Starting in December and ending on Opening Day, Joe Posnanski will count down the 100 greatest baseball players by publishing an essay on a player every day for 100 days. In all, this project will contain roughly as many words as “Moby Dick.” Yes, we know it’s nutty. We hope you enjoy.
Joe DiMaggio was in the midst of a nasty little slump when he took the field on May 15, 1941. He felt like he was hitting the ball pretty hard, but all luck had abandoned him. He was cracking line drives right at shortstops. He was smashing would-be doubles that were just within the reach of outfielders. He wondered when the cloud of bad luck would pass.
Advertisement
On May 13, he faced Cleveland’s Bob Feller, and he went hitless, and luck had nothing to do with it. After the game, he muttered: “I don’t think anybody’s ever going to throw a ball faster than Feller does. And his curve? It ain’t human.”
So when May 15 began, DiMaggio was in a foul mood. The Yankees were losing. New York manager Joe McCarthy made everybody come to Yankee Stadium early for extra batting and fielding practice. The Yankees lost 13-1 to the White Sox anyway to fall below .500. The New York Daily News’ sardonic lede: “The Yankees held secret practice at the Stadium yesterday morning, and they should’ve made the ball game that followed a secret too.”
DiMaggio managed a single off a pitcher named Eddie Smith. It was, the Daily News pointed out, his first single in three days.
The most wonderful things so often begin in the plainest ways.
The next day, DiMaggio got two massive hits, one of them a 430-foot home run off White Sox pitcher Thornton Lee — “one of the longest ever seen at the Stadium,” the Daily News crowed — and the other a 400-foot triple. It would be a little while before anyone noticed, but the streak had begun.
Joe DiMaggio was already baseball’s biggest star when the streak began. He’d won the previous two batting titles. He’d won the 1939 MVP convincingly over Jimmie Foxx and Feller. His career numbers for his first five seasons were .343/.402/.623, and he was celebrated for his center-field defense, and his Yankees had won the World Series in four of those five years.
But … he wasn’t yet DIMAGGIO, all capital letters. You have to remember, he came of age in a time of legends. Babe Ruth had only just retired when DiMaggio began. Lou Gehrig was DiMaggio’s teammate until he could no longer go on and yet considered himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. Foxx and Hank Greenberg were at their peak, Mel Ott was cracking hits and homers with the crazy batting style, and Feller, as DiMaggio himself admitted, threw a baseball as hard as anyone ever had.
Advertisement
Then in Boston, a thin kid named Ted Williams suddenly appeared and hit rockets.
What was DiMaggio’s claim to be among the immortals? He was a terrific ballplayer, yes, but he didn’t yet have anything he could call his own. His name would become legendary — “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio,” Simon and Garfunkel sang — but in those tense years before World War II, DiMaggio did not yet spark those emotions. It was foreign, and foreignness was feared. Stereotypes filled so many of the stories written about him — the boy eating his mama’s spaghetti, the slick black hair, the constant mentions of olive oil. “Although he learned Italian first,” Life magazine assured fans, “Joe, now twenty-four, speaks English without an accent and is otherwise well adapted to U.S. mores.”
And then there was the money. DiMaggio was unafraid to fight for money. He held out for more money after his sensational 1937 season, when he led the league in homers and total bases. It turned into the nastiest fight imaginable. “DiMaggio is an ungrateful young man and is very unfair to his teammates to say the least,” Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert told reporters. “I’ve offered $25,000, and he won’t get a button over that amount. Why, how many men his age earn that much? As far as I’m concerned, that’s all he’s worth to the ballclub and if he doesn’t sign, we’ll win the pennant without him.”
DiMaggio was outraged, but in those days there really wasn’t anything to be done. The press was against him. The fans were against him. He sheepishly signed for $25,000, at which point the victorious Ruppert ungraciously and smugly said: “I hope the young man has learned his lesson.”
When DiMaggio returned, the fans booed him. He never forgot that. Ever.
So, yes, Joe DiMaggio in 1941 was a star. But he still needed something to take him higher.
Advertisement
He cracked a single on May 17 and went 3-for-3 the next day against the St. Louis Browns. He doubled off Denny Galehouse on Monday, scraped a single off St. Louis’ Elden Auker in the bottom of the eighth on Tuesday and got two hits off Detroit pitchers Wednesday (though in that game, the bigger story was his perfect throw that nailed Charlie Gehringer trying to go first to third on a single).
It is striking, looking back, to see how easily the streak could have died before it ever got going. He singled in his last at-bat against Detroit’s Archie McKain. He got just one single in five tries against Boston in a 9-9 tie. He blooped just one single off Lefty Grove when the Red Sox crushed the Yankees 10-3. At this point, the streak was 11 games.
He got four hits and hit his second tape-measure homer of the streak in Washington on May 27. Two days later, reporters made the first mention: “In the fourth, Joe DiMaggio led off with a single to left, stretching his hitting streak to fourteen straight games.”
He was barely stretching this thing along. In the nine games between May 28 and June 5, DiMaggio got just one hit in eight of them. It didn’t really feel like anything. In one of those games — a 13-0 loss to Boston — DiMaggio made three errors, so who cared about the meaningless single? On June 1, the Daily News called out DiMaggio for “getting his slumps.” On June 3, DiMaggio’s lone hit was a homer, but the Yankees lost again and were mired in third place behind Cleveland and Chicago and just a game up on Boston and Philadelphia.
But people were beginning to follow along. June 4 was a rainy and dour day in New York; Gehrig’s funeral services were held. The Yankees were in Detroit — well many of them were. Bill Dickey left Detroit for the funeral (DiMaggio’s first wife was there as well). But DiMaggio stayed in Detroit and the next day he went 1-for-5, a triple off Hal Newhouser. The Yankees lost again. But the streak was at 21 games.
On June 8, DiMaggio managed two hits in each game of a doubleheader in St. Louis. The streak moved to 24 games.
The Daily News’ Jimmy Powers was still unimpressed. In his famed “Powerhouse” column, he wrote that, yes, DiMaggio had a hitting streak going, but that his “batting average has really been fattened at the expense of pushover pitchers, fellows on the lowly A’s, Browns and Senators.” Powers then ran a chart showing that DiMaggio was hitting .231 against Cleveland and .222 against the White Sox — the Yankees’ top contenders — but he was hitting a combined .448 against Philadelphia, St. Louis and Washington.
Advertisement
“Y’otto use the big club on th’ big bat on the big teams,” he advised DiMaggio in an accompanying comic.
When DiMaggio hit 26 straight games — 2-for-4 against Chicago with a game-winning homer in the 10th — the story began to take shape. Who had the longest hitting streak anyway? It was a pretty obscure trivia question at the time, but the modern record belonged to the great George Sisler, who hit in 41 straight games. Reporters rushed to find Sisler, who was running a sporting goods store in St. Louis.
“If my hitting streak is going to get broken,” Sisler said, “I’d like to see Joe DiMaggio do it.”
The reporter asked Sisler if he’d had gotten any breaks during the streak. “Lucky hits?” Sisler said, as all great hitters must, “I don’t recall any off-hand.”
DiMaggio homered the next day and doubled the day after that to tie the team record at 29. And it could have ended there. On June 17, DiMaggio failed to get a hit his first two times up and, his third time, hit a ground ball to short. The ball hit a divot in the infield and bounced up and over the glove (and head) of White Sox shortstop Luke Appling.
“That,” DiMaggio would say, “was the luckiest hit of my streak.”
But there are no lucky hits for great hitters, and the streak moved to 30, a Yankees record.
He was living right. An infield single extended the streak to 31 — that was the same day that Joe Louis fought Billy Conn in a fight the whole country was talking about. DiMaggio wasn’t really hitting any better than normal — he’d hit .347 for three weeks, and his lifetime batting average at that moment was .343. But he had excellent timing. And then he did get hot, three hits against the White Sox, four hits against the Tigers on Ladies’ Day at Yankee Stadium, two more hits including a homer against the Tigers a couple of days after that.
Advertisement
That homer actually set a different record: It was the 18th consecutive game that someone on the Yankees hit a home run.
As DiMaggio kept hitting, reporters realized they were covering something pretty new. Every day, people would ask each other “Did DiMag get a hit today?” Reporters sought out Ted Williams and asked him if he wanted to have a hitting streak like DiMaggio’s. His answer is almost as legendary as the streak itself.
“I sure have,” he said. “I’d like to break every hitting record in the book. When I walk down the street I’d like for them to say, ‘There goes Ted Williams, the best hitter in baseball.’”
It turned out that Ty Cobb, who had a 40-game hitting streak in his career and could be ruthlessly dismissive of younger players, was rooting hard for Joltin’ Joe. “DiMaggio is wonderful,” he said. “Would he hit the dead ball? He’d hit anything. He would be a great star at any time in the history of the game.”
And then, he added: “I think DiMaggio could be even greater than he is. I don’t think he conditions himself properly during the winter months.”
And then he said that Bob Feller was not as fast as Walter Johnson.
Well, you get what you get when you interview Ty Cobb.
DiMaggio himself was stunningly relaxed. He laughed as reporters nervously surrounded him as if they didn’t want to jinx him.
“Talking,” he said cheerfully, “is not going to stop it.”
“Are you worried?” they asked him.
“Why should I worry?” he asked. “The only time to worry is when you’re not hitting.”
He made it 37 straight games (and extended the Yankees’ homer streak). No. 38 came on a double in his last plate appearance against Auker. Two hits in each of his next two games, and Joe DiMaggio was at 40 games, one away from tying Sisler’s modern record.
And at this point, yes, it had grown into the biggest sports story in the country. Nobody had really cared about hitting streaks before, not like this. Nobody was even sure why a hitting streak even mattered — does it help your team win more if you spread hits out just so over a number of days? Probably not, no, but there’s something so satisfying about a hitting streak, something that speaks to the heart.
Advertisement
Every day, you wake up, and you hope that something good will happen.
And during a hitting streak, it does.
Plus, the streak perfectly fit the rhythms of Joe DiMaggio. There he was, every day, same look, same gracefulness, same sense of purpose. “There is always some kid who may be seeing me for the first or last time,” DiMaggio would say 10 years later. “I owe him my best.” This was his legacy, his play for immortality: As the sportswriters sang, he came to play every day, and he never threw to the wrong base, and he never made a mistake on the base paths, and he never threw away an at-bat.
And if the sportswriters exaggerated — and they perhaps exaggerated more for DiMaggio than anyone — it was forgivable because he was Joltin’ Joe. And he had the hitting streak.
He tied Sisler in the first game of a doubleheader at Washington by rapping a double in the sixth inning. In the second game, his single off reliever Red Anderson in the seventh inning got the Daily News to break out their war headline size: DIMAG SETS HIT RECORD.*
*Well, the full headline was: DIMAG SETS HIT RECORD; YANKS WIN 2; FLOCK SPLITS. Headlines used to be so much fun.
“How do you feel, Joe?” reporters asked.
“How would you feel?” he asked back. “Great! Terrific! Silly! Terrific! Anything you want.”
At some point — pretty late in the process, to be honest — reporters figured out that Sisler’s record was not the all-time record. “Wee Willie” Keeler, famed for saying that his job was to hit ’em where they ain’t — had hit in 44 straight games over two seasons, from 1896-97. It was a pretty suspect record, to be honest, as it was spread over two seasons and it was a whole different game.
But with Sisler out of the way there needed to be a new goal, and DiMaggio broke Keeler’s record on July 2 with a home run off Boston’s Dick Newsome (he had been robbed of hits twice by great fielding plays).
Advertisement
By the way, to give you an idea of how different the time was: There were 8,682 in the crowd when DiMaggio broke Keeler’s record.
After that, with no more worlds to conquer, DiMaggio just kept on hitting because he was DiMaggio. The Yankees played a doubleheader on Lou Gehrig memorial day — with 55,000-plus in the stands — and DiMaggio ripped four hits in the first game, two more in the second. That moved the streak to 48.
He got to 50 with another four-hit game, this one against the St. Louis Browns.
Two hits against St. Louis made it 51. In a four-game series against the White Sox, he spread out seven hits to move his streak to 55.
Then the Yankees went to Cleveland, and DiMaggio reached that number that ties so closely to his name: No. 56. You can see him cutting through that baseball poster with 56 written on it. You will think of him if you are buying groceries and 56 turns out to be the price. DiMaggio and 56 are utterly inseparable.
In 56 games, Joe DiMaggio hit .408/.463/.717, but this is hardly the point. As many have pointed out, for the entire 1941 season, Ted Williams hit .406/.553/.735.
No, the point is that he just kept the thing going. The streak ended on July 17 in Cleveland in front of the largest crowd — 67,468 — to watch a night game up to that point. DiMaggio hit three infield grounders that day. The first was a smash down the third-base line; Cleveland third baseman Ken Keltner made a backhand stab and fired across the infield to beat DiMaggio by a step and a half.
DiMaggio’s next ground ball was hit just as hard, but closer to Keltner, who threw him out easily. And his third grounder was a tailor-made double play to shortstop Lou Boudreau. Shortly after the game, DiMaggio was photographed making zeroes with his thumbs and index fingers — his first oh-fer in more than two months.
“It couldn’t last forever,” DiMaggio said, but he was wrong about that. It has lasted forever.
Note: Portions of this series were adapted from previous work that originated on my personal blog.
(Top photo: Bettmann)