In His Day, Clipper Meant a Winner

This column by the late Jim Murray originally was published in the July 7, 1994 edition of The Times.

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You know, in the press box sometimes, we old-timers used to have a bit of fun with the young guys on the bet.

Down on the field, some hotshot outfielder would go streaking back after a line drive and make a last-minute leaping catch of it at the wall. We would look on, unimpressed.

“DiMaggio would have been waiting for it,” we’d tell the youngsters scornfully. “DiMaggio never had to leap for a ball in his life.”

In the field, some eager young player would chase down a ground single and come up firing wildly. Only he would throw behind the runner, who would then help himself to an extra base. We would smirk.

“DiMaggio never threw to the wrong base in his life. Of course, that guy wouldn’t have been running if he knew DiMag was out there.”

Exaggerated? Not much. There was a large element of truth in the hyperbole. Joe DiMaggio played the game at least at a couple of levels higher than the rest of baseball.

A lot of guys, all you had to see to know they were great was a stat sheet. DiMaggio, you had to see.

It wasn’t only numbers on a page--although they were there too--it was a question of command, style, grace. Connie Mack, no less, once said he was the ultimate team player. That the Yankees won the pennant 10 times in the 13 years DiMaggio was with them attests to that.

The Yankees of his era were the personification of graceful elegance. Other teams were “the Gas House Gang,” or “the Rollicking Redbirds,” but the DiMag Yankees were all dignity. They beat you without getting their uniforms dirty.

They came to the ballpark in three-piece suits and shined shoes, cut hair and clean shaven. Their image was that of a company of Swiss bankers, not terrorists. Joe DiMaggio never got in a brawl on or off the field.

In sports--in all of entertainment--there is a principle known as empathy.

It has to do with the audience projecting itself into the performance of an athlete, dancer or singer. If what he does involves strain or effort, you experience it with him. Guys who balance plates thrive on it. You squirm, you strain, you hyperventilate.

But certain performers do what they do so effortlessly, you are unaware of struggle or strain. You are at ease. They are in control. So are you. Bing Crosby had that quality. It seemed so easy that every guy in the shower was sure he could sing like Bing. And Joe DiMaggio had that quality. He made it look easy.

Joe never got his hair mussed. His cap never fell off. He never lunged at a ball. In more than 600 plate appearances one year, he struck out only 13 times. People thought he was aloof. He was really shy. He once admitted that when he arrived in New York and a writer asked him for a quote, Joe didn’t know what he was talking about. He thought maybe it was a soft drink.

I caught up with the great DiMaggio (as Hemingway’s character, the ancient Cuban fisherman, keeps referring to him in “The Old Man and The Sea”) the other day. He was in town to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at the prestigious Cedars-Sinai Sports Spectacular, a fund-raiser for the Genetics-Birth Center at the hospital, and a cause close to DiMaggio’s heart because he has his own Joe DiMaggio Children’s hospital in Hollywood, Fla.

Everyone knows about the 56 straight games DiMaggio hit in back in 1941. Every fan knows that, when stopped for one night by spectacular fielding plays, he went on to hit safely in the next 16 games. So the record could have been 73. Everyone knows Joe hit in 61 straight games in the Pacific Coast League and that in his major league streak of 56 he had 91 hits, almost two a game; 15 home runs, almost one every three games; drove in 55 runs, scored 56 and batted .408. It is the most brilliant burst of batting in baseball history.

But, what no one ever knew about the great DiMag is, he was the first major league ballplayer to have an agent.

His agent? Are you ready? A little drum roll, professor. Ty Cobb!

Right! That Ty Cobb. The Georgia Peach.

“He used to eat in our family restaurant at the wharf in San Francisco,” Joe told me the other day. “So, he took an interest in me.

“When the Yankees bought me from San Francisco (for $25,000), they offered me a $5,000 contract. Ty Cobb was outraged. (With the volcanic Cobb, this was not an unusual state of affairs.) He wrote to the Yankees’ Ed Barrow and blistered him terribly. So Barrow sent back a $500 raise. Then, Ty sat down and wrote another letter. Oddly enough, he liked to write letters. Barrow came up with another $500.

“This went on for seven letters. Finally, Barrow wrote, ‘This is all! Tell Cobb to stop writing letters!’

“But I ended up with $8,500. And Cobb ate for free in the restaurant.”

Another little-known fact of the DiMaggio legend is that, in 1939, when Joe won the American League batting title with a .381 average, he could have become one of the few hitters in baseball history to have hit .400. Should have, actually.

“I was hitting .412 with a little more than two weeks remaining in the season,” he recalled. “Then, I had this terrible infection in my left eye. They injected it with Novocain. And [Manager Joe] McCarthy wouldn’t take me out of the lineup. The eye was tearing up and painful. I couldn’t really see the breaking ball. I lost 32 points on my batting average in two weeks. I shouldn’t have been playing.”

League rules used to provide that batting title eligibility was based on official at-bats in a season. It has since been changed to plate appearances, which include walks and sacrifices and times hit by pitchers.

But in ‘39, the batting title was based on times at bat. Would Joe’s .412 have qualified in 1939 if he had sat out the last two weeks as he should have?

“Oh, yes,” he says.

He ended up with 462 official at-bats and would have easily made the obligatory 400, he believes. As gaudy as DiMaggio’s actual numbers were--and remember, he spent three seasons at the height of his career in the service during World War II--they would have been even more glittering if one of the line smashes he hit in Game 57 of the streak had fallen safely, or if he had been able to go home and put on an eye patch in 1939.

You shudder to think what agent Cobb could get for him today.