Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and the Summer of ’41 (With George Will)

On this episode of Our American Stories, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will tells the story of Ted Williams. He also tells the story of a San Francisco fisherman’s son, Joe DiMaggio—his “streak” of 56 consecutive games with a hit, and his steely determination.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is our American stories, and we tell stories about
everything here on the show, as you know, which brings
us to George will the renowned political columnist whose very
best writing is about baseball. Here's George.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
I was born in May nineteen forty one. In the
nick of time. I had eleven days to get my
bearings before it began the streak. It was the greatest
event of a baseball season that flared dazzlingly on the
eve of darkness. There were just sixteen teams in ten cities,
and Saint Louis was baseball's westernmost outpost. But the future

(00:49):
California was present in San Francisco's Joe DiMaggio and San
Diego's Ted Williams. Williams was so volatile as a cult
and there's one dimension as a surgeon. Demaggio's cool elegance
concealed a passion to excel at every aspect of the game.

(01:09):
Williams used a postal scale in the clubhouse to make
sure humidity had not increased the weight of his bats.
The officials of the Louisville Slugger Company once challenged Williams
to pick the one bat among six that weighed half
an ounce more than the other five he did. He
once sent back to the factory a shipment of bats

(01:31):
because he sensed that the handles were too thick. They
were by five to one hundredths of an inch. In
nineteen forty one, Williams was hitting three nine, nine, five
five going into the season ending doubleheader in Philadelphia's Shi Park.
Daylight savings had ended the night before, so the autumn

(01:52):
shadows that made hitting hard would be even worse. If
Williams had not played, his average would have been rounded
up to four hundred. Instead, he went six for eight,
including a blazing double that broke a public address speaker.
He finished at four oh six. Today, when a batter
hits a sacrifice fly, he is not charged within a bat.

(02:15):
In nineteen forty one, he was williams manager Joe Cronin estimates.
Williams hit fourteen of them, so under today's rules, his
average would have been four nineteen. Since then, the highest
average has been George Brett's three ninety in nineteen eighty.
Williams's achievement is one of the greatest in baseball history,

(02:37):
but not the greatest in nineteen forty one. Nothing in
baseball quite matches Demaggio's fifty six game hitting streak. The
Yankees were on a tear, so at home they rarely
batted in the bottom of the ninth, Demaggio had to
get his hits in eight innings, and in the thirty

(02:57):
eighth game of his streak, he was hitless. Entering the
bottom of the eighth with the Yankees ahead three to one,
he was scheduled to be the fourth batter. The first
batter popped out, the second walked, and Tommy Henrik was
up and worried. He was a power hitter who rarely bunded,
but if he hit into a double play, the streak

(03:18):
probably would end. He returned to the dugout and got
manager Joe McCarthy's permission to bunt. Then Demaggio hit a double.
On July eighth in Detroit, the American League won the
most exciting All Star Game when with two out in
the bottom of the ninth and the National League leading
five to four, Williams hit a three run home run

(03:40):
to brig Stadium's upper deck. When play resumed after the
All Star break, with demaggio streak at forty eight, he
erupted for seventeen hits and thirty one at bats. As
the pressure intensified, Demaggio's performance became greater. He had four
hits in the fiftieth game, went far or for eight

(04:00):
in the doubleheader that ran the streak to fifty three,
had two hits in the fifty fifth game, and three
in the fifty six. The streak ended in Cleveland, when
the Indians third baseman Ken Keltner made two terrific stops
of rocketed grounders, both times his momentum carried him into
foul territory, from which he threw Demajo out by a blink.

(04:25):
In those fifty six games, Demaggio hit four to eight
with ninety one hits, thirty five for extra bases, including
fifteen home runs. He drove in fifty five runs and
scored fifty six. The next day, he began a sixteen
game hitting streak. When it ended, he had hit safely
in seventy two of seventy three games, not counting his

(04:48):
hit in the All Star Game. Most records are improved
by small increments, not this one. The consecutive game hitting
record for a Yankee had been twenty nine. The modern
Major League record had been George Sisler's forty one the
all time Major League record had been Willie Keeler's forty
four Demaggio fell short only of two other professional hitting streaks,

(05:15):
sixty nine games by Joe Wilhoyt of Wichita the Western
League in nineteen nineteen and sixty one in nineteen thirty
three by an eighteen year old playing for the San
Francisco Seals named Joe Demaggio. During Demaggio's streak, radio broadcasts
had been interrupted to bring bulletins about his progress, but

(05:37):
once radio interrupted baseball on the night of May twenty seventh,
when the Braves were playing the Giants and the Polo Grounds,
both teams left the field for a while at ten thirty,
and the public address announcer said, Ladies and gentlemen, the
President of the United States United States. About seventeen thousand

(05:57):
fans listened to FDR's radio address describing the lowering clouds
of danger. Michael Sidell, author of Streak Joe Demaggio in
the summer of forty one, says Demagio was a lot
like the Taciturn enduring characters then played in movies by
Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper, who was soon to play

(06:17):
lou Garig Demaggio number five was the successor to lou
Garig number four, who died on June second, nineteen forty one,
of the disease that now bears his name. Gerig was
seventeen days shy of his thirty eighth birthday. He died
sixteen years to the day after he became the yankees

(06:37):
regular first basement in game two of a streak of
two thousand, one hundred and thirty games consecutive played. Demaggio's
similar stance toward life, a steely will, understated style, relentless consistency,
was mesmerizing to a nation that knew it would soon

(06:58):
need what he epitomized heroism for the long haul. However,
the unrivaled elegance of his career is defined by two
numbers even more impressive than his fifty six. They are
eight and zero. Eight is the astonishingly small difference between

(07:19):
his thirteen year career totals for home runs three hundred
and sixty one and strikeouts three hundred and sixty nine.
In the nineteen eighty six and nineteen eighty seven seasons,
Jose Canseco hit sixty four home runs and struck out
three hundred and thirty two times zero is the number

(07:40):
of times Demaggia was thrown out in his entire career,
going from first to third base on the field. The
man made few mistakes off the field. He made a
big one in his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, but even
it enlarged his mythic status, as when they were in
Japan and sheied US troops in Korea. Upon her return

(08:03):
to Tokyo, she said to him ingenuously, You've never heard
cheering like that. There must have been fifty or sixty thousand.
He said, dryly, Oh, yes, I have. They had gone
to Japan at the recommendation of a friend Leftio Duo,
manager of the San Francisco Seals, who said that in
a foreign country they could wander around without drawing crowds.

(08:27):
The friend did not know that Japan was then obsessed
with things American, especially baseball stars and movie stars. When
the most famous of each category landed, it took their
car six hours to creep to their hotel through more
than a million people. As a Californian, he represented baseball's future.

(08:48):
He in San Diego's Ted Williams, a twenty one year
old rookie in nineteen thirty nine, when DiMaggio was twenty four. Demaggio,
a son of San Francisco fisherman, was proud, reserved, and
as private as possible for the bearer the second generation
of America's premium metaltic tradition, the Yankee Greatness, established by

(09:10):
Babe Ruth and Lou Garrick. Demaggio felt violated by the
sight of Maryland filming the famous scene in The Seven
Years Itch, when a gust of wind from a Manhattan
subway grate blows her skirt up over her waist. Yes, pride,
supposedly one of the seven Deadly sins, is often a

(09:33):
virtue and the source of others. Demaggio was Pride incarnate,
and he and Hank Greenberg did much to stir ethnic
pride among Italian Americans and Jews. When as a player,
Demaggio had nothing left to prove, he was asked why
he still played so hard every day, because he said,

(09:53):
every day there is apt to be some child in
the stands who has never before seen me play. An
entire ethic, the code of craftsmanship can be tickled from
that admirable thought. Not that Demaggio practiced the full range
of his craft. When one of his managers was asked
if Demaggio could bunt, he said he did not know,

(10:15):
and I'll never find out either. Demaggio, one of Jefferson's
natural aristocrats, proved that a healthy democracy knows and honors
nobility when.

Speaker 1 (10:27):
It sees it. And you've been listening to George Well
the Story of Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, the Story
of class incarnate two folks here on our American stories