56*

Walrus Online Exclusive: Facts and figures about Joe DiMaggio’s career can be found in “The DiMaggio Index.”Alfred Hitchcock once quipped that drama is life with the dull bits cut out. Baseball is like that, too, both as a sport and as a nine-inning contest — theatre that is frequently less than spellbinding. Quantum flashes of inspiration occur rarely, amid long stretches of tedium, and so, once observed, rapidly become mythical. For those who love the game, who learn and memorize its historical minutiae like verses of sacred text, the spells of inaction merely underscore whatever instances of transcendence we’re fortunate enough to witness. The deliberation of the game in these moments allows us, even encourages us, to hold past achievements in such high esteem.

During one eventful August weekend of this past season, three such moments flashed around North America in high definition, across fifty-inch plasma screens and onto the parchments of baseball history. Alex Rodriguez’s 500th home run and Tom Glavine’s 300th win (traditional Hall of Fame standards) bookended surely the most contentious record of them all: Barry Bonds’s 755th round-tripper, which tied the lifetime mark set by Henry Aaron thirty-one years ago. When, days later, the famously surly Bonds broke the record in front of a rapt home audience in San Francisco, headlines across North America invoked the asterisk some once used to qualify Roger Maris’s single-season home run record (achieved during a longer season than Babe Ruth’s mark). The asterisk for number 756 punctuated several years of debate over whether or not Bonds, whose steroid use was documented in a book by two San Francisco Chronicle reporters and whose personal trainer was imprisoned for steroid distribution, was worthy of the title of all-time home run king.

We in this hypermedia age have grown to expect this kind of microscopic scrutiny where our sporting heroes are concerned. But such was not always the case. And though it is worthwhile — and, for fans, fun — to consider every nuance of the astronomically remunerated performances of today, so too does it behoove those of us who love the game to train our lens backward, into baseball’s past. Many records of yesteryear, held to even a sliver of the light we cast upon the modern game, lose their sheen. Consider, for example, perhaps the most venerated record in all of sports, the fifty-six-game hitting streak of Joe DiMaggio.

Joseph Paul DiMaggio grew up in northern California, learning the subtleties of America’s pastime alongside his siblings on sun-baked lots in and around San Francisco. Three of Italian immigrant Giuseppe DiMaggio’s nine children went on to play major league baseball: Vince, Joe, and Dominic. And though Vince led the march to the professional game, playing with the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League in 1932, it was younger brother Joe who was the true prodigy. Having started with the Seals at seventeen, Joe ascended to the major leagues at only twenty-one.

When DiMaggio broke in with the Yankees in 1936, expectations were high. One writer observed, “Here is the replacement for Babe Ruth.” DiMaggio didn’t disappoint. His team won five of the next six World Series, and over the course of his career the “Yankee Clipper” established himself as one of the best players in the game. In 1955, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. But for all his accolades, he is known — most famously and above all else — for his hitting streak in 1941.

When the streak began on May 15 of that year, the Yankees had lost four games in a row and seven of the last nine, leaving them five and a half games out of first place. It was time for their better players to respond, and so DiMaggio did. For two full months, he reached base safely in every game, hitting .408 for the stretch, with fifteen home runs and the ludicrously low strikeout total of five. Hoisting themselves onto DiMaggio’s sinewy back, the Yankees vaulted into first place, going 41-13 (games nine and fourteen ended in ties) and eventually ran away with the American League pennant.

The streak came to an end on July 17, game two of a series against the hometown Cleveland Indians. It was a muggy Ohio night, yet there were more than 67,000 fans in attendance. DiMaggio had already obliterated the arcane record of Wee Willie Keeler, a 5’4”, 140-pound batsman who in 1897 had “Baltimore chopped” his way to a forty-four-game streak, assisted by the archaic rule that foul balls were not counted as strikes. Coming into the eighth, DiMaggio was 0-for-2 with a walk. He had twice smashed grounders that Indians third-baseman Ken Keltner had turned into unlikely outs. Relief pitcher Jim Bagby faced DiMaggio with the bases loaded and one down. Cleveland, which would end the season twenty-six games behind the eventual world-champion Yankees, was losing 4-1. There was, in essence, nothing at stake but the streak. When Bagby induced a grounder toward his adroit young shortstop, Lou Boudreau, the most extraordinary of sporting feats came to a most unremarkable end: a double play. The streak was over — consigned to the record books, to baseball history, to sporting mythology.

There were, from the earliest days, whispers that the streak was not all that it seemed. Given how thoroughly DiMaggio had trashed the old mark, and given that contemporaries such as Ted Williams and Stan Musial — hitters with stronger track records — could never break even the thirty-game mark, skeptics wondered if favouritism had somehow factored in. Indeed, a thoughtful examination suggests not only that the streak as we know it might not have happened, but also how and why such a fiction could persevere.

While DiMaggio was grinding through the early games of the streak, America was on the precipice of a conflict involving tens of millions of combatants. Congress had passed the Selective Service and Training Act the previous autumn, and by the summer of 1941 a handful of major-league stars, including Hank Greenberg, had been drafted in anticipation of the United States’s eventual entry into the war. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a life-long baseball fan, had written a letter in January of that year to baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis stating, “I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going . . . if 300 teams use 5,000 or 6,000 players, these players are a definite recreational asset to at least 20,000,000 of [their] fellow citizens.” The summer of ‘41, at least as far as big-league baseball was concerned, was to be business as usual.

The distractions of the war combined with the limitations of the media of the times to keep the particulars of the streak from public scrutiny. Though baseball was first broadcast on television in 1939 (a game between Princeton and Columbia), it wasn’t until after the war that telecasts became common. Radio had been integral to the national pastime since the thirties, and by the time war broke out many teams broadcast their entire schedules, but the Yankees were unable to attract a corporate sponsor willing to pay $75,000 to broadcast home games during the summer of ‘41. So, short of attending games themselves, fans of the Bronx Bombers could follow the streak only by reading the papers or listening to a nightly fifteen-minute radio re-enactment on wins. Every DiMaggio at-bat not witnessed in person was thus filtered, condensed, and dramatized — fully left to the imagination.