Sports Gripe
3-22-99. DiMAGGIO IN BLACK AND WHITE
This is not about Joe DiMaggio the player. I am not qualified to write about the player. I never saw him play. In fact, the only film of him in action that comes to mind is the famous clip of him kicking the dirt, without breaking stride, after Al Gionfriddo caught his deep line drive in the 1955 World Series. The clip is famous because it is widely reputed to be the only time Mr DiMaggio ever showed emotion on the field. The things I've heard about him, from those who did see him, put him in a class far beyond what his career stats suggest -- and his stats hardly detract from the argument that he was one of the best ever.
This is not about Joe DiMaggio the man. There's no reason to write about that, because it's already a matter of folklore, legend, and public record. Not that this stops people from writing about his life anyway, nor should it: DiMaggio's life was fascinating, and people are more than willing to revisit its details.
This is about Joe DiMaggio the symbol. That too is a very public thing, just like the Empire State Building and the Mona Lisa are very public, very familiar things. And just like any icon, it means something different to each pair of eyes.
To me, Mr DiMaggio's death marks the formal passing of the black and white era, in baseball and in American history.
Baseball has three eras. The ancient era started when baseball crawled from the primordial ooze of the Hudson River to the Elysian Fields of Hoboken, NJ to be born in 1839. This era came to an abrupt and arbitrarily determined close in 1899, so that records amassed in 1900 or after could be validated as "modern".
In the 20th century, baseball is cleanly divisible into two eras, black-and-white and full color. By historic coincidence, and not mere round-number contrivance, the turning point is at mid-century -- 1951, to be exact.
All the images from the first half of the century are black and white: those of Ty Cobb, Cy Young, Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson, Babe Ruth, Nap Lajoie, Rube Foster, Gehrig, Foxx, Greenberg, Simmons, Hack Wilson with his tiny feet, Alexander, Mathewson, Big Train, Grove, the hundreds of others who were photographed by Charles Conlon and the newspaper photographers of their day. If not sepia toned, they are all black and white.
Many players whose careers began later, in the late 30s or early 40s, were still around when the first of the memorable color images began to emerge. Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Stan Musial, and Satchel Paige transcended the black-and-white era. Famous late career photos capture them in the muted, less-than-lifelike subvibrancy of Ektachrome. But these were color pictures, nonetheless.
Joe DiMaggio left the game after the 1951 season, the last season in which everything was still strictly black and white. If there are any famous photos of him in uniform in color, I've never seen them. What's more, he was the Yankee Clipper. He wore throughout his career the most nearly black and white uniform in the major leagues, the formal boardroom attire of a franchise so relentlessly elite it defies the imagination of anyone born after the Eisenhower administration.
Mr DiMaggio did not cross over into the baseball's full color days. It was almost as if baseball, or America, or time itself was waiting politely for him to withdraw before ushering in a new era.
I saw Joe DiMaggio selling coffee makers on TV commercials before I ever saw a picture of him playing ball. The first picture I ever saw of him in action, was one of those famous still shots of him in the dramatic follow-through of his swing. I couldn't believe the soft-spoken, gray-haired coffee guy was the same man.
The tension, the symmetry, the elegant yet explosive release of energy, and the compositional balance of the shot is a true marvel. How can a man's body, from his left foot to his head, be at a 45 degree angle from the ground, and yet not be off-balance? And not only not off-balance: the batter is firmly and gracefully manipulating the laws of physics, instead of struggling to obey them. As though meticulously planned by a renaissance painter who believes deeply in the orderliness of the universe, all the important lines in the picture -- the creases in his uniform, the muscles in his arms neck and face, the shaft of the bat -- seem arranged so as to converge neatly on some unseen vanishing point, beyond the frame, probably somewhere back in the grandstand behind the plate. Photos of Mr DiMaggio finishing his swing are two-dimensional sculptures in black and white, chiseled in light.
Four years before Mr DiMaggio left the game, Jackie Robinson entered it. The familiar cliche is that Robinson "broke baseball's color barrier". But while Robinson's courage introduced all colors to the baseball palette, the accomplishment was of significance far beyond a game or a business.
A decade-long worldwide economic crisis had launched a worldwide war lasting nearly another decade. Even though the sides in the war were cartoonishly unambiguous (it was the war of good vs evil), in its aftermath, the existence of many shades of gray in American society could no longer be ignored or explained away.
At last, it was time to live up to the ideals under which the nation had supposedly been established, and to question if the way things always had been was necessarily right. Maybe all those who held power and status in American culture owed their station as much to an accident of birth as to merit or nobility of character. And therefore, maybe those who were poor and powerless were locked into their station by an equally accidental circumstance. And maybe that meant that, instead of being lazy or stupid or shiftless, they were unfairly deprived of rights and opportunities by a justice system that was, at best, designed to protect the property of the wealthy from the grubby survival instincts of the poor, and at worst refused to recognize them as fully human. And maybe our leaders made certain decisions, sometimes affecting lives in the hundreds of thousands, guided only by dark and petty motives. Maybe their grandeur and infallibility were inflated or simply false.
In the black and white era that held up Joe DiMaggio as its hero, one did what one was told without asking why. Whether or not Joe DiMaggio himself put all or any stock in this value system, he represented it to those who did. He came to be recognized as a symbol for a time when good was good, bad was bad, and wherever authority resided was justified, simply because it was authority.
After he left baseball, it was time in America to question whether tradition and authority were to be honored simply for being in place, or whether basis in reason was required. And what shape that reason should take. And where it should be found, and whether it was valid. To move away from being a society that was profoundly unjust for some, yet very, very comfortable for most, called for upheaval, division, violence, and pain.
Recognizing all the grays in the world is disillusioning, and trying to embrace them as a necessary part of it is hard work. It's a hell of a lot easier to relax with our prejudices and pursue our greater personal comfort than it is to give the benefit of the doubt to someone else. That's one reason why the black and white world that was left behind at the precise moment Joe DiMaggio retired is so appealing in retrospect.
But it's not nearly as simple as that. Not all of the changes that have been wrought by the movement of American culture away from its black and white era have been positive, and not all the values of the black and white era that have largely been rejected should have been.
Joe DiMaggio symbolized dignity, orderliness, and dutiful respect. Whether or not he was comfortable being a cultural symbol, and one senses he wasn't, he bore it without complaint. He wasn't responsible for those who often placed such values in bed with selfishness, intolerance and brutality. He was just a ballplayer, trying to be the best ballplayer. It's fitting that his artwork is always evoked in black and white.
Okay, I said I wouldn't discuss him as a player, but I lied. In recent weeks, I noticed something about DiMaggio's statistics that I had not noticed before.
Most guys who are winding down Hall of Fame careers these days are retiring with something like 10,000 at-bats to go with their 3,000 hits and 1,500 RBIs. But DiMaggio amassed his 1,537 career RBIs in 6,821 at-bats. No one ahead of him on the career RBI list has as few as 7,000 at-bats; the closest, Ted Williams, has 7,706.
For his career, Joltin' Joe needed an average of only 4.44 at bats to record an RBI. I prefer to see it expressed the other way around: he racked up .225 RBI for each at-bat. That ranks him fifth all time. Ahead of him in that category are Babe Ruth (.263), Lou Gehrig (.249), Ted Williams, (.239), and Jimmie Foxx (.236). No one will argue that Ruth, Gehrig and Foxx are not among the best in the history of the game, but even so, their numbers float just a little artificially high, because they rode the high offensive tide of the late 20s and the 1930s.
But these numbers argue much more forcefully for the dominance of Williams and DiMaggio, who got only nibbles of the fat times provided for hitters by the 1930s (DiMaggio came up in '36, Williams in '39). Williams' numbers clearly edge DiMaggio's, but then, DiMaggio was a far more rounded player, excelling in defense as well as hitting while Williams never pretended to care much about anything but hitting. But the main issue here is, even the years they lost to military service aside, they both played in much more pitcher-friendly times than their famous predecessors.
It's only one yardstick, but it has helped me to take more seriously the claims that DiMaggio was the best ever. (I already accepted that Williams was the best pure hitter ever.)