Read 56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports for Free Online

defense was valid enough to dismiss not just Greenberg but first basemen Mize and Foxx as well.
    DiMaggio covered the vast meadow of the Yankee Stadium outfield with long easy strides, a gorgeous gallop that on any day might lead to a game-changing play. Once, with Spud Chandler on the hill in a lopsided late-season game against Detroit at Yankee Stadium, DiMaggio took off after a high, colossal drive from Greenberg himself, racing on and on, out past the centerfield monuments and the flagpole, and deep into the graveyard, as the players called it, before catching the baseball more than 450 feet from home plate, two strides before the wall. DiMaggio had never even turned around, just looked up once, then flicked out his glove and snared the ball. Greenberg, envisioning an inside-the-park home run, was already at second base when DiMaggio made the catch, that’s how high and far the ball was hit; Greenberg just put his hands akimbo and stared mutely into the outfield.
    The crowd wouldn’t shush for five full minutes after that ball came down. The play immediately became The Greatest Catch I Ever Saw for all of the Yankees and all of the Tigers and for the 13,000 more who were at the Stadium that day, and for the tens of thousands of others who were not at the Stadium that day but who later said they were. “I couldn’t make a better one,” DiMaggio said afterward. Joe would have doubled the Tigers’ Earl Averill off of first base too on the play if only DiMaggio hadn’t paused a moment before throwing the ball in, almost surprised himself, and even then if Crosetti’s relay throw hadn’t hit Averill in the back as he hurried to return to first base.
    There were other DiMaggio catches, many, many others, improbable essays to render the uncatchable caught. Whenever a ball was hit deep, Gordon at second base or Crosetti at short would turn from the infield and see DiMaggio already with his back to the plate, already in full stride, his number 5 smoothly and swiftly receding. Then, though they’d seen it before, the infielders would nonetheless let out a soft and awestruck gasp, right along with the roar of the crowd, as DiMaggio turned and raised his weathered glove and casually plucked the baseball from mid-air like some upstate schoolboy taking an apple off a tree.
    Yet even that defense was not above reproach. Late in the summer of 1939, Tris Speaker, the peerless centerfielder who’d gone into radio after ending his 21-year playing career in 1928 and whose spot in baseball’s alltime greatest outfield was secure between Ruth and Cobb, got ornery, saying that “Joe DiMaggio is good. Understand that, please. But he is not great … and he plays too deep.” DiMaggio, after all, had had a season in which he’d made 17 errors, another in which he’d made 15. Speaker alleged that he could name 15 outfielders better than DiMaggio—though that was a claim he would retract. Later, when Speaker was asked to choose between DiMaggio or the gap-hitting Cardinals leftfielder Ducky Medwick as the finer all-around player, Speaker’s response was curt: “I’d take Medwick.”
    Other players got support too—lately people were saying that the skinny young kid with the big bat in Boston, Ted Williams, could one day wind up the greatest hitter of all. But deep down everyone, and certainly all the guys in Jackson Heights, even Gimpy, now putting on their club jackets and leaving their nickels on the table and getting up to walk out of the Bellefair and wend along the yellow-lit city streets to their boyhood rooms, knew that if they had to pick one player for their team, it would be DiMaggio. Finally, the numbers game fell his way: 691 RBIs in his first 686 big league games, two straight batting titles, and although he played in a ballpark so phenomenally spacious as to emasculate a righthanded batter, a season in which he hit 46 home runs. DiMaggio struck out a total of 71 times from 1938 through 1940. That was half of