56

Just finished Kostya Kennedy's 56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports, a decent enough read and a break from my usual fare. He clearly did a ton of research--interviews, newspaper reports, scrapbooks and diaries--to fill it out and consider the streak's impact on players and fans and even those who paid little attention to the game but knew DiMaggio. He clearly makes a case for the streak's significance in a larger American culture, though it inevitably pales somewhat next to the parallel developments of the summer of 1941--like, you know, Nazi Germany's advances, Roosevelt's radio broadcasts, Britain's pleas for help, and the implementation of the draft--that Kennedy pulls in as a foil to the nation's interest in baseball, and as a threat to individual players who might be drafted and to a sport that might be shut down to prepare for war. He does take some liberties in writing as though he knows the thoughts and feelings of some of the characters, which I was less enamored of--perhaps he has some reason for assigning the thoughts he does, but the historian in me wants footnotes and documentation to support those assumptions (while I'm sure the reader in everyone else wants the historian in me to shut up about footnotes and enjoy the damn book already).

But my favorite part of this book was the reading experience. I've never read a book on an iPad before, in part because I've never had an iPad (I recently was assigned one for work, so I'm getting to experiment a bit), and in part because even reading on my Kindle Fire can be really distracting since it does so much more than let me read. But in this case the iPad was perfect, mostly because I could switch back and forth between Kennedy and Baseball-Reference.com to check out the stats and bios and careers of guys I was reading about. Dom DiMaggio was pretty darn good, but most of us only know him because of his brother (Californians might know a bit more about all the DiMaggio boys who played ball in San Francisco). Charlie Keller was a slugger who walked a lot, somebody it seems like Billy Beane would have loved a few years ago. Lefty Gomez--Joe's roommate on the road--was good, but a Hall of Famer?! Phil Rizzuto, too, strikes me as another Hall of Famer who benefits from a couple of big years, but even more from being a Yankee (and I'm not so sure what makes him noticeably more qualified than Dom DiMaggio). It was also a bit shocking seeing so many holes in these guys' careers, 2-, 3-, and 4-year gaps when they were in the service (and also holy crap Ted Williams left those numbers with a 3-year hiatus).

Plus, seeing a bunch of guys who are smaller than I am, instead of some hulking behemoth, makes me realize I could have been a pro if I'd just been born a little earlier (ha!).

The last little bit of the book gets into some probabilities of a 56-game streak, the odds of it happening, the odds of it happening with DiMaggio, how much it stands above the next-longest (Rose's 44), its likelihood compared to the likelihood of somebody hitting .400, etc. A nice analytical addition, and something that will be familiar to folks who've read Nate Silver and his ilk on these things. This is a heavy way to end a light read, but it also drives home Kennedy's larger point--this is the rare number that's going to stand for awhile (unless DiMaggio makes a comeback, since he also hit in 61 straight as a San Francisco Seal).