NOTES #254

NOTES FROM THE SHADOWS OF COOPERSTOWN

Observations from Outside the Lines

By Two Finger Carney (carneya6@borg.com)

#254 JANUARY 22, 2002

JOLTING JOE DiMAGGIO

OK, so I couldn’t wait nine more days … but this will be the last issue this month. At least I am keeping my promise to keep it brief — this one will print out in five or six pages.

And if my review of Richard Ben Cramer’s book, and the essay following, inspires anyone to go searching themselves for Joe DiMaggio, a pretty good starting place is an old issue of NOTES that has just been added to the Archive — #126. It’s not all about Joe, but there’s a lot on him there, and from a wide variety of sources; if you haven’t seen it, I recommend taking a look.

Nothing to report on the publishing front, this time. Maybe I’ll have some news next issue. No rejection slips — that’s good.

I may also have something to report next time on the Regional SABR meeting, coming right up on January 26, at the Hall of Fame Library. I prepared a trivia quiz for the meeting, and may include it here.

Also next time, I’ll try to dig up some stuff on the Wizard of Oz (AKA Mr Smith, now in the HOF on deck circle), that I plucked off the SABR internet digest a while back.

But brevity it is — without further rambling … enjoy 254!

 

DiMAGGIO: A Hero’s Life (A Review)

Richard Ben Cramer’s book on Joe DiMaggio went on my “must read” list as soon as I read the first reviews. It took me a while to get a copy, and it seemed to take just as long to finish it, but that is because I was enjoying every page.

When I wrote a poem called The Yankee Clipper, I started by observing that Joe DiMaggio was born March 25, 1914 — same year as my father, same date as my son. For many of my player poems, I have done some real research, even read a biography or two, before trying to sum up the subject in thirty or forty lines. Now I wonder how my Clipper poem would go, if I had read Cramer’s book before hitting the keyboard.

Not that I’m regretting my poem — I think it does a neat job of describing the public image that DiMaggio cultivated and then protected. I mentioned The Streak, but stayed away from any and all numbers. I closed by saying that no father would mind seeing reflected in his son, some of DiMaggio’s consistency, poise, uncommon grace, and old-fashioned pride in his work. I might add, post-Cramer, that any dad would be relieved to see some other DiMaggio qualities reflected not at all in his offspring.

Cramer took years to write A Hero’s Life, a lot longer than he planned, and readers can be glad that he stuck to it, and included the final chapter, Joe’s death in March 1999. The 528 pages shows a dazzling amount of research, into every nook and cranny of Joe’s life. The details are so incredible, that they are indeed credible. Cramer seems to have tapped every major written source of information, and talked to (or tried) every significant person he could find. I do not think I have read a more detailed biography, certainly not of any ballplayer.

So readers get close-up views of Joe’s family life in San Francisco, where his talent on the diamond lights up a path out of work on the wharf or in a fishing boat. Before long, Joe is on center stage in Yankee Stadium, becoming a household name. The baseball in this book does not disappoint. Cramer gave me a new perspective on DiMaggio’s accomplishments, and put them all in rich context. His battles with injuries, the cheapskate Yankee brass, the media (wagged by the club in those days), and with his growing celebrity (pitted against his need for privacy), are all painted with fine brush strokes. Cramer seems at times to have been there, not just inside the times, but inside the emotions of the fans who cheered at the parks and beside their radios, who shook their heads reading one of the city’s dailies, and who elevated DiMaggio to a pedestal impossibly high and out of reach.

Cramer gets inside DiMaggio’s guts, too, revealing a greedy side, perhaps for the first time, and certainly as no one has ever done before with so much detail. No doubt some readers will wish there was less description of Joe’s womanizing, his relations with gamblers and members of organized crime, of the way access to this hero was carefully guarded, right up until Joe’s death. (DiMaggio’s lawyer, Morris Engelberg, comes off as even greedier than DiMaggio, as well as a truly despicable man. In fact, the collectibles industry takes some hits from Cramer, and my own decision to steer clear of it was reinforced.)

I had never paid much attention to whatever was written over the years about Joe and Marilyn; never read anything at all about Marilyn Monroe, to be honest. So Cramer’s telling of their meeting, their courtship and marriage, their divorce and their reconciliation, was all fresh and fascinating. (The Kennedy boys show up, too, along with lots of famous people — it seems that Joe walked among the rich and famous his last sixty years.) And I came away from this section feeling good about Joe and Marilyn; it seems that it really was a love story, and not a convenient way to grab headlines and the attention of the cameras. It is clear that this Broadway Joe was not at all Hollywood.

Was DiMaggio’s life ultimately lonely and sad? Hard to say. Certainly, Joe called all his own shots. He apparently was not easy to please, easy to stay close to. DiMaggio knew exactly who he was and how he needed to be treated (mostly, like a god, but he had a common touch sometimes, too — like with a physical therapist, at the end.) Nothing in the book is really shocking, but it is hard to put it down and wonder how his life might have turned out, if he’d have let different people into his life, and if he’d have taken on some social cause.

There is much in A Hero’s Life about making money. Only in America! Readers might wish there was more about how Joe spent his money — not that he ever needed to very often. Did he ever pick up a tab at a restaurant or bar? Yes, he took care of his parents, tried to help his son (without success), and finally favored his grandchildren. But there is something sad about the picture of DiMag at 80, making millions by signing balls and bats, for what?

Clearly, Joe DiMaggio had a long and uniquely interesting life. He was a hero made in America, made for America, and made by the America of each decade he touched. To follow this hero, readers learn much about the hopes of immigrants, the way the country went to war in the forties, and the way baseball grew up in Joe’s days (and after.) It’s worth the investment, and it feels good at the end, knowing that Joe will not get his cut.

DiMaggio left his mark on baseball, and on America. Maybe the best thing about Cramer’s work is that we see an American icon, “warts and all” — the way, I think, everybody should ultimately be seen and portrayed to history. DiMaggio was not Mr Perfect, only Mr Coffee. It must not have been easy, being Joe DiMaggio, playing such a demanding role. But in the end, Joe seems to have pulled it off. So has Cramer.

ME AND JOE D.

The only other book about Joe DiMaggio that I recall reading was Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s Me and DiMaggio. (Like Cramer’s, it was published by Simon & Schuster, but fourteen years earlier.) Unless you count Summer of ’49 by David Halberstam, who was credited by Cramer with an big assist, along with Seymour Hersh and Gay Talese. The latter’s classic essay (from Esquire) on Silent Joe appeared in the Fourth Fireside Book, and I read that, too. DiMaggio is in the first three Fireside volumes, too. So in a way, what I had read about DiMaggio primed me for Cramer’s jolting portrait.

I went in search of Joe DiMaggio myself once, back in March 1996. The result was the Opening Day issue of NOTES that year, #126, “Gone Fishing.” It’s in the NOTES archive, and I recommend it … read it on Opening Day!

It is odd that Joe DiMaggio is not linked to any particular famous game, except in a negative way. Al Gionfriddo stumbling into baseball immortality by snaring a long Joe D. clout to save Game Six of the ’47 Series for Brooklyn (the Yanks took Game Seven) … Ken Keltner getting famous by knocking down two balls near third base and throwing out the runner, Joe D. — and ending The Streak. Of course, if anyone else hit those balls, Keltner would not be known much outside of Cleveland and Boston (he did turn hero in the ’48 playoff game between those two teams.)

But it is also true that we associate DiMaggio with winning, with setting a standard for which his Yankee teammates could strive. The Streak itself, probably the feat for whichhe is best recalled, may have been somewhat tainted by some hometown official scorers, but DiMaggio was anything but “streaky.” He was consistent, and could rise to the occasion to deliver when the situation, the season required that. As quiet as he might be when he was down on the press, his bat and glove and baserunning spoke loudly on his behalf.

Willie Mays had “the Catch” but DiMaggio had the reputation of positioning himself so correctly, batter after batter, that he made every catch look easy. And if his bad feet prevented him from playing center the way it ought to be played, he sat. Sure he had slumps and off-years, but they were so infrequent that they were remarkable, the exceptions to his rule. He always looked good, and it may have been partly vanity, but it was also something he gave to the fans. He played with an intensity that commanded attention, because he played as if the fans in the park that day might be at their first game, or their only game, and the fans deserved the best. Not a bad approach.

I never saw DiMaggio play, only on jerky film where the players all ran too fast. I know Joe D. mainly through the medium of print — not the surest way to someone’s character. The greatest? Not for me. But for many, yes, he was.

DON’T KEEP THIS UNDER YOUR CAP

Over the years, without any real effort on my part, and without actually buying any, I have amassed a pretty good collection of caps. Naturally, most are baseball, but being from Pittsburgh, and being a man for all seasons, I also have caps bearing the logos of the Steelers (Stillers, in Pittsburghese), and the Penguins. I have a variety of Pirate headgear, all gifts or souvenir giveaways at Three Rivers, as well as a smaller set of caps from the era when my kids were playing and I was coaching. I recently surveyed the tags inside each, and discovered that the vast majority of my caps were manufactured outside the U.S.A. — in China, the Dominican Republic, Bangladesh — all over the globe.

Counting a cap from Geneseo, the college from which my daughter graduated last spring (see NOTES #234), I have just three that were made in this country. One is really old — the Penguin cap, stitched together by a company called AJD — city unknown. The other two were made by a company called New Era, which has several plants in upstate New York. The employees at New Era Cap Company also make all the caps for Major League Baseball (their five-year, $80 million deal runs thru next year), as well as many universities (New Era sold U. of North Carolina last year to the tune of nearly half a million bucks.)

New Era is a family-run business that pays its employees well, over $12 an hour — overseas workers receive a small fraction of that, maybe 15% by one estimate. So why is New Era the target of protests by the CWA (Communications Workers of America), and the college activist group United Students Against Sweatshops? Blame (or praise) the Workers Rights Consortium, a “labor-friendly watchdog group” (Buffalo News.)

They accuse New Era of tolerating poor working conditions (needle punctures are common injuries; critics say New Era’s injury rate is five times that of the cap industry average); of failing to recognize (let alone prevent, treat, and compensate workers for) work-related repetitive-motion injuries (my wife had successful carpal tunnnel surgery a few years ago; I know this is a big issue with certain companies); of reducing piece-rates used to calculate wages (by $3/hour), which affected older and injured workers most; and of generally trying to kill off or starve off the union (CWA) — something to which MLB can surely relate!

Oh, yes — critics also say New Era imports “at least 10% of its caps” from Bangladesh, and replaces those tags with “Made in USAs.”

Six months ago, a strike was called at the New Era

plant in Derby, NY, south of Buffalo. Not every employee was in the CWA, and of those who walked, 80 have returned, leaving 215 on the picket lines. Duke, Georgetown and the U. of Wisconsin at Madison have all cut ties with New Era, and UNC is thinking about it, but sales have actually gone up a few notches since the strike began, despite the general slump in the economy.

You make the call: pressure New Era so much that they, too, take their business overseas? One flyer I’ve seen says that the New Era workers have won the support of the Major League Players Association. MLB caps no longer made under union conditions? Outrageous! But if we can agree to forget salary caps and contraction …. Just kidding, Mr Fehr.

If any of the editors reading this want to pass it on, let me know and I’ll give you the footnotes, so you know I’m not writing this to make MLB or Bud Selig look conscienceless (for not throwing their considerable influence on the side of the Americans injured or out of work.) And if you want to look up more, try www.workersrights.org, or www.cwa-union.org. Or, I can put you in touch with my daughter, who works for a watchdog group in Buffalo, NYPIRG. I thank her for prompting this story.