56*

As the streak progressed, it developed an odd and frequently misunderstood media inertia. Baseball people had never been especially smitten with the notion of a consecutive-games hitting streak, and newspapers began to keep track of it more as a statistical oddity than as a phenomenon that would immediately capture America’s imagination, as history would have us believe. The New York Times, for its part, never mentioned sports stories on its front page — sports simply lacked gravitas. For accounts of DiMaggio’s exploits, a Times reader had to turn as far back as page twenty-five, after the arts and entertainment pages, then skippast stories on the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers, whom the Times covered with equal vigilance. In less-vaunted publications such as the Sporting News, DiMaggio was feted and lionized, but for the world at large the streak was page-twenty-five news. Even the day after it ended, the front page of the Times paid it no heed.

Outside of New York, reaction was mixed. Popular mythology holds that fans in other American League cities turned out in droves — largely, if not solely, to watch DiMaggio extend his record. DiMaggio biographers and many baseball historians seize upon large crowds, such as the one in Cleveland the night the streak came to an end, as evidence of public fervour. Actual attendance numbers tell a different story. Twenty-two of the fifty-six games saw crowds of fewer than 10,000 fans. Game forty-five, when DiMaggio broke Keeler’s record, was witnessed by only 8,682 people — in Yankee Stadium no less. All of 1,625 people witnessed the streak hit fifty in St. Louis. The sellouts noted by history were usually the result of doubleheaders, which drew fans seeking the bargain of an extra game, or contests played under lights, which were still relatively rare in 1941. And though more than 67,000 fans watched the streak end (under lights) in Cleveland, only 15,000 ventured to the game the previous day. This surprising variance in public attention allowed DiMaggio’s streak to progress quietly, and left those who helped perpetuate it to do so unnoticed.

In an essay related to his poem “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War,” Wallace Stevens called the poetry of war “a consciousness of fact, but of heroic fact, of fact on such a scale that the mere consciousness of it affects the scale of one’s thinking and constitutes a participating in the heroic.” A similar myth-making impulse seemed to affect the sports journalists of the era.

Reporters who covered the majors back then were not, by today’s measure, real journalists. They were almost like employees of the teams they covered. As DiMaggio biographer Richard Ben Cramer describes it, “Baseball writers had status, visibility, more freedom than any other reporter, more travel,more good times, and more money . . . they dined out on friendships with the heroes of the age . . . and every bit of it [was] on the cuff.” If a player didn’t like you, you’d simply be denied all access to the team. Cramer continues: “The quickest way to lose it all was to run afoul of the fellows in the business — not the newspaper business, but the baseball business.” A writer’s job was to keep the baseball people happy.

In keeping with the ethics of the era, Dan Daniel, a popular writer who had been covering baseball since 1909, enjoyed all the perks of covering the Yankees. He travelled with and befriended the players, and had his expenses paid for by the club itself. Daniel was, by modern standards, part of the team, as much a PR man as a reporter. He wrote of DiMaggio extensively, championing “The Big Dago” before DiMaggio had even appeared in the bigs, and it was he who authored the quote, “Here is the replacement for Babe Ruth.” The Clipper made for wonderful copy: he was a good-looking bachelor who patrolled the most revered position in all of sports, centre field for the New York Yankees. Daniel also happened to be the most important witness to the streak. The reason? This friend of DiMaggio and quasi-employee of the New York Yankees just happened, unbelievably, to be the Yankees’ official home-game scorer as well — the very arbiter of hits and errors. For games at Yankee Stadium, Daniel, and Daniel alone, decided if DiMaggio was to be credited with a hit.

“In war,” Stevens writes, “the desire to move in the direction of fact as we want it to be and to move quickly is overwhelming.” An impulse no doubt familiar to Dan Daniel.

There were instances early in the streak when others noted DiMaggio’s suspiciously good fortune. After game four, played at Yankee Stadium, the New York Herald Tribune wrote, “DiMaggio was credited with three hits on drives manhandled by fielders. Twice he handcuffed the third basemen and the other time Laabs [the St. Louis Browns’ right fielder] must have been worrying about backing into the railing when he let the ball jump out of his glove.” DiMaggio biographers tend to dismiss this preferential treatment, but even DiMaggio acknowledged, in a 1961 article in Sports Illustrated, that he was given breaks by scorers on a few questionable plays during the streak. At the time, however, no one seemed to mind if the hometown hitter was pencilled in for a cheap hit instead of an error every now and again. The standards of the day were simply different.

By game thirty, DiMaggio’s streak had reached the altitude at which most succumb. Only a dozen men have surpassed that mark in the past sixty-six years, and only Pete Rose’s forty-four-game run has made it past forty. It was June 17, and the Chicago White Sox were in town for the first game of a three-game series. Just over 10,000 people were present for one of the key moments of the streak.

“Old Aches and Pains” Luke Appling was the starting shortstop for the sad-sack Sox between 1931 and 1950. He played more than 2,400 games in his career, all with Chicago, and was elected to Cooperstown in 1964. Although Appling was a great hitter, he was a far-from-stellar fielder, leading the American League in errors six times, averagingan error every 3.66 games, and fielding a paltry .948 for his career, almost twice as many blunders per chance as his contemporaries Lou Boudreau and Phil Rizzuto. A ball hit to Appling, in other words, was anything but an automatic out.

In game thirty, Appling’s fielding would prove to be pivotal. “Jolting Joe DiMaggio was lucky,” read the Times’s account. “A ground ball that was labeled an easy out in the seventh suddenly took a bad hop, hit Luke Appling on the shoulder and DiMaggio’s hitting streak zoomed to thirty consecutive games.” More accurately, the hop was adjudged bad by Dan Daniel, and DiMaggio was credited with a hit. The play seemed, to many who saw it, to be a clear error. Hits and errors weren’t indicated on the scoreboard in those days, so some no doubt went home thinking the streak was over.