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Was Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak the greatest feat in all of sports or merely a product of its time?

by David Robbeson

Published in the October 2007 issue.  » BUY ISSUE     

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So was the play a fluky bounce? No film exists, and written accounts differ. Many sources describe a “routine grounder” that bounced off Appling’s shoulder after he reached for it (an error of technique that any well-coached Little League infielder would be keen to avoid). DiMaggio’s biographers tend either to avoid mention of the play or to dismiss it as an impossible hop. None of these biographers actually saw the game — indeed, many weren’t yet born. To the retroactive critical eye, it seems suspect that at the very point where most streaks die, DiMaggio’s only hit was a lucky one credited by Dan Daniel.

In the twelve games that the Yanks and ChiSox played during the streak, Appling was charged with but one single error. Despite balls literally hitting him in the throat (game twenty-five), Appling’s defence during the streak was adjudged three times more efficient than over the course of his career. And his defensive incompetence in game thirty-one may have benefited DiMaggio even more than in game thirty. Debate rages as to the exact sequence, but the Clipper’s only hit in the follow-up game was either a bloop shot or a screamer that Appling got a glove on, then dropped — twice, according to some. He didn’t bother to make a throw. Again, Dan Daniel was the deciding factor.

What’s worrying isn’t merely the possibility that Daniel gave DiMaggio a number of breaks, but that historical accounts of these crucial decisions avoid any meaningful analysis. Rather than discussing potential factors such as a poor fielder and a biased scorer, most rely on a few indispensable adverbs (crazy, bad, fluky) capable of turning a routine groundout into a record-aiding base hit.

The odds against DiMaggio’s streak are so huge, it’s a wonder we can bring ourselves to believe that it really happened. Edward Mills Purcell, who shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1952, calculated that DiMaggio’s streak was the only achievement in baseball history that defied mathematical probability. Hal Stern, a professor of statistics at UC Irvine, said, “DiMaggio’s streak is sufficiently unusual that it shouldn’t have happened yet.”

It took three years after he became eligible for DiMaggio to be elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame. In his first attempt, seven players finished ahead of him in the balloting, including Dazzy Vance, a pitcher with a lifetime record of 197-140, and Ted Lyons, a pitcher who lost 230 games (against 260 wins). By the time of the Clipper’s election in 1955, the scribes had voted five players into the shrine ahead of him.

DiMaggio’s legend didn’t really begin building until later, around the time New Yorkers Simon and Garfunkel celebrated him in 1968’s “Mrs. Robinson,” with the lyric, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.” The next year, a younger generation of baseball writers anointed DiMaggio the greatest living player. Given that his supreme accomplishment had happened nearly three decades before and that the intervening years had produced players such as Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, it seemed a specious honour, but it was one that DiMaggio and his admirers embraced.

Baseball, more than most sports, reflects the times in which it is played. Rules change, ethics shift, and one era’s decisions become another’s poor judgment. Sometimes the judgments of the day are merely questionable; often they’re exercises in hypocrisy. If, in an age when Barry Bonds, a seven-time mvp, can be demonized strongly enough to dull the lustre of the all-time home run record, it seems only fair to apply the same kind of critical scrutiny back through the ages, to re-examine the “great” feats of yesteryear.

One can choose to believe that Joe DiMaggio ran the equivalent of a nine-second 100-metre dash in 1941. But to do so one must neglect the fact that his race was timed not by an impartial third party, but by a friend of his — an admirer, a co-worker — and that it took place at a time when America badly needed heroes. Was the streak the most singular sustained accomplishment in the history of sport or the work of a collective imagination seeking a new mythology?
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Comments (4 comments)

Lisa Davis: Sirs:

That Dan Daniel had what we'd recognize today as a serious conflict of interest is an understatement. Yet your attempt to delegitimize the record overlooked several key points:

1) Law-and-Order Commissioner Landis not only had no problem with Daniel acting as the Yankees official home scorer, he allowed other teams to use writers with the exact same conflict of interest to act as their official home scorers.

2) Neither Appling or the White Sox raised hell with Landis re Daniel's scoring.

3) None of the hitters DiMaggio passed questioned the validity of the streak.

4) DiMaggio had a 61 game hitting streak in 1933 (no, none of them were scored by Daniel).

Why didn't you just conjure up some massive conspiracy in which Appling and every other fielder (and scorer) were paid off by the Yankees to suffer convenient lapses of "incompetence" because "America badly needed heroes" or some such nonsense? Better yet, stick to hockey! September 22, 2007 18:23 EST

The Author: Actually, if you read about DiMaggio's minor league streak (it's not the longest in minor league history, BTW) you would find that there were games when the scorer had to be escorted out of the park by policeman. Why? Because people were incensed with the hits DiMaggio was credited with. They considered it a sham: a media stunt. Cut to the Yankees in 1941. How and why would somebody cook up a hitting streak mythology? Perhaps because another team in another league had already used Dimaggio for that same purpose.

As for your Appling point; why on earth would he question the scoring? Perhaps you never played, but I can tell you that though you're never happy to fumble a play, if it's credited as a hit (rather than an error) you feel a lot better. It's simply counter-intuitive and illogical for the fielder in question to do anything but to sell the fact that it was a bad bounce. Again, that illustrates a key component that allows for the myth - Applings ever-lasting loyalty to the story... "wasn't my fault..."

Joe DiMaggio was an elite hitter - that's one of the key factors to consider in the creation of the streak. An average, or merely all-star hitter would be hard-pressed (Daniel or not) to duplicate this level of consistency. Many players have hit for higher averages over longer periods of time. Ichiro, for instance, once had a 10 week period of time when he hit .450. But there are few hitters capable of that at any one time.

If, against all common sense people decide to buy the myth, so what? Well, it seems to me that if it's important enough for someone to have an opionion about these things, they really should know more than the Sports Illustrated version of what happened. September 30, 2007 23:36 EST

Bob S: David Robbeson had it right about Dan Daniel's influences in baseball. Last game of 1945 season at Yankee Stadium, NYY Snuffy Stirnweiss
was battling CWS Tony Cuccinello for bat title.
In first at bat, Stirnweiss hit ordinary roller to Red Sox 3B Jack tobin who messed up the grounder completely. I was sitting at 3B railing of stands. The error sign went up. After the game ended, when it was learned that Cuccinello had won, .30846 to Stirnweiss' .30696, the scorer changed Tobin's error to a hit and Stirnweiss won bat title at .30854. This can be checked by game reports in NY Times & other NY papers.
Daniel controlled baseball writers so much that in 1942 he had NYY Joe Gordon win AL MVP with Gordon leading the AL 2B in errors and leading AL in grounding into DPs over Ted Williams' first triple crown. October 08, 2007 14:52 EST

cdogzilla: Hitting streaks are as stupid and arbitrary a thing to celebrate as hitting for the cycle. Even without the favoritism of an official scorer, isn't the 56 game hitting streak the least of the 'big records'?

DiMaggio hit .408 over 56 games, so what? Ted Williams hit .406 for an entire season. Surely that's orders of magnitude more impressive. Is that .408 the best anyone has ever hit over 56 games? I doubt it and, if it's not, then what's the big deal? Seriously, if you were a player and could choose between a hitting streak or to hit for higher average with more RBI over the same period of time, wouldn't you choose the latter? If you wouldn't, then wouldn't you have to conclude you were a Glory Hound putting your celebrity over your team's success?

It's my sincere hope that the hitting streak is demythologized when some Punch-and-Judy hitter goes 57 games hitting .276 with 1 HR, no game winning RBI, and more strikeouts than walks.

DiMaggio was a great player: .325 career batting average and 361 HRs in 13 seasons, etc ... That's why he's a Hall of Famer. Celebrating him for the hitting streak would be like saying he's a great player because he hit for the cycle x number of times. I don't know if he did or how many times, but the point is: it doesn't matter either way because it's irrelevant. October 13, 2007 08:49 EST

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