The Last Commissioner: A Baseball Valentine

Book by Vincent Fay

Chapter One

Joe and Ted

Mostly, I've been lucky. I came of baseball age in the late 1940s, when Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio were at the height of their powers. My family lived in southern Connecticut, in New Haven, a train ride away from Boston and a train ride away from New York. You could get the Red Sox games on the radio. But the Yankee games you could get -- if you actually had one -- on TV. We had a DuMont TV, black-and-white, about the size of a breadbox; my father, a frugal New Englander, had won it at a raffle at a Polish Catholic church in New Haven. I rooted for DiMaggio's Yankees, much to my father's chagrin. His team was the Philadelphia Athletics of Connie Mack. "Rooting for the Yankees," he'd say, "is like rooting for General Motors." The Red Sox, anchored by Williams in left, embodied the New England spirit: frugal, never flashy, successful, but not wildly so. When the Sox and the Yankees played, our little world slowed down. How many hits for DiMaggio? How many hits for Williams? Who won? Up and down Orange Street, where we rented the first floor of a three-family house, that's what people wanted to know. All the ballplayers were heroes, and these two men were the giants among them. They were in your dreams at night, on the sports page the following morning, they followed you up to the plate in our sandlot games as we tried to imitate their batting stances.

Later, I became the commissioner of baseball. As I say, I've been lucky. Forty years after Orange Street I was the commissioner of baseball and Williams and DiMaggio were still alive and well and active in the game I was charged with running. I found myself with a legitimate role in their lives, which, even as an idea, took some getting used to. When I became commissioner -- after the death of my great friend, Bart Giamatti, late in the 1989 season -- I remember walking on the grass at Wrigley Field and having the feeling that somebody would chase me off, that somebody would realize I was an interloper. But nobody did, and in fact people were very nice to me: I was the commissioner of baseball. And because I was the commissioner of baseball, I got to know DiMaggio and Williams, the heroes of my boyhood. The title came with remarkable privileges.

One day, I was able to spend several hours with them in a Washington hotel room, talking baseball. The two men respected each other, but they were never pals, they were not close friends, and now I had the two of them in a single room. As far as I know, it was the longest conversation the two of them ever had, the most time they had ever spent together. When this remarkable session was over, I did something smart: I got out a notebook and started writing things down as fast and as accurately -- I'm blessed with a good memory -- as I could.

I had met DiMaggio first, a few years earlier, in Baltimore, at a meeting of the Orioles board of directors. Eli Jacobs, the owner of the Orioles, did a smart thing: People he liked, he put on his board in ceremonial positions. DiMaggio was on that board. Howard Baker, the former Senate majority leader. George Will, the writer. An interesting group. I was invited to attend a meeting, as commissioner. I met DiMaggio and sat next to him during the game that followed. I knew enough to know that one had to be very careful, very respectful, when approaching DiMaggio on any subject.

"May I ask you a fan's questions?"

"You are the commissioner of baseball. You can ask me anything you want, Mr. Commissioner. I'll answer."

I warmed him up with some innocent questions. But then:

r"How come you never hit 400?" I asked.

"Now that is a question almost nobody asks me," he said.

"They're afraid. I know you won't yell at me."

"It's a good question," DiMaggio said. This was a pleasing thing, to be able to ask DiMaggio -- the great DiMaggio, as Ernest Hemingway called him in The Old Man and the Sea -- a good question. "In 1939, I was going to hit .400. Right around the first of September, we clinched the pennant. We always clinched around the first of September. Right about then, I was hitting .408.

"I was going to hit over .400 that year. Then I got an eye infection. Couldn't see out of the infected eye. Our manager was Joe McCarthy. Every day, McCarthy puts me in the lineup. Commissioner, that guy made out a lineup card in April and he never changed it. Every day I'd go to the ballpark, every day my eye is getting worse and worse, and every day I'm in the lineup. I couldn't hit. My average starts falling. Finally, the eye gets so bad they have to give me an injection in the eye. And McCarthy still has me in the lineup. I wouldn't say anything to him. Now I did not have a bad year, Commissioner. I batted .381. But with my eye amost closed I had to open my stance. The infection was in my left eye, the lead eye. So I had to swing my left foot around to try to see the ball, but I couldn't. I had trouble and my average fell. That was my year to bat .400 and I didn't do it."

My little interview was going all right, so I asked the follow-up question: "Joe, did McCarthy ever tell you why he kept you in the lineup every day with the eye infection?"

"Yes, one time," Joe said. "We were in Buffalo, speaking together. He says, 'Joe, did you ever wonder why the hell I kept you in the lineup that year, when you had the bad eye?'

"I said, 'Yes, I did.'

"He says, 'Because I didn't want you to be a cheese champion.'"

"Cheese champion?" I asked. "What does that mean?"

"I don't know, Commissioner," Joe said. "I never asked."

From then on, I loved talking to Joe because he seemed interested in talking to me. This was all a function of my job, and I was grateful for it -- about the greatest unexpected benefit a job could have. My office was in New York, where Joe spent a lot of time. Every so often, my secretary would say, "Mr. Vincent, Mr. DiMaggio is here. He wonders if you could see him." I would say, "There is always time in the commissioner's life for the Yankee Clipper." He loved that. He would say, "I was in the building and just stopped by." He was around a fair bit, because he had a great friendship with his old teammate Dr. Bobby Brown, the American League president who was also a physician.

With DiMaggio, all the great questions were long-simmering, and he went to his grave with many of them unanswered. Bobby had the same fascination with Joe that I had, that a great many of us of my generation had. Bobby used to tell the story of a game in which Joe hit two long shots to deep center -- it might have been Joe's brother, Dom, of the Boston Red Sox in center, I'm not sure -- and both times the centerfielder made the catch. Now he comes up a third time, same thing. Three huge blows, three outs, Joe comes into the dugout and there's an ice bucket. He kicks it as hard as he can. But the ice bucket is jammed up against a pole in front of the dugout. The bucket doesn't budge. "Every heart in the dugout stopped because he's our meal ticket," Bobby said.

"Now I'm in medical school. I know he has to be hurting like mad, he's probably broken at least a toe. But he shows no emotion. We don't say a word and he doesn't say a word. He just walks down the dugout and sits down. Doesn't rub his foot, doesn't touch it, nothing.

"Years later, we're in Japan together. I say to him, 'Joe, there's a question I've been wanting to ask you for years. Do you remember the game where you hit those three shots to center and made three outs, came into the dugout, and kicked the ice bucket?'

"'Oh yeah, I remember. My foot hurt for weeks. Jesus, I thought I had broken it. But I couldn't let you guys know I was hurting. I couldn't do that.' When someone asks how Joe led that team, that's the story I tell."

I once said to DiMaggio, "People are always asking you about your successes. May I ask you a question about failure?"

DiMaggio nodded.

We had been talking about All-Star games.

"What's the biggest failure you ever had in an All-Star game?"

"My first one, 1936," DiMaggio said, without pausing. He knew his career like nobody's business, the good times and the bad, not that there were many of those. "I was playing right field, at Fenway. Earl Averill, from Cleveland, was in center. He was senior to me. I was a rookie. Schoolboy Rowe was warming up along the right-field foul line for us. Gabby Hartnett, the Cubs' catcher, comes up to bat for the National League.

"I hear Rowe saying to me, 'Back up, kid, this guy hits out here.'

I backed up a little bit. 'Back up, rookie. He's gonna hit it out here.' I knew how to play the outfield, and I didn't like to play deep, but I backed up a little more. I'm a rookie, I'm not going to show up Schoolboy Rowe.

"Hartnett hit a shallow line drive. I went charging in for it. I never dove for a ball in my life, Commissioner, and I didn't dive then. The ball went right under my glove. The ball got by me, went to the wall, and we lost. Everybody ripped me, except one guy. Commissioner, do you know who that was?"

"Who?"

"Damon Runyon. Runyon was the Yankee beat writer. He was the only guy who didn't rip me."

In 1991, the All-Star game was to be played in Toronto and I invited President Bush -- the first President Bush, older brother of my high-school classmate and friend Bucky Bush -- to be my guest at the game. The president's son, George W., was then the president of the Texas Rangers.

I was in my office when the phone rang and the White House operator said, "Mr. Vincent, the president would like to speak to you. Are you available?" When the president of the United States calls, your heart skips a beat. Of course you are available. A minute later, George Bush was on the phone. His voice was very upbeat. He said, "I have an idea. You've invited me to the All-Star game. Why don't you come here with Williams and DiMaggio before the game, we'll have a ceremony midday in the Rose Garden, I'll give them the Presidential Medal of Freedom and then we'll all ...