56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports Read Online Free PDF

even when the country was flush. The DiMaggios always had to count pennies back home. And in the ’30s, even as he was beginning to make good money playing ball, Joe had seen the people on the streets hocking their things. He’d seen baseball players come home as teams folded on the West Coast, and he’d heard about pro leagues where pitchers were getting paid by the inning, 30 cents for every three outs.
    Still, what did that have to do with his own contract? Get whatever you can get. Isn’t that what every worker wanted, DiMaggio reasoned, whether you were cutting metal parts in a factory, or running a barbershop, or making house calls with a doctor’s kit in your hand?
    No one else seemed to see things quite that way. Not even McCarthy. DiMaggio had never quite forgiven his manager for siding with the Yankees brass in ’38, for saying that the team could get along without DiMaggio and that the $25,000 offered to him by the club seemed fair. “Well maybe McCarthy knows what he’s talking about, maybe he doesn’t,” DiMaggio retorted before he’d given in. He was in a spot when it came to money, and he knew it. Guys in the service were making $21 a month. And to the fans, baseball wasn’t really a job, wasn’t really work. Nothing was being built or farmed or produced. No one was being healed. These were grown men playing a game. The people in Yankee Stadium didn’t care about how much profit team owners might be making on ticket sales or on bags of peanuts, they only knew that they would do anything just to wear pinstriped flannel for a day. Why, I’d play for free if I could , they thought.
    Ball three.
    And yet baseball mattered. The day’s games were splashed on the front page of the newspaper. A headline would read YANKEES BEAT SOX , 6–5 and then below that—in larger type, but still, below — ROOSEVELT DEFIES NAZI BRIGADE . You’d see the box score from the Yankees’ game, or from the Giants’ or the Dodgers’ right beside news of a looming subway strike. So you couldn’t say that baseball was irrelevant, that the players’ work didn’t have impact. President Roosevelt believed that the game was vital for the country’s morale. DiMaggio never forgot that every day millions of people were watching and judging: baseball, the Yankees, him.
    Ball four. Keller was on.
    This DiMaggio slump, and these Yankees’ troubles, gave fodder to many of those judging millions, the baseball fans who in precincts across the country—a soda shop in Cleveland, a newsstand in Philadelphia, a hotel bar in St. Louis—debated the issues of the game. Would you rather have a great shortstop or a great catcher? Was the White Sox’ Thornton Lee now the best lefthanded pitcher in the game? Did Feller throw harder than Walter Johnson had? Were the Brooklyn Dodgers at long last for real? Discussion would inevitably turn to determining the greatest player in the game, and DiMaggio’s name would always emerge, his virtues enumerated and extolled until, “Mize is better” someone would blurt out, and the argument would ensue.
    Cardinals slugger Johnny Mize had broken in the same year as DiMaggio, had led National Leaguers in batting in 1939, in home runs and RBIs in ’40. If his batting averages over the years, typically about .340, were less than DiMaggio’s, well, Mize played in the National League where all the hitters’ averages were down compared to the American League. And Mize, who would stand on deck swinging three bats in hand, who crushed low pitches better than anyone alive, never had a lineup around him like DiMaggio did.
    DiMaggio could drive the ball, sure, but not, someone would invariably point out, as majestically as Jimmie Foxx, the Beast, a man so big and burly that he had to turn sideways to get through a doorway. Foxx had a vicious, compact swing and, at 33, he still hit home runs so far that his Red Sox teammates knew even as they were watching the ball soar to incomprehensible heights that they