Baseball turns its lonely eyes to DiMaggio again

LIKE MOST people my age who entered adolescence between Italia 90 and USA 94, I depended on the fleeting sporting icons du jour to shine a light on the permanent sporting icons of the past.

Thanks to Ireland’s eccentric achievements at both tournaments, I got to read about Mario Kempes, Just Fontaine and Eusébio. That Orbis sticker album with Ruud Gullit and Chris Hughton on the front nourished my pre-YouTube mind with animated step-by-step recreations of Archie Gemmill in 1978, a teenage Pele in 1958 and that Gordon Banks save in 1970.

With all due respect to Jack Charlton et al, the thing I’m most grateful to them for was how they nudged me down a gilded corridor of football history. They helped me to discover the multi-talented 1974-78 Netherlands, the 1966 North Koreans, the 1950 USA win over England and the very fact that last night’s visitors to the Aviva Stadium, Uruguay, even existed, let alone hosted a World Cup. Twice.

Pop music also depended heavily on what had gone before. One of the many cover versions we young uns didn’t realise was a cover version was the Lemonheads’ 1992 reworking of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs Robinson”. It was sped-up and plugged-in but “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio” was still as catchy and as mysterious as it must have been in 1969.

It mattered little that I didn’t understand the significance of Joe DiMaggio or why the mopey, long-haired lead singer of this grunge band from Boston was sad about the fact that “Joltin’ Joe [had] left and gone away (hey, hey, hey)”.

That’s the genius of the song. That closing verse leaves us hanging, even those of us with little or no knowledge of baseball. Where did you go, Joe DiMaggio? Whoever you are.

Major League Baseball swings back into action tomorrow against the backdrop of a damaging trial and a momentous anniversary of one of DiMaggio’s greatest seasons as a New York Yankee.

Now, more than ever, a sport that thrives off tradition has cause to hanker after a return to innocence, a return to a hot, joyous summer months before Pearl Harbour was bombed and war sent young men and women to the Pacific and Europe. And long before the still lingering scourge of steroids seeped into the game.

That summer of 1941, DiMaggio held a nation in his left-over-right grip and no matter how clichéd it sounds, Paul Simon and Tom Waits aren’t the only artists who “toast to the old days and DiMaggio too” with good reason.

Between May 15 and July 16, the son of an Italian immigrant emerged out of the shadow of Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth by hitting safely in 56 straight games. (A hit isn’t exactly a score. If the player gets to any of the three bases or scores a home run, it counts as a hit. The closest anyone has come is 44 games in-a-row and the record he broke stretched back to “Wee” Willie Keeler in 1897).

That two-month stretch included a sweltering day in Washington during which a double-header against the Senators saw him equal and beat the record as temperatures approached 40C. “I was able to control myself,” DiMaggio would later recall. “But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t dying inside.”

Pitcher Robert “Lefty” Grove, who would retire the same year, summed up the intense pressure the Yankees legend must have been feeling: “He knew what the press and fans expected of him and he was always trying to live up to that image. He knew he was Joe DiMaggio and he knew what that meant to the country.”

More recently, Sports Illustrated’s Kostya Kennedy’s newly-published book, ‘56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports’, described how almost the entire nation stopped what they were doing to listen in as the drama unfolded in the capital’s Griffith Park on July 2.

“In New York City radios played on stoops in Jackson Heights and on fire escapes in East Harlem, where Italian was still the language of the street … The play-by-play (commentary) by Arch McDonald would be broadcast on the powerful airwaves of WMAL through DC and east to the coasts of Maryland, Delaware and Virginia — the seaside hamlets that lay an entire country’s width from Joe DiMaggio’s Grotto on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco.”

This week, in the birthplace of DiMaggio and the home of the current World Series champions, the San Francisco Giants, there is little evidence of sentimentality or even title-defence nerves.

Former Giants slugger Barry Bonds, who broke baseball’s home run record under a shroud of suspicion in August, 2007, is currently under trial in the city where he achieved heroic status. He is accused of lying to a Grand Jury about his steroid use — or lack thereof, as he would have everyone believe. Testifying against him on Monday was a former girlfriend who divulged some very personal information. We learned how his temper and head grew inversely proportionally to the size of his genitals. The sort of murky case every sport would dread.

Once again, Joltin’ Joe, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you (woo, woo, woo).

* Contact: [e-mail]; Twitter: @JohnWRiordan