The Yankees won the game 7–4—their sixteenth victory in their last seventeen tries

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The surge that carried the Yankees to their fourth pennant in five years fifa 15 coins basically coincided with what, more than sixty years later, would still be widely recognized as the foremost individual attainment in baseball history: Joe DiMaggio’s feat of hitting safely in fifty-six consecutive games. It be- came one of the most familiar stories in all of American sports, featuring several suspenseful last-at-bats, a couple of questionable scorer’s calls, the theft (and return) of the hero’s favorite weapon, successive milestones reached and passed (thirty games to set a new Yankees team record, forty- two games to break George Sisler’s “modern” record, forty-five games to surpass Willie Keeler’s almost-forgotten 1897 record), and finally the streak’s end, enacted on the night of July 17 in Cleveland’s big stadium, with 67,468 people looking on.

The Yankees won the game 7–4—their sixteenth victory in their last seventeen tries, thirty-first in their last thirty-six—and thereby extended their lead over the Indians to seven games. But the overriding story was that Al Smith and Jim Bagby held DiMaggio hitless in four at bats. Third baseman Ken Keltner made two outstanding plays—what many years af- terward he described as “identical” backhanded stops against the foul line behind third base, followed by perfect throws to first baseman Hal Trosky. After the game, Keltner and his wife walked out of the stadium under police escort. “Joe had a lot of Italian friends in Cleveland,” said Keltner, “and the club wanted to make sure I got to my car OK.”

DiMaggio hit safely the next day and went on to accumulate another streak of sixteen games. Over his fifty-six-game run, he’d batted .408, hit fifteen home runs, driven in fifty-five runs, scored an average of a run a game, and struck out only seven times. (For the whole season, DiMaggio fanned thirteen times in 541 official at bats.) Nothing up to that time had captivated the media and the sports public like DiMaggio’s day-by-day per- formance—not Babe Ruth’s sixty homers in 1927 (because the Babe him- self seemed perfectly capable of breaking his own record the next year), not anything else. DiMaggio was no longer the Italian-American curiosity he’d been five years earlier but, as hailed in the hit song commemorating his streak, “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio.” It didn’t even seem to matter that, as revealed publicly by Lefty Gomez (his roommate on road trips), DiMaggio’s principal reading matter consisted of comic books, especially the “Super- man” and “Bat Man” series. If DiMaggio saw the latest edition of either of his favorites on a magazine rack, he had Gomez buy it for him. “He doesn’t dare buy it himself,” explained Gomez, “they all know him, you know.”