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| Tuesday, January 16 | ||||||||
| 'I've played my last game' From "Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life" | ||||||||
Editor's note: ESPN.com is running excerpts from Richard Ben Cramer's Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life recently published by Simon & Schuster. This is the third of three parts from Chapter 13, when the Yankee Clipper says it's over and Marilyn Monroe catches his fancy.
Next day, another tough customer -- Bob Lemon took the mound for the Indians. The Yankees had their smart junkballer, Eddie Lopat. Those two pitchers battled through the game . . . to a tense and terrible 1-1 tie in the ninth. The Yankees came to the plate with their cleanup man, Berra, scheduled as first batter. But Yogi topped a tame ground ball, for out number one. That brought up DiMaggio. The Stadium crowd was wailing for him. There was no Joe Page in the Yankee bullpen anymore. How long could Lopat go on? . . . DiMaggio stepped in, cocked his bat once, and stood still. Lemon fired the hard stuff that had got him past DiMag all day. But this time, Joe was ready. He turned in the box, his bat a blur, and smashed a shot down the line. It was right at Al Rosen, the Tribe third baseman. He could barely get his glove across to knock the ball down -- it was simply hit too hard to field. Dago had handcuffed the sonofagun -- and Joe was on first base, with the winning run, and the Yankees were up in the dugout, yelling. Woodling stepped in and stroked a single into right. DiMaggio turned it on around second base and slid into third as the ball came back to the infield. Lemon walked Bobby Brown to load the bases, and then little Phil Rizzuto stepped in. As Lemon wound up, DiMaggio streaked for home: a suicide squeeze! Lemon was no dummy. He fired that ball high and tight -- a pitch that was all but impossible to bunt. But Rizzuto was the best bunter in baseball. He yanked the bat up, with the barrel at his cheek, and dropped the ball down the first base line. DiMaggio blew by the catcher, standing up -- with the run that made the difference. And the Yankees stood alone in first place.
That finished Cleveland: they would fade to five games back. But once again, the Yanks would have to clinch against Boston. They'd have their shot, September 28, in a doubleheader at the Stadium. If the Yankees won both, they would be champs again. Game one, Allie Reynolds left nothing to chance. He threw a masterpiece -- a no-hitter -- and the Yanks won 8-0. In game two, Boston got up off the canvas to take an early 3-0 lead. But then the Yankees came on like killers. It was 7-3 by the fifth, with the Red Sox hanging on, trying to stay in the game -- have a chance to slug it out in late innings. But they'd have no chance. Two on and two out, DiMaggio faced the lefty Chuck Stobbs, who was careful -- he worked the count full, three-and-two. Then he had to come in, and DiMaggio put him away: home run over the left field wall. Three runs. End of contest. And the Yankees had their third straight pennant.
In the clubhouse, there was a big celebration -- whooping, hugging, everybody wet with spray. (In the Topping years, champagne had replaced Col. Ruppert's beer.) But DiMaggio sat quietly on his stool. He was holding a ball -- brother Dom had hit it to Gene Woodling for the final out. And Woodling ran in with it, to give it to the Dago. Joe said he'd keep that one. "My tenth pennant . . ." In the history of baseball, only Babe Ruth could ever say those words. But Ruth had won three of his with the Red Sox. For the Yankees, only DiMaggio had ten.
"He can't run and won't bunt. . . . "His reflexes are very slow, and he can't pull a good fastball at all." It was a brutal assessment, and damn near true. (The only thing High missed was how DiMaggio could still beat you, somehow.) . . . The good part for Joe was, he didn't have to answer. He was on an airplane, bound for Japan with Lefty O'Doul and fifteen other "U.S. All-Stars" -- and a two-month schedule of exhibition games. Their plane made the Tokyo airport at dusk. Magnesium flares lit the skies to signal the arrival of the diamond gods. They were driven in a cavalcade of open cars to the middle of town -- the Ginza -- where pandemonium ensued. A storm of paper scraps fluttered down from windows on all sides. Raking spotlights and a fusillade of flashbulbs lit the startled Americans in stroboscope freeze-frames. College boys and high school girls flung themselves onto the cars. Lefty and Joe were in the lead convertible, which was finally stopped dead by a million screaming fans: Banzai DiMaggio! Banzai O'Doul! . . . Japanese police and U.S. soldiers had to plead with the crowd to let the car move. Joe played a few games, then left the tour early, to fly home alone. Even the Japanese fans -- the way he figured -- were cheering only for what he had been. (At that point, he couldn't know: that screaming Tokyo crowd was a harbinger of his future, too.) When he got to the West Coast, he made his arrangements to meet the Yankee owners, Webb and Topping. He'd tell them his decision and announce it in New York. He flew east in early December, and Topping was ready with his last-ditch offers. Joe could have his hundred grand. He could play when he wanted -- fill in, pinch-hit. If he didn't want to travel, he could play only home games. Joe answered: "I'm never putting on that monkey suit again." . . . The Yankees scheduled a press conference the following day, at the club's midtown office. Of course, the papers knew what was up. A few doubters -- Daniel in the lead -- pointed out that Joe was barely thirty-seven. He could easily play another year or two. True, he'd hit only .263 last year -- but his career figure was still .325 . . . and he was still, in Daniel's phrase, "the equal of any center fielder in the league." But the writers closer to Joe knew, "equal" was only an insult. They limbered up, with elegiac columns on the Jolter's history, his impact, grace, and style. The chief topic was "class" -- that ineffable quality they'd chewed over so many nights at Shor's. Class, they concluded, made DiMag the greatest in the game; class would make him leave it, while the memory of him was bright. Cannon stepped out in front of the choir: "If you saw him play, you'll never forget him." The story was too big for one press conference. So many writers, radio men with microphones, television cameras, and newsreel crews packed into the club's Fifth Avenue suite that it took four rooms to stage the Clipper's final bow. His writer pals had typed out his statement, and the Yanks' PR man, Red Patterson, handed out carbon copies for the pencil press. In another room, Joe read aloud for the radio and camera crews: "I told you fellows last spring I thought this would be my last year. I only wish I could have had a better year, but even if I had hit .350, this would have been the last year for me. "You all know I have had more than my share of physical injuries and setbacks during my career. In recent years these have been much too frequent to laugh off. When baseball is no longer fun, it's no longer a game. "And so, I've played my last game of ball." Joe thanked the Yankees, the game, and its fans. He answered questions from the writers for an hour. He posed for pictures till the newsreel spotlights blew a fuse and plunged the Yankees' suite into darkness. When the lights went back on, DiMaggio was gone. "So he turned his back on the $100,000 and abruptly walked away," Arthur Daley wrote for the next day's column, Sports of the Times. "Only a man with character and an overwhelming pride could take a step like that. The Yankee Clipper has always been a proud man. That's why he was such a great ballplayer. He was never satisfied with anything less than perfection." Those were the other big topics of the day: perfection, pride -- and money. From within the game, it was mostly money. Frank Crosetti, now a Yankee coach, said DiMaggio had pushed the salary standard higher all over the major leagues. Now that he was gone, every player would suffer. . . . Gene Woodling, the young Yankee outfielder, was already making little enough -- he got by on his annual World Series shares. "Please, Joe, come back next year," Woodling pleaded in print. "I need more money to buy shoes for my three kids." . . . Frank Lane, GM of the White Sox, said DiMaggio's retirement would cost his club some five thousand fans -- twenty-five thousand dollars -- for every game the Yankees played in Chicago. That meant every team in the league would lose, perhaps, a quarter-million dollars. (For some clubs that was the whole team payroll.) But for fans, the story was Joe's own money. How could a guy turn his back on a hundred grand? Actually, DiMag and Topping already had an agreement. The club would pay Joe his hundred G's to move into the broadcast booth, to do the interview show after every Yankee game on TV. The announcement of that deal (one day after Joe's retirement) would diminish the mourning in New York -- and put paid (with a satisfying flourish) to all the talk about Joe's money. Withal, the real story was never announced. And the few men who knew it were not much for talk. (In fact, the man who knew best, Frank Costello, was already in the federal slam for failure to talk when Kefauver came calling. Now, the feds were threatening to strip his citizenship, and throw him out of the country. Costello still wouldn't talk.) . . . So, nobody ever wrote about the money in that Bowery Bank trust account -- money Joe would have in his hands, when he retired from the game. And even in the mob, there were few men who knew how that money had grown. But a handful of i grandi in East Harlem, a couple in the East Bronx, at least one in Brooklyn, weren't at all shocked when Joe hung up his spikes. (Nor would they be surprised, one year later, when Joe would dump that stupid broadcast job.) They knew he didn't need the money -- never would. As they said around their own kitchen tables, Joe DiMaggio didn't walk away from a hundred grand. He was walking into more than a million in cash -- all safe and sound, at the Bowery. With that sort of money, you could have a nice quiet life -- just what Joe always said he was after. . . . And he did leave town, soon after his announcement -- headed home, as he said, "for some peace and quiet." But he didn't stay around his old San Francisco haunts. No one could find him at Reno Barsocchini's. Nor at the Grotto. Nor at home. He flew two or three times to L.A. The official story was "business meetings" -- that, and Joe Jr. was down there in school. But it soon got around among his San Francisco pals, Joe had some girlfriend down there. Still, no one knew much . . . till one day that spring -- as Dario Lodigiani remembered. Dario had played golf in a charity tournament at the Merced Country Club. After that, all the guys went out to a bar. Dominic DiMaggio was partners in that bar. And Reno Barsocchini was serving drinks -- just to help out. "Hey, Dario!" Barsocchini called out. "Go down that hall and turn left, the first door you come to. There's a guy down there who wants to see you." "So I walked down there," Lodigiani remembered, "and I turned left, walked in. And there in a chair, there was Joe DiMaggio! And there, on his lap . . . "I said, 'GOOD NIGHT!' . . . Talk about a beautiful gal! . . . And of course, that was Marilyn Monroe." Click here for next excerpt. From JOE DIMAGGIO by Richard Ben Cramer. Copyright ® 2000 by Richard Ben Cramer. Reprinted by persmission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Richard Ben Cramer is the author of the bestselling What It Takes: The Way to the White House, which was acclaimed as one of the finest books ever written on American politics. His journalism has appeared in Rolling Stone, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Time and Newsweek. His dispatches from the Middle East for the Philadelphia Inquirer won the Pultizer Prize for International Reporting in 1979. with his wife and daughter, he lives on Maryland's Eastern Shore. | Purchase "Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life" Visit Barnes & Noble online to purchase your copy of this book.
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Richard Ben Cramer says Joe DiMaggio was a nearly impossible subject to write about.