DiMag & Co.

The great Joe DiMaggio did not begin to get his eye on the ball until late in May. That was all his Yankee teammates needed: after that, whenever Joe's big bat cooled off for a day, someone else took up the beat. Said happy Joe DiMaggio last week: "That's the way the old Yankees won pennants . . . when the top of the batting order got chilly, the bottom half got hot."

The New York Yankees were so hot that, with the season half over, they were now favorites to win their first American League pennant in four years. On the Fourth of July, they were a very comfortable 7 1/2 games ahead of their nearest rival. It was the kind of lead that the Yankees used to enjoy in the days of Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, but the 1947 Yankees got there by different methods. They no longer specialized in slaughtering the opposition with the home run and the big inning (the National Leaguers were doing that now). Instead, the Yankees relied upon timely hits, an occasional squeeze play, plenty of hit-&-run and lots of finesse in the field.

Joe DiMaggio's talented teammates look up to him as the man who sparks the show, but Joe himself says: "It's the man at the helm ... the pilot." The man at the helm is shrewd Manager Bucky Harris. Not the least of his talents is keeping peace between the players and rambunctious Larry MacPhail, the club president. The blowoff that cleared the air came May 22, when MacPhail fined six stubborn players (including DiMaggio) for refusing to cooperate with the Yankee promotion office. From that day, with the team mad, the Yankees rolled up 34 victories in the next 46 games. Harris' pre-game pep talk was always the same: "If we can only get over this one."

Bucky Harris had taken a chance on aging George McQuinn, a 37-year-old first-baseman who was as washed-up as any big leaguer could be: the last-place Philadelphia A's had given him an unconditional release. Now, besides being the best fielding first-baseman in baseball, McQuinn was just shy of Joe DiMaggio's .339 batting average. Harris also had a prize asset in Pitcher Frank Shea, a 24-year-old rookie, the cutup of the Yanks' locker room. As of last week, he was the league's top pitcher. His record: 11 wins, 2 defeats.

There was no such standout team in the National League, where three fence-busting clubs--the Braves, Dodgers and Giants--were bunched on top. The league lead had changed hands between them eight times in the past month. Some experts thought that the defending St. Louis Cardinals, now that Stan Musial was beginning to hit again, might yet make it from fourth to first.

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