching that streak, but appreciating DiMaggio, even for 1941, requires a certain sophistication. During 1941, DiMaggio struck out 13 times. Swinging as hard as he could, clouting 30 home runs, against the best pitchers in baseball throwing him their best stuff at the corners, DiMaggio struck out once every two weeks. “He simply had no weakness,” Bob Feller says. No one has ever gotten his bat on the ball with so much power so consistently as Joe DiMaggio, 1941.

He was not the same player after World War II. DiMaggio was a winner down to his last at bat — a two-base hit — but after the war his excellence came fitfully. He was not quite as fast a runner as he had been. His throwing arm weakened. Good inside fastballs bothered him. These foibles and slumps upset Larry MacPhail. Like Red Smith, MacPhail confused a star with a deity.

Larry MacPhail discovered that he had a mortal playing center field. These pages may suggest that Leland Stanford MacPhail was a bit of a clown. He was not that. Increasingly he was a bit of a drunk. He could be petulant, petty, and, as on the issue of integration, as wrong-headed as a sinful Janus. But what saved MacPhail in baseball, at least for a little while, was inspired pragmatism. All right. We’re stuck with DiMaggio. God is not available to play center field in the Bronx. Let’s make the best of what we have.

DiMaggio had waged contract wars with the Yankees across many seasons. Some fault was his. Once he told San Francisco reporters that he threw a Yankee contract into the municipal dump. The story that followed infuriated the Yankees’ feudal lords. But some fault traced to Yankee management, which was mean-spirited.

MacPhail, stuck with DiMaggio, called the star into his office at the Squibb Building immediately after the 1946 season. Aside from hitting under .300, DiMaggio had failed to bat in 100 runs for the first time in his major league career. His divorce was final now. Absolute. He wasn’t hitting. He was alone. DiMaggio did not feel good about himself

“We know what happened last summer, Joe,” MacPhail began. “We’re going to move on from there. We aren’t going to brood about the past.”

Brooding is an avocation with DiMaggio. He looked at MacPhail and exercised his right to remain silent.

“This yellow pad,” MacPhail said. “
I
’
m
taking one sheet. I’m giving
you
one sheet. Do you have a pen?”

DiMaggio nodded.

“We’re going to do numbers. Last year, Joe, coming out of the army you were paid $43,500. I want you to write down on that yellow paper what you think you should be paid for next year. I’m going to write down what I think. Then we’ll compare numbers.”

DiMaggio took his time. He didn’t trust baseball people. He wanted to be careful. But he wasn’t a thief. He’d had a lousy year. He got $43,500 and gave the team a lousy year. They finished third. He wasn’t worth another $43,500.

DiMaggio wrote down five numbers. The salary he proposed for himself, a significant cut, was $37,500.

MacPhail looked and nodded and said, “Now I want you to see
my
numbers, Joe.” MacPhail had written $43,500.

“I guess,” MacPhail said, “you’d rather play for my numbers than for yours.”

DiMaggio smiled. The somber presence lightened.

A satisfied DiMaggio was nobody you wanted to pitch to when a game was on the line.

A few days later, October 19, MacPhail traded Joe Gordon, a splendid second baseman, to Cleveland for Allie Reynolds, a right-handed pitcher of great strength, who for mysterious reasons had not won consistently.

Reynolds, an Oklahoma Creek Indian, was reborn in the Bronx and nicknamed Superchief. He could start and relieve and overpower every batter in the league, including Theodore S. Williams.

Years later Casey Stengel talked to me about Reynolds’s ability to win as a starter and win as a reliever with grammar unique to Stengel and, in the middle of all that crowded syntax, a quality of awe.

“Reynolds,” Stengel said, “is the greatest two ways, which is startin’ and relievin’, the greatest ever, and I seen the great ones, Mathewson, and I seen Cy Young and I wondered who that fat old guy was, which tells you what a dumb young punk I was. You could look it up.”

With a happy DiMaggio and a primed Superchief, the revived Yankees were ready to take over the world, come 1947 and the years that followed. MacPhail was an architect of that great team, which now awaited only a Second Coming, the arrival of Casey Stengel, ringed by light. But for that the Yankees would have to wait through another Christmas or two.

*And sometimes more than that. He won the 1946 American League batting championship at .353. But two years later he hit under .250.

+
This rule was demanded by Shor himself, a loud, beefy, softhearted character. I saw one of America’s most famous columnists drink himself into a stupor at Shor’s. The proprietor hired a limousine with driver to take the man home to Connecticut and had a headwaiter ride along and pour the columnist into bed.

That indiscretion stayed off record. My former wife, a pretty Pennsylvania girl, arrived one night noticeably pregnant. Shor pointed a finger at her navel and said, “You been doing that thing again.” After the baby was born a few weeks later, Shor sent two dozen red roses to the hospital room. I found it impossible to
stay
offended by blustery, gauche Toots Shor.

*But only DiMaggio was so graceless as to complain about the relative rigors of service. Greenberg, who never complained, did hard duty, rising from private to captain, with a fighting unit in South China.