WASHINGTON -- There is peculiar pathos to the lives of most great athletes because their careers compress life's trajectory of aspiration, accomCOplishment and decline. Then what? For most, the rest of life, which is most of life, is anticlimax.
But there was a seamlessness to Joe DiMaggio's life in and after the game. The patina of age did not dull the luster of his name. Baseball, sport of the long season and much history, has an unusually rich statistical geology. Some numbers are so talismanic that simply citing them suffices to identify the achievement and achiever.
Examples are 116 (victories in a season, 1906 Cubs); 511 (career victories, Cy Young); 1.12 (season earned run average, Bob Gibson, 1968); 130 (stolen bases in a season, Rickey Henderson, 1982); 755 (home runs, career, Hank Aaron); 60, then 61 and now 70 (home runs by Babe Ruth in 1927, Roger Maris in 1961 and Mark McGwire in 1998); .406 (most recent .400 season, Ted Williams, 1941). And baseball's most instantly recognized number, 56 -- Mr. DiMaggio's consecutive game hitting streak in 1941.
The Streak
The Streak, as it is still known, was stunning, even if a sympathetic official scorer at Yankee Stadium may have turned an error or two into hits. It took two sensational plays by Indians third baseman Ken Keltner to stop The Streak, and the next day Mr. DiMaggio started a 16-game streak. His 56 has not been seriously challenged in 57 seasons. His 1933 minor-league streak of 61 has not been matched since then.
Because of baseball's grinding everydayness, professionals place a premium on consistency. Mr. DiMaggio brought his best to the ballpark every day. What he epitomized to a mesmerized nation in 1941 -- steely will, understated style, heroism for the long haul -- the nation would need after Dec. 7.
However, the unrivaled elegance of his career is defined by two numbers even more impressive than his 56. They are 8 and 0.
Eight is the astonishingly small difference between his 13-year career totals for home runs (361) and strikeouts (369). (In the 1986 and 1987 seasons, Jose Canseco hit 64 home runs and struck out 332 times.) Zero is the number of times Mr. DiMaggio was thrown out going from first to third.
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 she visited U.S. troops in Korea. Upon her return 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.
Travel abroad
They had gone to Japan at the recommendation of a friend (Lefty O'Doul, manager of the San Francisco Seals), who said that in a foreign country they could wander around without drawing crowds. 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 -- he and San Diego's Ted Williams, a 21-year-old rookie in 1939, when Mr. DiMaggio was 24. Mr. DiMaggio, a son of a San Francisco fisherman, was proud, reserved and as private as possible for the bearer. Mr. DiMaggio felt violated by the sight of Monroe filming the famous scene in "The Seven Year Itch" when a gust of wind from a Manhattan subway grate blows her skirt up above her waist.
Pride, supposedly one of the seven deadly sins, is often a virtue. Mr. DiMaggio was pride incarnate, and he and Hank Greenberg did much to stir ethnic pride among Italian-Americans and Jews. When as a player Mr. DiMaggio had nothing left to prove, he was asked why he still played so hard every day. Because, he said, 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 Mr. DiMaggio practiced the full range of his craft. When one of his managers was asked if Mr. DiMaggio could bunt, he said he did not know and "I'll never find out, either."
Mr. DiMaggio, one of Jefferson's "natural aristocrats," proved that a healthy democracy knows and honors nobility when it sees it.
George F. Will is a syndicated columnist.
Pub Date: 3/09/99