The DiMaggios Read online

  Fans streamed into “Old Rec,” as the Seals’ ballpark was affectionately known. It was certainly no marvel of design. It had been constructed with chicken wire and warped lumber, and it creaked when the west wind came off the Pacific Ocean. It was 311 feet to the left-field seats, and only 235 down the right-field line, though a 50-foot fence snared many balls that would otherwise have been home runs. The home and visitors’ clubhouses were wooden cottages in back of center field, where there were no seats. The park could accommodate 16,500 people.

  Women were admitted free on weekends, but could sit in the first four rows of the grandstands only if escorted by a man. Everyone wore hats, and most men wore coats and ties. Many people rented a seat cushion for a nickel to avoid bench splinters—and to use as a projectile when they objected to an umpire’s call.

  Eight rows of benches under the grandstand were nicknamed the “Booze Cage,” because before Prohibition everyone who paid for a 75-cent ticket to sit there got a shot of whiskey or two bottles of beer. During Prohibition, Booze Cage spectators were given soft drinks and added their own alcohol to it from flasks. The section did not allow women; tipsy fans could be profane in their comments to the opposing teams, and sometimes fistfights broke out.

  By the end of the 1920s, the PCL consisted of eight teams. For the many fans who could only read about the 16 major league teams in the papers (the nearest major league city was St. Louis), their PCL team was as important as any major league team, if not more so. The competition between the PCL teams was fierce. The players loved the game and loved to win—especially once the Great Depression took hold and they became anxious to be kept on the payroll. They earned a certain level of celebrity by playing well, yet they were very much part of their communities. In San Francisco in the 1920s, few people owned cars. That included Seals players, who could often be seen in uniform on ferries and trolleys, heading to the ballpark along with the spectators.

  Lefty O’Doul was the star of the 1921 season, going 25-9 with a 2.39 ERA, but the Seals finished two games behind the Los Angeles Angels. O’Doul had been born in San Francisco on March 4, 1897, in a tough Irish neighborhood known as Butchertown. When he was in seventh grade, a female teacher introduced him to baseball and to pitching. Lefty led his school to a city championship. At 16, he quit school to go to work with his father at a slaughterhouse. He didn’t give up baseball entirely, playing in Sunday sandlot leagues. In 1917, when he was 20, the Seals took notice of the 17 straight games he won for the sandlot team the Native Sons and signed him.

  After his brief debut in 1917, O’Doul spent a year learning the ropes with a team in Des Moines, then won 13 games for the Seals. The New York Yankees reached across the country to purchase his contract in 1919. During that season, though, he developed a sore arm. He hoped to rebound in 1920, but instead of winning games, he put more of his energy into carousing with his new teammate, Babe Ruth. The next year the manager, Miller Huggins, banished O’Doul back to the Left Coast, just in time for his revived arm—and bat, as he hit .338 in 74 games—to produce a second-place finish for the Seals. Unfortunately for San Francisco fans, who were enthusiastic supporters of the handsome, generous, and flamboyant hometown hero, O’Doul was invited back to New York.

  In the 1922 season, the Seals averaged five runs a game and won 127 games and the league championship. The following year the pitching staff notched 112 complete games in the 210-game season and the team repeated as league champion. After a close-but-no-cigar season in 1924, the Seals ran away with the pennant in ’25, going 128-71 with Frank “Turkeyfoot” Brower’s 36 homers and 163 RBI and Paul Waner’s .401 average leading the way. (Paul Waner went to the Pittsburgh Pirates after the 1925 season; his brother Lloyd joined him there in 1927, and the two Hall of Famers were teammates for 14 years.)

  Lefty O’Doul was back in the San Francisco spotlight in 1927, not as a pitcher but as a hitter. His 1922 season with the Yankees had been a washout, and he was sent to Boston. The following year wasn’t any better, and the Red Sox let him go. The sore arm continued to plague him in 1924 with the Salt Lake City Bees. But there were two big upsides to that season—he was back in the PCL, where fans cheered him everywhere, and he made the conversion into a full-time player who hit much better than anyone expected, .392 in 140 games.

  O’Doul was even more impressive in 1925, playing in 198 games and rapping 309 hits in a staggering 825 at-bats. His average was .375, and he drove in 191 runs. The following year, the Salt Lake team headed west to become the Hollywood Stars. Despite his hitting .338 with 116 RBI, the Stars looked to unload Lefty. The Seals were happy to pay just $7,500 for his services.

  It turned out to be a steal. O’Doul hit .378 with 33 home runs and 158 RBI, scored 164 runs, and scampered for 40 stolen bases. His reward for being voted the PCL Most Valuable Player in 1927 was $1,000.

  Another exciting event for baseball fans in the San Francisco area that year was the arrival of O’Doul’s old pal Babe Ruth. The Bambino was coming off a season in which he broke his own record for home runs by clubbing 60 and combining with Lou Gehrig, Tony Lazzeri (a San Francisco native who had graduated from the PCL), and Bob Meusel to produce “Murderers’ Row” for the world champion New York Yankees. After the season, Ruth put together an exhibition team of major leaguers looking to earn extra money, the Bustin’ Babes. The team barnstormed up and down the West Coast, taking on sandlot squads, including a series at Recreation Park.

  One indication of the popularity and success of the Pacific Coast League is that, when the Seals earned their next title, in 1928, each member of the winning team received a check for $9,000; by contrast, each player on the New York Yankees that year received only $5,813 for winning the World Series. Joining the Seals’ staff and winning 18 games was 19-year-old Vernon “Lefty” Gomez. It is unlikely that 13-year-old Joe DiMaggio, seeing him pitch that season, could imagine how important Gomez would be to him in a few years. After that season, Gomez was sold to the Yankees.

  By the time of the stock market crash in October 1929, the Seals had earned seven PCL championships, more than any other team in the league—especially, their fans liked to point out, the cross-bay Oakland Oaks. The following year saw the last game at Recreation Park, a 17–7 win by the Seals over a squad of major league all-stars. When Vince DiMaggio became a member of the Seals organization late in 1931, the team’s home was Seals Stadium, at Bryant and 16th Streets. They would remain there for as long as the franchise continued to exist, through 1957.

  The Seals were never a rich franchise, but they at least had been a profitable one through the 1920s. That changed in the years after the stock market crash, as happened with many businesses and families. During the four years following the crash, the national unemployment rate jumped from 3.2 percent of the labor force to almost 25 percent. San Francisco was hit as hard as anywhere. Giuseppe, being self-employed, couldn’t lose his job, but the demand and thus the prices for his catches declined.

  It had to grate on him in 1931 that one of his able-bodied sons had spent a long season playing baseball up north instead of helping to keep the family afloat financially. Vince showed no sign of mending his ways the following year. He played for a Seals farm club, the Tucson Lizards of the Arizona-Texas League. This must have seemed something like madness to Giuseppe, who may also have felt that he had lost a son.

  Dominic later explained: “Dad was a fisherman, a man who worked hard because he had to and because he believed you’re supposed to. . . . That’s the way Giuseppe DiMaggio was—a determined and independent man who never let anything interfere with him as he worked to reach his goals.” But, Dominic added, “that same attitude helped all of his baseball-playing sons more than he ever knew.”

  Vince found the best way to blaze that forbidden trail and make everything possible for his two younger brothers. First, he made the most of his months in Tucson by leading the league in home runs with 25 to go with a robust .347 a
verage and 81 runs batted in. Second, he showed up suddenly at the Taylor Street house late that summer of ’32. The baseball season wasn’t over in San Francisco, but it was in Tucson: the bankrupt Lizards had disbanded, a victim of the Depression.

  “When he got back from Tucson, Arizona, you could have sopped him up with a blotter,” Dominic told Fay Vincent. “He was so thin and lost so much weight.”

  But Vince had saved almost every penny he had earned as a professional, and he had a presentation to make. This time, when he confronted his father, it was not to argue but to put $1,500 in cash on the kitchen table. Vince told a suspicious Giuseppe that he had earned it legitimately—from playing baseball. Giuseppe went from suspicious to astonished. Fifteen hundred cash from playing a silly game for boys?

  “Well, that’s a different story,” he told Vince.

  Giuseppe stroked his thin mustache and thought that maybe he had been wrong about Vince . . . and that maybe his next boy, Joe, could make money playing this not-so-silly game too. Plus, there was another son after that.

  “Dad came to me, and I was just a little guy at the time,” Dominic recalled, “and said one day—I’ll never forget—he said, ‘And when are you going to play baseball?’ ”

  It was already happening. Giuseppe just hadn’t expected it from “little Dommie.”

  FIVE

  Although his older brother had returned home a sort of hero with all that cash, Joe didn’t say anything about his own interest in baseball. He liked living in the family home, liked how his mother and sisters doted on him. He didn’t want to have to go into exile, and he was not going to rebel against his father as Vince had. Instead, Joe did what he had to do to bring in a few bucks here and there. And with subtle support from Rosalie, he played baseball.

  The turning point had come in 1931.

  It wasn’t the best time to open a new stadium anywhere in the United States—except, apparently, in San Francisco, where 18,000 people, including the specially invited Ty Cobb, squeezed into Seals Stadium on opening day, April 7. The 8–0 shutout of Portland by Sam Gibson was a harbinger of the season: the Seals would win another pennant behind Gibson’s 28 victories, with a .314 team batting average. The new park’s dimensions of 360 feet to left, 365 to right, and 400 to center took a toll on power hitters, but the Seal batters made the adjustment by becoming better contact hitters. Local boy Frank Crosetti drove in 143 runs with a .343 average. (When the season ended, the Yankees bought his contract and he began a 37-year career as a player and coach in New York.) Meanwhile, Henry “Prince” Oana, a native of Hawaii, had 161 RBI on just 23 home runs.

  By that season, with Vince playing pro ball up north, Joe had become more serious about baseball. He’d lost interest in tennis, and he had just turned 17 as Christmas 1931 approached. Galileo High School was history. In his autobiography, Joe says he stuck it out in the school for two years, but according to Dario Lodigiani, “he was there a couple of months, and he dropped out. He never went to school anymore. I wouldn’t say his studies came hard to Joe. He just didn’t care about them. If Joe made a point to actually learn something, he would have been a good student. Joe, he was pretty sharp.”

  Unlike Vince, Joe dropped out of school not to help support the family, but because he simply didn’t like school. He later reflected that “if I had to do it over again, I’d have stuck with schooling a lot longer than I did. My mother’s judgment on the subject of education was correct, as it was in most all other matters.” This smacks more of posturing for young readers than sincere regret.

  Joe much preferred hanging around the neighborhood, finding jobs here and there for pocket money and playing baseball when it suited him. He would prepare by sitting alone at the North Beach playground, rolling Bull Durham cigarettes. “Because he was such a good player, he was the only one the director let smoke during games,” reported Dante Benedetti, who grew up in the neighborhood, in I Remember Joe DiMaggio.

  One day, in one of those chance occurrences that seem significant only later, Joe was looking to buy Christmas presents for his parents when Bat Minafo and Frank Venezia called him over. Venezia had once been one of Joe’s regular pals, but they had been avoiding each other after a disagreement a year earlier. Both boys knew that Joe had displayed flashes of being a very good athlete and had socked the ball around on the local sandlots. Earlier, they had formed a club called the Jolly Knights, which Joe had refused to join, and now the club was starting up a baseball team. With real uniforms to wear. In spite of the tension between them, Bat and Frank asked Joe to be on the team. Not having much else going on, Joe gave a typically terse response: “Okay.”

  As he recalled, “I was a pretty cocky kid in those days, and I said to myself, ‘If Vince can get dough for playing ball, I can too.’ ”

  Joe did not make any money from baseball in the 1932 season, but he came to enjoy it, and he and others discovered that he was very good at it. He had grown to a full six feet, two inches tall, and though still slender, there were strong DiMaggio muscles in his shoulders and chest. Joe hit like Vince—when he connected, the ball took off. But Joe connected more often than Vince, who during the ’32 season in Tucson was showing a propensity for striking out.

  The Jolly Knights won a lot more games than they lost. Joe cost them runs with spotty play at short and third, but he gained them many more by sending the ball screaming between infielders or over the heads of outfielders in whatever park they played. When the team’s success attracted a sponsor and a new name, Rossi Olive Oil, the players were able to upgrade their uniforms and equipment. Up north, Vince heard about his brother’s team and issued a challenge to the Rossi boys to come play the Lumber Leagues. Vince was glad to see his brother when Joe made the trip up with his team, but not glad at all when the Rossi team beat up on the Lumber Leagues teams.

  It can’t be said that Joe played baseball purely for the love of it. After all, though he wanted nothing to do with fishing, he was a son of Giuseppe DiMaggio. Money talked. It talked to Joe that summer when a scout for the Class A Sunset Produce team—Rossi was in the B League—gave him two dollars after he hit a long home run.

  So long, Bat and Frank and the rest of the Rossi bunch. Joe moved up to the next level of baseball in San Francisco, settling in at third base for the squad sponsored by Sunset Produce. Again he showed that he was a raw but natural hitter. In the 18 games he played for Sunset Produce, Joe batted .632 and was rewarded with a pair of featherweight baseball shoes.

  After watching him play, Fred Hofmann, a former Yankees catcher, made Joe an offer. Hofmann managed the Mission Red A’s, another Class A team underwritten by the San Francisco Missions, a PCL franchise that shared Seals Stadium with the more popular team. Hofmann offered Joe a contract for $150 a month, which was very good money for a teenager, and a lot better than being handed two bucks here and there.

  But Joe refused it. Another opportunity had come along. After Vince returned to San Francisco from Tucson, the Seals put him on their roster. They needed help. The proud franchise had little to be proud of late in the 1932 season. They were mired in fourth place and would finish 13.5 games behind Portland. Still, Vince had finally made the PCL, the best level of play next to the major leagues, and he was ecstatic and eager to prove himself. He didn’t have time to adjust to PCL-level pitching, though, and ended the season with a modest .270 average and six home runs.

  According to the story told through the years by both Vince and Joe, Augie Galan, the Seals’ regular shortstop who would later star for the Cubs and Dodgers, had been invited to accompany Prince Oana home to spend some time playing ball in Hawaii, making extra money on a barnstorming tour. The Seals manager, Ike Caveney, could replace Prince with Vince in the outfield, but complained that he’d be stuck without a shortstop.

  Vince, never one to repress himself, blurted out, “What’s the matter with my brother Joe? He’s a shortstop.”

  And an
other DiMaggio joined the Seals roster.

  Joe got into just three games before the ’32 season ended for the Seals. His debut was on October 1 against the San Francisco Missions. He went 1-for-3, with his first hit a triple. Vince was more of a factor in the Seals’ 4–3 victory that day, going 2-for-4 with a double. In six more at-bats that season, Joe managed only one hit, a double, and had two runs scored.

  Both brothers were back for spring training with the Seals in 1933. Vince would fight for a starting job in the outfield. If Joe was going to stick with the Seals, it would have to be with his bat. His strong throwing arm was not suited for the infield. He had a hard enough time handling the grounders hit his way, and then it was even more of an adventure when he sidearmed the ball toward first base. During one exhibition game, Joe narrowly missed bouncing one off the noggin of Charlie Graham, the Seals’ owner, who was sitting in the stands behind first.

  Fortunately, he was able to hit anything a pitcher threw to him. As Joe reported, “I just stood up there and slashed away, and it was my hitting which kept me from being chased right out of the park.”

  When not dodging errant throws, Graham saw enough promise to take a chance—a pretty substantial one. He offered Joe a contract. Technically, Giuseppe was offered the contract, since at 18 Joe could not legally agree to anything. But what did Giuseppe know about baseball contracts? He hadn’t even signed Vince’s. A family tradition began: Tom had the best business head on his shoulders, so he negotiated on behalf of the family.