League had proposed a rule stating that the league’s “championship club may not make any trades” for an entire season except for picking up a player off waivers. The idea was to stop the rich from getting richer. More precisely the idea was to slow the Yanks. When the league’s eight teams voted on the rule it passed 7–0. The Yankees abstained.
Yes, the Tigers were themselves the defending American League champions now, having lost to the Reds in the 1940 Series. But nobody expected them to repeat, and far less so now that Hank Greenberg was gone, the first big-name ballplayer drafted into the service. (The less formidable Hugh Mulcahy, a Phillies pitcher, had entered in March.) Greenberg had clubbed two home runs in his last game, May 6 against New York, then hung up his jersey on the hook of his locker-room stall and headed to Michigan’s Fort Custer for a new uniform, Army issue. Since then the Tigers were a shell of themselves, sliding in the standings and destined, it seemed, to slide further still. But that didn’t mean that Del Baker wasn’t trying to win every game he could. And apparently he’d thought the best way to win this game was to take his chances and pitch to DiMaggio. For the Tigers, so far, so good.
Ball two.
DiMaggio looked out past the outfield, past the half-empty bleachers to the Burma-Shave billboard, and another for Philip Morris tobacco. Soon, he thought, he’d have a smoke. There were about 10,000 fans in Yankee Stadium. How many of them understood that this walk to Keller was a slight to him? He hated the thought of that, hated the idea of being anything less than perfect in the public’s eye. That’s why he took things so hard when the crowd booed him over the money. “I only want to get what I’m worth,” he had said during one salary standoff, thinking that might help people understand. “I only want what’s fair.”
The holdout in 1938 had led to the worst of the jeers, and if the Yankees’ championships and the brilliance of DiMaggio’s play in the seasons that followed had surely eased that hostility there were still those who wouldn’t forget, especially when he was struggling at the plate, and especially because he’d fought again for better pay, though less stridently, in ’39 and ’40. Missing the start of training camp had become an annual ritual, but it wasn’t as if DiMaggio didn’t want to be with the team; really, that’s all that he wanted—just for the right price.
By the time he and the Yankees’ general manager Ed Barrow had settled on his 1941 salary in March—$37,500, nearly triple the big league average but less than Greenberg or Indians’ ace Bob Feller were set to make—the rest of the Yankees had already reported to spring training. Joe and Dorothy drove off from San Francisco and headed for Florida that very day and so hurriedly that he’d gotten a speeding ticket before they were out of California, stopped by a state patrolman for going 70 miles an hour on the Golden State Highway.
When he’d arrived in St. Petersburg, DiMaggio played with a determination unlike anyone else’s. Even in the exhibition season. Before the Yankees broke camp he had hit safely in 19 straight games, a run that would continue for eight more after the regular season began. There was never a question, then or ever, of DiMaggio’s effort, his self-imposed insistence on doing whatever it took to win. That intractable drive could at times seem almost cruel—no one slid harder into a base—but over time revealed itself as a simple, cold judgment: that on the baseball field the need to win subjugated all else. That’s how DiMaggio would always play and how he always had, since his sandlot days. He just wanted to be paid fairly for bringing home those Yankee titles, for helping to put people in the seats.
He knew well how hard times had been. His father made a living catching fish off a little boat in San Francisco Bay. Try feeding nine children that way,
Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson