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The centerfielder of the New York Yankees had the worst charley horse he could remember. He wore a thick bandage over his left thigh (to support the strained muscles) and a second bandage around his middle to hold up the first one. Said Joseph Paul DiMaggio, more in simple fact than in complaint: "I feel like a mummy."
On any ordinary day such aches & pains would have put Centerfielder DiMaggio out of the lineup. But no day last week was an ordinary one in the American League. The Yankees were fighting for survival in the hottest pennant race in history, and they needed DiMag.
The visiting Boston Red Sox treated him with proper respect, crippled or not. Twice he came to bat with runners on base, and a buzz of excitement rippled through Yankee Stadium and down the pitcher's back. Twice he banged in a run. The third time, the crowd let go an angry bellow: the Sox, trying to protect a slim lead, sent him to first base on a pass instead of letting him swing at the ball. Joe scored the run that put the Yankees out in front, anyway.
That night, with the scores all in, the Yankees, the Red Sox and the Cleveland Indians found themselves knotted in a triple tie for the American League lead—a state of affairs so unprecedented that league officials had to powwow hurriedly to consider what should be done if a season happened to end that way.*
Jeez! Jeez! Across the U.S. last week, the seesaw race had baseball fans quivering. Cleveland motorists had to wait for their gasoline until absent-minded attendants finished listening to another play on their radios; business in downtown movie houses slumped 25%. In Boston, scalpers asked and got as much as $30 for a pair of tickets. One New Yorker, his nose buried in the box scores, tripped over a fire hydrant and banged his head hard enough to need stitches.
The ballplayers felt the tension too. In the Yankee dressing room, they kept nervously assuring each other that they didn't have pennant jitters. (The strain registered on steady Joe DiMaggio: he was up to a pack of Chesterfields a day.) Cleveland's Indians had lost only three games since Sept. 8; all anybody had to do to make them jump was strike a match.
When high-strung Lou Boudreau, the Indians' manager and shortstop, juggled his line-up last week and lost a game, there were public mutterings that maybe Club President Bill Veeck should have fired him last year, after all. One afternoon Boudreau sat listening to a broadcast of a Boston Red Sox game. He raked his hair with his fingers and exclaimed, "Jeez! Jeez!" every time the Sox scored. The Sox, under square-jawed Manager Joe McCarthy, seemed a shade less panicky. They had power to burn—what they prayed for was pitchers able to last nine innings. This week, with only five games to go, Cleveland edged one big game ahead of both the Yankees and the Red Sox.
Sirens in Boston. The National League race, too, had been a thriller for most of the summer, but by contrast it was winding up as quietly as a Quaker meeting. For a fortnight it had been clear (to all but bitter-enders) that Billy Southworth's Boston Braves were too far ahead to be caught. This week the Braves clinched it —their first pennant since 1914. Boston's Acting Mayor Tom Hannon called for the blowing of sirens all over town.