Editor’s note: Baseball commissioners don’t often form close relationships with players, but Fay Vincent, who was commissioner from September 1989 to September 1992, did just that with Joe DiMaggio. Vincent wrote a version of this column that appeared at FoxNews.com Tuesday.
Joe DiMaggio at 100: Memories of the finest player I ever saw
On the 100th anniversary of Joe DiMaggio’s birth (Nov. 25), it seems appropriate to remember him as I do as the finest baseball player I ever saw play our delicate little game.
Bobby Doerr, the Hall of Fame second baseman and Boston Red Sox teammate of Ted Williams, once told me that Williams was the best hitter of their time but that Joe was the best all-around player. I grew up rooting for the Yankees as a kid in New Haven and, much later, when I got to know Joe well, I never failed to feel as if I were in the presence of a deity. Joe always acted as if he knew he was special.
I also got to know Dom DiMaggio, the youngest of the trio of major league outfielders, and, in his own right, a superb center fielder for the Red Sox. The two brothers had drifted apart over the years, but as Joe lay dying, Dommy was loyal and he and Joe shared some closing times.
Joe apparently resented the minority opinion that his kid brother was a better fielder. Joe was tough and sensitive and extremely proud. He insisted on being introduced as “the greatest living ballplayer,” though he tolerated Williams being called the “greatest living hitter.”
In my view, Joe stands at the head of the list of those I saw play for the simple reason that he was not only a superb player, but he also made his teammates better. He played 13 seasons for the Yankees and led his team to 10 American League pennants and 9 World Series championships. I asked him about his leadership and whether he ever gave a pep talk to his teammates.
“No, I did not do that,” he answered rather formally. “I just played hard the way Gehrig did and I guess it worked.”
That was Joe. He was quiet and yet he was totally aware of how the team and the baseball world saw him. He had the self-confidence that comes with being able to perform at the highest level when the game was on the line.
In 13 years, he hit .325 and three times was voted the most valuable player in the American League. He hit 361 home runs in the old Yankee Stadium with the enormous left-center field dimensions. But he struck out only 369 times in his career.
He could hit any fastball, especially when he “calculated” it was coming. He told me he never “guessed” what a pitcher would throw. I asked him who the toughest pitcher was for him and he quickly told me, “Mel Harder of the Indians because he had a great curve and I had trouble with it.” When Dom answered the same question by citing Bob Feller as the toughest pitcher for him, I told him Joe had said he had good luck with Feller. “You cannot pay attention to that,” Dom said. “My brother could hit anyone, even when he was 14.”
I often had lunch with Joe and I was respectful of him and his privacy so I never asked about Marilyn Monroe and let him control our conversation. He was happy to talk baseball and even to answer tough questions.
Once I asked him about his worst day at an All-Star game and he told me of his failure to catch a line drive hit by Gabby Hartnett in the 1936 game which led to his being soundly ripped by the baseball press the following day. He remembered only one writer defended him. He asked me if I knew which writer. Pausing, he told me his supporter was Damon Runyon who at the time covered the Yankees for a New York paper but subsequently became a noted author of short stories and Broadway collaborator. Typically of Joe was his ability to recall the writer who stood up for him. He surely remembered anyone who offended him. Forever.
In the memorial service for DiMaggio at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, his former Yankee teammate, Dr. Bobby Brown, brilliantly summed up the reasons Joe was a great player and why his statistics do not tell the whole story. Bobby explained there are no statistics to tell us how many times in the late innings Joe took the extra base to stretch a single into a double or a double into a triple. There are no numbers to tell us how many late-inning crucial catches he made or how many times he threw out the tying run at third base or at home. Bobby urged us to accept his testimony as a teammate. I do.
***** ***** ***** *****
Vincent’s appreciation of DiMaggio brought some DiMaggio detractors out of the woodwork.
A New York newspaper, Vincent noted, ran a column with a headline “Joe D Was Overrated!” An online sports site, he said, proclaimed, “DiMaggio’s Hitting Streak Is Overrated.”
Hitting streak overrated? DiMaggio hit .408 during his 56-game streak in 1941, collecting 91 hits in 223 times at bat, hitting 15 home runs and driving in 55 runs. In baseball history no one else has hit in more than 44 consecutive games in a season. Overrate that.
As Vincent notes, DiMaggio hit 361 home runs and struck out 369 times. That’s a remarkable ratio. Compare it with just these three players: Ted Williams 521 home runs, 709 strikeouts; Henry Aaron 755 home runs, 1,383 strikeouts; Barry Bonds 762 home runs, 1,539 strikeouts.
Those numbers don’t look to me that DiMaggio is overrated. And if anyone wants to look at DiMaggio’s career numbers and try to use any of them to try to make the overrated case, remember that DiMaggio lost three prime years to the armed services during World War II – ages 28, 29, 30 in 1943, ’44 and ’45.
Then there was the birth-anniversary contribution of John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball. He went on MLB Network to debunk the DiMaggio myth.
“There’s the legend, of course,” Thorn said, according to MLB.com, “that he never had to dive for a ball because he was always so skillfully positioned, never threw to the wrong base, never had a ball hit over his head, that kind of thing; never had to dive for a short ball or a ball in the alley.
“If you had said it about somebody today, you would say that the guy hasn’t got heart and wasn’t going to go for all the balls he could get to. If you look at DiMaggio’s range factor, he never led the American League and he never even finished second once.”
I have never had any regard for the position of baseball historian, and with his metrics-based view of DiMaggio, Thorn does nothing to change my view of his position.
Thorn can play with his new-fangled statistics all he wants, but his comments only enhance my severely negative view of the new metrics. Are these so-called experts going to plow through history and tell Fay Vincent and me we weren’t seeing what we thought we were seeing, that those of us who actually watched players play and based our judgment on what we saw on the field, and not the computer, didn’t know what we were seeing?
If DiMaggio was overrated and a myth, I wasted a lot of time watching baseball games.
–MURRAY CHASS