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 another 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.
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, Joe 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.
The other version can be found in Richard Ben Cramer’s detailed biography, Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life, based on reports in the San Francisco Examiner. A Sunday in May was Family Day at Seals Stadium, featuring the Stars playing the home team in a doubleheader—which meant DiMaggio versus DiMaggio. Each team notched a win, and Vince and Joe each had two hits. The Examiner, citing police sources, had Joe getting into his car at Fourth and Market Streets after midnight. He didn’t own a car then, but anyway, the implication was that he had been out drinking and fell. The identity of his companion was never ascertained, and Joe stuck to his own version. Vince may have been with him, and Joe’s version of events may have been an attempt to protect his brother. Imagine what trouble Vince would have been in if he had been out carousing with his younger brother and Joe wound up in the hospital.
In any case, Joe missed weeks of action with tendon problems. Even when he returned, the left knee was gimpy. Because of all the games he missed, he managed only 375 at-bats, but he collected 128 hits, good enough for a .341 average, one point higher than the 1933 season. His total of 69 RBI, though, was 100 below the previous year’s total. The Seals, who had gotten rid of a few veterans in cost-cutting moves, missed Joe’s production. They ended the season in fourth place.
Vince had turned 22 that September and put in a full season with the Hollywood Stars. He had grown into a strong man at five-eleven and 183 pounds, and though his average fell to .288, he had power that he had not displayed before in the PCL. He smacked 17 home runs and drove in 91 runs. He had a better year than his younger brother.
The Stars, though, had a disappointing season. They had acquired 32-year-old Smead Jolley. PCL fans remembered him as a sturdy left-handed hitter who in 1927 and ’28 had posted averages of .397 and .404 for the Seals before going on to spend several seasons in the majors. With Jolley in the outfield next to Vince, along with a couple of other fresh faces, the Hollywood club expected finally to dethrone the Angels. But owner Bill Lane’s heart attack on opening day augured that the year wouldn’t go as planned.
The Stars enjoyed visiting San Francisco because they knew they were going to be entertained when Vince took them to the DiMaggio home on Taylor Street. “It was great fun going there,” recalled Bobby Doerr, a Jefferson High School prospect who joined the Stars in midseason that year. “The food was wonderful, and Mama DiMaggio was so generous—there was always a lot to eat. I loved watching the veteran ballplayers try to drink Papa DiMaggio under the table. He made his own wine in the cellar, as people did in those days, and these old-line ballplayers would come in, and they would drink the wine hard and fast the way they drank whiskey. Mr. DiMaggio—he always had this little cigar in one hand—would just hold his glass and sip it slowly and watch them, and pretty soon they would go under the table instead.”
By season’s end, pitcher Joe Sullivan had done his part, compiling a 25-11 record. Jolley, Johnny Bassler, and future baseball executive Fred Haney all hit over .300. Vince and Jolley had been solid run producers. But a 97-88 record wasn’t nearly good enough, and the Angels sailed to another championship.
Joe had come back after the injury, but he certainly didn’t appear to be as good as new. The Yankees were hesitant about adding him to the club. Joe later wrote that hitting .341 “was good enough, but the ‘wonder’ tag was off me. I was labeled ‘crippled’ now.”
In November, the Yankees sent him to a specialist in Los Angeles, who determined that with a combination of treatments and rest, the knee would be fine. That was good enough for Yankees’ owner Jacob Ruppert (of Ruppert Brewing Company, addressed as Colonel Ruppert for the rank he’d achieved in the National Guard), general manager Ed Barrow, and manager Joe McCarthy. The club paid $25,000 for an “option” on Joe, meaning that he would be shipped off to New York after the 1935 season.
Strapped for cash, Charlie Graham, the Seals owner, had to grit his teeth and take the offer. (In Lucky to Be a Yankee, Joe contends that Joe Cronin, manager of the Red Sox and also from San Francisco, told him afterward that if the Yankees had passed, the Boston club had intended to offer $60,000 to the Seals for his contract. If this was true, beginning in 1939 the Red Sox would have had Joe DiMaggio in center and Ted Williams in left and conceivably would have been the most successful major league team of the mid-20th century, instead of the Yankees.) When the time came, New York would also send five players west to fill out the Seals lineup.
Joe made that ’35 season a memorable one for San Francisco fans. After a slow start, his knee regained full strength. He flirted with .400 for much of the season and finished at .398—which was not good enough, however, to earn the PCL batting title. Oscar “Ox” Eckhardt of the Mission Reds finished one point ahead. Eckhardt went on to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1936, but was never again mentioned in the same sentence as Joe DiMaggio. The Seals won the PCL title that year, and Joe picked up the MVP plaque. To go with his stratospheric average, he had slugged 34 home runs and led the league in both RBIs and runs scored.
More than just the healed knee helped Joe produce such a scintillating season. Lefty O’Doul was back in town. There was no baseball figure in San Francisco more popular than O’Doul, including Joe. The city had been in mourning after he left the Seals at the end of his great 1927 season. Many remembered that a Kids Day he sponsored that September drew an overflow crowd of 20,000 into Recreation Park, which would remain the all-time record. He was not a particularly good fielder. “He could run like a deer,” commented a Chronicle columnist. “Unfortunately, he threw like one too.” But he could hit. Playing for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1929, he knocked out 254 hits and had a .398 average, which has been exceeded only twice in 84 years. No hitter in major league history who hit 32 or more home runs in a season has ever struck out fewer times—19. And his combined average of 330 hits and walks that year is still a National League record as well.
From the A’s, O’Doul went to the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 1930 he joined a group of All-Stars that included Lou Gehrig and Lefty Grove to play a series of 17 games in Japan. Total attendance was 450,000. The tour was the beginning of a mutual infatuation between O’Doul and Japanese baseball fans. He returned in 1934 with Ruth, Gehrig, Gomez, Jimmie Foxx, and other American luminaries in tow. At the end of the 1934 season, he retired and returned to San Francisco. His lifetime average of .349 remains the fourth highest in major league history, behind Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson. He is not in the Hall of Fame, however, because his career game total of 970 is below the required 1,000.
Lefty took over as manager of the Seals in 1935 and had a strong influence on Joe DiMaggio. “I never taught him anything about hitting,” O’Doul said about Joe. But he was being too modest. Louis Almada of the Mission Reds had numerous opportunities during the ’35 season to watch Joe emerge as a great hitter: “Lefty O’Doul told Joe to spread his feet out. Hit off his back foot. He said, ‘Don’t move until you see the ball. Just wait until the ball gets on top of you. Hold your bat back. Hold your bat up high.’ O’Doul had to correct a few things. Joe didn’t just fall into it right away. But you could see that tremendous change that came over him.”
The most significant change was that Joe became more of a pull hitter. O’Doul had played in cavernous Yankee Stadium, and he knew, especially as the season progressed, that Joe was bound for New York. O’Doul had seen many fly balls to left-center, center, and right-center that would have been round-trippers in the PCL fall into gloves. By urging Joe to pull, O’Doul was helping him to develop the skill to hit homers down the left-field line, only 300 feet long in Yankee Stadium.
O’Doul gave Joe more than technical instruction. No matter what he did on the field, Joe was still an awkward, socially stunted young man. In I Remember Joe DiMaggio, Steve Barath, the Seals third baseman who was his roommate on the road in the 1934–35 seasons, said, “Joe was never friendly. I mean, he was friendly with me, but he didn’t want to go out. He was just scared of the world. Shy. That’s the word for him.”
“The biggest thing Joe learned from O’Doul was how to live like a hero,” wrote Richard Ben Cramer in Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life. “Everybody knew Lefty, everybody watched him, said hello to him, loved him. And in the middle of it all, Lefty did just what he wanted. He was handsome, at home anywhere he went, always the best-dressed man in the room. The admiration of males he accepted with offhand grace, and to the adoration of females he extended a courtly and catholic welcome. For Joe, this brush with the hero’s life wasn’t quite like hitting—he couldn’t just do it himself the next day. But if he was going to be a big-leaguer, a New York big-leaguer . . . this was his chance to learn at the master’s knee.”
Lodigiani remembered that “O’Doul was New York–smart from all the years that he played in the major leagues. He played with New York, especially. He kind of smartened Joe up, told him what to do, what to wear, how to dress. First thing you know, when he comes back, when you see him, Joe looked like a department store. He looked great.”
The Yankees’ interest in Joe was hotter than ever when the ’35 season ended. It certainly helped that in an article in Collier’s magazine late in the season O’Doul declared that Joe would be a national star within two years. What a bargain he looked like now, a phenom from San Francisco in exchange for just $25,000 and five players who were not much more than castoffs. Joe’s .361 three-year average in the PCL had Ruppert & Company in New York believing that he was more than ready for the major leagues and could probably step into the starting lineup.
And the Yankees needed the help. Babe Ruth, who had gone from slugger to sluggish, had been banished. On May 30, he had played his last game, back in Boston where he began, this time for the Braves. For the third year in a row the Yankees finished in second place. This trend could continue, or worsen, if the club didn’t find a young player to plug into the middle of the lineup next to Lou Gehrig, who would turn 33 in June and whose offensive stats were down significantly from his season in 1934.
So the Yankees mailed Joe a contract with an offer of $5,625 in salary. Joe showed the contract to O’Doul as well as to Tom. O’Doul turned to his pal Ty Cobb, who had Joe write a letter to Ed Barrow asking for more money. Barrow offered $6,500. Cobb dictated another letter to Joe. Barrow wrote back saying that $8,500 was his final offer and that Joe should “tell Cobb to stop writing me letters.” Joe signed the contract in November and celebrated his 21st birthday.
There was rejoicing in the DiMaggio household. Giuseppe and Rosalie were about to see a son of theirs earn what to them was a fortune, and on the world’s biggest stage. Maybe Tom and Mike had some regret that they hadn’t been given the chance to try baseball, but there was nothing to be done about it; that door had closed for them a good ten years earlier.
Another older brother might have been jealous that Joe was going to the major leagues ahead of him. But Vince believed that his time would come, maybe after just one more season with the Hollywood Stars. His increasing power showed that he was close—he had finished the season with 24 home runs (fifth in the PCL, though 10 behind Joe) and 112 RBI to go with a .278 average. He had been a star on the Stars, who otherwise had a bad season. A 73-99 record indicated a franchise in trouble, as did drawing only 90,000 fans total. And anyway, Vince wasn’t the grumbling kind. He wanted Joe to do well and make the whole family proud.
For Dominic, meanwhile, Joe’s promotion was like a beachhead. If Joe did well, maybe Dommie would get a chance too. Dominic was still undersized and slim, still wearing the thick eyeglasses that gave him more of a scholarly than athletic look, but the desire to play pro baseball was burning inside him, and he was going to take his shot.
Though he would always call San Francisco home, there was to be no looking back for Joe. He recalled: “When I packed my baseball togs in the dressing room of Seal Park [after his last game], I was sorry to leave the fellows I’d been with for three years; sorry to leave Lefty O’Doul. . . . I was sorry, yes, but I was glad too, for the Yankees had picked up my option and I was headed for the big leagues, headed for the team I wanted to be with most of all.”