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

would be called liars when they retold the tale. Four times Foxx had led the AL in home runs; three times he’d won MVP; in 1938 he’d knocked in 175 runs. And in his eight full seasons with the Athletics, and through his five in Boston, Foxx never had much of a lineup around him either.
    This kind of baseball talk provided daily sustenance for the teams at the Bellefair, the brightly lit ice cream and sandwich shop on Junction Boulevard in Queens where Commie Villante and several other members of the Jackson Heights Hornets now sat in booths, pulling on their malteds. The school day was done and dusk was coming on. Saturday, and a big ballgame against the Corona Hawks over at Aces Field, was a couple of days away. Now Richie Cassata was talking. “I still say Mel Ott.”
    Commie rolled his eyes. Cassata was the one nutso Giants fan in the group. Commie and the rest of the DiMaggio guys, among them Squeaks Tito who could and would recite more Joe DiMaggio statistics and trivia than anyone else would care to remember (“Didja know he hit .398 his last year in the Pacific Coast League but still missed the batting title?”) pointed out that Ott, at 32, had been fading some, and that anyway the short rightfield fence at the Polo Grounds, a playground-like 258 feet down the line, was the real reason why he’d been the National League’s best home run hitter in five different seasons. “That’s where he always hits ’em,” said Commie, “and they’d just be fly outs anywhere else.”
    Commie and Squeaks didn’t protest against Cassata too much, though, not really wanting to change Richie’s stance. His mom was the one who took the raffle money and got the Hornets’ uniforms every year, which meant that Richie had first crack at whatever number he wanted. Like his idol, Richie was a lefthanded hitter and an outfielder, so he always took Ott’s number 4, leaving in play the digits of all the Yankee heroes: number 15 for pitcher Red Ruffing, say, or number 8 for catcher Bill Dickey; number 6 for Gordon, or the most coveted, DiMaggio’s number 5.
    If Cassata’s Ott argument fell somewhere between cute and specious, Commie knew that Gimpy Moskowitz at least had a case when he said he believed that Greenberg was the best player in the game. Gimpy, whose sprained ankle years before had secured his nickname in perpetuity, played ball for the Hawks, and lived on the other side of Roosevelt Avenue. But he was a Bellefair regular, munching now his tuna salad on white. Gimpy made Commie laugh with the jokes he told and all the Hornets liked him fine. Gimpy wasn’t the only Greenberg booster around either. There were reasons that Greenberg earned baseball’s highest salary—$55,000 a year—and his 183 RBIs in 1937 was one of them. His 58 homers in ’38, tied with Foxx for the most ever by a righthanded hitter, was another. His 1940 MVP trophy was a third. And just look at how the Tigers had fallen apart this season without him. In New York, a city of two million Jews where Greenberg’s following was as strong as anywhere but Detroit, the newspapers occasionally floated, even advocated, the potential benefits of a DiMaggio-for-Greenberg trade, just to get folks talking.
    The glass door at the front of the Bellefair swung open and a few of the Bettes came in, walked toward the rear of the seating area, waved and took a booth of their own. Commie and Squeaks waved back and called out greetings—Commie was sweet on a Bette named Janette—and in that pause Harry the Hawk jumped in. “Fine, Gimpy, but what about his fielding? Joe’s out there pulling down balls better than anyone in centerfield. Greenberg’s just bumbling around at first.”
    For his part Harry the Hawk manned the outfield, or the second sewer in the stickball games, like a statue; he’d gotten his nickname not for any swiftness or sharp eye but because of a strange sound he sometimes made when calling for a ball. But Harry had a point. The allusion to