Joltin’ Joe Has Gone

They talked about his grace on the field, his mystique off it. A center fielder by trade, but more than that: the centerpiece for his New York Yankee juggernauts and the sport he played.

Joe DiMaggio died Monday, and people had trouble finding a way to describe the person and player.

Not that his Hall of Fame statistics don’t speak volumes, but DiMaggio’s celebrity and charisma outdistanced Cooperstown. If anyone shared the Babe’s pantheon, maybe it was Giuseppe Paolo DiMaggio Jr.

“He was a step above,” said Bill Rigney, who came off the same Bay Area sandlots to become a shortstop with the New York Giants in some of the years DiMaggio was headlining across the East River in Yankee Stadium.

“He was the type player who would walk into a clubhouse and his team knew it had a chance to win,” Rigney said. “He was the type player who brought a presence to the game and his team. He was very private and very much a loner, but he cared about the game and the Yankees.”

Rigney, who went on to manage the Giants, Angels and Minnesota Twins, learned that firsthand.

Recovering from a shoulder injury while his team was on the road, he was given permission to work out before a game at Yankee Stadium.

Slipping into his Giant uniform at a locker next to DiMaggio’s, he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was DiMaggio, who said to him, “In this clubhouse, no one wears anything but a Yankee uniform. I’ll have the equipment man get you one.”

No one has worn DiMaggio’s No. 5 in the Yankee clubhouse since 1952, when it was retired.

In his 13-year career interrupted by three years of military service during World War II, the Yankees won 10 pennants and nine World Series, and the man known as the Yankee Clipper won three most-valuable-player awards, two American League batting titles, drove in more than 100 runs nine times, had a career batting average of .325 and produced one of baseball’s most celebrated records in 1941, hitting in 56 consecutive games.

If Ken Keltner, the Cleveland Indian third baseman, had not taken two hits away from DiMaggio to help end the 56-game streak, he might have hit in 73 in a row. It is generally forgotten that he immediately rebounded with a 16-game hitting streak.

It is also generally forgotten that in 1933, earning $250 a month as an 18-year-old center fielder with the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League, DiMaggio hit in 61 consecutive games during one of the best seasons by any player at any level. He batted .340 with 259 hits and 169 RBIs in 187 games.

“He was the best player I saw in my 46 years in baseball,” said Buzzie Bavasi, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers during the period when they were so often on the short end of World Series meetings with DiMaggio’s Yankees.

No wonder Bavasi considers DiMaggio a player “I could love and hate at the same time.” Mostly, however, a player he could respect and admire.

“He could do so many things,” Bavasi said. “I mean, we talk about five-tool players, guys who can run, hit for power, hit for average, throw and field. But DiMaggio had a sixth tool. He could think. He was an inning ahead of everyone.”

Rigney saw that sixth tool in another way.

“I don’t think Joe was the fastest guy in the world, but he always knew where the ball would come down,” Rigney said. “He wasn’t afraid to turn his back to the plate like a Willie Mays.

“I remember seeing an interview with Joe and Ted Williams a few years ago in which Joe called Williams the best hitter and Williams said, ‘Yes, but you were the best player.’ A lot of us had to work at it, but Joe played easy, effortlessly.”

He also seemed to play with a lack of emotion, but it might have been his discipline and restraint. Bavasi and others could remember only once when he displayed anger on the field, kicking the dirt near second base when Al Gionfriddo of the Dodgers deprived him of a home run in Game 6 of the 1947 World Series with a celebrated catch.

“Even when he hit in 56 straight he seemed to look on it only as part of his job,” Bavasi said.

The best of all time? Who can say? Certainly one of the best.

The Sporting News tabbed him 11th in a new book ranking the top 100. In that remarkable summer of ‘41, when Williams--who later called DiMaggio the best right-handed hitter he ever saw--became the last player to hit .400 at .406, DiMaggio hit .357 with 30 home runs, 125 runs batted in, 43 doubles and, incredibly, struck out only 13 times. For his 13 seasons, DiMaggio averaged 28 homers--and 28 strikeouts, a stunning combination measured against the current free-swinging era when a slugger’s strikeouts often out-number his homers two or three to one.

Serving in the Army as a volunteer during his prime baseball years, DiMaggio missed the 1943, ’44 and ’45 seasons, and ultimately retired after the 1951 season at 37, forced out by a heel injury and the arrival of Mickey Mantle.

“Think about it,” Commissioner Bud Selig said. “He retired almost 47 years ago and his name is still magic. There was an aura about him like no other athlete I ever saw.”

Selig might have hoped that a player he calls his “all-time hero,” a player he first saw when his mother treated him to a trip to New York for his 15th birthday, would have taken a more active role or position in the game, but DiMaggio’s penchant for privacy underscored that aura, lent magic to the name.

Certainly, his nine-month marriage to Marilyn Monroe and the homage he later paid her after her death contributed to the mystique.

“Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” pondered Simon and Garfunkel.

Well, it wasn’t as if he disappeared in his later years. But the Joltin’ Joe of baseball and Les Brown musical renown--the DiMaggio that Santiago yearned to take fishing with him in Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea”--channeled interview requests through his attorney and rejected most, was known to chase reporters out of his San Francisco restaurant and, aside from a brief tenure as a vice president and hitting instructor with Charlie Finley’s Oakland Athletics, restricted his ballpark appearances to the throwing out of an occasional first pitch or a Yankee Stadium old-timers’ game, where he always insisted on being introduced last.

Through the years, DiMaggio reportedly assembled a memorabilia collection worth millions of dollars and did well financially as the pitchman known as Mr. Coffee, but with his passing at 84, what we know about him only scrapes the surface of what we don’t.

Don Newcombe, the former Dodger pitcher who struck out DiMaggio four times in Game 1 of the 1949 World Series, saw DiMaggio each January for years at a golf outing sponsored by a pharmaceutical company for which they worked, and DiMaggio would laugh and caution Newcombe not to bring up that Series setback in the company of others.

“Joe only had to walk into a room and heads would turn,” Newcombe said. “He was a very gracious, very nice man. I found him sitting alone in a golf cart at La Costa one day and asked him, ‘Joe, how do you feel about giving autographs? I’d like to get a couple for my lady and myself.’ He said, ‘You can have anything you want, Newk.’ He not only signed a ball but wrote out a note addressed to my friend that we still have. It makes us feel good every time we look at it.”

Bavasi knows the feeling--or, at least, knew it.

In the den of his La Jolla home, he has 28 baseballs, each bearing the signature of a player in the Hall of Fame. Someone broke into his house recently but only one baseball was taken, the one autographed by DiMaggio, the private man whose life and times even represented honor among thieves.