WHILE INTEGRATION was stirring souls in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, Larry MacPhail was looking at a baseball problem in the Bronx. The Yankees of 1946 were mediocre. They finished third, seventeen games behind the champion Red Sox. No Yankee batted .300 in 1946. The team attracted 2.3 million customers, a Yankee record, but that was the heady wine of peace as much as Yankee baseball. Finishing last in the National League, the Giants drew an imposing 1.2 million. The postwar Yankee story in 1946 centered on Joe DiMaggio.
Larry MacPhail wanted Yankee baseball to resound with carnival noises. He offered nylon stockings as gifts on Ladies Day. He booked the team on airlines in an era when train travel was both efficient and luxurious. He dispensed immoderate quantities of liquor to the press. But the ballclub did not win. On May 9, 1946, in a game against the Browns, DiMaggio dropped a routine fly ball. Two plays later, trying to take a single on one bounce, he misread the hop and the ball skipped past him. Two errors in a single inning. The Browns won, 6 to 1. In the press room later, MacPhail drank hard. After three bourbons he announced, “Looks like DiMaggio came out of service too damn soon. Biggest disappointment of my life. That guy may be all washed up.”
Sober the following day, MacPhail called Clark Griffith, the penurious old pitcher who owned the Washington Senators. According to one Washington sportswriter, MacPhail offered DiMaggio for Mickey Vernon, a rangy left-handed first baseman who had never hit as many as ten home runs in a season. Griffith turned down the deal.
The idea of that trade brings a denial from Lee MacPhail (“My father would have mentioned it. He never did”) and occasions shudders of horror in the Bronx (“Vernun fuh DiMaj? Whadaya? Nuts?”). MacPhail may have been drinking when he propositioned Griffith. That would explain his memory loss around the house. Or he may have felt embarrassed. Anyway, the deal was not as ridiculous as it seems. DiMaggio might have been through in 1946, an athlete dying very, very young. Vernon, while no superstar, was competent* and durable. He was also four years younger than DiMaggio and, in fact, played major league ball until 1960, nine seasons after DiMaggio’s retirement.
MacPhail’s next attempt to discard his somber center fielder showed the man at his roarin’ redheaded best. He invited Tom Yawkey, the multimillionaire bon vivant who owned the Red Sox, to join him for a night of talk and drink at Toots Shor’s. Yawkey kept his distance from the press, in the manner of many monied men, but Shor’s was a safe saloon for public drinking. By unwritten rule, what went on at Shor’s was off the record, unless a specific exception was made.
MacPhail steered Yawkey to a banquette in a corner and told him rollicking stories. How he had built a winner in Cincinnati. How he had patched together a champion for Brooklyn. What he had needed to create a winner there in 1941, MacPhail told Yawkey, was Billy Herman, the great second baseman of the Chicago Cubs. Philip K. Wrigley, the chewing gum manufacturer who owned the Cubs, hadn’t wanted to give up Herman, but MacPhail induced Wrigley to drink with him in a hotel suite. In four hours, MacPhail’s Dodgers had Billy Herman. “I poured drink for drink with Wrigley, but I didn’t swallow the stuff,” MacPhail explained. “I kept excusing myself to go to the bathroom. Then I’d throw my drink down the sink. After a while I was a helluva lot more sober than Wrigley. I pulled out some papers and he signed them. I got Herman for a coupla second-raters and some cash and won the pennant in Brooklyn. Some guys say we won it on the ballfield, around second base. Sure. But we also won it when I was filling a sink hole with good booze.”
MacPhail threw out no booze at Shor’s. He knocked back drinks, and Yawkey joined him. MacPhail got to his idea. “I have this big dago in center field. He hits the hell out of the ball, but to left center. We got a spot out there that’s four hundred seventy feet from home. He hits these tremendous drives, home runs anywhere else, and in my ballpark they’re just damn long outs.”
“That’s the way this game is,” Yawkey said. “I got this skinny kid, pulls everything left-handed, hits these long balls to right and right center. In my ballpark, right center reaches four hundred twenty feet from home.”
The men drank some more. Yawkey wanted to know what MacPhail thought about Rickey’s plan to bring “nigras” into baseball. Shor later recalled the conversation for me.
“Gonna kill our business,” MacPhail said.
Yawkey nodded. (Yawkey’s Red Sox did not employ a black ballplayer until 1959, fully twelve years after Robinson’s major league debut.)
They were both drinking hard and they were getting along very well. After a while, at two in the morning, MacPhail proposed his trade.
The Big Dago for the Skinny Kid.
No cash. No other ballplayers.
Even up, Joe DiMaggio for Ted Williams.
“Helluvan idea,” Yawkey said.
“Put the Dago up there with your close-in left field wall,” MacPhail said, “and he’ll hit sixty homers.”
“Right,” Yawkey said. “Put the Kid in the Stadium, with the right field stands so close, and he’ll hit seventy!”
“We gotta deal?”
“We gotta deal!!”
“Shake.”
“Skoal.”
“Let’s have another.”
“There’s got to be a morning after . . .”
Maureen McGovern, who was not born until 1949, sang that hangover lyric decades later. When this particular 1946 morning after struck, Yawkey telephoned. “I can’t do it, Larry.”
“I thought we had a deal.”
“We did. I’m not denying that. But I can’t do it. They let Babe Ruth out of Boston. If I let Williams go, the fans will crucify me.”
“You’ll make new fans. Every Italian in New England will pay to see my guy.”
“No deal,” Yawkey said. “Excuse me. I’ve got to go and get a Bromo-Seltzer.”
* * *
As World War II had moved toward its mushroom-cloud conclusion, DiMaggio was out of shape, plagued by stomach ulcers, beset by arthritis, and brooding about the breakup of his marriage to a blonde starlet named Dorothy Arnold, whom someone has described as “spring training for Marilyn Monroe.”
After the 1942 season, with the draft closing in, DiMaggio enlisted in the air force. DiMaggio claims he never asked for special treatment, but the air force cast him as a celebrity soldier. His tours of duty took him no closer to a battlefield than the New Jersey pine flats, and DiMaggio, an enlisted man, was not your basic grunt. He found GI uniforms “a little skimpy” and hired a tailor to make alterations. Custom-tailored olive drabs. He lent his name to a sports column some forgotten ghost tapped out for service publications. And, for the entertainment of generals and admirals, he was required to play baseball.
First, Staff Sergeant Joe DiMaggio played center field for a team at the Santa Ana Army Air Base in southern California. “Our pitching was so bad,” he complained, “I once had to spend forty-five minutes chasing base hits around the outfield.” (Sherman was right. War is hell.) Later, transferred to Hawaii, DiMaggio starred for the Seventh Air Force team, a Pacific powerhouse packed with conscripted major leaguers and managed by a tall lieutenant named Long Tom Winsett, who had flopped as a Dodger outfielder across three seasons. Under manager Winsett, a lifetime .237 hitter, DiMaggio played ninety games and batted .401.
Viewed from Guadalcanal or Remagen Bridge, DiMaggio’s wartime hitch was a Sunday afternoon stroll beside the lily pond in southeast Central Park. But DiMaggio was not a Sunday-strolling character. In the best of times, he was high-strung, intense, chain-smoking. Wired, people say today. The older, milder term was “He’s a worrier.” Now as an enlisted man, the Wired Worried Clipper had real reason for concern. How long would the war last? Afterwards, whenever afterwards began, how much of his baseball skills would remain? There was no pension, much less job security, for major league ballplayers, and the war was robbing DiMaggio, as it robbed Bob Feller and Hank Greenberg, of prime earning years.*
Beyond that endemic insecurity, Dorothy Arnold’s decision to divorce DiMaggio troubled him in ways he did not fully understand. He was something of a roué, as famous among New York showgirls as he was among New York ball fans. But he was also the son of devout Roman Catholics. The Church, not prominent in his everyday life, asserted itself when DiMaggio married, as loudly as a bass organ chord.
DiMaggio insisted on a church wedding, which meant that Dorothy had to agree that their children would be raised as Roman Catholic. (She was nominally Lutheran.) She then decided to take instruction in the Catholic faith, although her conversion turned out to be less permanent than a cathedral. After the marriage, on November 19, 1939, in a huge ceremony at St. Peter and St. Paul’s, a San Francisco columnist reported that the DiMaggios’ wedding guests were so numerous and hungry that they consumed twelve turkeys, eight hams, fifteen chickens, and four sides of beef. This very gaudy, very crowded Italian Catholic wedding made front-page news for the tabloids.
Now, less than four years later, Dorothy was suing for divorce. The DiMaggio family was shocked. Divorce was unknown on the island near Sicily where the parents were born. How could that little blondie from Minnesota divorce their beloved Joe? The family felt scandalized and DiMaggio himself became a very angry man. He was a big, broad-shouldered character and on several occasions threatened to punch out people who asked about the divorce.
Dorothy was less inclined toward silence. She told reporters that her home life as Mrs. DiMaggio was dull. Joe went out a lot, leaving her alone. He liked to have fun with the boys. At least she hoped it was the boys. She herself liked to entertain and found nice apartments, even a penthouse on Central Park West, in New York, but Joe didn’t seem to want to be the host at parties. He liked to go out with the boys. At least, she hoped it was the boys. She thought the arrival of their son, Joe DiMaggio Junior, would secure their marriage. But the baby, she complained, couldn’t compete with Joe’s other interests, the boys he loved to talk and drink with at Toots Shor’s. At least, Dorothy concluded, raising one carefully plucked brow, “I hope it was the boys.” Subsequently, on instructions from her attorney, Joseph P. Haller, Dorothy shut up. Early in 1944, she divorced DiMaggio following, as Time magazine put it, “four and a half years of marriage, two trips to Reno and one child.”
Like very few — Charles Augustus Lindbergh comes to mind — Joe DiMaggio is a neurotically private public man. In a memorable observation that appeared in The Aspirin Age, John Lardner wrote: “Lindbergh was deliberately responsible for his continuing fame and notoriety [after the solo flight to Paris in 1927]. Loathing the blatant contactual phases of publicity, he showed nonetheless one of the truest gifts ever seen on this planet for attracting it. . . . It appeared that he needed fame to subsist, to support his confidence in the role he had won. Here is the paradox that engrosses his analyzers: a man supernormally ingrown and aloof becoming with sure instincts a chronic public figure.”
If we substitute DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1941 for Lindbergh’s historic flight — and I don’t mean to diminish either accomplishment — we have a splendid parallel. Later DiMaggio would celebrate or compensate for his retirement from baseball by marrying Marilyn Monroe. Then, having plighted his troth with the most famous blonde on earth, DiMaggio faulted the press and public for intruding on his privacy. If Colonel Lindbergh noticed, he would have offered a steely but approving smile.
DiMaggio was born in the Bay Area village of Martinez, California, on November 25, 1914, the eighth child of a couple who emigrated from Isola delle Femmine, a small, impoverished island off Palermo. All the boys — Thomas, Michael, Vincent, Joseph, and Dominic — were given the middle name Paul. It was impossible in the cabin household where Joe DiMaggio began life to forget that Paul was his father’s favorite saint. Giuseppe Paolo DiMaggio, Sr., never learned to read English. The household language was Italian.
In 1915 the family moved to a ground-floor apartment at 2047 Taylor Street on the slope of Russian Hill in the North Beach section of San Francisco, about a quarter mile from the dock. Giuseppe had bought a fishing boat that he named for his devout wife. In a phenomenon astonishing not only to baseball enthusiasts but to geneticists, the three youngest children of Giuseppe and Rosalie — Vince, Joe, and Dom DiMaggio — grew up to become major league center fielders.*
DiMaggio has not been expansive about his early years, but he says, “My parents told me I was knock-kneed and I had to wear some kind of braces. After that I had weak ankles. When I was seven or eight I picked up a broken paddle and started swinging. My sister Frances liked to pitch to me. They tell me I hit my sister’s stuff pretty hard.”
DiMaggio attended Hancock Grammar School and San Francisco Junior High before entering Galileo High School. He neither achieved nor aspired to distinction on school teams or in the classroom. After a while he quit school and went to work in an orange juice cannery. He peeled oranges eight hours a day. “I used to wonder,” said his sister Marie, “if Joe was backward. Not quick.” She was suggesting retardation. “I mean, I wondered what was the matter with Joe. Then I decided it was mostly that he was so shy.”
The baseball talent bloomed on rocky sandlots for teams called the Salesian Boys and the Jolly Knights, and then we find an oft-told and still lovely story. A shy and lonely boy, a social wallflower, steps onto a ballfield and suddenly assumes great grace and strength and beauty. “Joe,” said his brother Tom, “could always hit like hell.” At eighteen DiMaggio played 187 games for the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League. He batted safely in sixty-one straight games and knocked in 169 runs. That was in 1933. After that, someone else had to peel the oranges in the cannery. The Yankees signed DiMaggio two seasons later.
With some urging from the Yankee front office, two California veterans, Frank Crosetti and Tony Lazzeri, agreed to take DiMaggio with them to his first major league spring training in 1936. Lazzeri and Crosetti shared the driving and then — it may have been in Texas, it may have been in Alabama — Lazzeri turned to DiMaggio and said: “Okay, champ. It’s your turn to drive.”
“I don’t know how to drive a car,” said twenty-one-year-old Joe DiMaggio.
After watching DiMaggio take batting practice on March 2, 1936 — just batting practice, no 95-mile-an-hour fastballs, no shooting, hissing, snapping curves — Dan M. Daniel wrote in the New York World-Telegram: “Here is the replacement for Babe Ruth.” That was the first fusillade in the DiMaggio publicity barrage that continues into the present.
The three New York ballclubs underwrote New York baseball journalism years ago, and promotional copy — that is what Daniel actually wrote — was the return. The teams paid expenses for baseball writers on the road: hotel, Pullman berths, a weekly meal allowance. “Loans” were common. The teams served (and still serve) free meals and drinks to sportswriters before and after every home game. Favored journalists, who wrote with scarlet passion, drew special rewards, say a free trip to Florida for the wife and children during spring training. In this climate, most New York baseball writers were not in fact reporters. They were hairy-legged cheerleaders sans pom-poms.*
Stanley Woodward, whose integrity eventually cost him his job at the Herald Tribune, visited the Yankee camp on DiMaggio’s first day and reported that during a half dozen turns at batting practice DiMaggio hit three balls over the left field fence. “But the question still exists,” Woodward wrote, “whether he can power the offerings of the American League brothers after they start cutting loose, whether he can go and get them in the outfield and whether he can throw as well as his enraptured ex manager, Lefty O’Doul, says he can.”
Daniel dined out into the 1970s on his extravagant rhapsodic sentence from 1936. “I could tell at once,” he liked to say in a raspy, not unpleasant voice, “DiMaggio was the apotheosis of poetry in motion. I knew he was a great one right away.”
But Stanley Woodward, clearly, didn’t know. Good sports-writers come with a healthy skepticism. They know the story of the rookie who hits hard across several weeks of batting practice. A few weeks later, the rookie dispatches a collect telegram:
Dear Ma:
Be home soon.
They’re starting to throw curves.
DiMaggio never had to send that wire. In the seasons before he enlisted in the air force, decent Scotch sold for $2.50 a fifth, and a new Plymouth, with safety steel body and hydraulic brakes, cost $510, sales tax extra in those few states that imposed sales taxes. DiMaggio’s accomplishments in New York and a certain stubborn contentiousness brought him a salary of $43,750 by 1942. He was such a formidable businessman that the commissioner of baseball, hatchet-jawed, white-haired Kene-saw Mountain Landis, investigated a charge that Joe Gould, a tough little boxing manager, was DiMaggio’s business agent.
“He’s just a friend, Judge,” DiMaggio told Landis. “He gives me advice on endorsements.”
“We have no objection to that,” Landis said, “but is Gould getting a percentage of your Yankee salary?”
“No, sir.”
“Because if he is, DiMaggio, I’ll suspend you. My job is to protect baseball. We can’t have agents dirtying up the game. Suspend you. Maybe banish you for life.”
In a sense, DiMaggio called Landis’s bluff, as no other player ever did. He reported his chilling meeting to Bob Considine, a popular columnist for the Hearst newspapers.
“Why this heavy righteousness in Landis’ office?” Considine wrote the next day. “If Gould dug up easy endorsement dough for DiMaggio, it’s none of Landis’ business.
“The lackadaying is a front. The big league bosses are afraid that the ball players will smarten up enough to hire tough agents to speak for them.
“And if that ever comes to pass, the ball clubs would have to pay the blokes what they’re actually worth.”*
DiMaggio, a strong, rangy slugger who rarely struck out, clearly was worth a great deal. Center field at Yankee Stadium was only slightly smaller than the state of Nebraska and DiMaggio roamed the Bronx prairie with great skill. When Hank Greenberg walloped a 460-foot drive in August of 1939, DiMaggio ran back and caught that formidable wallop. DiMaggio could throw and catch the ball and hit, and with remarkable quickness he learned to play the New York press as well as he played the outfield.
Toots Shor’s restaurant in the West Fifties had a special appeal to athletes and celebrities. It was against house rules to bother anyone for an autograph; ballplayers in Shor’s were safe from tourists and fans.
The place was a clubby kind of barn; a lady I took there once said it had all the chic warmth of her boarding school gymnasium. Shor pampered the columnists and the ballplayers and they reveled in hard-drinking, nonstop talking camaraderie. At table one in Shor’s, DiMaggio came to know Considine and Jimmy Cannon and Bill Corum and Red Smith, and if any of them ever wrote a critical sentence about him, it has escaped my research. DiMaggio took the sports columnists into his confidence. Leaving his shyness far behind, he learned to swap stories until each important New York sports columnist regarded Joe DiMaggio as a personal buddy. Although this obviously was distinct from playing ball, it stands as a remarkable accomplishment on its own. In time someone remarked of Cannon that he “romanced DiMaggio as if Joe were some broad.” DiMaggio has a poker player’s feel for people, their strengths and vulnerability. He treated Cannon like a friend and the writer rewarded him with love poems in the shape of columns. As sports editor, Woodward felt he had to reprimand Red Smith only once.
“Walter,” Woodward said, using Smith’s baptismal name for emphasis. “You are not writing about deities. Stop godding up the athletes.”
The reference was to DiMaggio.
If you had any doubts about the batting skills of Ted Williams, you could get them cleared up by Williams himself, often in a memorable way. Once, trying to understand the sudden stardom of one of Williams’s teammates, the journeyman infielder Billy Klaus, I asked if Williams could explain a man having a very good year after experiencing a relatively bad one.
“Who ya askin’?” Williams said in a congenial bellow.
“You.”
“Mister,” Williams said, “I can see you don’t know very much about baseball, if you’re asking me about a bad year. See them bastards there.” He indicated a semicircle of New England sports reporters auditing from a distance. “Every one of them would give their left nut to see me have a bad year. But, mister, it ain’t gonna happen because ol’ T.S.W. [Theodore Samuel Williams], he don’t have bad years.” Lest I miss the point, Williams bounced a bat off the grass with great force, caught it one-handed on the rebound, and walked away.*
Such extravagant behavior was alien to DiMaggio. Indeed, he took pride in keeping his emotions under rigid control. When questions annoyed him, DiMaggio glared through the questioner. He didn’t boast. He was a more subtle artist than Williams and is perhaps more difficult to appreciate.
Fast as he was in his youth, DiMaggio never stole more than six bases in any major league season. As a rookie, stationed in left field, he threw out 22 base runners. By 1940, established in center, he threw out only 5. DiMaggio was an outstanding base runner on a team that did not steal, but there is no statistic for that. Rival base runners stopped taking chances when Joe DiMaggio was throwing from the outfield, and no statistic covers frozen base runners either. He twice led the league in home runs, batting average, and runs batted in, but he never led in all three columns during the same year. The vaunted “triple crown” eluded him.
Williams is most famous for hitting .406 in 1941. “You know,” DiMaggio remarked as we sat with Hank Greenberg at a little table on an Old Timers’ Day at Shea Stadium, “I wanted to hit .400 myself. One year, I really had a chance. That was 1939. On September 8, I think it was, I was hitting .408.
“Then something went wrong with my left eye. Really wrong. It got sore as hell, all bloodshot and inflamed. I could hardly see out of it. Allergy? I don’t know.
“But Joe McCarthy didn’t believe in cheese champions [a boxing term, for champions of small worth]. He kept playing me every day. He had to know the agony I was going through, swinging at that tough pitching with a blurry eye. I’ll never understand why he didn’t give me a couple of days off. But he didn’t. You played in those days with anything short of a broken leg.” His vision reduced, DiMaggio finished the 1939 season with a batting average of .381.*
DiMaggio’s most soaring accomplishment is generally said to be his great batting streak. In 1941, he hit safely in 56 games, swinging hard, not bunting, even when the streak was on the line. No one has come within a dozen games of matching that streak, but appreciating DiMaggio, even for 1941, requires a certain sophistication. During 1941, DiMaggio struck out 13 times. Swinging as hard as he could, clouting 30 home runs, against the best pitchers in baseball throwing him their best stuff at the corners, DiMaggio struck out once every two weeks. “He simply had no weakness,” Bob Feller says. No one has ever gotten his bat on the ball with so much power so consistently as Joe DiMaggio, 1941.
He was not the same player after World War II. DiMaggio was a winner down to his last at bat — a two-base hit — but after the war his excellence came fitfully. He was not quite as fast a runner as he had been. His throwing arm weakened. Good inside fastballs bothered him. These foibles and slumps upset Larry MacPhail. Like Red Smith, MacPhail confused a star with a deity.
Larry MacPhail discovered that he had a mortal playing center field. These pages may suggest that Leland Stanford MacPhail was a bit of a clown. He was not that. Increasingly he was a bit of a drunk. He could be petulant, petty, and, as on the issue of integration, as wrong-headed as a sinful Janus. But what saved MacPhail in baseball, at least for a little while, was inspired pragmatism. All right. We’re stuck with DiMaggio. God is not available to play center field in the Bronx. Let’s make the best of what we have.
DiMaggio had waged contract wars with the Yankees across many seasons. Some fault was his. Once he told San Francisco reporters that he threw a Yankee contract into the municipal dump. The story that followed infuriated the Yankees’ feudal lords. But some fault traced to Yankee management, which was mean-spirited.
MacPhail, stuck with DiMaggio, called the star into his office at the Squibb Building immediately after the 1946 season. Aside from hitting under .300, DiMaggio had failed to bat in 100 runs for the first time in his major league career. His divorce was final now. Absolute. He wasn’t hitting. He was alone. DiMaggio did not feel good about himself
“We know what happened last summer, Joe,” MacPhail began. “We’re going to move on from there. We aren’t going to brood about the past.”
Brooding is an avocation with DiMaggio. He looked at MacPhail and exercised his right to remain silent.
“This yellow pad,” MacPhail said. “I’m taking one sheet. I’m giving you one sheet. Do you have a pen?”
DiMaggio nodded.
“We’re going to do numbers. Last year, Joe, coming out of the army you were paid $43,500. I want you to write down on that yellow paper what you think you should be paid for next year. I’m going to write down what I think. Then we’ll compare numbers.”
DiMaggio took his time. He didn’t trust baseball people. He wanted to be careful. But he wasn’t a thief. He’d had a lousy year. He got $43,500 and gave the team a lousy year. They finished third. He wasn’t worth another $43,500.
DiMaggio wrote down five numbers. The salary he proposed for himself, a significant cut, was $37,500.
MacPhail looked and nodded and said, “Now I want you to see my numbers, Joe.” MacPhail had written $43,500.
“I guess,” MacPhail said, “you’d rather play for my numbers than for yours.”
DiMaggio smiled. The somber presence lightened.
A satisfied DiMaggio was nobody you wanted to pitch to when a game was on the line.
A few days later, October 19, MacPhail traded Joe Gordon, a splendid second baseman, to Cleveland for Allie Reynolds, a right-handed pitcher of great strength, who for mysterious reasons had not won consistently.
Reynolds, an Oklahoma Creek Indian, was reborn in the Bronx and nicknamed Superchief. He could start and relieve and overpower every batter in the league, including Theodore S. Williams.
Years later Casey Stengel talked to me about Reynolds’s ability to win as a starter and win as a reliever with grammar unique to Stengel and, in the middle of all that crowded syntax, a quality of awe.
“Reynolds,” Stengel said, “is the greatest two ways, which is startin’ and relievin’, the greatest ever, and I seen the great ones, Mathewson, and I seen Cy Young and I wondered who that fat old guy was, which tells you what a dumb young punk I was. You could look it up.”
With a happy DiMaggio and a primed Superchief, the revived Yankees were ready to take over the world, come 1947 and the years that followed. MacPhail was an architect of that great team, which now awaited only a Second Coming, the arrival of Casey Stengel, ringed by light. But for that the Yankees would have to wait through another Christmas or two.
*And sometimes more than that. He won the 1946 American League batting championship at .353. But two years later he hit under .250.
+This rule was demanded by Shor himself, a loud, beefy, softhearted character. I saw one of America’s most famous columnists drink himself into a stupor at Shor’s. The proprietor hired a limousine with driver to take the man home to Connecticut and had a headwaiter ride along and pour the columnist into bed.
That indiscretion stayed off record. My former wife, a pretty Pennsylvania girl, arrived one night noticeably pregnant. Shor pointed a finger at her navel and said, “You been doing that thing again.” After the baby was born a few weeks later, Shor sent two dozen red roses to the hospital room. I found it impossible to stay offended by blustery, gauche Toots Shor.
*But only DiMaggio was so graceless as to complain about the relative rigors of service. Greenberg, who never complained, did hard duty, rising from private to captain, with a fighting unit in South China.
*Vince was a gifted defensive player, but he led the National League in strikeouts six times. Dom, who wore spectacles, played eleven seasons for the Boston Red Sox. Fenway Park rooters made him the hero of a song Harvard men and others chanted to the tune of “O Tannenbaum”:
Oh, Dominic DiMaggio!
He’s better than his brother Joe.
*Editors and publishers allowed the baseball writers to live in indentured servitude because, bless my M.B.A., it saved money. Only after World War II did several nasty incidents prompt three newspapers to pay their own way. These were the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Daily News.
*Mirabile dictu, it has come to pass.
*The senior Boston baseball writer on this trip, Hy Hurwitz of the Globe, later told me: “I know Williams. We were in the Marines together. He staged that tantrum to get you to knock the Boston press in a national magazine. Whatever you asked him, he was going to end up knocking the Boston press.”
*The season of 1939 was not easy. In the grip of a fatal disease, Lou Gehrig had to stop playing for the Yankees after eight games. Subsequently, pulled muscles and inflamed corneas seemed less than serious. Still, McCarthy could safely have rested DiMaggio in September and protected the .400 average while the eye healed. The Yankees won the pennant by seventeen games.