The DiMaggios Read online

  After five exhibition games, the transition to major leaguer was going smoothly enough. But then, in a game against the Boston Braves, as Joe slid into third base, Joe Coscarart, a third baseman who had played for Seattle in the PCL, fell and landed on Joe’s ankle. That injury wasn’t severe, but the treatment was. An inattentive trainer put Joe under a diathermy lamp for too long, resulting in a foot burned badly enough that a doctor told him he couldn’t play for three weeks. After McCarthy sent him north to New York to recuperate, Joe missed playing in the opening day game against the Senators, with President Franklin Roosevelt throwing out the first ball. Worse, he had no chance to crack the starting lineup now that Chapman had ended his holdout.

  As consolation, Joe got his first look at New York. “I was the typical, gawking country kid when I stepped off the train at Penn Station. It’s a good thing Paul Krichell, Yankee scout, was there to meet me or I might still be wandering around the station.” When Joe was able to go on a guided tour of the city, it included a very important stop. “One of the first things I did in New York was to hobble to Yankee Stadium. I had never seen anything like it and it was a little frightening to know that this was to be my stamping grounds for as long as I could make it.”

  In April, Colonel Ruppert’s personal physician examined Joe’s “barking puppy.” The burn was healing, but the wound kept reopening. Joe was out of action the entire month. In calls home to Giuseppe and Rosalie, he worried that his career with the Yankees was over before it began.

  Finally, at the end of April, the doctors cleared Joe to play. McCarthy had him ride the bench until May 3, when he started in left field against the St. Louis Browns at Yankee Stadium. Chapman was in center, with Selkirk in right. In the infield were Red Rolfe, Crosetti, Lazzeri, and Gehrig. Bill Dickey was the catcher, and pitching was the former San Francisco Seal Lefty Gomez. Joe, wearing number 9, showed right away that he belonged—after a groundout in his first at-bat, he singled, tripled, and singled, and the Yankees cruised to a 14–5 win. In the game he collected his first run scored and first run batted in. The effect on a revived Gehrig was obvious—the cleanup hitter had five runs scored and two RBI on a 4-for-5 day.

  Joe’s first home run a few days later, smacked against the Philadelphia Athletics, propelled the Yankees past the Red Sox into first place. By the end of the month, his average was .411. There really had been no need to worry about American League pitching. Forget Gehrig, Dickey, Gomez, and the rest of them—the newspapers spilled all their ink on the rookie. Joe was on his way to becoming an even bigger star in New York than he had been on the West Coast. Writers in other cities joined the chorus.

  “I got an eyeful of DiMaggio this afternoon in those two games against Washington, and, brother, methinks they haven’t overrated him much,” praised Shirley Povich, a Washington Post columnist. “If there’s anything that DiMaggio can’t do on a baseball field, I dunno what it is. That .380 batting average he’s sporting around is no myth (as three consecutive doubles off Buck Newsom’s pitching in the second game attest) and the only thing that will stop that guy from dragging down every ball hit into his field is the fences.”

  While Joe was establishing himself in the starting lineup of the Yankees, Vince and Dominic were trying to navigate their way toward the major leagues. For Vince, 1936 would be his fourth season with the Hollywood Stars, and he had to wonder if this was as far as he was going to get. Sure, hundreds of men over the years had played their entire careers in the Pacific Coast League and had few if any regrets. The fans were great up and down the West Coast, the money wasn’t bad (especially with so many other people not having jobs at all), and he could still spend plenty of time in San Francisco with his family and all the DiMaggios except Joe. But Vince was 23 when the season began, and that was getting to be a bit grizzled for a hopeful. By now he had given up the dream of being an opera singer, but he wasn’t ready to give up the dream of being a major league ballplayer.

  Vince was now a San Diego Padre. The Hollywood Stars had lost 99 games the previous season and more than a few of their fans. Owner Bill Lane decided it was time for a move, and the growing city of San Diego had long sought a team. In early 1936, Lane moved the team there, where they were renamed the Padres. They made their debut on March 1 as winners against the Seattle Rainiers at Lane Field.

  Dominic turned 19 in February 1936 and was a full year out of high school. He became the first of the DiMaggio children to attend college, still thinking about chemical engineering. But like his brothers, he had the baseball bug bad by this time. He was young enough and smart enough that if he couldn’t advance in the game, he could go back to college and a career. He had a job at the Simmons Bed Factory in San Francisco, and there were many guys his age envying the steady paycheck. He was a good, reliable worker and well liked by the people at Simmons.

  That season, fitting baseball in around his schedule at the factory, Dominic played for the local sandlot team, the North Beach Merchants. Though he played mostly shortstop instead of the outfield, as he would have preferred, he was making an impression as a good contact hitter and an aggressive base runner, as well as making the plays he had to make in the infield. The Seals took notice and began to scout him. The modest Dominic thought that “by that time any baseball player in San Francisco named DiMaggio was going to get a good long look from the scouts.” Still, “I wanted to make sure of it,” he said later.

  If there were any doubts about Dominic’s baseball ambitions, they were dispelled when he quit his job. Or tried to. The Seals and the Cincinnati Reds were about to hold a combination baseball camp and tryouts, and the players who did the best would be offered a chance to make one club or the other. Dominic intended to give it a full shot. His boss, however, wouldn’t allow him to quit; instead, he told Dominic to do his best and the job would be waiting for him if the tryout was unsuccessful.

  There were 143 men at the camp. Dominic would always be known as a gritty player, and grit was what he needed now to overcome his nervousness and inexperience. That his brother Joe was already a legend wouldn’t help—he had to be better than the other players.

  And he was—or close enough. Dominic played hard, hitting solidly and showing what he could do in both the infield and outfield. He made enough of an impression that his days in a mattress factory were over. “I was called into the Seals’ offices from the field, where I had been trying out, to sign my contract, along with my brother Tom who had been Joe’s business adviser and was about to become mine.”

  Dominic’s career would prove that he was a genuinely talented player, but on that day in the spring of 1936, was it also the case that the Seals signed him because he was Joe DiMaggio’s kid brother? Money was still tight for the Seals, and they had lost their biggest star. A DiMaggio in the lineup had to help attendance. The Seals didn’t hold a press conference every time they signed a player, but Walter Mails, the club’s PR man, arranged one for Dominic. Wearing a new Seals uniform and with Tom DiMaggio standing behind him, Dominic signed his contract in front of a group of reporters. With that ceremony over, Mails invited everyone in attendance to “have a beer.” Dominic followed the reporters into the ballpark’s dining room to be part of the celebration, but Mails told him, “You can go down and chase some more fly balls now. We’re all through with you.”

  It didn’t matter. What was most important was that in 1936 the three DiMaggio brothers were all what they had aspired to be: professional baseball players.

  In less than three months, Joe had made enough of an impression on American League fans that he was on the All-Star team. By the end of May, when he was hitting over .400, he had become so popular among the New York fans that he needed a police escort when he left Yankee Stadium. His teammates didn’t seem to resent all the attention the 21-year-old was receiving from the press and the fans. When Billy Knickerbocker of the Cleveland Indians tried to hit Joe in the head with a throw, Lazzeri led the charge of Yankees out of
the dugout to teach the shortstop a lesson.

  The week of the All-Star Game, Joe was on the cover of Time. If anyone should have been jealous it was Gehrig, as the “Iron Horse” was having a resurgent season. But the big first baseman was happy that the Yankees were once again the powerful team from the days when he and Ruth anchored the lineup, and a trip to the World Series seemed certain.

  When the American League and National League squads took the field on July 7 at Braves Field in Boston, Joe was the first rookie to have made an All-Star roster. It would have been impossible to keep him off it—he was batting .358. Recalling his swift ascent, he offered in his autobiography, “Freshmen aren’t ordinarily picked for this game, but here I was in the starting lineup with the cream of the crop, certainly a far cry from the pick-up games I’d been playing not too many years before on the old Horse Lot in San Francisco.” He was “confident I was going to have my biggest day in baseball. It turned out to be my poorest public exhibition.”

  The first All-Star Game had been played in 1933, and the American League had won all three contests since. Lefty Grove of the Red Sox started, but the National League countered with a powerful one-two punch, Dizzy Dean of the Cardinals and Carl Hubbell of the Giants. Still, many believed that adding the sensational Yankee rookie to the lineup virtually locked up a fourth victory.

  Instead, Joe took much of the blame for the AL’s first defeat. In the first inning, against Dean, he hit into a double play. In the next inning, he charged a line drive off the bat of Gabby Hartnett, but instead of dropping into his glove for a shoestring catch, the ball bounced under and past him. Hartnett wound up with an RBI triple.

  In the fourth inning, with lefty screwballer Carl Hubbell pitching, Joe popped up to Leo “The Lip” Durocher at short. In the fifth, his former Seals teammate Augie Galan homered to right, upping the score to 2–0. Billy Herman singled to right, and when Joe couldn’t find the handle on the ball, Herman cruised into second on the error. He ended up in the dugout a minute later when Joe “Ducky” Medwick singled him home. Joe had a second chance against Hubbell in the sixth—but instead of redeeming himself, he dribbled one back to the mound.

  He was embarrassing himself not only in front of the 25,556 people in the seats but—via the Mutual, CBS, and NBC radio networks—the fans in New York and family and friends in San Francisco. If this was how he stacked up against the better players in baseball, maybe he’d be returning to pickup games at the old Horse Lot. The American League rallied in the seventh, with the National League up 4–0, but Joe wasn’t part of it. Gehrig smashed a homer, and Luke Appling singled in two runs. With the tying run on base, Joe pounced on a Lon Warneke pitch, but the ball flew directly at Durocher.

  He was given one more opportunity in the ninth, with two outs and Charlie Gehringer on second base. He popped out to Herman at second, and the game was over. In five times at bat, the balls he hit never left the infield. Joe lamented that he was “a young man who had learned something and learned it the hard way.”

  The next day’s newspapers, especially in New York, were tough on the rookie. Dan Parker in the Daily Mirror compared him to a not-highly-regarded heavyweight boxer: “Poor Giuseppe DiMaggio found himself in the same predicament as Primo Carnera breaking in a new pair of shoes. At every run, Joe encountered a new pinch. In every pinch he fell down. McCarthy’s prize rookie won the hand-gilded mountain goat antlers . . . by donating three runs to the National League cause and refraining from batting in a half-dozen or so that he might have driven home.”

  For a ballplayer who hadn’t endured much criticism since he first picked up a bat, the caustic comments stung. Still, Joe thought that his dismal performance “may have been the most important event of my baseball career. It opened my eyes to many truths, to the fact that anything can happen in any one ball game, or series of games; that things are hardest just when they look easiest.”

  Teammates, reporters, fans, and friends who later marveled at Joe’s stoicism on the field and his apparent lack of emotion could readily understand the self-reflecting he did after the 1936 All-Star Game. He vowed to “bear down in every inning of every game.” The boy who had found playing baseball back in San Francisco an effortless exercise realized that to excel against the bigger boys in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and elsewhere, talent wasn’t enough—he had to work harder than anyone else.

  Two weeks after the embarrassment of the All-Star Game, McCarthy moved Joe into center field, out of necessity. Joe, playing right field, had chased down a ball off the bat of Goose Goslin that should have belonged to Myril Hoag, playing center. Hoag and Joe collided. Hoag was hit in the head so hard that a blood clot formed and he would require brain surgery. McCarthy saw Hoag’s tragedy as Joe’s opportunity. Except for an experiment at first base in 1950 suggested by Casey Stengel, Joe would be the center fielder for the Yankees for the rest of his career, his superiority in the league challenged only by his brother Dominic.

  All the New York players had to do was keep breathing to win the pennant. When they clinched it on September 9, it was the earliest a team had done so in the major leagues. The season ended with the Tigers a speck in New York’s rearview mirror, 19.5 games out. Though he still didn’t get the headlines that Joe did, Gehrig was back to being the foundation of the Yankees. An average of .354, 49 homers, and 152 RBI earned him a second Most Valuable Player Award, his first since 1927. Joe had set the table nicely for Gehrig by batting .323 with 206 hits (his 15 triples led the American League), and with the Iron Horse in the order behind him, no one could pitch around the rookie (who had only 39 strikeouts). Joe logged 29 home runs and 125 RBI. Gehrig and four former PCL players—Joe, Lazzeri, Crosetti, and Gomez—were headed to the World Series.

  Meanwhile, Vince hoped the Padres would improve enough to get into the PCL playoffs. A promising youngster helped. On June 27, in a game against the Sacramento Solons, Ted Williams made his PCL debut. It was not an auspicious start: Henry “Cotton” Pippen struck out the beanpole 17-year-old with three pitches. Nevertheless, from this point on Ted Williams would figure in the lives of all three of baseball’s DiMaggio brothers, his life and career interlacing with theirs as friend and teammate to Vince and Dom and as rival to Joe.

  Teddy Samuel Williams was a San Diego native, born on August 30, 1918. Sam Williams, his father, a mixture of English and Welsh, met May Venzor, a woman of mostly Mexican descent, in Hawaii. He was in the U.S. Army, and she was training to be a Salvation Army officer. Ted was born eight years later, and his brother Daniel two years after that. Sam had an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, and May devoted most of her life to her obsession with the Salvation Army. Neither had much time left over for their sons.

  Ted grew up wanting to play baseball all the time. In his autobiography, My Turn at Bat, he recalled, “We lived in a little $4,000 house on Utah Street my mother had gotten through the kindness of the Spreckles family, a prominent family in San Diego. My mother was going to pay them back, but I don’t think she ever did. The North Park playground was a block and a half from my house. It had lights and we could play until nine o’clock at night.” The park became his home because his mother “was gone all day and half the night,” his father didn’t come home until late at night, and “I remember being ashamed of how dirty the house was all the time.”

  Ted played on the baseball team at Horace Mann Junior High and then for the team sponsored by the American Legion Padre Serra “Fighting Bob” Post. In three years on the high school varsity, his batting average was .430. Though he had a picture of Babe Ruth on his bedroom wall, the boy’s heroes were Charles Lindbergh, Bill Terry of the New York Giants, and Cotton Warburton, a star on the University of Southern California football team.

  The youngster had unofficial tryouts with the Los Angeles Angels of the PCL and also with the St. Louis Cardinals. But he wasn’t eager to be that far north or east, away from friends. Being away from his home, however, wouldn’t
have bothered Ted very much. In his autobiography, Williams defended his father—whom the kindest reporters would later describe as a “wanderer”—stating, “He stuck it out with my mother for twenty years, and finally he packed up, and I’d probably have done the same. My mother was a wonderful woman in many ways, but gee, I wouldn’t have wanted to be married to a woman like that. Always gone. The house dirty all the time. She was religious to the point of being domineering, and so narrow-minded. . . . My mother had a lot of traits that made me cringe.”

  After graduation from Hoover High School, Ted joined the Padres. His mother signed the contract that was to pay her son $150 a month. Lane could have afforded more—the Padres were a hit in San Diego and would lead the PCL in attendance that year—but at six-three and only 148 pounds, Ted did not evoke visions of a power hitter, surely not one who would go on to club 521 home runs for the Red Sox. Yankee scout Joe Devine came to San Diego to look him over. If the youngster had performed well, Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio might have ended up on the same team. But Devine concluded that the teenager “is a very slow lad, not a good outfielder now and just an average arm. There is big doubt whether Williams will ever be fast enough to get by in the majors as an outfielder.” The scout did allow that Williams “shows promise as a hitter, but good pitching so far has stopped him cold.” The Yankees passed. (Williams contended in his book that the Yankees turned him down when his mother asked for a $1,000 signing bonus.)