The Big Guy

(See Cover)

The centerfielder of the New York Yankees had the worst charley horse he could remember. He wore a thick bandage over his left thigh (to support the strained muscles) and a second bandage around his middle to hold up the first one. Said Joseph Paul DiMaggio, more in simple fact than in complaint: "I feel like a mummy."

On any ordinary day such aches & pains would have put Centerfielder DiMaggio out of the lineup. But no day last week was an ordinary one in the American League. The Yankees were fighting for survival in the hottest pennant race in history, and they needed DiMag.

The visiting Boston Red Sox treated him with proper respect, crippled or not. Twice he came to bat with runners on base, and a buzz of excitement rippled through Yankee Stadium and down the pitcher's back. Twice he banged in a run. The third time, the crowd let go an angry bellow: the Sox, trying to protect a slim lead, sent him to first base on a pass instead of letting him swing at the ball. Joe scored the run that put the Yankees out in front, anyway.

That night, with the scores all in, the Yankees, the Red Sox and the Cleveland Indians found themselves knotted in a triple tie for the American League lead--a state of affairs so unprecedented that league officials had to powwow hurriedly to consider what should be done if a season happened to end that way.*

Jeez! Jeez! Across the U.S. last week, the seesaw race had baseball fans quivering. Cleveland motorists had to wait for their gasoline until absent-minded attendants finished listening to another play on their radios; business in downtown movie houses slumped 25%. In Boston, scalpers asked and got as much as $30 for a pair of tickets. One New Yorker, his nose buried in the box scores, tripped over a fire hydrant and banged his head hard enough to need stitches.

The ballplayers felt the tension too. In the Yankee dressing room, they kept nervously assuring each other that they didn't have pennant jitters. (The strain registered on steady Joe DiMaggio: he was up to a pack of Chesterfields a day.) Cleveland's Indians had lost only three games since Sept. 8; all anybody had to do to make them jump was strike a match.

When high-strung Lou Boudreau, the Indians' manager and shortstop, juggled his line-up last week and lost a game, there were public mutterings that maybe Club President Bill Veeck should have fired him last year, after all. One afternoon Boudreau sat listening to a broadcast of a Boston Red Sox game. He raked his hair with his fingers and exclaimed, "Jeez! Jeez!" every time the Sox scored. The Sox, under square-jawed Manager Joe McCarthy, seemed a shade less panicky. They had power to burn--what they prayed for was pitchers able to last nine innings. This week, with only five games to go, Cleveland edged one big game ahead of both the Yankees and the Red Sox.

Sirens in Boston. The National League race, too, had been a thriller for most of the summer, but by contrast it was winding up as quietly as a Quaker meeting. For a fortnight it had been clear (to all but bitter-enders) that Billy Southworth's Boston Braves were too far ahead to be caught. This week the Braves clinched it --their first pennant since 1914. Boston's Acting Mayor Tom Hannon called for the blowing of sirens all over town.

In both leagues, 1948 had been a season in which the quantity of excitement outweighed the quality of play. The home-run mark was never threatened; American League pitchers set a new record for bases on balls (5,045), and one outfielder allowed himself to be hit on the head by a fly ball he was supposed to catch. Baseball was still showing the interfering effects of World War II: not enough good young recruits had come up through the minor leagues to replace fading oldtimers.

In a year like 1948, a handful of indispensable "old pros" stand out like Gullivers among the Lilliputians. Each of the top teams in the American League race has one.

For the Red Sox it is tall, willowy Leftfielder Ted Williams, 29. He has a batting average of .368, the league's best, despite the variety of defensive shifts against him. And Cleveland would scarcely be out front without the 31-year-old Boudreau. His ankles are bad, and he is notoriously slow on the base paths, but his ability to anticipate plays makes him the best shortstop in baseball this year. In addition, he runs his team and hits .354.

With the New York Yankees, it is Joe DiMaggio. He had only missed one game all season, and he was leading the big parade in baseball's most spectacular departments: home runs (39) and runs batted in (153).

No Pushups. At 33, Joe DiMaggio has black hair, beginning to be flecked with grey. Tall (6 ft. 2 in.) and solid (198 lbs.) in the smart double-breasted suits he wears off the playing field, he might be mistaken for a man with an office in midtown Manhattan. The tipoff that he is an athlete is his walk. It has a flowing, catlike quality, without waste motion.

Unlike his perennial Red Sox rival, Ted

Williams, who does pushups every morning to strengthen his wrists and forearm muscles, DiMag frowns on off-the-field exercise, likes to loll in bed until 10 a.m. or later. He is also fond of his food: "I don't diet. I believe in three square meals a day and I'm not ashamed to say I'm nuts about spaghetti."

Part of Joe's notions about his daily regimen come from a talk he once had with Ty Cobb, after DiMaggio's first year with the Yankees. Cobb told him that a good outfielder was crazy to spend 15 minutes a day shagging fly balls once he got in shape: "Don't spend your hitting energy chasing flies. Grab a few and then sit down in a cool, shady spot." DiMag has been conserving his energy ever since. He even seems to conserve it on the playing field.

One of the sights of baseball is watching DiMaggio take a practiced look at a ball heading his way, turn, and without a backward look glide to the spot where the ball is coming down, swing around casually and let the ball fall into his glove. Like all champions, he makes it look too easy. "It's just getting the jump on the ball."

No Difference. The fans, however, don't think of DiMag as a fielder. They come to see him knock one out of the park. Whether at Yankee Stadium or on the road, a reverent roar greets him as he strides to the plate. Joe tells himself that the pitchers should be more worried than he is, and they usually are. He is a cool, relaxed figure, his bat held high and motionless, as he waits for the ball to zip in from the pitcher's box, 60 ft. away, at something like 91 m.p.h.

Unlike Babe Ruth, who used to stand with feet close together and fanny toward the pitcher, DiMaggio takes an abnormally wide stance (with feet 36 in. apart) squarely in the center of the batter's box. He waits until the very last moment before swinging. His system: "I look for his fast ball. Then if he comes in with a curve, I still have time to swing."

Joe, a right-handed hitter, prefers batting against left-handed pitchers. Reason: like many righthanders, he thinks he sees the ball sooner and follows it better from a southpaw delivery. But whether the pitcher is right-or left-handed seems to make no practical difference. He hits Right-hander Bob Feller and Left-hander Hal Newhouser as if he owned them. Last fortnight he became the eighth man in baseball history to hit 300 home runs.*

Like all ballplayers, DiMag has his hitting slumps. What causes them? Says Joe: "Oh, pressing too hard, hot weather --almost anything. I don't like to talk about slumps." Around the league he is known as a "loner" who shuns locker-room monkeyshines. After a ball game, Joe will sit quietly on the bench in front of his locker, slowly consuming a bottle of beer. "I go back over the ball game," he says. When asked if it helps, he replies, "Not much."

"A Little Extra on Big Days." DiMaggio does not hit the ball as hard as the mighty Ruth did, nor as often as Ted Williams does. But as a clutch hitter he is terrific. With men on bases and the chips down, his bat spells bingo.

This useful faculty resulted in one of the season's most dramatic moments. At Boston's Fenway Park three weeks ago the score was tied, 6-6, in the tenth. The bases were loaded, and two were out as Joe stepped to the plate. In the press-box a sportwriter sympathized with the Red Sox pitcher: "I'd rather be anybody in the world than Earl Caldwell right now. I'd rather be Henry Wallace."

Caldwell pitched, Joe swung, and a tremendous drive hit the net by the left field roof--foul by inches.

Thinking about it after the game, Joe said, "My God! You don't hit two balls that hard in one day."

But he did, and this time it was fair.

Boston's centerfielder, who happens to be Joe's younger brother Dominic, whirled and started running. Then he stopped. The ball, one of the longest home runs ever hit in Fenway Park, went to the right of the flagpole high above the 379-ft. distance marker. It scored four runs and kept the Yankees in the pennant race. Says Joe: "Maybe you give it a little extra on big days. But you don't feel it. You must do it unconsciously. It's inside you and it does something to you.

But you don't know it's there." Joe

DiMaggio candidly accepts the fact that he is good.

So do the fans. There is a "Joe DiMaggio Fan Club of Pittsburgh," which rides special buses to Cleveland (Joe's nearest stopping point to Pittsburgh) to cheer him on. When the Yankees play in Philadelphia, another fan club lets go with "DiMaggio" locomotives--like undergraduates at a football game. Does he like it? "Sure," says Joe. "A guy's got to like it. But it makes you feel embarrassed if you have a bad day."

He accepts as part of the job the autograph seekers who accost him in hotel lobbies and restaurants. He doesn't mind the kids so much, he says--it's the adults: "They always wait till you are about to put the steak in your mouth."

For his part, Joe looks with awe on Broadway footlights and the people who work behind them. In Manhattan, he lives in a 54th Street apartment hotel, not far from the theatrical swirl, and he sees as many plays as he can (some recent favorites: High Button Shoes, Show Boat, Annie Get Your Gun).

He never acquired the ballplayer's habit of chewing tobacco (he likes pistachio nuts) nor the ballplayer's trait for pinching a penny. As a result, he has hung on to only about a fifth of the $500,000 he has earned from baseball. (This year he will make about $67,000.) He owns a few blue chip stocks, a small annuity, and until recently a part interest with two of his brothers in DiMaggio's Famous Restaurant, a seafood place on San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf.

"Baseball, What Is That?" San Francisco, where Joe grew up, is still the city he knows best. He comes from an old-fashioned Italian family, poor to begin with, but proud of each other and extremely close-knit. His parents, who had come from Isola delle Femmine, an islet off the coast of Sicily, had a ground-floor flat on Taylor Street, on the slope of Russian Hill. Joe was the eighth of nine children.

Papa DiMaggio, who ran a fishing boat from the wharf at the foot of Taylor Street, believed that his five sons should be fishermen too. All the boys--Tom, Michael, Vince, Joe and Dominic--worked on the boat at one time or another, but most of the time they preferred to play baseball. "Baseball, what is that?" Papa DiMaggio used to shout. "A bum's game! A no good game! Whoever makes a living at baseball?"

One of his objections to baseball was that it wore out shoes too fast. But when Joe's older brother Vince (who later played with National League teams) was hired as a professional ballplayer for the San Francisco Seals, Papa's objections melted. Joe was peeping through a knothole one afternoon, watching brother Vince play, when a Seals' scout, Spike Hennessey, clapped him on the back. How would he like to come inside for a tryout? Joe could think of nothing he wanted more. Five years later, little brother Dom was given his chance too, on the strength of being a DiMaggio.

Within the DiMaggio family circle, relative batting averages are a cause of pride, but bear no relationship to the affection the members feel for each other. Bespectacled Dom is the family pet. "Oh, you ought to see him run the bases," his sister Marie says. "He's like a little rabbit." The entire family, including Joe, has been extremely pleased by the couplet that Red Sox fans have been chanting this year to the tune of Maryland, My Maryland:

He's better than his brother Joe--Dom-in-ic DiMaggio!

When the boys send money home (Joe has bought his parents a new house, Mike a new fishing boat), Papa shows no favoritism. Says he of Joe: "Justa one of my boys."

Ruppert's Rookie. In the early '30s, nonetheless, it didn't take long for Joe, the pea-green rookie, to outshine Vince and the other Seals. In his first full season (1933) he smashed the Pacific Coast League record by hitting safely in 61 consecutive games. He struck up a friendship with the team's first baseman, a fancy dresser and wisecracker, aped his dress and manners. From the Seals' trainer, an oldtime featherweight boxer, he soaked up fancy words. For a while, his stock reply to anyone asking him where he had been was: "Oh, I've been nonchalantly meandering down the pike."

In 1935, he helped win the Seals the coast league pennant with a .398 batting average and was voted the league's most valuable player. To get Joe on the Yankee string, the late Colonel Jake Ruppert paid out $25,000 (plus five other players). When Joe reported to the Yankee training camp at St. Petersburg two seasons later, he had been given the biggest buildup ever given a rookie.

Reporters inspected him as if he were a prize bull at a cattle show. He answered their questions. No, he'd never been east of the Rockies before ... He didn't think Florida was as pretty as he'd heard it was . . . He didn't know whether he could hit big league pitching, but he was glad to try.

He hit 29 home runs that season, played in the All-Star game, and the World Series.

Matter of Dates. After that season, everything DiMaggio did seemed to make headlines. His wedding to Dorothy Arnold Olson in 1939 (later ended in divorce) was easily the biggest public wedding ever seen in San Francisco. Fans climbed trees and stood on rooftops to catch a glimpse of the couple leaving the church. Joe made more news as baseball's balkiest holdout. Then, too, he seemed to suffer more than his share of injuries; fans were forever reading accounts of sore arms and pulled ligaments.

Joe made what he now considers the grave error of bickering with the Yankees over salary matters. After a long holdout siege, he missed the first twelve days of the 1938 season. He was booed all over the circuit, and the booing in Yankee Stadium was loudest & longest.

"It got so I couldn't sleep at night," says DiMaggio. "I'd wake up with boos ringing in my ears. I'd get up, light a cigarette and walk the floor sometimes till dawn." Nevertheless, he bore down and had a big year: 32 homers, 140 runs batted in, a batting average of .324.

In 1943, with the U.S. at war, DiMaggio made up his mind to join up. He was 28 and married, and his draft board had classified him in 3-A. He went in voluntarily, became Private J. DiMaggio, U.S. Army Air Forces. In the Air Forces, he put in three years' service in the physical training program for flight cadets. He rose to staff sergeant. Joe had one hitch in Hawaii during 1944; otherwise he was not overseas. He had a chance to play in a couple of exhibition games, entertaining troops, but that was all the baseball he had in those three years.

When he returned to the Yankees in 1946, there was no more of the old booing. After his long layoff, he had one poor season, then struck his stride last year and edged out Ted Williams for the American League's "Most Valuable Player" award (his third). Gruffed Williams: "It took the big guy to beat me, didn't it?"

Without the big guy and another old reliable, Tommy Henrich, who leads the American League in doubles, triples, and runs scored, the 1948 Yankees would not be much of a ball club. They were certainly not in the same class with the great Yankee teams of the '20s (Ruth and Gehrig) nor the teams of the '30s (Gehrig, Dickey, Lazzeri, Rolfe). Yet even with DiMaggio hobbling last week, they had been able to keep the American League race so close that the race might not be over till the last day of the season.

Lou Boudreau's Cleveland Indians had one substantial advantage: in the final days of the race, they would not have to play either the Red Sox or the Yankees. The Sox and Yanks, playing two of their last five games against each other, might knock each other out of the title. Baseball weisenheimers were cracking that nobody was going to win the pennant--two teams were going to lose it.

The DiMaggio boys were doubly involved in all that. When Joe telephoned his mother in San Francisco the other day, she told him of Dominic's plans to be married. Dom, she said, would get married on Oct. 7--unless the Red Sox won the pennant and had to play in the World Series, in which case it would be Oct. 17. "Mama," said Joe, "I'll see that Dom is free to get married on the seventh."

*Their decision in case it happens this year: a playoff game between Cleveland and Boston on Oct. 4, with the winner to take on the Yankees Oct. 5. The World Series begins Oct. 6. *The other seven: Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Hank Greenberg, Jimmy Foxx, Chuck Klein, Mel Ott and Rogers Hornsby.

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