The DiMaggios Read online

  Tom DiMaggio and Graham went back and forth. Every time Joe hit a long homer or had a multihit game (forget the errors), Tom’s position improved. Finally, Graham agreed to pay Joe an amount unprecedented for an untested rookie, $225 a month, at least 50 percent more than other rookies were being offered. Tom said yes, and Giuseppe signed immediately.

  Suddenly, playing a game his father had once ridiculed, one he had never been as passionate about as Vince, had made the second-youngest DiMaggio sibling the family’s highest-paid wage-earner. Giuseppe had no problem with one of his children making twice as much as he did. Wasn’t this why he and Rosalie had come to America from the other side of the world? It was just so unexpected that their eighth child would get ahead by playing a game.

  At the 1933 training camp, Joe got extra instruction from Caveney, who had played shortstop with the Cincinnati Reds. However, it wasn’t enough: Joe continued to bobble balls and endanger anyone sitting on the right side of the field. Because of his shyness, Joe wasn’t impressive to others off the field either. One club report described him as “a gawky, awkward kid, all arms and legs like a colt, and inclined to be surly.” When the 1933 season opened, Joe was on the bench.

  Surprisingly, Vince rode the pine next to him. He had injured his arm and could not make throws from the outfield, and there was no room for him in the infield. Since Vince could not make a good case for getting out on the field himself, he spent time advocating for his brother. Vince, Joe later recounted, “kept telling me that I had the ability, and couldn’t miss.”

  Vince’s generosity early in the 1933 season—and its eventual impact on baseball—cannot be understated. As the older brother, he could have expected Joe to promote him to the manager, not the other way around. Vince had played professionally the previous year in the Pacific Coast League; Joe had three games under his belt. Also, with Vince waiting for a starting spot to open up, pushing for Joe to get the job risked more bench time and lower earnings for himself. But for the happy-go-lucky brother, Joe’s potential and simmering desire to prove himself were the priorities.

  During an early game, Caveney sent a nervous Joe up to pinch-hit for the right fielder, Ed Stewart. He was so shaky that he couldn’t lift the bat off his shoulder, but it turned out okay—the pitcher couldn’t get the ball over the plate and Joe walked. When the inning was over, instead of sending Vince or Prince Oana out to take Stewart’s place, Caveney told Joe to play right field. He never played the infield again.

  The transition to the outfield did not go flawlessly. “Joe was very sensitive,” reported Louis Almada, an outfielder on the San Francisco Missions in 1933, in I Remember Joe DiMaggio. “One time he was coming in on a fly. A lazy fly. He was coming in and he had his hands up. I don’t know what happened. Maybe he stumbled or something. He had his hands up, and the ball hit him on top of his head. It bounced up in the air and of course he caught it. All the guys laughed. All the players laughed, and he resented that. He had rabbit ears. He heard the players laughing and yelling, ‘Get a basket out there!’ and ‘You’d better put on a catcher’s helmet!’ Just popping off. He resented that. He was very proud.”

  In what might appear to be a cruel irony, early in the ’33 season, with Joe showing signs that he could hit PCL pitching, and with Stewart as backup, the Seals decided that there was no room on the roster for Vince. The club released him.

  “Just when I was glorying in success, Vince was cut loose,” Joe lamented more than a few times over the decades to combat the accusation occasionally dredged up that he had pushed Vince out of San Francisco baseball. But the 18-year-old rookie had no say in the Seals’ personnel decisions. And Vince always insisted, “Don’t ever say that I was in any way jealous of Joe and his success in baseball. He was my brother, and I was proud of him.”

  But being unemployed was a big blow for Vince, as he had a wife to support. He had met Madeline while playing in the Lumber Leagues. Her parents had emigrated to America from northern Italy, but Vince, still pursuing his own path, didn’t care that Madeline was not Sicilian. Her father had died when she was very young, in the 1917 flu epidemic that swept the United States, leaving Madeline’s mother a widow who did not speak English, with four children. When she went to a store, she would put money on the counter and the shopkeeper would count out what he was owed, pushing the rest back to her. Eventually, she married a man who had worked with her late husband, and they had a child together.

  In 1931, Madeline had been dating a man she expected to marry. That changed when he took her to a baseball game and she and Vince spotted each other. Soon, the future husband became an ex-boyfriend. Never one to agonize over a decision, Vince determined that he and Madeline should walk down the aisle. In his self-imposed exile, he did not inform his parents until he came home and surprised Giuseppe with the $1,500 cash. Madeline was the second surprise. Now he had to figure out how to support her.

  The problem seemed to be solved when the Seals, under pressure financially with attendance down, re-signed Vince. Joe, who had struggled at the plate after his brother’s departure, responded by batting over .300. Then, in May, Vince was axed again by the penny-pinching club, and he wondered if his hard-earned PCL career was over. But soon the Hollywood Stars signed him. Injuries had taken their toll on the Stars, including one to outfielder June Taitt, and the team—in the red because of the Depression and still suffering from the indignity of seeing the crosstown rival Los Angeles Angels capture the PCL championship—were stocking up with new players as best they could. The team signed Vince to replace Taitt.

  If Joe was unhappy about the Seals finally letting his brother go for good, he didn’t show it. In fact, in his first full season with the Seals he displayed the demeanor that would mark his entire career on the field. In I Remember Joe DiMaggio, Bill Raimondi, a catcher with the Oakland Oaks during the 1930s, recalled that Joe “was a very quiet guy on the field. Didn’t bother anybody. He’d hardly say hello to you. Nothing fooled him. He ripped everything. In the Coast League, they’d knock you down. He’d just move out of the way. Never said a word. Go back up there and take his cuts. He had trouble with one of our pitchers. I think it was Roy Joiner. He came close and Joe took exception. They had a little skirmish. No blows were struck. They just started talking to each other. That was the first time I ever saw Joe get riled up. That was probably the only time.”

  Happy to be roaming right field, where his strong arm was an asset, Joe had a breakout year at the plate, one of the most remarkable ever seen in the Pacific Coast League. That he hit .340 at only 18 was special enough, even in a league that featured plenty of offense. But offering a preview of what he would do with the Yankees eight years later, in the 1933 season with the Seals he collected at least one base hit in 61 consecutive games. The previous PCL record was 49 games; the major league record was 44. The 61-game streak had nothing to do with the quality of the pitching. The PCL was loaded with good players at most positions, including on the mound, and competitively it was only one level lower than the major leagues—plenty high enough for a teenager facing PCL pitching for the first time.

  The club owners couldn’t have been happier. As relatively inexpensive as tickets to the ballpark were, many people in the midst of the Depression were thinking twice about spending that money. It can’t be said that Joe DiMaggio single-handedly saved the Pacific Coast League, but his thrilling quest for a new record did bring in the fans.

  “When my streak passed its thirtieth game, attendance increased at every park I played,” Joe recalled. “A few writers went so far as to claim my streak stimulated interested in the league at a time when it was facing financial collapse. I was too much of a kid at the time to pay much attention to that.”

  The streak had begun May 28. Because of a bruise, Joe had tape around his right thumb in that game. Even after the thumb healed, he superstitiously had it taped every day after that; otherwise, for the first half or so of the streak, J
oe took it all in stride. He later admitted, however, that “by the time I was approaching forty games, the pressure was really on me.”

  There were, of course, close calls. After hitting in 42 straight games, Joe batted against Tom Sheehan of Vince’s team, the Hollywood Stars. Sheehan was a veteran, having been a teammate of Babe Ruth on the Yankees. He was coasting 12–1 and had two outs in the ninth inning when Joe, who was 0-for-3, dug in. On a 3-2 count, he lined one into the outfield to preserve the streak. When the ninth inning began in the 49th game, Joe was again hitless and the Seals were again losing. If he batted at all that inning, he would be the seventh batter. All six players reached base ahead of him (one was hit by a pitch), and Joe doubled in the winning runs.

  Then there were games when Joe took care of business right away. “DeMaggio [Joe’s name was frequently misspelled early on], 18-year-old batting sensation of the Coast League, either has nerves of steel or he has no nerves at all, for the kid slammed out a single in the first inning of the game last night,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle. “That hit drove in two runs and smashed the record of forty-nine games made by Jack Ness eighteen years ago.”

  “There were people who would go to the ballpark, and when Joe got a hit, they’d leave,” remembered Dario Lodigiani, who had not yet made it to the PCL. “They just wanted to see Joe get a hit. I went out there a few times as a kid to watch him. There was a fellow named Buck [later Bobo] Newsom, who had played in the big leagues. He was pitching for Los Angeles. He came out and made a statement: ‘If when we play the Seals he’s still got the streak going, I’ll stop him.’ The first pitch he threw to Joe, Joe hit it against the wall for a double.”

  According to future major leaguer Eddie Joost, “I was playing for the Mission Reds in ’33. I was only sixteen years old. I was playing third base one day in San Francisco. [Joe] hit a ball right between my legs before I could get my glove down. That’s how hard he could hit the ball.”

  The streak came to an end on July 26 against the Oakland Oaks. Ed Walsh Jr. held Joe hitless. “I caught the last out he made in the game that ended the streak,” said Emil Mailho, an Oaks outfielder. “People said to me, ‘Why the hell didn’t you drop it?’ I said, ‘They never drop them when I hit them.’ ” It’s a good line, but Mailho was wrong. It was Harlin Pool who caught Joe’s ninth-inning shot.

  During the streak, Joe batted .405—104 hits in 61 games. With his typical reserve, Joe had not bothered to correct the sportswriters who often reported his name as “DeMaggio” in their stories (including his first appearance in The Sporting News, a national publication), but he finally did after the July 26 game so that it would be engraved the right way on the watch he was to be awarded by the PCL.

  There was a reward for the hitting streak that Joe valued even more—his father’s approval. Giuseppe had begun to think well of baseball when Vince returned home with real money in his pockets, but now his fourth son was making him proud. His namesake was so good at baseball that the whole city was talking about him, and misspelled or not, his name was in the newspapers. Thousands of people every day were cramming into Seals Stadium to watch Joe DiMaggio.

  “Bocce ball?” Giuseppe, who looked at the box score in the San Francisco Chronicle every morning to check how Joe did, said dismissively. “No money in bocce ball. Baseball, that’s the game!”

  Joe played in 187 games in 1933, more than he would play in any future baseball season. He had an incredible 762 at-bats and 259 hits—28 of them home runs—and 169 runs batted in. Still shy of his 19th birthday, Joe DiMaggio had become the Bay Area’s brightest baseball star. But there may have been some resentment among the Seals about his rapid rise. They would choose Augie Galan, who batted .356, as the team’s MVP. Despite Joe’s performance, the Seals ended the season in sixth place with an 81-106 record.

  In L.A., Vince embraced the opportunity given him by the Hollywood Stars, who put him in the outfield where he belonged full-time. It looked like a lost season for the Stars by the middle of August, with the club mired in fourth place. But with winning series against Portland and Oakland, a pennant drive was under way. Two weeks later, when the Stars went into a series against the Sacramento Solons, they were just a game behind the Angels. Though nothing he did would remind fans of his brother’s hitting streak, Vince was in the thick of the drive with timely hits and superb fielding. The Stars beat up on Sacramento, and when they faced the Angels on September 6, they were in first with a one-game lead.

  They squared off in a doubleheader on a foggy night in Los Angeles before a PCL-record crowd of 24,695. The first game was a pitchers’ battle between Frank Shellenback and the home team’s Buck Newsom that the Angels won, 2–0. The second game was postponed. The Stars broke the first-place tie by beating the Angels, 11–8, the following day, but the home team took four out of the next five contests to move ahead by three games. (To save on travel costs, it was not unusual for a PCL series to be seven games.) The deflated Hollywood squad stumbled toward the finish line, winding up in third, seven games behind the Angels. Still, their 107-80 record was impressive, and Vince couldn’t help but feel some satisfaction that he had contributed to that; the Seals, without him, wound up 25 games under .500.

  Vince’s power numbers weren’t great—11 homers and 65 RBI—but his .333 average in 74 games with the Seals and Stars (only seven points lower than Joe’s season average) showed that when given the chance, he could hit in this league. When the L.A.-based club traveled north to play in San Francisco, Vince happily watched the fans at Seals Stadium cheer Joe on. He was even glad when his own fans cheered Joe during the hitting streak. In the middle of the Depression, what was good for the game was good for every player able to keep collecting a paycheck.

  On the varsity squad at Galileo High School, Dominic was nicknamed “Bunky,” after a kid character in a popular comic strip. Even though it wasn’t his preferred position, he played second base because, unlike Vince and Joe, he didn’t have a strong arm and playing second required shorter throws. But he worked at it. “By the time I was a senior in 1934, my arm had grown so much stronger that I was a pitcher and a shortstop,” he reported in Real Grass, Real Heroes. He hit .400 that year, yet batted ninth because the coach wanted to spread the offense throughout the lineup.

  “Hitting at the bottom of the order wasn’t my biggest disappointment in high school, though. That came when we lost the championship in the final game of the season. I came in as a relief pitcher in the eighth inning with the bases loaded. We lost the championship on a sacrifice fly. That kind of crushing disappointment can make a baseball player grow up in a hurry.”

  At 17, though only five-foot-seven and 135 pounds, Dom was hooked on baseball, following in his brothers’ base paths. However, he would become the first of the five DiMaggio brothers to receive a high school diploma, and he entertained the thought of becoming a chemical engineer. He even had a plan for a while of making it to the professional level for just one year, then quitting to pursue a more regular career. But over time that plan faded.

  When given an opportunity in the outfield at Galileo High, Dominic invented a style of playing center that he would employ throughout his career and that would make him arguably the best center fielder in the major leagues. He stood at a right angle to the plate, with his left foot facing the plate and his right foot parallel to the center-field fence. Dominic found that he got a better jump on the ball by facing the left-field foul line as the pitch was thrown. It didn’t matter to him if the batter was a lefty or righty (though that would affect where he stood in center). With this unprecedented style, Dominic got a quicker start on fly balls over his head, he could come in faster on line drives, and he charged ground balls better. A few coaches and managers tried to change his stance, but for the next 18 years no one could dispute the results.

  What could Joe do in the 1934 season to top a 61-game hitting streak? To begin with, he could make more money—despite the club
’s precarious finances, Tom negotiated a raise for his brother—and then he could be sold to a major league club. After enjoying success with two other Bay Area Italian-American prospects in Tony Lazzeri and Frank Crosetti, the New York Yankees had been scouting the Seals, and it was rumored that they would offer as much as $75,000 to buy DiMaggio’s contract. The Seals certainly could have used the money, but Joe was still under 20, and he and his parents didn’t want him going anywhere, especially to the other side of the country. The idea was to let him have another good year, let him get a little older, and then maybe the Seals would make even more money off him.

  “If Dead Pan has a good year in 1934 he’s certain of a big-league tryout next Spring,” wrote the syndicated columnist Jack Kofoed, using the nickname the San Francisco press had given the stoic and silent Joe the previous season. “He simply can’t miss if all the stories I’ve heard from the Coast are true. He’ll leave the boys at North Beach and the smelly seamen at Fisherman’s Wharf and come East to see what it’s all about. I wonder who will get him? Will he some day be trying to fill the shoes of Babe Ruth, or of Al Simmons or Big Poison Waner. Giuseppe DiMaggio! What a name for a baseball hero! It doesn’t sound right.”

  Then, to the shock and dismay of fans—and certainly the DiMaggio family—his career almost ended during the season of ’34.

  There are two versions of what happened. Joe’s version was that after a doubleheader in June, he went to the apartment of one of his married sisters for dinner. On the way back home to Taylor Street, Joe sat in a cramped position in a taxi, and when he got out and put weight on his left leg, it collapsed on him. “There was no twisting, just four sharp cracks at the knee, and I couldn’t straighten out the leg. The pain was terrific, like a whole set of aching teeth in my knee, and I don’t know yet why I didn’t pass out.” He claimed that he was able to stagger to a movie house nearby, and the manager drove him to the nearest emergency room.