SPEAKING OF SPORTS
December 1998
by Barry Stagg
Joe DiMaggio: The Yankee Clipper
This is a peculiar time to write about a baseball legend, with the flurries and the eggnog merging in the Christmas interlude. This is a special time and the right time for a DiMaggio column because the great Yankee is in failing health in a Florida hospital. He was so sick that he had to miss the inimitable pageantry of a Yankee World Series sweep. Pneumonia and being eighty- three years old, can make you stay home even for these transcendental events.
Joseph Paul DiMaggio was born in Martinez, California on November 25, 1914. World War I was three months old and festering when the fishingfolk DiMaggios welcomed a brother for young Vincent Paul. Brother Dominic Paul joined the family in February 1917. All three fisherman's sons would go on to play major league baseball. Only Joe would become a legend, an icon of both his sport and his era.
In 1941, it took fifty-six games before American League pitchers could hold Joe DiMaggio hitless for a full game. He hit .357 for the season and drove in one hundred and twenty-five runs. He lost the American League batting title by a mere forty-nine points to some guy named Williams playing out of a field called Fenway. Pearl Harbor was bombed twelve days after Di Maggio's twenty-seventh birthday and the Americans took up weapons against Hitler and his Japanese allies.
The famed Yankee Clipper hit .305 in the 1942 season then went to war for the duration of the conflict. He never played another major league game until that first rapturous postwar season in 1946. Like his rival and fellow superstar Ted Williams, he left three good, prime baseball years on the fields of battle of the last good war. Their sacrifices pale in comparison to the many who gave their lives or limbs to the cause. Still, in these winter years of the lives of DiMaggio and Williams, it is worth noting that these great young athletes surrendered their prime to the patriotic cause. In late 1998 Joe DiMaggio is an eighty-four year old war veteran. Williams, The Splendid Splinter, turned eighty in August.
Soon the old baseball players will be dead. The callow fans of today will lose whatever tenuous link there remains to the days when these stalwart Americans ruled the fields of pre-Jackie Robinson baseball. DiMaggio played and starred absolutely in a time when he represented the ultimate goal of a red-blooded American caucasian and the impossible dream for the lads on the wrong side of the colour line.
DiMaggio, like Williams, was a Californian, foretelling the days when California would become the main source of prime baseball talent in the whole world. DiMaggio and his brothers were San Franciscans. Williams grew up in San Diego. Neither was around this fall when The Yankees and San Diego met in the World Series. Think about the days that used to be.
I will bet that, right now, there is a Newfoundlander reading this column who can remember listening to Yankee and Red Sox games booming in across the water from clear channel AM radio stations in New York and Boston. The games were ones from a time when brash Williams and stoic DiMaggio led people back to some semblance of domestic order after the long killing fields of 1939-1945. Those were the days, indeed.
So, in this chilly Christmas season, when grass is frozen and baseball is a seasonal and an historical memory, pause for a moment and nod to the baseball lions, Joe DiMaggio and his alter ego, Ted Williams, in their winter years.
Until next month,next year: Be proud, be prosperous.