Memories: DiMaggio, Williams and the Summer of 1941

The scoreboard operator inside the Green Monster in Boston’s Fenway Park was named Bill Daley. It was 1941. Each time Joe DiMaggio would get a hit to extend his streak, Daley would yell through an opening in the board to Ted Williams in left field, something like, “Hey, Ted, Joe just got a double.”

Williams, almost as engrossed in DiMaggio’s hitting as his own, would turn and shout toward center field, “Hey, Dommie, Joe just got a double.”

Then, Dom DiMaggio, Joe’s little brother in age and size, would smile at Williams and silently rejoice--but just for a moment. The Boston DiMaggio--they called him the “Little Professor” because he wore glasses--had an intensity as deep as Joe’s and Ted’s, but he had business of his own. He’d immediately refocus on the game, resuming his sideways stance facing left field, ready to fly after the next ball.

When the Sox got to the dugout after the inning, Ted would be talking about Joe’s hitting and Dom mostly would be listening. The summer of 1941 was heating fast. Joe DiMaggio was on his way to one of the game’s most enduring records, hitting in 56 straight games, and Williams was pounding toward another. Not since he batted .406 that season has any player hit .400.

Dom DiMaggio was the link between the two, Joe’s devoted brother but his fierce opponent, Ted’s dear friend. Ted and Dom called one another “Teddy” and “Dommie.”

In the privacy of the Red Sox’ clubhouse, Williams could be all relaxed and full of himself. He’d take a stance in the middle of the room, expounding on some fine point of hitting. Dom, who dressed at the next locker, would sit there and sometimes, taken by the pleasure of the moment, smile at Williams’s antics.

Dom still smiles when he remembers. He loved Ted.

Williams would look over and, seeing the Little Professor’s grin, would say, “Hey, Dommie, you think I’m full of it, don’t you?”

“I’d say, ‘No, Teddy, no, I really don’t.’ ”

“Ah, Dommie, you do so.”

Joe wore different flannels. Inevitably, Dom and the brother he also loved would meet during the 56-game streak--the Yankees and Red Sox played eight times during that span. Dom would experience deeply mixed feelings of the rarest sort: He’d do anything he could to beat the hated Yankees, knowing all the while that he might have to make the catch that would end his brother’s streak.

“I wasn’t that happy about it, but there was no way I would have done anything differently,” he said the other day.

Dom DiMaggio is walking along a Washington street. He’s just finished a hearing on Capitol Hill, where he testified about Paget’s bone disease, from which he suffers. Now he’s headed for a relaxed lunch wit his wife, Emily, in the back of a nearby restaurant. He is 74, two years younger than Joe. When you get past the glasses, Dom resembles Joe. His features are as sharp, his smile is as shy. He sounds like Joe.

He’s reserved. Joe is even more so. Vince, the late older brother who completed the triumvirate of major-league DiMaggios, was the outgoing one.

Dom DiMaggio has written a book, “Real Grass, Real Heroes: Baseball’s Historic 1941 Season,” with his friend, Bill Gilbert. It is a charming eyewitness account of the remarkable times.

There were nine DiMaggios: five boys, four girls. Mae and Marie and Joe and Dom, the baby, are still living. Dom, from his homes in Massachusetts and Florida, keeps in close touch with Marie. He’ll see Joe occasionally. Dom was hoping to see him at an old-timers game last weekend at Fenway.

“I called the Red Sox’ office,” said Dom, “to see if he was coming and they said Ted wasand Joe was ‘if his schedule permits.’

“The guy likes to be mysterious, I guess,” said Dom, with a smile. Dom always had a sense of humor, and he could make Joe smile even when he wasn’t happy.

“On the next-to-last day of the 1948 season, we knocked the Yankees out of the pennant in Boston,” Dom said. “Joe and I left the park together in the same car with some others. We rode along and not a word was spoken--by anybody in the car. It was very tense. We always played so hard to beat the other team.” Now, though the Yankees were out of it, Boston still had a chance for a first-place tie with Cleveland. Finally, Joe said, “Well, you guys knocked us out of it today, but tomorrow I’m going to take care of you guys,” as if his bat alone was enough to down the Sox.

Dom laughed. “Now, Joe, you’re not underestimating my abilities, are you?”

The ice was broken. They were brothers once again.

Still, beating one another brought them special pleasure.

“I loved to play in Fenway Park,” said Dom, “but next to that I liked to play in Yankee Stadium. It was big and you could run around. I could hit the ball into all that space. We always wanted to beat the Yankees so badly.” He paused and laughed. “Although sometimes it was futile.”

One time, Dom noticed as he fielded a hit into left-center that Joe had taken a wide turn at second base. Joe was known for not getting thrown out trying to take an extra base. But this time he would stumble slightly trying to get back to second, and Dom had the arm. He threw behind his brother and nailed him.

Dom felt sorry, although he wouldn’t have had it any other way.

“I stood there and was embarrassed,” he said, shrugging and giving a sheepish glance.

Joe glared out at him. “It was as if to say, ‘You don’t throw behind the runner.’ But I did that quite often.”

The day the streak began, on May 15, 50 years ago last Wednesday, DiMaggio and the Yankees were mired in slumps. “I just can’t seem to get going,” DiMaggio told a newspaper reporter in the clubhouse.

The New York World Telegram first noted the streak, according to “Streak: Joe DiMaggio and the Summer of ‘41,” by Michael Seidel. It already was at 13.

Williams began having the time of his life. He followed DiMaggio’s streak, and hit .500 himself over the last two weeks in May.

DiMaggio made it 19 straight with a single and double in Cleveland against Bob Feller. It was the day Lou Gehrig died, June 2.

On June 26, it looked as if the streak would end at 37 against St. Louis in New York. But with the Yankees leading 3-1 in the bottom of the eighth, Tommy Henrich bunted with one out to ensure he wouldn’t hit into a double play. DiMaggio, next up, doubled on the first pitch.

June 28--Philadelphia had Johnny Babich on the mound at Shibe Park. “He did a bad thing,” Dom DiMaggio remembered, “a bad thing.”

Babich wouldn’t pitch to Joe Walked him on four pitches the first time. Second time too. In the seventh, Babich threw three more balls to DiMaggio: outside, inside, in the dirt. Then . . . DiMaggio reached out with his long swing for a high and outside pitch. He shot the ball back past Babich’s legs for a single.

Dom was eating a bowl of chili, still frowning about Babich.

On June 29, DiMaggio went out to break George Sisler’s 41-game streak, the modern record, in a doubleheader in Washington. DiMaggio doubled in the first game, but between games had his bat stolen. By now, the pressure was intense, and he was unnerved. But using Henrich’s bat, he managed a single in five trips in the second game. The bat was discovered in Newark, N.J., in time for a doubleheader two days later in New York with the Red Sox.

Dom DiMaggio: “Joe and I were talking on the field before the start of the first game, and I told him it seemed he couldn’t do enough. He had broken the consecutive-game hitting streaks for both leagues--now he had to try and break a record set in the last century. It seemed irrelevant to me. Everybody knew about Wee Willie Keeler, but who ever heard of his 44-game hitting streak? Besides, Keeler did it under different rules, including not getting charged with a strike for hitting a foul ball.”

By the time Ken Keltner made his two memorable plays at third base on July 17 in Cleveland, DiMaggio had broken every consecutive-game hitting streak but his minor-league one of 61 with the San Francisco Seals.

Williams continued hitting so consistently that Dom DiMaggio took his feats as a matter of course. His average dipped to .393, but it was back above .400 when with about a week remaining in the season his manager, Joe Cronin, is said to have first hinted to Williams that he might take some time off to preserve the average. From Gene Schoor’s “The Ted Williams Story” (1954), one imagines Williams sounding like John Wayne spouting these words, slowly and firmly, to the manager: “Well, I figure that a man’s a .400 hitter or he isn’t. He’s a .400 batter all the way, for the whole season--not just part of the season. I’m going to play in every game, Joe, straight down to the wire.”

Dom said he and others watched Williams with awe on the last day in Philadelphia when--with his .400 in hand--Williams declined to sit for the doubleheader, then between games declined again. He would not take the safe way out to preserve his average. He played on, with a flourish. “Six hits for the day,” Dom said softly.

Yet an awfully sweet moment that season came in a game that didn’t count in the standings, the All-Star Game of July 8 in Detroit. DiMaggio’s streak was standing at 48. Williams’s average was .405. In the eighth inning against the National Leaguers, Joe doubled and Dom drove him in. In the ninth, Williams broke up the game with a blast. Joe was on base and Dom was in the on-deck circle. There had been a long conversation on the mound before Claude Passeau pitched to Williams. Dom still wonders what was said, and how close they came to walking Williams and pitching to him.

Dom laughs as he thinks of “Ted jumping up and down and clapping” as soon as he hit it.

Dom is sitting in the back seat of a car now, looking contented. Suffice it to say:

Joe DiMaggio was named the American League’s most-valuable player for ’41. “Honestly , that was the year it should have been shared,” Dom said.