Baseball: Midseason
(See front cover) Baseball superstition says the teams which lead the major leagues July 4 will lead them when the season ends. The superstition proves nothing except the gullibility of the baseball public. Neither in 1934 nor 1935 was either pennant winner leading on July 4. Nonetheless, coming at midseason and coinciding with that mid-summer equivalent of the World Series, the All-Star game, July 4 serves as a convenient punctuation point in the long saga of the No. 1 U. S. sports event, the six months', 154-game pennant race. Last week baseball addicts were busy reconsidering the start and prophesying the finish of what has been so far one of the most surprising baseball years on record.
In the National League, last year's pennant winners, the Chicago Cubs, were a notch behind the St. Louis Cardinals on the morning of the Fourth. In the evening, they were a notch ahead of them because, while St. Louis was losing two games to Cincinnati, the Cubs were splitting two with Pittsburgh. In the second half of the season. Chicago's main strength will be the best pitching staff in the league --Warneke, Lee, French, Davis and Carleton. Weakness of the team so far has been the failure of Outfielder Augie Galan to bat as well as he did last year. The Cardinals have Jerome Herman ("Dizzy") Dean, generally rated the best pitcher in baseball, and, at second base, the ablest recruit in the league, Stuart Martin, who is not to be confused with their famed third baseman. Pepper Martin, now playing at right field.
Well behind the Cubs and the Cardinals, though by no means out of the running, three teams were last week fighting for the two remaining places in the league's first division. Of the three--Cincinnati Reds, Pittsburgh Pirates and New York Giants--the Reds, in the third season under their enthusiastic owner, Radio's Powel Crosley, appeared the ablest, as they were undoubtedly the most surprising, because they have won only one pennant in 51 years, have been tailenders since 1929. The Boston Bees (onetime Braves), feeblest team in the league a year ago, were battling sturdily in sixth place, far ahead of the Philadelphia Phillies, the ridiculously temperamental Brooklyn Dodgers.
In the American League an extraordinary state of affairs obtained. Picked by most competent baseball critics to finish in or below their 1934 and 1935 position of runner-up to the Detroit Tigers, the New York Yankees on July 4 were ten full games ahead of them and, to all appearances, pennant winners. The Detroit Tigers, handicapped by the illness of their catcher-manager. Mickey Cochrane. who had a nervous breakdown when his team failed to hit its stride at the season's start, were a bare percentage fraction ahead of the Washington Senators.
Even if they fail to win the pennant this year, the Senators will be pleased if they can beat the Boston Red Sox. The Senators' Manager Bucky Harris was fired by the Red Sox's Owner Thomas Yawkey, whose fabulously extravagant expenditures to make his team a pennant winner have thus far totaled $2,000,000, including the $225,000 he paid the Senators for Joe Cronin with whom he replaced Harris (TIME, Nov. 5, 1934). On July 4 the Senators were pleased to find themselves a game ahead of the Red Sox who, second until they lost four straight games to the Yankees last week, floundered into a tie with the Cleveland Indians for fourth place. Straggling along toward the rear of the second division were Chicago, Philadelphia and St. Louis.
The All-Star game, started in 1933 as ballyhoo for the Chicago W'orld's Fair, has become an annual feature of the big-league season. This year 16 players for each squad were selected by newspaper polls, five more by the manager of each side. Two million readers from 42 states sent in votes. Last week. Managers Char lie Grimm (National League) and Joe Mc Carthy (American League) announced their starting lineups:
American League -- Position -- National League Gehrig (N. Y.) First Base Collins (St. L.) Gehringer (Det.) Second Base Herman (Chi.) Appling (Chi.) Shortstop Durocher (St.L.) Higgins (Phil.) Third Base Whitney (Phil.) Selkirk (N. Y.) Left Field Medwick (St.L.) Averill (Cleve.) Centre Field Galan (Chi.) DiMaggio(N.Y.) Right Field Demaree (Chi.) Ferrell (Boston) Catcher Hartnett (Chi.) Grove (Boston) Pitcher Davis (Chi.)
Who wins the All-Star game is not particularly important. Some players, like Pitcher Carl Hubbell, who two years ago struck out five of the American League's best batsmen in succession, take the affair more seriously than others. Who plays in the All-Star games (rules call for at least one man from each club) is more significant, as a fleeting but true reflection of the huge, changing panorama of sport in the U. S. On last week's squads, baseball addicts found many a name which has for years been part of this panorama. They also found two that have belonged to it for less than six months, those of the only two players ever chosen for an All-Star team in their first season as major-leaguers. One was Stuart ("Stew") Martin who had certainly earned his position by ousting his own manager, famed Frankie Frisch, as the Cardinals' regular second baseman. A 22-year-old North Carolinian, who last year at this time was utility man on the Asheville team in the Piedmont League, Martin's batting average of .349 for the 60 games he has played in this year has made him one of the five leading batsmen of the National League and its most spectacular rookie since Dizzy Dean. The other was Joseph Paul Di Maggio, 21-year-old outfielder of the New York Yankees, the American League's most sensational recruit since Ty Cobb (1905).
The Yankees bought Outfielder Di Maggio from the San Francisco Seals for a reputed $75,000, not a record price but one high enough to justify him in displaying the utter lack of ability which expensive minor-league stars conventionally show in their major-league debuts. Any chance Di Maggio might have had to shine this season seemed even more thoroughly ruined by the attention he received in training camp, where sportswriters hailed him as the prize find of a decade. Far from achieving the collapse which his billing led sophisticated baseball addicts to expect, Rookie Di Maggio proceeded to make the notices seem inadequate. For his first month of play, he batted .400, fielded his position almost perfectly, hit safely in 18 games in a row. In his second month, his batting average slipped to .350 but he became one of three American League baseballers in history who have hit two home runs in one inning for a total of eight bases. In the Associated Press resumes of each day's outstanding baseball hero, Rookie Di Maggio has appeared seven times during the past month. His closest rival is Dizzy Dean, who has appeared four times. In any list of reasons why the Yankees were leading the league by ten games, Yankee Di Maggio would appear at the top. On July 4 he climaxed his first half season in big-league baseball by making his eleventh home run, while the Yankees were beating the Senators in a doubleheader.
Joseph Paul Di Maggio Jr. learned baseball on San Francisco's windy Funston playground, baseball kindergarten of big-league players like Oscar Vitt, Alvin Crowder, Umpire Babe Pinelli. One day the playground coach, Edward Hennessey, found him peering through a knothole at the San Francisco Seals, introduced him to their president, Charlie Graham. The Seals tried young Di Maggio at shortstop but he showed a tendency to throw ball to the outfield instead of first base. That was in 1932. In 1933 Joe Di Maggie's older brother Vincent, Seals outfielder, hurt his shoulder, was released. Joe was sent to play right field. He got a hit his first time at bat, continued to hit safely in 61 consecutive games, smashing the Pacific Coast League record of 45 to bits. When he finished the season of 1934, the Yankees had to hurry to get an option on his services at $75,000. Manager Joe Cronin, who had been Di Maggie's boy hood hero, was ready on behalf of Thomas Yawkey with $60,000.
In the middle of the 1934 season. Di Maggio twisted some tendons in his knee getting out of a taxi. The Yankees let their option run last year, partly to give him more seasoning but more to make absolutely sure that he was not a physical wreck. There was one more anxious moment when it looked as if Colonel Ruppert might have bought a $75,000 goldbrick. That came in the training season last spring when Di Maggio first bruised an ankle and then, while treating the injury, managed to get his foot burned by a sun lamp. He made his debut at the Yankee Stadium three weeks late, got a triple and two singles in six turns at bat.
On the field, Di Maggie's principal virtue is his ability to make timely hits. First Baseman Lou Gehrig -- who on July 4 ex tended his major-league record for consecutive games played to 1,726 -- has a higher batting average (.398), but rival pitchers consider Di Maggio more likely to break up a game. He hits with a loose, easy swing, in a style that reminds experts of famed "Shoeless Joe" Jackson, flicking power into the bat with his wrists at the last possible moment. Di Maggio is not likely, this season or any other, to rival famed Babe Ruth as a home run special ist, but he hits for extra bases about half the time and is already almost as much of a hero as Ruth used to be. The clubhouse boy who sorts the Yankee's fan mail esti mates Di Maggio's to be as large as Ruth's. Most of it comes from Italian well-wishers.
When New York sportswriters first en countered Di Maggio, they mistook for exaggerated evidences of self-assurance his promises to make good which, it became apparent even before he had time to fulfill them, were actually the entirely defensive protestations of a naturally diffident youth who had never before been more than 200 miles from home. Like many young broth ers in large Italian families, young Di Maggio is characterized by a solemn, al most embarrassing humility which is exceedingly useful because it causes his elders and superiors to take paternal interest in him. When he was sold to the Yankees, a celebration was arranged at which he was scheduled to talk into a microphone. The Seals' trainer, a onetime featherweight fighter named Bobby Johnson, prepared a speech and drilled it into him, but when the time came Di Maggio merely scuffed his feet, too frightened to open his mouth. He has since become an accomplished radio speaker. Admiring the sang-froid of Trainer Johnson and the Seals' first baseman, Jack Fenton, who was his roommate on roadtrips, he did the best he could to copy their manner isms, dress and replies to wisecracks. When anyone asks Di Maggio where he has been, he has a stock reply: "I've been meandering nonchalantly down the pike."
The family which Di Maggio used to help support by selling newspapers after school now, because he sends home almost his whole salary from the Yankees, lives in considerably more comfort. They own a three-family house above San Francisco's fishing wharfs. Blackhaired Maria Di Maggio, who gave her favorite brother a signet ring when he left home, keeps scrapbooks which are extensive because San Francisco sportswriters play up Di Maggio for the city's 60,000 Italians. There are three other sisters and four brothers of whom the oldest, Tom, like greying Joseph Di Maggio Sr., who retired three years ago, is a crab fisherman. For a time it looked very much as if young Joe might follow the family profession also. This was last year when Tom Di Maggio, acting as his manager, in a financial dispute with the management of the Seals, threatened to take Joe out of baseball and put him on a fishing boat. Joe was willing, but in the nick of time a settlement was reached whereby Joe got $6,500 of the price for which his club had agreed to sell him to the Yankees. The Seals profited handsomely because Joe Di Maggio won the league pennant almost singlehanded. but to San Francisco's crabs the deal made no difference at all. Joe used the money to buy a fishing boat for his brother Mike.
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