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

Mize’s total in that time, a third of Foxx’s. Greenberg typically struck out about 100 times in a single season .
    The Yankees won one World Series in the seven seasons before DiMaggio arrived. Then they won it in each of his first four years. DiMaggio played every element of the game with a controlled and beautiful ferocity, a fullness that Cleveland’s Feller called “inspirational.”
    If some fans were quick to detract, to say “Yeah, but… . ” and bring up Mize or Foxx or Greenberg or any of the rest, maybe it was because they still resented DiMaggio’s complaints about his contract. Maybe it was because people outside of New York were sick of the Yankees’ dominance. Maybe it was because DiMaggio didn’t yet have that single irrefutable achievement, something akin to Babe Ruth’s 60-home run season or Lou Gehrig’s 2,130 consecutive games played or Ty Cobb’s 4,191 career hits, to firmly exalt him. Maybe it was because DiMaggio could be shy and even aloof when the fans descended. Maybe there was also something else.

Chapter 4
The Italian
     
    A LL OF THE Italian players got called Dago, not just Joe. When he’d first come up there were three of them on the Yankees: Tony Lazzeri, Big Dago; Crosetti, Little Dago; and DiMaggio just Dago. Now Lazzeri was gone, Rizzuto had come in, and he was Little Dago too. Sometimes the guys on the team—Gomez, McCarthy, Bill Dickey, any of them—got it mixed up: which Dago was which? Half the time even the Italian ballplayers called each other Dago, or Daig, bantering the word among themselves, diluting any sense of negativity with their own nonchalance. Some other nicknames, though, they were less likely to use.
    In opposing stadiums and from out of opponents’ dugouts, all sorts of epithets came Joe’s way. Even as the Yankees went on to beat the Tigers 5–4 at the Stadium that afternoon—on Red Rolfe’s triple in the 10th inning (Del Baker’s strategy of pitching to DiMaggio and walking Keller had worked to help Detroit get out of the ninth)—and then beat them again the next day with DiMaggio singling in the seventh, Joe, as ever, heard it from the Tigers’ bench each time he came to bat: “You big Guinea, DiMaggio!” Or one chirper’s particular favorite: “Hey Spaghetti Bender!”
    This was common jockeying and everyone was a target, especially if you could play. Guys would scream anything that they thought might distract a hitter, rile him up, get him thinking about something other than the pitch coming in. McCarthy always ordered a couple of Yankees backups to lean out of the dugout and ride the Tigers’ Greenberg—“Heeb” or “Jewboy” they’d hurl toward him—to try to push him off his game. Ted Williams heard it for being so damn skinny and for the way he fidgeted around in the batter’s box. Williams let it show when the jockeying rankled him, yelled right back sometimes.
    DiMaggio, though, never looked over at the catcallers, not even the smallest glance. He just dug into his stance and stood waiting for the pitch, still as a photograph.
    He’d been hearing the coarse names and letting them roll off for years. That’s what you did. Yet the needling felt different now, the words somehow sharper and full of implication. It wasn’t easy to be an Italian in America in the spring of 1941. Not with Italy and its fascist dictator Benito Mussolini allied alongside Hitler’s Nazis, and not with the U.S. invested in beating down the Italians in the war. Just a week earlier, mid-May, more than 80 Italian men had been rounded up in New York City, taken out to Ellis Island and held there before being deported. They were waiters and busboys, dishwashers and cooks (and even a lawyer too) seized at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and the Pierre and the Caviar Restaurant right there on 49th Street two blocks from Toots Shor’s where DiMaggio liked to go for a steak. They were young guys trying to make the start of a life, not wanting to go back to Italy,