“I’ll do anything you want.”

RIP Dom DiMaggio, 1917 – 2009

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Dom DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr and Johnny Pesky, going to throw out the first pitch, Game Two, World Series, 2004

Dominic DiMaggio, beloved by Red Sox fans, younger brother of Joe DiMaggio, passed away yesterday at the age of 92. A little pipsqueak in glasses, good friend of Ted Williams (the pictures of the two of them together look like a vaudeville comedy team, with the tall beanpole Williams towering over his teeny friend), it was maybe hard for DiMaggio to carve out a spot for himself … with such an older brother and such a best friend! But once you start listening to what his contemporaries had to say about him, and once you look at his stats, you see: Uhm, no. Boy did well all on his own thankyouverymuch. A 34 consecutive-game hitting streak – the longest in the history of the ballclub. That was in 1949, the record remains unbroken today. In 1997, Nomar went on a 30-game hitting streak, but so far – 30 does not = 34. DiMaggio still holds it. Kind of awesome that his older brother Joe holds the all-time record in this particular stat, with a 56-game streak in 1941. Nice dovetail there.

In tribute to DiMaggio, here’s a bit from David Halberstam’s Teammates, The: A Portrait of a Friendship, a book about Ted Williams, Johnny Pesky, Dom DiMaggio and Bobby Doerr.

Rest in peace.

Dominic had always succeeded by overcoming adversity. Nothing ever came easily for him. If Bobby Doerr had been the natural, playing with instinctive grace and fluidity, then Dom was the one of the four teammates who had struggled against the greatest odds. The scouts, the men who judged these things with their cold, analytical eyes, and who spent their daytime hours tracking high school and American Legion ball, spotting the talents of boys and trying to project them into the men they would one day become, loved a Bobby Doerr, and more often than not they barely saw a Dom DiMaggio in the beginning, or, perhaps more accurately, they stopped for a moment because of the name, saw the size, and then kept looking. He just did not look like a ballplayer. Somehow he always looked much younger than he was …

But he had talent, passion, and purpose, and these qualities would more than make up for those things that most scouts did not see at first. He would become in time what John Pesky called “the almost perfect ballplayer: so smart and so talented. McCarthy loved him because he never made a mistake. He always did everything right. I will never understand why he is not in Cooperstown.”

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More from Teammates, The: A Portrait of a Friendship, about DiMaggio’s start:

He also got lucky in that Lefty O’Doul was, Dominic later decided, the best hitting coach he had ever seen. Lefty had already worked with Joe, getting him to pull the ball more, because he knew that in any number of big league parks, including Yankee Stadium, the left-centerfield fences fell away sharply. In Yankee Stadium it was known as Death Valley, and you coul dlose home runs there all too easily.

It did not take long for O’Doul, a man with a lifetime .349 batting average in the majors, to turn Dominic around as a hitter. Because he was so small Dominic had thought he needed to put all his weight into the ball when he swung. Thus, without realizing it, he tended to lunge at the ball. O’Doul quickly taught him that that was the wrong way to go, and probably saved his major league career in the process. By lunging, O’Doul explained, he was actually subtracting his weight from his swing, and thereby reducing its power. Many other managers would have looked at Dominic and settled for what he could do for them on defense in the outfield; they would not have cared whether or not he could hit and what that meant to his career. But O’Doul saw the passion and the hunger and was willing to invest his time in him.

What O’Doul taught him was that a hitter’s power came from his legs, his hips, and his butt. What Dom was to do was wait on the pitch, keeping his body still, and then at the last split second start his swing, taking a very small step into it. O’Doul was very patient with him, and he would later tell others that Dominic was the ideal pupil, perhaps the easiest player to coach he had ever dealt with. “I’ll do anything you want,” the rookie told him, and whatever O’Doul suggested, Dominic worked on. What also helped was some early film of brother Joe, who by then was with the Yankees, his career soaring. He had come to a Seals workout and took batting practice with them, and a friend used an early movie camera to take some footage of him. And there it was on film, just as Lefty had said it should be: Joe poised at bat, head and body not moving at all until the final split second, when he began his swing; then every part of his body, in perfect coordination, seemed to lever the bat into the ball. Gradually Dominic began to adjust, to hold back and wait. It took about three weeks for him to get it. One of the hard parts was to keep his butt still, but Lefty was very good – he would stand near Dominic in the batting cage, and when Dominic moved his butt early, Lefty would jab at it with a fungo bat.

Dominic got it down one day early in the season in Coalinga, a small town in central California where the Seals were playing an exhibition game. It was a little town with a little ballfield, short fences, and everyone on the Seals was hitting the ball over the fence in practice. Lefty had asked Dominic to take batting practice with the regulars that day because he wanted to work with him a bit more. And suddenly Dominic too started hitting the ball over the fence. That of itself was not that impressive – everyone else was. But Dominic knew that he was hitting the ball much harder, that for the first time he was fusing all his strength into his swing, just as Lefty had ordered. He went over to O’Doul after practice and told him, “Lefty, I’ve got it now. I’ve finally got it.”

Yup, Dom. You’ve got it.

You will be missed.

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3 Responses to “I’ll do anything you want.”

  1. Jayne says:

    //talent, passion, and purpose//

    – kind of reminds me of you.

    Thanks for posting this. You’re right – he will be missed.

  2. Kerry says:

    Beautiful!

  3. red says:

    Jayne thank you, hon! So nice – needed to hear that.

    The picture of those three old teammmates on the mound just kills me. I remember that moment from 2004. Kind of incredible.

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