Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and the Summer of ‘41 (by George Will)

On this episode of Our American Stories, George Will tells the story of Ted Williams. He also tells the story of a San Francisco fisherman, Joe DiMaggio, his “Streak” of a hit in 56 consecutive games, and his steely determination.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is our American stories, and we tell stories about
everything here on the show, as you know, which brings
us to George will the renowned political columnist whose very
best writing is about baseball. Here's George.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
I was born in May nineteen forty one. In the
nick of time. I had eleven days to get my
bearings before it began the streak. It was the greatest
event of a baseball season that flared dazzlingly on the
eve of darkness. There were just sixteen teams in ten cities,
and Saint Louis was baseball's westernmost outpost. But the future

(00:49):
California was present in San Francisco's Joe DiMaggio and San
Diego's Ted Williams. Williams was so volatile as a cult
and there's one dimension as a surgeon. Demaggio's cool elegance
concealed a passion to excel at every aspect of the game.

(01:09):
Williams used a postal scale in the clubhouse to make
sure humidity had not increased the weight of his bats.
The officials of the Louisville Slugger Company once challenged Williams
to pick the one bat among six that weighed half
an ounce more than the other five he did. He
once sent back to the factory a shipment of bats

(01:31):
because he sensed that the handles were too thick. They
were by five to one hundredths of an inch. In
nineteen forty one, Williams was hitting three nine, nine, five
five going into the season ending doubleheader in Philadelphia's Shi Park.
Daylight savings had ended the night before, so the autumn

(01:52):
shadows that made hitting hard would be even worse. If
Williams had not played, his average would have been rounded
up to four hundred. Instead, he went six for eight,
including a blazing double that broke a public address speaker.
He finished at four oh six. Today, when a batter
hits a sacrifice fly, he is not charged within a bat.

(02:15):
In nineteen forty one, he was Williams manager Joe Cronin estimates.
Williams hit fourteen of them, so under today's rules, his
average would have been four nineteen. Since then, the highest
average has been George Brett's three ninety in nineteen eighty.
William's achievement is one of the greatest in baseball history,

(02:37):
but not the greatest in nineteen forty one. Nothing in
baseball quite matches Demaggio's fifty six game hitting streak. The
Yankees were on a tear so at home they rarely
batted in the bottom of the ninth. Demaggio had to
get his hits in eight innings, and in the thirty

(02:57):
eighth game of his streak, he was hitless. Entered in
the bottom of the eighth with the Yankees ahead three
to one. He was scheduled to be the fourth batter.
The first batter popped out, the second walked, and Tommy
Henrik was up and worried. He was a power hitter
who rarely bunded, but if he hit into a double play,
the streak probably would end. He returned to the dugout

(03:21):
and got manager Joe McCarthy's permission to bunt. Then Demaggio
hit a double. On July eighth in Detroit, the American
League won the most exciting All Star Game when with
two out in the bottom of the ninth and the
National League leading five to four, Williams hit a three
run home run to Briggs Stadium's upper deck. When play

(03:43):
resumed after the All Star break, with demaggio streak at
forty eight, he erupted for seventeen hits and thirty one
at bats. As the pressure intensified, Demaggio's performance became greater.
He had four hits in the fiftieth game, went four
for eight in the doubleheader that ran the streak to
fifty three, had two hits in the fifty fifth game,

(04:06):
and three in the fifty six. The streak ended in Cleveland,
when the Indians third baseman Ken Keltner made two terrific
stops of rocketed grounders, both times his momentum carried him
into foul territory, from which he threw Demajo out by
a blink. In those fifty six games, Demago hit four

(04:28):
oh eight with ninety one hits, thirty five for extra bases,
including fifteen home runs. He drove in fifty five runs
and scored fifty six. The next day, he began a
sixteen game hitting streak. When it ended, he had hit
safely in seventy two of seventy three games, not counting

(04:48):
his hit in the All Star Game. Most records are
improved by small increments, not this one. The consecutive game
hitting record for a Yankee had been twenty nine. The
modern Major League record had been George Sisler's forty one.
The All time major league record had been Willie Keeler's
forty four Demaggio fell short only of two other professional

(05:13):
hitting streaks, sixty nine games by Joe Wilhoyt of wichitav
the Western League in nineteen nineteen and sixty one in
nineteen thirty three by an eighteen year old playing for
the San Francisco Seals named Joe DiMaggio. During Demaggio's streak,
radio broadcasts had been interrupted to bring bulletins about his progress,

(05:36):
but once radio interrupted baseball on the night of May
twenty seventh, when the Braves were playing the Giants and
the Polo Grounds, both teams left the field for a
while at ten thirty, and the public address announcer said,
Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States States.
About seventeen thousand fans listened to FDR's radio address describing

(06:00):
the lowering clouds of danger. Michael Sidell, author of Streak
Joe DiMaggio in the summer of forty one, says Demagio
was a lot like the Taciturn enduring characters then played
in movies by Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper, who was
soon to play Lou Garig Demaggio number five was the

(06:21):
successor to lou Garig number four, who died on June second,
nineteen forty one, of the disease that now bears his name.
Gerig was seventeen days shy of his thirty eighth birthday.
He died sixteen years to the day after he became
the yankees regular first basement in game two of a
streak of two thousand, one hundred and thirty games consecutive played.

(06:46):
Demaggio's similar stance toward life, a steely will, understated style,
relentless consistency, was mesmerizing to a nation that knew it
would soon need what he epitomized heroism for the long haul. However,
the unrivaled elegance of his career is defined by two

(07:09):
numbers even more impressive than his fifty six. They are
eight and zero. Eight is the astonishingly small difference between
his thirteen year career totals for home runs three hundred
sixty one and strikeouts three hundred sixty nine. In the

(07:29):
nineteen eighty six and nineteen eighty seven seasons, Jose Canseco
hit sixty four home runs and struck out three hundred
and thirty two times zero is the number of times
Demaggia was thrown out in his entire career, going from
first to third base on the field. The man made
few mistakes off the field. He made a big one

(07:51):
in his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, but even it enlarged
his mythic status, as when they were in Japan and
visited US troops in Korea. Upon her return to Tokyo,
she said to him ingenuously, You've never heard cheering like that.
There must have been fifty or sixty thousand. He said, dryly, Oh, yes,

(08:13):
I have. They had gone to Japan at the recommendation
of a friend Leftio Duo, manager of the San Francisco Seals,
who said that in a foreign country they could wander
around without drawing crabs. The friend did not know that
Japan was then obsessed with things American, especially baseball stars
and movie stars. When the most famous of each category landed,

(08:37):
it took their car six hours to creep to their
hotel through more than a million people. As a Californian,
he represented baseball's future. He in San Diego's Ted Williams,
a twenty one year old rookie in nineteen thirty nine
when Demaggio was twenty four. Demaggio, a son of San

(08:57):
Francisco fisherman, was proud, reserved, and as private as possible
for the bearer the second generation of America's premium methletic tradition,
the Yankee Greatness, established by Bay Ruth and lou Garrick.
Demaggio felt violated by the sight of Maryland filming the
famous scene in The Seven Years Itch, when a gust

(09:19):
of wind from a Manhattan subway grate blows her skirt
up over her waist. Yes, pride, supposedly one of the
seven Deadly sins, is often a virtue and the source
of others. Demaggio was Pride incarnate, and he and Hank
Greenberg did much to stir ethnic pride among Italian Americans

(09:43):
and Jews. When as a player, Demagio had nothing left
to prove, he was asked why he still played so
hard every day, because he said, every day there is
apt to be some child in the stands who has
never before seen me play. An entire ethic, the code
of craftsmanship can be tickled from that admirable thought. Not

(10:06):
that Demaggio practiced the full range of his craft. When
one of his managers was asked if Demaggio could bunt.
He said he did not know, and I'll never find
out either. Demaggio, one of Jefferson's natural aristocrats, proved that
a healthy democracy knows and honors nobility when it sees it.

Speaker 1 (10:29):
And you've been listening to George Well the Story of
Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, the Story of class Incarnate.
Two folks here on our American stories