This Day in Yankee History (“The Great DiMaggio” Returns to Clobber the Red Sox)

June 28, 1949—Baseball’s greatest rivalry, between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, recorded one of its most astonishing chapters, as the Bronx Bombers’ Joe DiMaggio (in the photo accompanying this post with brother Dom of his team’s rivals), back on the field after a painful bone spur had sidelined him for more than two months, began a pivotal three-game series by single-handedly pulverizing the Bosox.

This year, Yankee fans like myself have been forced to deal with another summer in which our team tries to stay close enough to the Red Sox that they won’t fall irretrievably behind if catastrophe strikes.

I suggest that Joe Girardi hand out to each of his plays a copy of David Halberstam’s terrific Summer of ’49 to see how the Bombers withstood the heat of a prior pennant race. 

In particular, he should get Alex Rodriguez to forget about what he’s going to do now without his steroid crutch and instead absorb the lessons in determination, single-minded concentration and self-confidence demonstrated by a prior five-tool, three-time MVP.

In the early 1970s, like most eighth-graders then and since, I was forced to read Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1954), a title that, like John Steinbeck’s The Pearl, is invariably assigned by skittish English Department chairs who choose a subpar rather than prime work of a great author because they mistakenly believe that students of a tender age will respond better to simplicity than to quality. It’s a little like Bob Dylan’s 1988 CD, Oh, Mercy: it’s not really a return to its creator’s great days, but the mere fact of an improvement after a creative drought is enough to cheer partisans.

But there’s one vignette in The Old Man and the Sea that almost redeems the purchase price, all by itself. In it, the fisherman of the title, Santiago, gives the kind of comfort that fathers in the New York area were used to imparting in those years:

"The Yankees cannot lose."

"But I fear the Indians of Cleveland."

"Have faith in the Yankees, my son. Think of the great DiMaggio."

As we now know, 10 years after his death, DiMaggio’s Achilles heel lay not so much in a physical but in a moral defect that, under the tutelage of Ty Cobb, evolved from an early insistence that he be paid what he was worth to an unrelenting miserliness by the time of his death in 1999.

The great paradox of his career is that the slugger, a man so aloof that he was said to “lead the league in room service,” also endlessly inspired his teammates, and perhaps never more so than during a pennant race with the Sox that became a classic. "We wanted to perform like DiMaggio," second baseman Jerry Coleman recalled years later. "Because of that. . . you push yourself harder."

The prior winter, the Yankee Clipper, aware of every penny he was worth, became the first baseball player to sign a $100,000 contract. But the first half of the season was a trial for him. His father died, the pain in his right heel throbbed, and the combination of enforced idleness and his perfectionist tendencies resulted in stress so pronounced that his ulcers flared up.

In the later years of his Hall of Fame managerial career, Casey Stengel’s use of the platoon system became much remarked upon. But he’d never used it much until, by necessity, he had to this first year with the Yankees. 

Not only was DiMaggio out, but Stengel didn’t have a regular first- or third –baseman and, after the hardy troika of Allie Reynolds, Vic Raschi and Eddie Lopat, his major hope for the pitching staff was divine intervention.

Miraculously, all the maneuvers paid off, and the Yankees were sitting atop a five-game lead as they headed toward the end of June.

But their Ted Williams-led rivals—who, every spring from 1947 through 1951, would be picked to win the pennant by The Sporting News—were showing signs of rounding into championship form. 

Their manager, Joe McCarthy, was dying for the opportunity to rub it into the former employer that had greased the skids on him during the 1946 season, edging him out for "health" reasons.

In mid-June, DiMaggio woke up one morning to find that the pain that bothered him in his right heel had, mysteriously and blessedly, vanished. 

He hadn’t picked up a bat in two months, but now convinced himself that, come hell or high water, he’d be ready to play in the Red Sox series at the end of the month.

By the end of the lost weekend in Fenway Park, it was the Red Sox rather than DiMaggio who were feeling the pain:

* June 28--DiMaggio’s two-run homer off Mickey McDermott provided the margin of victory in the Bombers’ 5-4 victory.

* June 29—With the Sox leading the Bombers 7-1, the Yankee Clipper cut the score to a far-more-respectable 7-4 with a three-run blast in the fifth. His solo shot in the eight broke a tie and paved the way for a 9-7 victory.

* June 30—With the Yankees barely holding on to a 3-2 lead in the seventh, DiMaggio engaged in a war of wills with Red Sox ace Mel Parnell, battling to a full count before sending the ball skyrocketing over the steel towers in left field, giving the Yankees a 6-2 win and a sweep of the series.

Four homers in three games. When the Red Sox lost the pennant on the last day of the season to their archrivals, they would all wish that something had prevented DiMaggio from playing that weekend three months earlier. 

But it proved once again why he was regarded as without a peer in the "summer game."

A half century later, New Yorker baseball writer Roger Angell aptly described the impact of the son of a San Francisco fisherman who inspired Hemingway’s Santiago: 

"No one else brought such presence and quiet command to the hard parts of the game, or is remembered by all who saw him play as being engaged in a private vision of his work that was offered daily for our pleasure."