Reading all the accounts of Joe DiMaggio’s brave battle with illness has led me to recall the time when he and I corresponded, hitter to hitter. It was through my Uncle Irvin that we hooked up.
Although the war cost him his shot at the big leagues, Irvin was by many accounts the greatest baseball player in the history of Lynn, Mass. He had starred for the semiprofessional Lynn Frasers and played in the Cape Cod League alongside Birdie Tebbetts and Yogi Berra, and even knew many Negro League stars. He could run, bunt, and hit for power, and got offered a contract by the Boston Braves. Irvin carried in his wallet a taped-up newspaper clipping in which National League umpire Artie Gore described him as “pound for pound, the greatest ballplayer I ever saw.”
When I was 11, Irvin intervened to rescue me from a serious crisis. The crisis was: I couldn’t hit for beans. Given that I was planning to spend the next three decades playing left field for the Boston Red Sox, this non-hitting jeopardized not just my standing with my friends but also my future livelihood. Irvin started coming to the house daily.
You could see where Artie Gore got that “pound-for-pound” trope. Irvin was only five-four or five-five. While he’d added a few pounds in the years since he’d played, he was still quick as a cat. With his left hand holding an imaginary bat, Irvin would point his right index finger at me and start to twirl it frantically. He’d glare at me and intone, as if pronouncing a curse, “You see the spin onnat ball.” (The twirling finger was supposed to indicate a wicked overhand curve, though the pitching I was then failing to hit was only 2-3 m.p.h. this side of underhand.) “You see the spin an’ you see the stitches an’ then . . . ” Having pulled his right hand back, he now brought both hands around in a lightning-fast pantomime swing and said, “Whoompf!” He cocked his head up and you could imagine a pantomime ball rocketing out of our backyard.
Then Irvin said, “Let’s open up your stance.” He got me to squat down and stick my foot out and wiggle the bat high above my head, as if it were a rope I was hanging from. “There!” he said. “You look like Vern Stephens.” Vern Stephens was a power-hitting short stop who had played for the Red Sox decades before, but I didn’t know that. The way Irvin had me standing, I assumed Vern Stephens was a local seamstress.
My next few games were tense. Opposing teams yelled, “Whassa matta, batta batta batta?” My dad and my grandfather leaned intently on the chain link fence, smoking cigars. My Uncle Irvin sat in the bleachers yelling “Whoompf! . . . Whoompf! . . . ”
And I stood at the plate, going: Whiff . . . whiff. When I made contact, I tapped anemic bloopers to the second baseman. But that was the point, Irvin said. Those bloopers would turn into triples to the right-field gap, as soon as I developed mammoth arms and wrists like his own.
“How do I do that?” I asked. At this point I weighed about 72 pounds.
“Let’s see,” Irvin said. “Why don’t you ask . . . Joe DiMaggio?” Irvin dropped the name like it was a friend at City Hall. “Yeah, Joe DiMaggio. He has strong arms and wrists, very strong.”
My faith in Irvin was unshakable. I sent off a letter addressed to “Joe DiMaggio, San Francisco, California.” When I got home from school four days later (where have you gone, U.S. Postal Service?), a manila envelope was on the kitchen table. It had a “Swingin’ A’s” return-address and “DiMaggio” scribbled next to it. The note inside, accompanied by a real-nice autographed picture, read:
Dear Chris,
I have no special exercise for strengthening the arms or wrists.
Joe
I keep it on my wall to this day. As a reminder of what might have been. If Joe had been a little more forthcoming in the arm-and-wrist department, things would have been different. I’d’ve been standing at the plate in Fenway with my foot in the bucket and my bat waggling ridiculously above my head. I’d’ve seen the spin on that ball and, with a sweep of my mighty arms and wrists . . .
Whoompf!
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
