Over
the course of those twenty-three games, Ted hit .487 (43 for 88)
and Joe hit .368 (32 for 87). Head to head, Ted was also the winner.
In the eight games DiMaggio played against the Red Sox during those
twenty-three games, he had as many as two hits in a game only once,
and then not really. The first of his two hits that day came on
a scoring decision so outrageous that even the New York writers
held their noses. Ted, on the other hand, had some of his biggest
days against the Yankees. Over the full season, it came to .453
(29 – 64). Against the rest of the league he hit .398.
Then too he fielded better than he ever had. When the Kid was hitting,
the Kid could field marvelously well.
During the full fifty-six games of the DiMaggio streak, the Yankees
and the Red Sox played three series, beginning with a home-and-home
series in May and ending with a three-game series, in the first
week of July, in which Joe first tied and then broke Wee Willie
Keeler’s resurrected record of forty-four straight games.
The two series in May constituted the foundation of Ted’s .400 season,
coming as they did in the middle of a sixteen-game spurt in which
he went 34 for 61, for an average of .557. In the five games against
the Yankees, he was 10 for 16 (.625). DiMaggio had one hit in each
of those games, and in two of them he was extremely fortunate to
keep the fledgling streak alive.
On Saturday, May 24, Joe was hitless when he came to bat in the
seventh inning, with runners on second and third, two out, and the
Red Sox leading, 6-5. With first base open and the winning runs
on base, Joe Cronin ordered Earl Johnson – a left-hander, yet –
to pitch to him, and DiMaggio lined the first pitch into left field
to win the game. If Cronin had walked him, as all the percentages
screamed out for him to do, the streak would have ended, unheralded
and unremarked upon, after nine games.
The next day DiMaggio had a hit in his first time at bat. Ted had
three singles and a double, behind Lefty Grove, to lift his average
to .404 and take over the batting lead for the first time. Over
the rest of the season he would drop below .400 only twice, once
following hard on his triumph in the All-Star Game and again on
the day before his triumphant finish in Philadelphia.
The second May series with the Yankees consisted of a double header
at Fenway Park on Memorial Day. Ted’s batting average was now up
to .421, and Joe’s streak was at thirteen. Number fourteen was both
the worst game he ever played and his luckiest day of the year.
DiMaggio had come into Boston with a stiff neck and a bad cold.
The day was cold and windy, and in the course of the doubleheader
he made four errors, including a dropped fly ball. In the first
game, his hit again came on his last time at bat, bringing the streak
to fourteen. By the second game, he had stiffened up so much that
he could barely move his head or his right shoulder. For reasons
that are inexplicable, Joe McCarthy not only sent him out to play,
but also kept him in the game after the Yankees had fallen behind,
10-0, by the fourth inning.
Joe had already made the first of his three errors in the second
game by then (to go with the error he had made in the opener) by
allowing Williams’s first-inning single to skip through his legs.
Before the game was over, he made four atrocious throws to third
base and home plate. A less sympathetically inclined scorer could
have charged him with five errors. Easily.
Joe’s hit came in the fifth inning with Mickey Harris pitching a
perfect game. DiMaggio hit a fly to right, an easy out except that
Pete Fox, the right-fielder, lost the ball in the sun and the buffeting
wind. If he had recovered in time to get a glove on it, Fox would
have been charged with an error.
The Yankees got no other hit off Harris until there was one out
in the ninth. If DiMaggio’s hit had been the only one, might now
the Boston scorer have changed his ruling in order to give Harris
his no-hitter?
In those two series in May, Ted went 7 for 11 in New York and 3
for 5 in Boston. Joe was 5 for 18, with one hit in each game.
|
