Over the years I have managed to pick up a few items at yard sales, swap meets, and the like that became some of my favorite treasures. Two of them feature famous baseball players and sit on my bookshelves.
One is from 1946 and I believe is a page from Life magazine. I found it in one of those bins filled with old magazine pages, and only recently did it take on an added baseball significance.
The page shows a “BASEBALL SHIFT” in which the Cleveland Indians employed a novel defensive alignment against Ted Williams, with the subhead, “Indians try to stop Ted Williams by placing six men in right field.”
The page describes how Williams tormented the Indians in the opener of a July 14, 1946, doubleheader, so they went to the extreme shift in the second game. Amazingly, thanks to Baseball Reference, we actually have these full box scores online, and they confirm the facts of the magazine.
Fans of today’s MLB will no doubt recall that such defensive shifts were virtually unknown until just a few years ago, but today they are extremely common. Pull hitters like Williams would face them virtually every time up today, but it was not a normal strategy in 1946 in the least.
Take a look at that photo and note that Williams still managed to hit a double to right anyway!
The second baseball treasure is from The Sporting News and dates to 1933, when an 18-year-old phenom showed up for the old San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League. His name was Joe DiMaggio.
Not that The Sporting News got that right. Their “Minors Worth Watching” feature correctly identified the hitting prowess of the 18-year-old outfielder who set a record for the longest hitting streak in PCL history, 61 games. DiMaggio, of course, would later embark on what remains by far the greatest such streak in major-league history, 56 games in 1941. TSN certainly foreshadowed the skills that would make DiMaggio a Hall of Famer for the Yankees in years to come.
But they didn’t quite get his name right, just a little detail that leaped out at this longtime copy editor. They called him “Joe De Maggio.”
Some good history in this article from MiLB.com on DiMaggio’s amazing minor-league career. Give it a read.
