Free Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America by David Halberstam Page A

others. Just for fun I timed them to see how long they would maintain their silence. Believe it or not, they didn’t speak for an hour and twenty minutes. At the end of the time DiMaggio cleared his throat. Crosetti looked at him and said: ‘What did you say?’ And Lazzeri said, ‘Shut up. He didn’t say nothing.’ They lapsed into silence and at the end of ten more minutes I got up and left. I couldn’t stand it anymore.”
    His teammates did not resent DiMaggio’s need to be private. Watching him play day after day, often under immensely difficult circumstances, they became the true advocates of his greatness. Some forty years later, Henrich, a proud, unsentimental man, would point out that when fans asked him to compare the Mantle and DiMaggio outfields, he always said that DiMaggio’s was better “because we had the better center fielder.” Then Henrich would point out an astonishing and revealing statistic about DiMaggio: By and large, such power hitters as DiMaggio have a high strikeout ratio. It is in the nature of the big swing. ReggieJackson, for example, has almost four and a half strikeouts for each home run. Even Hank Aaron, a marvelous line-drive hitter whose power came from his wrists, struck out twice for every home run. Ted Williams, whose eyesight was as legendary as his concentration, struck out 709 times against 521 home runs. But Joe DiMaggio, Henrich pointed out, hit 361 home runs and struck out 369 times.
    His teammates understood that he put extra pressure on himself to live up to the expectations of the media and the fans. They knew that he pushed himself to his limits both physically and emotionally to carry the team. That being the case, they appreciated that he was different, that he worked things out for himself. Once when he was going through a prolonged slump, Bill Dickey, by then the hitting coach, explained to Mel Allen, the broadcaster, what he thought DiMaggio was doing wrong. “How does Joe react to what you’ve just said?” Allen asked. “Oh, I haven’t spoken to Joe yet,” Dickey answered. “Why not?” Allen pursued. “A player like Joe, when he’s in a slump, you don’t go to him. You wait until he comes to you. First he tries to work it out himself. Then if he doesn’t he’ll let you know he’s ready,” Dickey answered.
    DiMaggio rarely dined with the other players on the road, even Keller and Henrich, with whose names his was inextricably linked in a thousand box scores. He led the league, his teammate Eddie Lopat once shrewdly noted, in roomservice. He sought out dark restaurants, where he would sit in the back, in a corner, so that he would not be recognized. If DiMaggio palled around with anyone on the team, it was usually the newer or more vulnerable players who hero-worshiped him and ran favors for him: there was Joe Page, the relief pitcher, whose behavior was erratic enough so that his place on the team was rarely secure; then, for a time, there was Clarence Marshall, the handsome young pitcher; and finally, at the end of his career, DiMaggio palled around with Billy Martin. Martin began his friendship withDiMaggio by violating the most sacred rule of Yankee etiquette: He asked DiMaggio out for dinner. “Hey Joe, let’s go to dinner tonight” a statement so startling, a presumption so great, that his teammates long remembered it. DiMaggio was so amused by him that he assented, and the two became friends.
    Some DiMaggio hangers-on were known as his Boboes, the phrase then popular for caddies. One who was proud to be known as a DiMaggio Bobo was Lou Effrat, the Times’s baseball writer. On occasion, Effrat would come in late to Toots Shor’s, the main wateringhole of baseball men and sportswriters, to be told by Shor himself that his presence was requested. “The Daig [for “Dago,” DiMaggio’s nickname] wants you,” Shor would say to Effrat. “What does he want?” Effrat would ask. “He wants to go to a midnight movie.” Effrat knew the