Lisa DavisSeptember 22, 2007 21:23 EST

Sirs:

That Dan Daniel had what we'd recognize today as a serious conflict of interest is an understatement. Yet your attempt to delegitimize the record overlooked several key points:

1) Law-and-Order Commissioner Landis not only had no problem with Daniel acting as the Yankees official home scorer, he allowed other teams to use writers with the exact same conflict of interest to act as their official home scorers.

2) Neither Appling or the White Sox raised hell with Landis re Daniel's scoring.

3) None of the hitters DiMaggio passed questioned the validity of the streak.

4) DiMaggio had a 61 game hitting streak in 1933 (no, none of them were scored by Daniel).

Why didn't you just conjure up some massive conspiracy in which Appling and every other fielder (and scorer) were paid off by the Yankees to suffer convenient lapses of "incompetence" because "America badly needed heroes" or some such nonsense? Better yet, stick to hockey!

The AuthorOctober 01, 2007 02:36 EST

Actually, if you read about DiMaggio's minor league streak (it's not the longest in minor league history, BTW) you would find that there were games when the scorer had to be escorted out of the park by policeman. Why? Because people were incensed with the hits DiMaggio was credited with. They considered it a sham: a media stunt. Cut to the Yankees in 1941. How and why would somebody cook up a hitting streak mythology? Perhaps because another team in another league had already used Dimaggio for that same purpose.

As for your Appling point; why on earth would he question the scoring? Perhaps you never played, but I can tell you that though you're never happy to fumble a play, if it's credited as a hit (rather than an error) you feel a lot better. It's simply counter-intuitive and illogical for the fielder in question to do anything but to sell the fact that it was a bad bounce. Again, that illustrates a key component that allows for the myth - Applings ever-lasting loyalty to the story... "wasn't my fault..."

Joe DiMaggio was an elite hitter - that's one of the key factors to consider in the creation of the streak. An average, or merely all-star hitter would be hard-pressed (Daniel or not) to duplicate this level of consistency. Many players have hit for higher averages over longer periods of time. Ichiro, for instance, once had a 10 week period of time when he hit .450. But there are few hitters capable of that at any one time.

If, against all common sense people decide to buy the myth, so what? Well, it seems to me that if it's important enough for someone to have an opionion about these things, they really should know more than the Sports Illustrated version of what happened.

Bob SOctober 08, 2007 17:52 EST

David Robbeson had it right about Dan Daniel's influences in baseball. Last game of 1945 season at Yankee Stadium, NYY Snuffy Stirnweiss
was battling CWS Tony Cuccinello for bat title.
In first at bat, Stirnweiss hit ordinary roller to Red Sox 3B Jack tobin who messed up the grounder completely. I was sitting at 3B railing of stands. The error sign went up. After the game ended, when it was learned that Cuccinello had won, .30846 to Stirnweiss' .30696, the scorer changed Tobin's error to a hit and Stirnweiss won bat title at .30854. This can be checked by game reports in NY Times & other NY papers.
Daniel controlled baseball writers so much that in 1942 he had NYY Joe Gordon win AL MVP with Gordon leading the AL 2B in errors and leading AL in grounding into DPs over Ted Williams' first triple crown.

Jerry HJuly 13, 2011 14:40 EST

I didn't really question DiMaggio's streak until I read "56 - Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports," by Kostya Kennedy. Mr. Kennedy, an excellent writer, is a New Yorker through and through (a former reporter for Newsday and contributor to the NY Times and the New Yorker) and clearly a big fan of Joe DiMaggio who very strongly attacks any suggestion that DiMaggio's streak was not legitimate. However, in reading his very enjoyable book, I couldn't help but come to the opposite conclusion.

As Mr. Kennedy points out, Americans were exceedingly apprehensive about WWII (Pearl Harbor was only a few months away) and they were looking for a hero and something for which they could cheer. Baseball players were being drafted and called up on a regular basis. Meanwhile, the Depression was still being felt and ballparks around the league still experienced absolutely dismal crowds. In this climate, it's natural the baseball establishment would want to support something amazing - something like DiMaggio's streak.

Meanwhile, as this article points out, Dan Daniels had GREAT incentives to give DiMaggio hits rather than rule certain plays as errors. In fact, as Mr. Kennedy's book points out, Mr. Daniels absolutely cherished his role as the Yankees scorekeeper. Mr. Kennedy infers from this that Mr. Daniels would not skew his rulings in favor of DiMaggio, but considering that the Yankees owner probably would have dismissed Daniels had his ruling broken DiMaggio's streak, this is all the MORE reason for him to essentially cheat in DiMaggio's favor. (In his book, Mr. Kennedy addresses the Game 30 error and points out that "the media accounts" of the play all stess how it was a bad hop. Unfortunately, Mr. Kennedy only looked in New York media accounts and did not even reference what the Chicago media said about the play.)

Additionally, Mr. Kennedy's book also reflects how pitchers around the league often insisted upon pitching to DiMaggio in order to give him a "chance" to keep his streak alive, even when that was against his team's best interests. In one instance, the Yankees had a runner on first with one out in their last at bat and the hitter batting before DiMaggio, a power hitter, bunted in order to avoid hitting into a double play and depriving DiMaggio of getting another at bat. Then, with first base now open and two outs, the opposing pitcher declined to walk the hot-hitting DiMaggio (a no-brainer play, as any little league player can attest), but instead pitched to him and, perhaps not surprisingly, DiMaggio got a hit.

All in all, aside from making me realize that DiMaggio was a horrendous jerk (i.e., how he cheated on his pregnant wife while on road trips, though Mr. Kennedy insists DiMaggio remained faithful in his own way because he still missed his wife after sending the various floozies home after having sex with them), Mr. Kennedy's book utterly convinced me that DiMaggio's streak was largely, though certainly not entirely, the product of public relations, favorable scorekeepers, and not-so-antagonistic opposition.

Ethan LAugust 15, 2011 21:29 EST

A little further research indicates that smack dab in the middle of the streak, on June 1, cross town rival New York Giant Mel Ott hit his 400th home run and his 1,500th RBI. One day later Lou Gehrig dies. The Yankees MUST have been looking for a hero. So the games in question, games 31 and 32, would have been a great opportunity for media hype and to boost public morale, or better yet, YANKEE morale. It was great timing. And the perfect player to pin it on since he had a 61 game streak in the PCL. I'm not trying to devalue Dimaggio's streak, only put it in perspective. If the errors were overlooked, I can see why.